Opinions on Nutanix

[sluggster66]

In the process of looking at a San and server refresh.

 

We have been looking at the offerings from Nutanix and I would be really interested in peoples thoughts on the product.

 

Thanks in advance

[Paid_Peanuts]

First of all let's understand your environment. Type of school, number of users, services hosted on-site etc.

 

My personal opinion, if I were refreshing our kit starting again tomorrow: something like a Dell vrtx box with the blade chassis and utilise Windows storage spaces with hdd + ssd would be more than sufficient.

Scalable also, know stone computers do their equivalents of the vrtx box which look good.

 

If your hyper v - storage spaces

Vmware - vsan and save your money on the San element. Get hosts like dell r730xd and populate with traditional spinning disks for capacity and then ssd for the hot tiering of data.

 

I think the days of a San in a school environment are over.

Edited May 16, 2016 by Paid_Peanuts

[nicholab]

Nurtanix do seem to have the most flexable hyperconverged setup. Also nurtanix do have their own scale out file server. They do some units that are storage heavy which seems to be the thing in schools we use more file space than any other work load. Also vsan is the new kid on the block both HP, Datacore and Falcononstore do SAN as software. Edited May 16, 2016 by nicholab

[glen_j]

Nutanix are OK, however it is not easily upgradable and would need to be replaced as a whole unit when the time came, basic support on ours was £8000 p/a to start with (that's just office hours mon-fri and next day on site)

[synaesthesia]

Hard to say without knowing what you use, what you have, where you're going etc but it would be hard to justify a SAN these days - for a university or particularly large college maybe, but anything up to secondary it'd probably be fairly backwards. Would that money be better invested in pushing Office 365/Gapps etc?

[clodhopper]

We looked at Nutanix last year and yes it was very good but SOOOOO expensive.

 

Also looked quickly at Stone Computers solution which is called Integrum now.

 

Ended up with a Dell / Equallogic solution

[nicholab]

Lenovo and dell both have agreements with nurtanix and other hyperconverged vendors this may be a cheaper way to buy.

[ChrisHykin]

Hi,

 

Nutanix as a solution is incredibly powerful - but fundamentally it's built more for the provision of high disk IO workloads (DB, VDI) than the typical server/storage replacement that I would wager(?) you're looking at. That said, they recognise the merits of the Education market and are starting to tweak some of their lower end platforms to edge towards a price point that competes with the VRTX. As one poster highlighted, the support, although fantastic, is expensive, and doesn't reduce in price linearly with the hardware discount you negotiate - to the point where it actually looks quite odd on any quote you'll recieve. You may also find that you are inherently paying for a number of Enterprise features that you are unlikely to use (replication and DR - doubles the price) etc.

 

At Stone we designed the Integrum from the ground up for Education, to deliver 95% of the feature set of Nutanix, but at a price point that makes both the support and the hardware competitive with any server/storage refresh. We've upgraded it over 2 generations and are looking at how we progress it further. We have a VSAN version and a Hyper-V version and I'd encourage anyone to at least give it a look as part of a procurement process. But yes, I am bias!

 

Best of luck with your refresh!

 

Chris

[pantscat]

As others have said, it really depends on what you want to do with it and your planned workload. Nutanix is a neat solution, but in my experience is quite expensive compared to some other solutions.

[JulieONeilEMC]

In the process of looking at a San and server refresh.

 

We have been looking at the offerings from Nutanix and I would be really interested in peoples thoughts on the product.

 

Thanks in advance

 

Have you looked at VCE's VxRail hyper-converged appliance? It might be the perfect fit. Here's a link to learn more. https://store.emc.com/Product-Family/VCE-Products/VCE-VxRail-Appliance/p/VCE-VxRail?CMP=listenGENvxrail