Nutanix HCI

[srothman]

Anyone running any of these in their data centers?
How do they compare to EVO:RAIL or Simplivity?

 

[zylje1]

I work for one of SA's largest law firms and we recently invested in Simplivity. I guess you need to first establish what it is that you require from the solution. For us it was a drive to reduce cost for our remote office deployments, specifically server infrastructure, and to have a 'zero touch' solution after it was deployed as we have no technical personnel on the ground. The technology integrates directly into VMware vCentre where you drive all the operations for the Simplivity's. We perform local backups of the virtual servers on the Simplivity in the remote office in seconds and then also perform remote backups to our Datacenter over a 6Mbps (15ms latency) link with no issues. We can recover a whole remote site in our datacentre in minutes. It also features data compression and deduplication which works well.

I would suggest that you contact them. Very helpful guys and they should be willing to give you a trial on one of their appliances. Let me know if I can give you their contact details.

 

[srothman]

Thanks zylje1.
I've been talking to partners around all the appliances, and being a Dell house at the moment, we are leaning towards Nutanix if it can provide us with the functionality we're after.
That being said, if the other two can do as well (or better) at a lower cost, then we'll look long and hard at them as well.

 

[Gizmosa]

We installed Simplivity at one of our clients a while ago. I must say that I'm very impressed with performance and stability. We have 2 sites and we were backing up the VM's on a nightly basis on a back then 2MBps Diginet to the other site. The compression works great over the WAN. The performance of the VM's are very impressive as they run on the SSD drives. I have recently done DR testing and restoring a 200GB server takes about 2 min. Failover on the same site works exactly the same as VMWare. The plugins on VMWare works very well and you always know what is going on. We have the Dell servers with 5 year on-site support. We had one SATA drive failure after about a week. The Simplivity device logged the call with support and within hours the drive was on site.

I must say I think my client made a very good investment and it is a pleasure working with the Simplivity devices and Support.