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Nutanix Versus VCE: Web-Scale Versus Converged Infrastructure in the Real World

This Field Report was created by Taneja Group for Nutanix in late 2014 with updates in 2015. The Taneja Group analyzed the experiences of seven Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform customers and seven Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Vblock customers. We did not ‘cherry-pick’ customers for dissatisfaction, delight, or specific use case; we were interested in typical customers’ honest reactions.

As we talked in detail to these customers, we kept seeing the same patterns: 1) VCE users were interested in converged systems; and 2) they chose VCE because VCE partners Cisco, EMC, and/or VMware were embedded in their IT relationships and sales. The VCE process had the advantage of vendor familiarity, but it came at a price: high capital expense, infrastructure and management complexity, expensive support contracts, and concerns over the long-term viability of the VCE partnership (see an opinion of the DELL/EMC merger at end of this document). VCE customers typically did not research other options for converged infrastructure prior to deploying the VCE Vblock solution.

In contrast, Nutanix users researched several convergence and hyperconvergence vendors to determine the best possible fit. Nutanix’ advanced web-scale framework gave them simplified architecture and management, reasonable acquisition and operating costs, and considerably faster time to value.

Our conclusion, based on the amount of time and effort spent by the teams responsible for managing converged infrastructure, is that VCE Vblock deployments represent an improvement over traditional architectures, but Nutanix hyperconvergence – especially with its web-scale architecture – is an big improvement over VCE.

This Field Report will compare customer experiences with Nutanix hyperconverged, web-scale infrastructure to VCE Vblock in real-world environments. 

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Cohesity Data Platform: Hyperconverged Secondary Storage

Primary storage is often defined as storage hosting mission-critical applications with tight SLAs, requiring high performance.  Secondary storage is where everything else typically ends up and, unfortunately, data stored there tends to accumulate without much oversight.  Most of the improvements within the overall storage space, most recently driven by the move to hyperconverged infrastructure, have flowed into primary storage.  By shifting the focus from individual hardware components to commoditized, clustered and virtualized storage, hyperconvergence has provided a highly-available virtual platform to run applications on, which has allowed IT to shift their focus from managing individual hardware components and onto running business applications, increasing productivity and reducing costs. 

Companies adopting this new class of products certainly enjoyed the benefits, but were still nagged by a set of problems that it didn’t address in a complete fashion.  On the secondary storage side of things, they were still left dealing with too many separate use cases with their own point solutions.  This led to too many products to manage, too much duplication and too much waste.  In truth, many hyperconvergence vendors have done a reasonable job at addressing primary storage use cases, , on their platforms, but there’s still more to be done there and more secondary storage use cases to address.

Now, however, a new category of storage has emerged. Hyperconverged Secondary Storage brings the same sort of distributed, scale-out file system to secondary storage that hyperconvergence brought to primary storage.  But, given the disparate use cases that are embedded in secondary storage and the massive amount of data that resides there, it’s an equally big problem to solve and it had to go further than just abstracting and scaling the underlying physical storage devices.  True Hyperconverged Secondary Storage also integrates the key secondary storage workflows - Data Protection, DR, Analytics and Test/Dev - as well as providing global deduplication for overall file storage efficiency, file indexing and searching services for more efficient storage management and hooks into the cloud for efficient archiving. 

Cohesity has taken this challenge head-on.

Before delving into the Cohesity Data Platform, the subject of this profile and one of the pioneering offerings in this new category, we’ll take a quick look at the state of secondary storage today and note how current products haven’t completely addressed these existing secondary storage problems, creating an opening for new competitors to step in.

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Unitrends Really Raises the Bar on free Data Protection

On May 12, 2015, Unitrends released a new free virtual appliance backup product, Unitrends Free. Unitrends Free shares the core software engine of Unitrends flagship product, Unitrends Enterprise Backup (UEB), but is specifically designed for IT professionals seeking protection for home labs, early-stage virtualization projects and small environments. Unitrends Free is a genuinely usable version of this full product that is simply limited to 1TB of protected capacity. 1TB lets users do more than just test the product: they can use it in production for as long as they want.

The free product boasts functionality that is often unavailable even in full versions of competing products. For example, Free supports both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual environments as well as multiple VMs and individual item recovery. It allows the user to perform both full and incremental backup and create synthetic fulls in the background. And although recovery verification is considered a high end functionality, this free product has it. And the list goes on. 

Taneja Group believes that Unitrends is setting a new standard in a free product, not only in its full functionality but in professional support. These are all novel things in the fast-moving data protection industry, and Unitrends is accelerating the pace of innovation even more.  Read on for more details.