FIELD REPORT: NUTANIX VERSUS VCEi-bit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/nutanix... · servers, Nexus...

Copyright Taneja Group, Inc. 2014. All Rights Reserved. 1 of 15 87 Elm Street, Suite 900 Hopkinton, MA 01748 T: 508.435.2556 F: 508.435.2557 www.tanejagroup.com

FIELD REPORT

FIELD REPORT: NUTANIX VERSUS VCE

WEB-SCALE VERSUS CONVERGED INFRASTUCTURE IN THE REAL WORLD

OCTOBER 2014

This Field Report was created by Taneja Group for Nutanix. The Taneja Group analyzed the experiences of seven Nutanix Virtual 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. 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.

SIMPLIFYING INFRASTRUCTURE USING CONVERGENCE Virtualization has significantly changed the nature of business computing the IT datacenter. It consolidates servers, accelerates testing and development, and revolutionizes workload and application management. But big changes often introduce big complexity. For all of its new agility and the power to run dynamic applications, virtualization has also made the computing environment much more complex.

The virtual data center duplicates network and storage functionality for its own environment, but adds overhead to the physical computing layer beneath it. Virtualization needs separately purchased physical servers, storage, network, and fabric equipment capable of handling dynamic and fast-growing VM workloads. The added complexity can easily overwhelm the improvements in servers and applications by degrading functionality in the network, storage, and data protection. As


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a result, businesses are no longer saving money and time from virtualization; they are actually spending more.

Traditional Convergence with VCE

VCE Vblock is a converged response to virtualization infrastructure complexity. In a converged environment, the virtualized infrastructure converges into a single stack built from networking, storage, and server components that are converged by pre-integration or procurement.

Several traditional compute, networking, and storage vendors jumped early on the ‘convergence bandwagon’. VCE was first to market with its converged Vblock. The company was created as an investment partnership between Cisco, VMware, and EMC. Each Vblock combines Cisco UCS servers, Nexus networking components, VMware virtualization software, EMC storage systems, plus a myriad of system management software and tools specific to the different products in the Vblock.

Additional big vendors jumped into the convergence marketplace with their own products, including HP, NetApp, Dell, and IBM. The common thread is that VCE and other convergence vendors use legacy components to create these converged stacks. If the converged stack is using best-of-breed components – and if partners work closely with each other through integration and upgrade cycles – convergence can simplify the complex environment. The converged stack may itself be highly complex to manage, but customers can always depend on service providers to take care of that for them… at a price.

The question becomes: Does the cost of VCE converged infrastructure sufficiently lower the cost of managing the complex virtualized data center? Maybe, but often not. Many customers who already buy equipment from VCE partners see buying Vblocks as a natural evolution of their installed Cisco, VMware, or EMC environments. But at the end of the day, the stacks are still just racks of traditional enterprise computing components. The data center is spending a lot of money for a minimal gain in convergence benefits. Is it all worth it?

Enter Web-scale HyperConvergence with Nutanix

If the traditional converged infrastructure was the only game in town, the benefits might be worth the added price and effort. But vendors like Nutanix, with its web-scale architecture and highly scalable hyperconvergence, offer the same or greater operating benefits, are cheaper to buy and support, scale more simply, have fewer power needs, and take up less rack space.

Unlike VCE, Nutanix is not built on the backs of existing multi-vendor legacy systems. The Nutanix web-scale nodes and blocks are purpose-built from the ground up as a single stack, including server, storage, server and storage virtualization, dedupe, and data protection. In turn, each stack may be interconnected with additional stacks for a modular building block approach to the modern data center.

NUTANIX VERSUS VCE ARCHITECTURAL COMPARISION

Architectural approaches to solving ever-evolving IT infrastructure requirements have changed multiple times over the past few decades. The original mainframe era gave way to the client-server era, and then proprietary architectures gave way to open standards based on X86 hardware architectures. With the advent of the cloud era, a relatively new approach using massive scale-out or hyper-scale architectures has been invented out of physical necessity, as no single data center could contain the ravenous consumption of compute and storage created by Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others cloud providers.


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Since that time, the “scale-out” versus “scale-up” architectural approaches have been more rigorously debated, even though each one has some inherent attributes that may benefit particular workloads and preferences. Due in part to the cloud era we are currently in, scale-out architectures are on the rise and are being used by many enterprises. In this comparative Field Report, you will see the contrasting benefits of the Nutanix “scale-out” approach (termed Web-scale), versus a VCE Vblock “scale-up” approach using fixed-sized hardware infrastructure individually designed to satisfy each virtualized workload requirement.

Convergence Using VCE Vblock with a Scale-Up Architecture VCE Vblock systems integrate the virtual infrastructure into an integrated solution made up of individual server, storage, and networking components managed and supported as one. Vblock converged infrastructure is made up exclusively of VMware software, Cisco Nexus and UCS, and EMC storage using a customizable scale-up architectural approach.

The major benefit of using scale-up, hardware-centric infrastructure is the ability to customize a virtual solution tuned to a unique workload. With the scale-up approach, you build a hardware framework that includes enough physical resources to enable a specific range of workloads. Typically, compute and storage are scaled by either adding more server blades to a fixed chassis or more hard drives in a fixed-size external disk array. But you must decide upfront on the size of the solution and then scale up within those physical limits.

The following section describes some of the typical benefits and disadvantages of using a scale-up approach to a converged infrastructure.

Typical Scale-Up Benefits:

Performance can be fine-tuned to specific workloads due to well-known constraints on the design. VCE allows for a wide variety of Vblock product designs, each targeted at different workload ranges. For instance, you can use either EMC VNX or VMAX arrays. The downfall is that businesses end up paying a big price if they pick the wrong technology from the start. They will either overpay if they choose too much performance for the business need, or will have to conduct a forklift upgrade if the business solution is sized too small.

Upgrades are typically hot plug and simple with no additional wiring needed. Storage or compute capacity upgrades can usually be performed by simply hot-plugging in more HDDs or compute blades. This works well, as long as the product is operating within the performance /capacity range of the overall solution needs. Administrators may have to spend additional cy-cles configuring the new storage in LUNs or volumes if the upfront design does not call for this.

Custom hardware can be designed with guaranteed performance and reliability. Custom hardware designs can be designed with stricter control of both components and firmware, which in turn allows the supplier to guarantee a certain levels of performance and reliability through rigorous testing.

Typical Scale-Up Disadvantages:

Performance and capacity do not scale linearly. Scale-up architectures generally have lumpy performance and capacity scalability, as businesses generally have to over-provision the infra-structure in order to upgrade within the initial hardware framework. With VCE, you need to pick the right model of VNX to start with. If you choose poorly, performance will degrade as you add more capacity, making you wish you had picked a bigger array to start with.

Hardware refreshes involve a forklift operation. When refreshing hardware in a scale-up environment, you generally have to bring in an all-new hardware platform and perform a mi-


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gration to the new hardware set. This often requires expensive data migration services in order to move data from the old solution to the new one.

Hardware redundancy is over-provisioned. Generally, hardware redundancy is built in at the frame level by the sheer duplication of hardware components. This contrasts with a scale-out architecture, where redundancy can be architected using an N+1 approach. This is more effi-cient and less expensive way to scale the solution.

Proprietary hardware approaches are generally more expensive. Purpose-built hardware tends to be more expensive than industry-standard hardware. Purpose-built solutions also re-quire unique skill sets to support the custom environments, and lack the volume efficiency of industry-standard hardware solutions.

Hyperconvergence Using Nutanix Web-Scale Architecture

The basic definition of scale-out is that the individual building blocks of infrastructure are self-contained and can be incrementally added to a pool of other similar building blocks in an N+1 manner. Each unit of infrastructure should be easy to add, and the redundancy factor of the entire solution should also operate at the individual node level.

The Nutanix system is purpose-built for virtualization from the ground up. It includes all virtualization, compute, and storage components – along with advanced features such as dedupe and data protection functionality – built into an x86 building block. In addition, the Nutanix infrastructure (which Nutanix defines as “web-scale”) evolves beyond competing systems by being software-defined; with shared-nothing, distributed data, metadata and operations; it is self-healing with non-disruptive upgrades; and includes API-based automation and analytics.

The Nutanix architecture supports virtualization clusters that can support a wide variety of business workloads by mixing and matching nodes specifically optimized for those environments. Customers can start with the appropriate number of nodes for the workload, and then incrementally and linearly scale as needed over time.

Typical Scale-Out Benefits and Nutanix Web-Scale Enhancements:

Scales linearly in performance and capacity as each node is added. In addition to providing linear scale-out, Nutanix also provides additional flexibility. Compute-to-storage ratios of each node can be tuned in the system for various workload needs.

Hardware is based on industry-standard, high-volume commodity infrastructure. Nutanix uses 4-node 2U form factor x86-based server hardware as a basic building block, which maxim-izes density while leveraging commodity hardware components. Other configurations are avail-able, including storage-heavy 1-node in 2U or 2-nodes in 2U, meeting a wide range of applica-tion and VM needs. This is extremely important because additional nodes can be purchased in cost-effective, bite-sized increments. In addition, the overall cost of the solution is less expen-sive than proprietary hardware designs.

The solution maintains an N+1 node redundancy that is more cost efficient than a typical 1:1 redundancy of scale-up architectures. Nutanix enhances this by allowing the user to set the level of redundancy for each VM to go beyond even a single node failure.

Hardware refresh/upgrades are a built-in feature through the use of built-in N+1 redun-dancy and automatic node expansion. Nutanix supports this important feature, and can also perform rolling firmware upgrades to further allow upgrade/migration of software in addition to the hardware – with no down time.

Typical Scale-Out Disadvantages and Nutanix Mitigations:


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Latency under certain conditions can be longer based on data locality of the storage re-quest relative to location of the compute VM. Nutanix mitigates this issue by understanding which nodes host which VMs, and then moves the most recent data to that node’s local storage. Nutanix also keeps all metadata cached locally on the SSD drives in every node in a cluster, lim-iting maximum latency to one network hop.

Scale of any individual cluster is limited to the efficiency and performance of internode communication overhead and networking technology used to transport that communica-tion. Nutanix mitigates this by first performing deduplication and compression of incoming da-ta, in addition to storing all metadata on the SSD drives. Metadata routing is kept to a minimum and de-duplication ensures that data transport between nodes is minimized. Deduplication and compression also minimize replication bandwidth between clusters for disaster recovery and high availability services. This is extremely important as this saves both time and money for businesses.

Management tools need to be aware of a large volume of individual nodes. Nutanix man-agement tools were developed with a multi-node approach. In addition, the Nutanix manage-ment platform is VM-aware and presents all information with a VM-centric approach. Simple dashboards summarize CPU and storage utilization of the entire cluster. Performance and ca-pacity can also be presented at the individual VM level. In addition, Nutanix provides an enter-prise-level management solution that aggregates multiple Nutanix clusters together under one management interface.

SUMMARY FIELD REPORT ANALYSIS The Taneja Group report was designed to compare VCE customer experiences with Nutanix customer experiences. We interviewed seven VCE customers and seven Nutanix customers and examined the results. The interviews focused on the following areas:

The customer’s overall environment, industry, and business applications running on the converged infrastructure. We asked what drove the customer to consider a converged system to start with and why they picked the solution vendor they did.

Time-to-value experienced. This included the entire pre-sales process, consulting services, and how long it took to deploy once they customer actually put in the order to buy the solution.

Acquisition cost and size of deployment for each converged system, including total VM or VDI instances, amount of storage, etc. If possible, we captured what was paid for the system, including what they are currently paying for service costs. We also asked about current capacity utilization.

Ongoing operational costs. We asked in-depth questions on the customer’s current experience with each solution, how many people they have managing the system, and their support experiences. We probed on how active their environments were and the processes used to provision and destroy VMs.

Upgrade experience, including the cost of upgrading the system and easy of scaling the system.

General observations, including what they liked most about the system, what they are worried about, and a comparison of life before convergence and after convergence.

After interviewing all of the customers, we compared the Nutanix owners’ experiences with VCE owners’ experiences. In some cases, we obtained quantitative data. Other respondents’ remarks were more qualitative in nature, either due to the customer not willing to share details or not knowing the specific hard data such as purchase price. The following table summarizes the overall results/theme we heard in the following areas based on these specific customer interviews.


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Value Category

VCE Nutanix

Architectural Approach

The scale-up approach led to some initial sizing problems. Strategic concern for longevity of cooperative relationship between the partner companies.

The scale-out “web-scale” approach allowed customers to start with smaller configurations and flexibly grow as their needs evolved.

Time to Value

Average 2-3 month long design phase, 45 days for factory configuration, and 1 week or more to deploy.

Average design took 1-2 weeks, order to delivery in 2 weeks, and 1 day to deploy.

Acquisition Costs (CapEx)

Higher costs for purchasing rack(s) of equipment. Installation and training came as extra costs.

Lower acquisition prices through hyperconverged web-scale architecture at affordable flexible increments.

Ongoing Costs (OpEx)

Support costs were higher and upgrades were complex and required specialized VCE engineers to perform. Large equipment took additional space and cost a considerable amount in power and cooling.

Support costs were minimal compared to VCE because Nutanix is simpler to deploy, provision, and upgrade. Nutanix’s compact form factor saved a tremendous amount of rack-space and power and cooling costs.

Ease of Management

Different customers used different management approaches based on previous backgrounds.

Administrative tasks were VM-centric with no specific knowledge needed for servers, networking, or storage management.

Scalability Scaling was typically done by buying another Vblock unit at the same price as the initial purchase.

Customers started with a single affordable unit and easily expanded as needed in modular fashion.

After extensively reviewing the data, we rated the Nutanix and VCE solutions numerically on a scale of 1-5 for each of the key value categories listed above. Based on the size of customers we interviewed, we assigned these ratings assuming VM clusters were up to 1,000 VMs in size. The Nutanix solution outscored the Vblock solution by and aggregate average score of 4.37 to 2.77.

Key Value Category (1-5, 5 being highest)

Weights

VCE Rated

Nutanix Rated

Architectural Approach 2 3.0 4.5

Time to Value 2 2.5 4.5

Acquisition Cost (CapEx) 4 3.0 4.0

Ongoing Cost (OpEx) 3 2.5 4.5

Ease of Management 2 3.0 4.5

Scalability 2 2.5 4.5

Weighted Average Total 2.77 4.37


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FIELD REPORT RESPONSES BY CUSTOMER The following section contains the summarized responses of each customer the Taneja Group interviewed. We maintained strict confidentiality, but gave as much industry and environment information as possible while keeping this paper to a reasonable size. We summarized all of the VCE responses and detailed the Nutanix studies.

VCE Owners

VCE CUSTOMER: FINANCIAL SERVICES: REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT AND MANAGEMENT

Environment: VDI installation using Vblock 200.

Time to Value: The pre-sales discussion took 1 to 1-1/2 months. Once they ordered the solution, it took about one month to install.

Acquisition Cost (CapEx): $250K for 150TB across 16 CPUs of a dozen cores each. VMware was included in the price, but there was an additional cost for the VAR they engaged for integration. The total additional cost for installation, training, and documentation was $45K.

Ongoing Cost (OpEx): Support was included for the first year and will go to 18% a year.

Scalability: They are open to expanding, but need to monitor the load on servers. The current environment has 12 server VMs and 200 VDI clients, and they expect that number to grow. VMware has been their framework for about eight years. VDI represents 15% of desktops.

VCE CUSTOMER: LAW FIRM

Environment: The firm invests heavily in EMC for its two data centers and a third that is being built. They currently have three 5800s in production with about 100TB in the virtualized environment. They have reached 100% server virtualization and 100% desktop virtualization.

Time to Value: Due to VCE’s complexity and cost, the customer’s accounting firm handled the initial negotiation. The negotiation process took one year and failed because of subsequent growth in storage. The customer’s company underwent a new design phase and negotiation. Pre-sales discussions and negotiations took an average of 2.5 months. Since then, the negotiation process has become considerably easier.

Acquisition Costs (CapEx): Over five years, the customer paid $1.4 million in acquisition costs and another $340K in consulting and implementation services.

Ongoing Costs (OpEx): $1.3 million in ongoing costs. They internally support their Cisco network, but pay VCE for support at $250K per year for five years.

Ease of Management: Of entire administrator time, less than 10% is on Vblock. Of a staff of 18, two devote half of their time each to Vblocks.

Future: The firm has been a VCE customer for five years. The customer’s IT team appreciates Vblock’s great stability, but will probably not buy another one because of the high price of all three components plus surrounding services. The customer finds he has more negotiating strength and cost flexibility if he buys components individually and does the integration in-house. Competitive pressures between EMC and Cisco are also a concern since it might affect long term VCE viability.


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VCE CUSTOMER: IT SERVICES ORGANIZATION

Environment: The organization has two Vblocks in production supporting 80 VMs and 270 VDI clients. Typical business application workloads on the Vblock include VDI, databases, and MS SharePoint. They are evaluating whether or not to roll out VDI to 10 more regions, and will purchase more Vblocks if they decide to do it. The organization appreciates Vblock’s integrated architecture and finds it relatively simple to manage.

Time to Value: The initial driver was effectively managing the new VDI installation and existing databases. Pre-sales design and factory configuration took a few months, but deployment took 2-3 days.

VCE CUSTOMER: RESEARCH HOSPITAL

Environment: This research hospital has several remote data centers. They have a 320 and 720 in the corporate center, and one 720 each in two regional data centers. Their primary usage is VDI support and server virtualization, with about 50% of servers virtualized currently. Their goal is 100% server virtualization. They already had VMware and Cisco in-house; EMC was new to them.

Time to Value: Design discussions took several months because they were deep diving into the VDI environment. Once they placed the order, it took 45 days for VCE to configure in the factory and deploy in the customer’s environment.

Acquisition Costs (CapEx): Although the IT team was confident that the Vblocks would suit their environment, they were uncomfortable with the complex pricing and negotiation process.

Ongoing Costs (OpEx): The IT team did not spend appreciably more or less in OpEx than before. They spent more on outside VCE support, but less on internal IT time, which freed up administrators for higher value projects.

Ease of Management: The Vblock fit in well to their existing Cisco environment, and has better uptime than the legacy HP equipment it replaced.

VCE CUSTOMER: K-12 SCHOOL DISTRICT

Environment: This large school district’s all-Cisco network runs the main data center and ten ROBOs connected over the WAN. Two Vblock 300s run core IT services, some email and office docs, databases, and a Citrix VDI. One Vblock supports a VDI server farm of 900.

Time to Value: Three weeks for the custom design process, 45 days to configure in the factory. Once configured, it took a week to install.

Acquisition Cost: At first, the company rejected VCE over its expense. They later decided that the converged infrastructure would save on OpEx and would help to secure integrity of infrastructure, so they purchased it. They received an excellent deal for their first Vblocks, but found VCE less willing to negotiate on additional purchases.

Support Cost: The first model came with installation and training included, and the school district did not need those services for the second. However, VCE is insisting that the school district accept a new support contract for the following year: $35K per Vblock each year for VCE upgrade services, or VCE would not provide any support. The IT team counter-offered and is waiting on VCE’s response.


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VCE CUSTOMER: HEALTHCARE SERVICES

Environment: This healthcare organization bought four Vblocks and deployed them into VMware environments in four data centers. Across the entire storage environment, the IT team is adding 12-20 new VMs a day. Legacy storage supports many of these new VMs since the IT team must expand Vblocks in order to add capacity.

Acquisition Cost: They initially purchased four Vblocks, and plan an expansion program to retire 20% of legacy hardware assets over four years and replace them with Vblocks. CapEx is estimated at $4 million across the four years.

Ease of Management: The company has Vblock specialists on their IT staff, who originally came from networking, server, or storage backgrounds. Of the 32 total administrators in their environment, ten specialize in the Vblocks.

Support Cost: The company estimates current and future support over four years at $3.5 million.

Future: The company is comparing a HP/Juniper converged deal with VCE. Their present VCE equipment is under a five-year lease. The customer commented that EMC, Cisco, and VMware will sell their own products first before selling VCE Vblock. Another complication is increasing competition between EMC and Cisco.

NUTANIX CUSTOMERS

Municipal Engineering Firm

ENVIRONMENT

This municipal engineering consulting firm owns three NX-1000s and four NX-3000s. The VM framework is VMware ESXi 5.5 with vCenter. They are presently migrating 20 of a projected 50 VMs onto the Nutanix platform, for a total of 26TB of effective virtual storage. Business applications and workloads include SharePoint, CRM, ERP, Web servers, ASP.net, Java Web Apps, SQL, and Oracle databases. Depending on retention requirements, some data is replicated between clusters and some is backed up to their Commvault data protection system.

PRIMARY DRIVERS

The company wanted to replace the legacy SAN in its virtualized environment. They examined traditional storage systems at length, but were put off by the amount of time and costs involved. They looked at the Nutanix system and determined that the system was well engineered and designed to work in a virtualized environment, was simple to manage, and was highly scalable.

TCO ADVANTAGES

Nutanix provided all that they needed in their environment, including installation and startup service, which was included in the purchase price. The Nutanix pre-sales process only took a few days. Actual installation time was one day and the product went into production two days later.

The firm’s IT director commented, “The time it took us to add capacity was reduced by an order of magnitude, especially with storage.”

Support needs are minimal: they have only used Nutanix support once for a minor issue, which was resolved over the phone in an hour.


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In-house, one VMware and one network administrator support the system part-time. Because of Nutanix’ simplicity, the administrators do not need to spend much time configuring networking, creating VMs, or provisioning storage. The company uses Nutanix instead of vCenter to provision and monitor. “We could do these actions in vCenter, but we find the Nutanix UI very useful and simple to use. We do not need multiple experts to administer the product.”

WRAP-UP

“This is exactly what we were looking for at the start of the project. After having looked extensively at conventional systems, we are convinced we spent less capital cost, and we know for sure we spend far less time managing it than we did with our conventional non-integrated system.”

Hospitality Industry Marketing Firm

The firm provides marketing expertise, website development, and a powerful booking engine for the hotel industry. They have been in business since 1998. They develop a wide array of applications for their hotel client base, including web hosting, client SQL databases, booking system and analytics, email and gateway, and others.

ENVIRONMENT

One NX-3350 supports 42 VMs running client-facing applications. The initial design took two weeks. From design to installation, it took two months instead of the projected two weeks because of an ordering backlog at Nutanix. Once the equipment arrived, deployment went quickly: the initial setup took 1.5 hours, the administrators trained for a few days on the new system, and the collocation center took a week to migrate the production VMs.

PRIMARY DRIVERS

The IT team experienced very poor support with their legacy SAN provider. The team leader had a prior positive experience with Nutanix support when working at an enterprise integrator. When he had a chance to deploy Nutanix at his present company, he was positive about making the change. Price was another barrier against competitive solutions, which were considerably more expensive.

TCO ADVANTAGES

The firm paid $98K for its Nutanix system, which included three years of premium support priced at $32K. One system engineer runs the Nutanix platform part-time; spending just eight hours a month on management.

Nutanix engineers upgraded the Nutanix firmware three times since the company’s purchase. The newest version supports automatic firmware upgrades done remotely. The IT director said, “We are very happy with the support experience.”

The firm leases space at a co-location data center. Cabinet space, power, and management services are all costs that Nutanix was able to lower or retire. Cabinet space went from 12U to 3U and Nutanix’ lower power needs saved $1K a month. They were also able to drop some networking services they were paying at the collocation site because Nutanix provided the missing services.

WRAP-UP

“Our performance increased substantially over our old storage infrastructure due to accelerating SSD performance. The improvement was very noticeable.”


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Prepaid Card Services

ENVIRONMENT

Founded in 1992, this company provides the prepaid card industry’s largest set of products and services. The company uses IBM PureFlex for its production data and Nutanix for fluid VM creation in its busy development environment. Today, the company owns four 2000 series blocks and two 4250s with four nodes per block.

PRIMARY DRIVERS

The development department was forced to depend on IT to create new VMs. However, IT’s top priority was fulfilling customer production systems, which caused long delays in provisioning new VMs for the test/dev environment. Application and database development fell behind in a company that prided itself on rapid product development.

The development department needed its own system that converged server, network, and storage for fast VM creation. They chose Nutanix hyperconverged systems for control and affordability.

TCO ADVANTAGES

Prior to Nutanix, the development group requested VM creation – and would get their new VM sometime in the next several weeks. Since the Nutanix deployment, that weeks-long deployment shrunk to less than an hour. Two administrators work half-time to manage the 24-node system.

Installation would have taken four hours, but the Nutanix tech asked permission to give them the deployment so they could improve their tools and procedures. With the company’s permission, the engineer finished in 1.5 days. The company’s software configuration manager said, “It was the Nutanix tech’s time, it was fine. Their drive to continually improve is one of our favorite things about them.”

The Nutanix platform supports about 400 permanent VMs and 100 that cycle through temporary testing procedures or a proof of concept VM for a prospective customer. Many of these VMs are very dense and their number is increasing. “At some point, we’ll hit enough average VMs so we’ll expand the Nutanix block. We are growing enough to soon add more storage.”

Nutanix’ small form factor fit into a crowded data center, which lacked the room for massive new switches and storage. “The Nutanix platform gave us the data center in a box. Upon deployment, provisioning is done with one click.”

Nutanix support is flexible. The company just re-signed their support contract to include one support check each year for all systems, instead of a per-node billing cost. Updating has been trouble-free since they went to version 3 of the Nutanix software.

WRAP-UP

“The primary reason for picking Nutanix wasn’t only price, it was control. We needed to control our own platform.”

Government Agency

Senior Virtualization Engineer

This government agency runs a multi-tenant VDI deployment using VMware Horizon View and Nutanix.


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ENVIRONMENT

Nutanix supports the servers, common services including Active Directory, and all virtual desktops. The IT team presently supports about 640 VDIs with projected growth to 4,000 split across two government networks. The agency uses Tivoli for backup.

The agency started with a purchase of two Nutanix NX-3450s. Now each of their deployed systems support about 1,300 users with about 50 users per node/200 per block. Utilization is 33%. Since the NX-3450 purchase, the agency also bought NX-6020, and 7010 models. The NX-3450s support VDI and related services, while the newer models are slated for additional VDI deployments and other greenfield projects. Another IT team deploys the virtual desktops, migrating about 15 physical desktops to VDI a day.

PRIMARY DRIVERS

VDI was a new greenfield environment that did not have existing connectivity to traditional enterprise storage arrays. The IT team was looking for a solution that provided both compute and storage so they could start up quickly and cost-effectively. They did look at a NetApp array, but were most interested in a hyperconverged platform. Nutanix fit the bill.

TCO ADVANTAGES

The agency spent $5.4 million for Nutanix purchases and support contracts. All start-up services including installation were included in the purchase price. Even with this large project and typical government procurement cycles, the Nutanix procurement project took just two weeks.

The first purchase was two 3450s. Both machines took 2-3 weeks from purchase to installation. They had done a previous proof of concept and learned how to optimize Nutanix for their environment, so optimization went quickly.

Power and cooling and space were not driving purchase factors, but have yielded OpEx savings.

As the VDI reaches the 4,000 mark, they will train six administrators and one lead to support the entire VDI environment full-time. The senior engineer remarked, “VDI was a hard project. Now we’re definitely meeting the security and performance goals we were given at the beginning of the project. Nutanix has been very quick and responsive. We’re very happy with that.”

The only serious support issue was an outage in the production environment that took Nutanix eight hours to diagnose, send the parts, and complete the fix. Since then, there have no outages. The agency runs daily health checks and discusses findings with their Nutanix technical account manager three times each week.

WRAP-UP

“Big optimization for our environment, such as fat security, might have been a longer process than other users might experience. We knew that going in, but it was still very fast. Once installed, you get provisioning with a couple of clicks. It doesn’t get much easier than that.”

Construction Management Firm

ENVIRONMENT

This company runs a Citrix XenApp farm that delivers applications to 95% of the workforce. They plan to migrate infrastructure workloads, including Microsoft Active Directory, SQL, Exchange, SharePoint, and third-party business application servers.


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The company owns six Nutanix-3000s supporting 31 VMs with 20TB useable capacity. The legacy SAN supports 79 VMs with useable 59.34TB. Three administrators manage the Citrix environment including Nutanix. Between them, the administrators specialize in Citrix application delivery, networking, and data center services. Long-term, the IT team may turn over Nutanix administration to a virtualization and storage administrator.

The company adds two to three Citrix XenApp delivery servers monthly to support additional staff growth and new applications.

TCO ADVANTAGES

The acquisition cost was $244K, which included all components and installation. From order to installation was ten days. Once installed, the IT team took some more time to test and learn the new system, and moved in the production workload three weeks later.

The Nutanix interface is simple and the internal team upgrades its own firmware. They are on a quarterly schedule for standard patching, and as-needed for critical or out-of-band patches. The IT director said, “We haven’t run into anything overly difficult at this point. Management of the system is fairly straightforward.”

The IT team provisions and monitors using VMware vCenter and vCenter Operations Manager, and uses Nutanix Prism every other day for periodic health checks.

WRAP-UP

“We are happy with it. Overall, the system seems to be quite reliable and easy to manage. Nutanix plans more performance and expandability in future releases and we will transition our legacy component-based infrastructure to hyperconverged.”

University

ENVIRONMENT

The university has two campuses and the data center supports 1,500 students and faculty users. All main applications are virtualized with only three physical application servers left for video surveillance, archiving, and backup. All 50 VMs run on one Nutanix 3000 cluster with four nodes in a 2U enclosure. Raw capacity is 16.5TB and the university uses about 60%. CPU utilization averages 25% with a low of 19% and a high of 31%.

PRIMARY DRIVERS

The growing virtualized environment was hard to manage with separate compute and storage systems. The IT team was interested in replacing legacy equipment with hyperconverged systems because of unified systems, scalability, web scale, and affordability. The team chose Nutanix for these factors plus its ease of management.

TCO ADVANTAGES

The acquisition cost was $83K for three nodes, which included a $10K one-year support contract. Installation and startup support were also included in the price. The following year, they spent $35K to upgrade their Nutanix platform, including $10K for the new year’s support contract.

Time-to-value was quick: first contact to design took one month, and from order to installation was two weeks. Migration started with 15 VMs and the rest P2V. Migration took one month to complete and was simple to do with no added training.


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Nutanix is simple to manage and administrators do not need to touch it when adding or deleting VMs. The IT systems administrator said, “The management interface is really good. The dashboard lets us do a lot of power and health monitoring.”

Going to from 37U to 2U with Nutanix allowed the IT team to remove a rack. “Space savings wasn’t our primary motivation, but we ended up seeing dramatic savings on energy. We’ve saved $11K a year in power savings, which basically pays for the support contract.”

WRAP-UP

“At first I didn’t think I could afford Nutanix. But I had already budgeted a certain amount for storage, and when I looked at the cost, I realized I could get the Nutanix cluster for what I would have spent just on storage.”

Premium Retailer

ENVIRONMENT

This global retailer has 35 total nodes across a mix of ROBOs and data centers. Nutanix systems range between 1000, 3000, and 6000 models and store a total of 100TB. The company supports 30 VMs with a utilization rate between 30% and 60%, and is migrating VMs off of legacy systems onto Nutanix.

PRIMARY DRIVERS

The company’s traditional infrastructure was expensive and hard to manage. Storage was a particular challenge in the face of fast-growing virtualized data. The IT systems architect said, “Companies are going bankrupt from the inside out because of storage costs. It’s expensive to buy, expensive to run, and expensive to scale out.”

The architect decided to replace the legacy’s layered computing stacks with Nutanix for big savings and ease of scale-out. “Other storage vendors say that with Nutanix you have to scale your controllers and memory every time you add storage. The vendors think they’re making an accusation. My response is that Nutanix is doing it exactly right. You have balance your load and Nutanix makes it less expensive and easier to do than adding a bunch of expensive new systems.”

Simplicity was another major purchase driver. Managing complex compute stacks from many different vendors required storage expertise and time. The architect wanted a powerful but simple-to-manage system instead, and Nutanix fit the bill. Future plans include VDI, corporate computing infrastructure, instant messaging, and the warehouse management system. They are also looking at Nutanix for big data. The company is considering replacing Symantec backup in the virtualized environment with Nutanix replication. The replacement would offer single pane-of-glass management and a significant cost savings over Symantec backup, which is one of IT’s highest costs.

TCO ADVANTAGES

The initial use case for Nutanix was supporting the company’s internal private cloud. The cloud runs on Nasuni cloud storage and a Volt Cloud orchestration layer. However, it was a challenge for multiple ROBOs to move massive amounts of unstructured data onto the cloud. Performance was one issue and rack density was another, since several ROBOs were space-constrained. The company added Nutanix clusters to move unstructured data to the cloud. Performance, cost, and a small footprint made these systems the top choice. Nutanix can work on 110 power and 1Gb interfaces, which is well adapted for remote offices.


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A large-scale VDI project is a second major driver. The pilot project is a small installation that will grow over the next three years to 1500-2000 VDI users. The company is adding new Nutanix nodes to create a dedicated VDI cluster. A major benefit of Nutanix is that as VDI grows, the company will bolt on more clusters in a smooth scale-out function.

WRAP-UP

“Nutanix’ cost and use case was so compelling that another manager who loves traditional storage said that they should charge more so not everyone will use it. There has been such a dramatic price reduction that we’re holding the dam against all the people wanting to use it – we have to finish legacy hardware refresh schedules first.”

TANEJA GROUP OPINION Taneja has found that the majority of VCE customers adopted Vblocks because they already had active VCE or VCE-partner sales teams coming at them. VCE Vblocks are a solid convergence technology, but we see VCE wins where account control is already held by EMC, VMware, and/or Cisco. These sales teams will expend a great deal of energy selling VCE to their existing customers. Since many of these companies already have one or more VCE partners in their environment, it seems like an obvious solution to hand a convergence project over to VCE.

However, that does not mean that VCE is the best choice – even in the enterprise data center. Long pre-sales cycles, higher acquisition costs for equivalent performance and capacity, higher ongoing support costs, and stranded capacity are all real concerns. And once in, it’s hard to get out as customers are locked into the five-year lease cycle that VCE prefers to sell.

In contrast, Nutanix offers great advantages of scale-out architecture and advanced web-scale management. (In fact, the web-scale platform that makes Nutanix a standout in the hyperconverged segment may prove to supersede the segment entirely.) We have already described a number of Nutanix’ key features and benefits. Now factor in initiatives like Nutanix CloudConnect, which allows customers to use the public cloud starting with AWS as a backup target for data stored on Nutanix web-scale systems.

We believe that even data centers that are happy enough with converged systems today will look to hyperconverged systems tomorrow. Better yet, instead of investing in a traditional convergence solution, businesses should consider going directly to a next-generation solution like Nutanix.

ABOUT TANEJA GROUP Taneja Group’s mission is to deliver best-in-class technology analysis and consulting for the storage, server, virtualization and cloud markets to enable our clients to convert technology into business. We are a boutique firm of operational experts with both broad and deep expertise in storage systems and technologies, server and desktop hardware and software, virtualization platforms and appliances, cloud software and services, and physical and virtual infrastructure management solutions.

For more information, please visit www.tanejagroup.com.

NOTICE: The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be accurate and reliable, and includes personal opinions that are subject to change without notice. Taneja Group disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy of such information and assumes no responsibility or liability for errors or for your use of, or reliance upon, such information. Company, Brand and Product Names referenced herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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FIELD REPORT: NUTANIX VERSUS VCEi-bit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/nutanix... · servers, Nexus...

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