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Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
232
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
119
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (8th), Software Defined Storage (SDS) (2nd), Public Cloud Storage Services (3rd), File and Object Storage (3rd), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (4th)
StarWind Virtual Tape Library
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (21st), HCI (25th)
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
NISHANTPANCHAL - PeerSpot reviewer
Principle Technical Specialist at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Unified storage has simplified private cloud operations and delivers strong security and ROI
Regarding areas for improvement, I think Data Lens could be enhanced from Nutanix's side, but it has been a long time since I logged into that console, so I do not remember much. It is a SaaS-based offering on the Nutanix portal. It is not something you deploy on-premises; it is not on-prem access. You connect your cluster to the SaaS-based Nutanix and then access the Lens console. I need to check it since it has been almost two or three months since I logged in. Nutanix Enterprise AI actually needs to improve a lot if I compare it with any other product such as NVIDIA and other offerings in the market. Nutanix Enterprise AI still requires a lot of work. I did not check that in much detail technically, but whatever I thoroughly checked, it still lags behind in many features. When it comes to AI-related features, I think the ecosystem of Nutanix is not as big as NVIDIA because NVIDIA has its own inferencing system and model training platform such as NeMo, NeMoTron, and others. Nutanix does not have such things. It can be built using NVIDIA CUDA libraries, but what I saw when I was testing the product is that you can run NVIDIA NeMo and PyTorch and two other things, but as a software, Nutanix does not have an end-to-end platform. That is something Nutanix should focus on.
reviewer1414572 - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Director at University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics
Flexible and reliable with helpful support
I am not sure if this is a limitation of my physical hardware or if it is the software itself. However, I would like the throughput to be faster. Who would not like things to be faster? It would be nice if StarWind could come up with a best practice document for configuration. I had to do some playing around in my environment with test runs to get the configuration that really allowed for the maximum amount of throughput that I was going to get with the software. Once I had figured out what worked best, the solution was rather fast for backing up 30+ TB of data

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Now they are trying to add more and more applications because they're getting better performance and stability."
"I would definitely suggest this solution to a colleague because of the ease of use."
"The performance is very good."
"Even if they weren't one of the fastest arrays in the entire industry, I would use them for their support model and ease of use."
"We chose Pure Storage primarily because of its combination of performance and ease of use."
"Technical support is very good."
"It has improved my organization in the way that now we have lower latency, we get fewer complaints from customers, and we see a constant response time."
"It’s easy to set up and support is excellent."
"The inclusion of it in the Nutanix Objects Storage platform simplifies my process as I am no longer required to acquire a separate platform. Instead, I can simply purchase additional licenses as needed. All management can be performed from a single unified interface, making it a convenient and streamlined experience."
"The most valuable feature of Nutanix Unified Storage is SMB file sharing."
"My opinion is that this solution has very good stability."
"The most valuable features of the solution are high availability and synchronization to another location."
"The solution is very easy to manage."
"From an analytics perspective, the best aspect of Unified Storage is its locality. When you read data, you want to know that you're only reading data from the particular local storage node. It's also critical to access the data as quickly as possible from that. From a business perspective, the most important thing is ease of use. Having a combination of compute and storage makes it much easier to manage."
"I have found Nutanix Volumes highly stable with good performance."
"I strongly recommend Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) to all users."
"The support that they provide is excellent, with 24 hours a day seven days a week support, and all the engineers and the support staff know the solution very well."
"The most valuable feature of the StarWind Virtual Tape Library is the archiving to the AWS cloud."
"If you currently have Veeam there is no other solution that is as easy and affordable as StarWind."
"I like the fact that we can simultaneously upload the virtual tapes to different cloud providers, and the settings can be adjusted to speed up the upload times even further."
"It is a stable solution."
"We simply replicate our backups from Veeam to the virtual tape library that StarWind implements, while magically transporting those to B2 for our offsite backup requirements."
"The solution made our backups way more reliable."
"StarWind VTL allowed us to back up to virtual tape that was created within Veeam and upload the tape to the cloud."
 

Cons

"We would like to see more cloud support, which we know is coming, although it's not out yet. It's going to be released in the next versions. That would be the biggest win, if additional cloud support is built into the array."
"I would like to see some improvements on the FlashBlade side around the CIFS space support. I am not super familiar with all the different NAS protocols that they run on their box, but there could be some improvements made on SMB CIFS side."
"The 3PAR SSD arrays that we have are still failing a lot so even though we're under warranty, we still have to get someone out and usually have someone troubleshoot so that usually adds onto the cost. With Pure, we've had a disc fail and we pop it out and you pop it in and it's good to go."
"If I need to change or troubleshoot the dashboard, I cannot do it without calling support. If I want to move something critical, I cannot do it by myself. The dashboard blocks me from changing those critical things."
"FlashArray's capacity for forecasting should be improved because it needs to be a bit more current. I think it's bundled with the deduplication and other compression factors. We need more user interfaces for forecasting in this software and more interfaces need to be integrated with this array management tool."
"We would like to see more development on their Copy Automation Tool (CAT) for Oracle, as well as better integration for our customers running Oracle VM."
"The file functionality could be better."
"It took us a year to get it to stabilize and to get the best out of Pure."
"When considering the difference in cost benefits, if you consider it only as a storage solution, you may find it expensive."
"We have had to deal with some infrastructure and general cluster issues but these issues don't impact storage."
"The training programs could be improved. It's quite challenging to find adequate learning resources online, as there isn’t much available on the internet or YouTube."
"The product does not offer one console."
"One thing I'd appreciate is having a desktop application similar to what VMware offered."
"If they can add an integrated DLP feature, it would be great."
"The licensing terms are restrictive, as they go by terabyte cost."
"With all of the Nutanix equipment, the licensing is expensive. We operate in the enterprise space, but we're a midsized company. At times, the price tag is a little bit shocking for a company with only 35 employees."
"In practice, it is somewhat technical to deploy and manage, but overall it gets the job done."
"The main thing that I felt could be improved was having an estimated time of completion for the virtual tape uploads to the cloud."
"The solution's training process and online documentation could be more thorough."
"I am not sure if this is a limitation of my physical hardware or if it is the software itself. However, I would like the throughput to be faster."
"The initial installation can be complex and should be simplified."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our licensing is on a yearly basis. So, every year, we renew. We could do a three-year contract, but right now, we only do a one-year."
"Cost-wise, it's been very effective."
"It could always be lower, but it's okay."
"The price was more favorable than Dell EMC."
"For us, as the customer, it reduced the price of the management."
"We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership."
"I don't know the exact cost but it's around $1,000."
"When I last looked, the prices were reasonable, and we could get an excellent array for about $60,000."
"It is quite expensive otherwise as it comes with three-tier peer underlying hardware."
"The price of the license is expensive when comparing it to traditional storage."
"I am not the one who makes the calls, but it seems to me that it was very competitive. Other solutions would have required dedicated hardware, so an additional CapEx has to be put in place. In that sense, it was definitely a more competitive option to go with Nutanix Files."
"It is very good. It is much more competitive than a dedicated storage platform."
"The product has an annual licensing fee."
"It is competitive with other vendors, but you get more for your dollars. It is fairly priced, but not cheap."
"Compared to other solutions, NUS is cost-effective and efficient. It also has good performance."
"It's not the cheapest solution. It's in line with other solutions, but it offers features that the competitors don't have at any price point, especially with regard to analytics and ransomware prevention. No one else has any sort of object-based storage available. Nutanix Unified Storage is a lot more feature-rich. This is a situation where you get what you pay for."
"The initial setup and deployment are also covered in the purchase at no additional cost."
"The pricing of the solution could be more flexible to meet the needs of smaller to mid-market size companies."
"If you currently have Veeam there is no other solution that is as easy and affordable as StarWind."
"The solution is cost-effective."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise160
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise31
Large Enterprise69
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
When comparing cost, I find that the cost is either the same or slightly higher, but that is returned by the ease of ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
The only thing I think could be improved is price. The price is the main concern for our customers.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nutanix Unified Storage?
The pricing for Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is subscription-based with capacity-based licensing and has moderate to...
What needs improvement with Nutanix Unified Storage?
One area for improvement I noticed while using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is expanding advanced analytics and pred...
What advice do you have for others considering Nutanix Unified Storage?
My advice for others looking into using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is to clearly understand your storage requireme...
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Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
Nutanix Files Storage, Nutanix Volumes Block Storage, Nutanix Objects Storage
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco
Volvo, Sony, Samsung, Hitachi
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs. StarWind Virtual Tape Library and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.