Being deeply customer focused means developing a deep understanding of your customers needs and challenges and then developing solutions that help. Nutanix has been focused on the customer since inception, it’s one of our core principles. And that goes for our storage products. That is why we are so pleased to have been recognized as a Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage.

Gartner Peer Insights is a free peer review and rating platform designed for enterprise software and service decision makers. Nutanix Files and Nutanix Objects solutions were first included on the Gartner Peer Insights list as a discrete product in the summer of 2020 and within a very short time, received over 56 peer reviews with an average rating of 4.8 out of 5*, one of the highest in the distributed file systems and object storage space.

As a result of our rapid and highly favorable customer feedback, we are one of only five companies to place in the top right quadrant of the Gartner Peer insights “Voice of the Customer” Distributed File Systems and Object Storage framework for 2021.

We are thrilled to be recognized and believe our focus on helping organizations of any size simplify and secure their unstructured data while gaining greater insight and visibility earned our Customers’ Choice recognition. But better than that was to hear what our customers had to say.

Easy to set up, easy to manage

Nutanix storage solutions can stand up file and object servers in a matter of minutes and provide shares in less than an hour using Nutanix Prism Central for all management tasks. The consumer grade design of our single pane of glass management console simplifies previously complex provisioning and management tasks making day to day storage management available to non-storage experts such as VDI managers and application owners.

Automated load balancing and remediation engines reduce maintenance overhead by monitoring storage system performance and health for potential problems. When problems are identified, remediations solutions are provided to administrators who can commit those remediations with a single click freeing them from the need to manually commit the remediation. We are pleased with the number of positive comments about our management simplicity from our customers on Gartner Peer Insights such as this from an IT Virtualization Engineer in the Finance sector:
 

“Nutanix Files is amazing! Nutanix Files is awesome. Practically one-click deployment and super easy management with qualified updates at the push of a button. Any unique issues faced are easily handled by support services.” Read the full review here.

Resilient storage services

In addition to our non-disruptive load balancing and remediation solutions for storage, our solutions are based on the shared-nothing architecture leveraged by our HCI environment. Not only does this protect from downtime from single system failure, it also prevents planned downtime with non-disruptive software upgrades. Software upgrades for storage controllers are a normal part of IT operations. With traditional dual controller architectures, software upgrades often require the dual controller storage systems to bring down one of two storage controllers at a time resulting in significant performance impact. As a result most storage administrator teams schedule software updates for nights and weekends when the impact to performance will be minimised.

With our Nutanix storage solutions, upgrades are done in a rolling fashion allowing one virtual controller at a time to be upgraded and restarted. Since all other controllers remain online, impact to files and share performance is minimal. For many of our Nutanix storage solution administrators this is a significant time saver and improvement to quality of life because the upgraded process which previously had to be done during nights and weekends to limit downtime impact, can now often be conducted during business hours without slowing business. We were pleased to see the many comments from our customers about the resilience they experience with Nutanix Files and Nutanix Objects such as the one below from an IT Director and early adopter of Nutanix Files.
 

“The Last File Server You Will Ever Need. This solution has been rock solid for 3 years with no major issues or outages.” Read the full review here.

Deep insights with built in analytics

Risk to data is increasing and a modern storage solution needs to provide next generation security and visibility for your valuable data assets. Nutanix storage solutions provide protection of data with integrated worm and immutability for our object storage solutions to prevent data from being tampered with. Policy based control of immutability policies and the ability to shift responsibility for data management to the end user with the object browser simplifies management of data security while giving granular control to the data owner.

Both objects and files offer native event notification engines. These notification capabilities are commonly leveraged with third parties, like syslog servers for event and audit aggregation.  Nutanix also leverages the notification frameworks to offer native auditing and analytics. While integration with third party tools or export of data to JSON and CSV formats are options, most customers opt for the Nutanix Files analytics dashboard for simplicity sake. The dashboard provides a single point of view for file use and access activity including information about who is using data, how they are using that data, and potential risks through access violations. This information shows current details as well as trends so that administrators can identify risks for behaviors over time.

In the latest release of Nutanix Files we leveraged our analytics engine to track activity and identify possible malware and ransomware activity based on known attack vectors such as specific file names used by ransomware payloads. When a threat is detected, administrators are informed and the activity is blocked to prevent spread of the ransomware payload.

Our customers have been particularly excited about our analytics engine as it gives them the visibility they need better to protect their environments. We often hear comments such as the one below from an IT Manager in the Manufacturing industry.
 

“Easy For Use, Good Performance, Scale-Out And Reasonable Cost. The Files Analytics also comes for free, it can give some useful info during audit and troubleshooting.” Read the full review here.

How to try it for yourself

The beauty of software defined storage technologies is how easy it is to implement, even for trial purposes. If you’re already a Nutanix customer and want to try Nutanix Files or Nutanix Objects, you can do so on your existing cluster. All Nutanix clusters are entitled to 1TB of Nutanix Files capacity and 2TB of Nutanix Objects capacity. To try this yourself on your environment, take a look at the simple deployment videos for Nutanix Files here, or Nutanix Objects here.

If you’re not currently a Nutanix customer or you are but dont have the capacity to try this on your own cluster, you can try it on us. Nutanix Test Drive is a self paced demo environment that allows anyone to register for a trial Nutanix environment. When you register for a Nutanix Test Drive, a fully functional Nutanix cluster is deployed in the public cloud and credentials are sent to you. You can explore the cluster on your own and you are also provided with self-paced tutorials for common administrative tasks so that you can see just how easy yet powerful Nutanix storage solutions are. To access a Nutanix Test Drive, register here.

¹ The GARTNER PEER INSIGHTS CUSTOMERS’ CHOICE badge is a trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice constitute the subjective opinions of individual end-user reviews, ratings, and data applied against a documented methodology; they neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Gartner or its affiliates.

Disclaimer:
* Ratings and reviews are current as of March 11, 2021. Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice constitute the subjective opinions of individual end-user reviews, ratings, and data applied against a documented methodology; they neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Gartner or its affiliates.

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