With the recent news around EMC acquiring VCE, Nutanix found themselves on the receiving end of a great deal of questions from industry experts, press and media and end-users, who want to know more about the difference in the technology from Nutanix and VCE.

The Taneja Group, an industry analyst firm, recently conducted a field report customers about the real world performance of converged vs. Web-scale converged infrastructure solutions.

Converged and hyperconverged systems seek to simplify this complexity. Both types integrate the hypervisor, physical servers, network, and storage into a single simplified infrastructure. The hoped-for results are lower infrastructure cost, faster business computing and lower overhead for IT administrators.

Taneja interviewed a random sample of customers of each vendor and here are some of their conclusions:

Acquisition Costs

• VCE’s Vblock costs are higher for purchasing rack(s) of equipment. Installation and training comes as extra costs.
• Nutanix offers lower acquisition prices through hyperconverged web-scale architecture at affordable flexible increments.

OPEX

• VCE support costs are higher, and upgrades are complex and require specialized VCE engineers to perform. Large equipment takes additional space and costs a considerable amount in power and cooling.
• Nutanix support costs are minimal compared to VCE because of the ease of deployment, provisioning, and upgrading. And its compact form factor size saves a tremendous amount of rack-space and power and cooling costs.

Ease of Management

• VBlock – Different customers used different management approaches based on previous backgrounds.
• Administrative tasks are VM centric with no specific knowledge needed for servers, networking, or storage management.

Time to Value

• A Nutanix installation requires a one to two week design phase, two weeks for order to delivery and one day to deploy.
• VCE has a two to three month design phase, 45 day factory configuration and one week deployment.

The report indicates the same conclusions kept emerging: VCE users see convergence as a benefit over traditional do-it-yourself infrastructure, but an expensive one. The Nutanix users also shared valuable hyperconvergence benefits. In contrast to VCE, they also cited simplified architecture and management, far more reasonable acquisition and operating costs, and considerably faster time to value.

You can access the full Taneja Group report here.

 

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