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  • Modern Infrastructure staff
Modern Infrastructure staff
6/8

Nutanix Acropolis is helping shops ditch expensive hypervisors

Source:  kimberrywood/iStock
Designer: Linda Koury/TechTarget

Scalability and simplicity are two main benefits of Nutanix Acropolis that helped the product win Modern Infrastructure's Impact Award for Best Converged and Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Product. Nutanix Acropolis combines software-defined storage with virtualization to create a well-rounded hyper-converged platform on which administrators can run nearly any workload.

Acropolis runs on x86 server nodes across four hardware platform lines.

Nutanix offers the Acropolis software in three tiers. The Starter option is ideal for small deployments, while the Pro tier offers features such as rich data services, resilience and management features. The Ultimate version, which offers the full software suite, is aimed at organizations with advanced security requirements and those with multisite deployments.

Brian Anderson, an IT director at Boston University, has been a Nutanix customer for several years. He recently replaced the IT organization's VMware setup with the Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor.

"It's been a bit of a challenge, as VMware has some features and functionality that are more fleshed out, but I believe Nutanix is more forward-thinking with some of their capabilities," Anderson said. "From a management perspective, the VDI cluster requires little maintenance, and to perform updates is seamless and requires virtually no downtime."

For others Acropolis offers the ability to forgo a proprietary hypervisor -- and the hefty price tag that comes along with it.

"We were able to get tremendous value of savings initially by not having to buy all of the VMware licensing," said Alton Levesque, the IT strategic director of LabCorp, a healthcare research company based in Burlington, N.C. Acropolis can be categorized as a self-healing system because it creates distributed autonomous capabilities among all nodes in a cluster. Built-in fault handling minimizes issues in the event of a failure. But when a problem does inevitably occur, many users praise Nutanix for its excellent customer support.

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