HCI Hero

19 HCI platforms — software-defined, turnkey appliances, disaggregated HCI and open source — including Nutanix, VMware VCF/vSAN, Dell VxRail, Azure Local, Windows Server S2D, HPE, Scale Computing, Proxmox, OpenShift Virtualization, Sangfor, Huawei FusionCube and H3C UIS. Cisco HyperFlex is kept for reference and marked end of sale.

69 comparison points across architecture, storage, data protection, networking and security, operations, containers and AI, deployment and hardware, licensing, support, cost and the vendor itself — each tagged as a business point, a technical point or both.

Every answer comes from the OEM's official website and links to the exact page it came from, on screen and in every export, so a finding can be checked in one click.

Compare with a business lens, a technical lens or both, and add use cases — VMware exit, VDI, edge and ROBO, tier-1 databases, private cloud, Kubernetes, AI and GPU, disaster recovery, hybrid cloud, SMB, regulated and air-gapped, test and development. They pre-select the points that matter and weight the ranking; every point can still be ticked or unticked.

75 licence editions with their licence model, metric, minimums, included support and price — compared within one OEM (for example NCI Starter, Pro and Ultimate) or across OEMs.

Hardware routes, software, licences, subscriptions and support are set out for each platform: appliances, certified nodes and validated hardware, support tiers and severity-1 response times.

A cost estimate sized for each platform from your workload, using its own controller overheads, data protection and cluster limits — software, capacity add-ons, hardware, hardware support, Windows Server guest licensing and implementation over one to seven years.

OEM list prices are used where the OEM publishes them; everything else is a clearly labelled estimate with its basis, so nothing on screen is mistaken for a quotation.

A logical architecture and an implementation design are drawn for every platform — layers, management plane, protection and DR, top-of-rack switching, nodes, witness, networks and VLANs, and the implementation steps.

Exports are real Office files: a Word report with the full hyperlinked matrix and both diagrams, a PowerPoint deck with charts and editable diagrams, and an Excel workbook whose cost sheet recalculates as you change the inputs.

Use it as a guest to compare everything; sign in with your niyyasoft.com account to save comparisons and download Word, PowerPoint, Excel and diagram files.