Nutanix digs itself into a hole ... and refuses to drop the shovel

Comment Nutanix has dug itself into a hole by trying to occupy the moral high ground with regard to performance testing of hyperconverged systems, saying it's in favour of transparency, yet pulling out of an independent StorageReview test of its product following poor results.

About a month ago, Nutanix (Lukas Lundell) and VMware (Chuck Hollis) were involved in a blog spat over hyperconverged system testing, each saying the other wouldn't let it release performance results of testing of each other's products.

It got nowhere, as each still refuses to let the other release their tests of the competing product.

Lundell, global director of solutions and performance engineering at Nutanix, said a set of Nutanix's own tests of its products were coming.

We can't find them on the Nutanix site.

The well-respected StorageReview was engaged in a review of Nutanix's NX-8150 product. It has turned into a saga, with Nutanix effectively withdrawing from the review, following an adverse result. The editor, Brian Beeler, has written about this sorry episode.

Here is his summary:

Nutanix sent an NX-8150 cluster for review, our testing revealed performance issues, Nutanix made several software updates over six months to improve performance, in June it asked to update our cluster with newer Haswell-based systems, we agreed, Nutanix then backtracked and refused to send the promised replacements.

The testing event sequence was this:

• January 2015 – NX-8150 four-node cluster with Nutanix OS (NOS) 4.0.2.2 arrived at StorageReview. VMmark test runs set at 10-tile level: attempted multiple times without getting a passing score

• End-January – Software upgraded to NOS 4.1.1 and Sysbench testing attempted, getting 300TPS/node, but paused when Nutanix expressed deployment concerns and software upgrade flagged
• May – Upgrade to NOS 4.1.2 and prior tests repeated, but "with 4.1.3 and ESXi 6.0 support coming ... we opted to pause testing to allow Nutanix to have the benefits of the more efficient hypervisor and other upgrades in ESXi 6.0"
• June – upgrade to NOS 4.1.3 with ESXi 6.0 support: Sysbench testing saw 600TPS/node and balanced cross-node performance, but "Nutanix disagreed with our database testing process", despite being a Sysbench contributor

• July – Nutanix requested NX-8150 return with replacement by newer, better-performing, Haswell-based cluster. When NX-8150 returned, Nutanix requested StorageReview execute Nutanix's own (all-synthetic) test plan

• New Nutanix NX-3460-G4 cluster ship made dependent on StorageReview agreeing Nutanix test plan