The primary use case for AFF is for use in our production environment. Within our production environment, we have a number of different data stores that AFF serves. We use a number of protocols from NFS to CIFS, as well from the file system protocols, and in the block level we use iSCSI.

We are a fully on-prem business as far as data positioning data sets. 

We don't have real-time applications that we run in-house, being a law firm. The most important thing is the availability of our environments and applications that we serve to our client base. We don't have real-time applications that we could be measured in real tangible form that would make a huge difference for us. Nevertheless, the way it goes: the faster, the better; the more powerful, the better; and the more resources you can get from it, the better.

We primarily use it for storage for VMs and backup units.

We use this solution on a daily basis. In Sweden, typically small to medium-sized companies use this solution.

We evaluated HP and EMC. The main differences were the support, functionality, and cost of NetApp. 

The only problem is that when you change to NetApp, it may have a large impact on your backups or something else.

When comparing with Pure for example, with Pure you have no maintenance anymore and with NetApp, you still need maintenance. For the maintenance, you need an external company to maintain the system. With Pure you have less maintenance which is a good item.

I think it could have better monitoring.

We like the fact that we also use it and therefore can tell our clients about it from an actual user perspective, not just a sales perspective. 

No one has a price-to-earnings ratio that NetApp has, everyone's is inflated. NetApp's is below market, NetApp pays a two and a half percent dividend, NetApp stock has doubled in the past 12 months. NetApp's largest customer is probably the federal government, which uses more than 50% of NetApp, from my understanding, if you subtract cloud, although I'm not privy to understand how much cloud the federal government uses that is actually NetApp under the covers.

The fact of the matter is, if you need the top-selling, performing, file serving appliance to deliver your files to your end-users, NetApp pretty much invented the technology. While no one really can take credit for serving files, NetApp has been doing it for more than 25 years. They do it better than anyone. They have utilities around that. They can do three things that their competition can do with multiple different solutions. I'm sure there are some obscure things that they do in vertical markets that their competition does better, however, I'm not going to comment on radiology or genetics or things of that. They do a lot of things, yet, not like a Swiss army knife. They do a lot of things and are the best of breed of products put together.

Other manufacturers claim simplicity. In fact, frankly, they do have an advantage in that regard, however, they don't have the functionality. If you were to compare one of those products to NetApp, head to head from a feature perspective, NetApp would wind up in the top 10.

I primarily use the solution for asically all my main data for all my ESXi hosts.

NetApp is a good choice because it's not only for a normal application, but it can also integrate with Nvidia for AI solutions.

The scalability is great and super easy. We are able to just connect, go through the UI, and select to expand the cluster. It is super easy even if you want to scale it out by having a Mirror setup, not a cluster, or pairing them together. By being able to do this with just a couple of clicks of a mouse button, it is superb.

We have thousands of customers, but there is not much to do for daily operations because it just runs. We have alerts setup in it, but we seldom have to do anything.

For ONTAP, in general, the deduplication ratio and Snapshot limitation are areas that need improvement. There is a global limitation on the number of Snapshots or clones that can be spun off of a particular Snapshot. If those limitations are increased, it might be helpful.

With regard to Fibre Channel and iSCSI, the block protocol is still not up to the mark. NetApp has not been a leader in file and block services.

SnapCenter is still not mature enough and has a grid at scale. It is still not up to the mark and is not delivering as promised when we initially invested in StorageGRID.

In terms of Oracle workloads, NFS workloads specific to databases, Snapshots, data production strategies, and SnapMirror, significant room for improvement is needed from NetApp.

Compatibility with multiple vendors has been a pain and continues to be so.

We are using AFF for a few clients. It's a specific type of data we use for these arrays, not like a block kind of thing or regular data. A few clients have particular requirements about where we put all the data. We are primarily using FAS, and we have around four or five AFF boxes. We don't deal with AFF regularly. 

We're not currently using NetApp Cloud Backup, but we're planning on implementing it. I'm not sure because my architect is the one who manages the end-to-end services for NetApp. He makes all the decisions on the NetApp side whether we use AFF or FAS. AFF is a unified storage box, so we route certain data to AFF. 

The main purpose of the AFF is to work with applications that require high-intensity I/O operations. For example, we run some open-source DBs, as well as Oracle, that require high-intensity I/O. We also have a high-performance computing setup.

We have two locations. In the first location, we have an AFF cluster. In the second location, we have an AFF cluster that works in combination with ASAs.

Our environment is primarily made up of open-source applications. 

We always get what we need from their technical support, but what I find annoying is that you always have to go through all the various levels of support. That has definitely improved, but you always have to go through the front end, explaining what your environment looks like and what the impact of the issue is. But that's the only complaint I have about the support.

It would help if they had a customer profile and could look it up and. When I create a case, I try to put in as much information as I can, but it's not always read. I get a standard email back from NetApp that says, "What does your environment look like?" even when I have put all of the information in the case, upfront.

We are mostly using it for ESX, i.e., a mix of both CIFS and NFS shares, and NAS purposes. 

We have a team of four core NetApp trained people from the storage team who are managing NetApp. Two of them are in the learning stage, and I am one of them. 

For our customers, the main benefit is the performance they get with NetApp AFF. We have a lot of feedback from customers about how their applications work faster and that they are very happy with it.

We deploy it a lot for VMware environments and, with VMware, we have nearly all the client's applications. We can have 500 or 1,000 virtual machines on the AFF. Sometimes they tell us that a compute application that, with earlier generations of storage solutions, took hours or days, takes much less time with AFF. For some customers, it takes three or four or five times less, with the new AFF.

Using NetApp AFF has also helped to reduce support issues. It's very stable and we don't have a lot of issues with it. I can talk a lot about this aspect because sometimes we provide support for NetApp. We have certification for level-one and level-two NetApp support. We only escalate the L3 support to NetApp. It's a very good technology with very few bugs.

In addition, the ONTAP data management software has simplified our clients' operations. NetApp is simple to manage. You can grow and reduce the capacity, and you can create a backup copy through replication with SnapMirror and SnapVault. There are a lot of features in NetApp and they are simple to implement.

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment is not complex and not much time is required. The stop that takes time is data migration.

Dell EMC XtremIO is scalable and it is easy to do. However, we cannot have more than four bricks.

We have approximately 10 people in the storage team who use the solution and 5,000 use the services in my organization. 

The solution is used on a daily basis. The media profiles are launched for each user and it communicates to the Dell EMC XtremIO daily.

The primary use case for XtremIO is for managing business applications, either critical or non-critical. It's mainly used in the banking and finance sectors, but it can be used for other sectors as well. XtremIO is an on-premises solution. 

Scalability has an upper limit, so it's difficult to scale to a certain extent, or to an enterprise, level, but it simply runs out. There is a limit to how far you can go.

We have 20,000 users with varied workloads from SAP, SharePoint, and Exchange.

We intend to replace it with something else or to upgrade it as it comes to its end of life.

The initial setup is straightforward and quick.

I have a SolidFire grid set up and I find that it is a stable solution. I did have to replace a disk on one occasion, which is something that the technical support contacted me about. While I have not used SolidFire in production, I have not heard complaints about stability from any of our customers.

One of the most valuable thing aspect of the solution is the fact that it's all in one and all in a very small physical footprint. It has all of your major components, including your storage area network, servers, and networking footprint.

The delivery of the product is very fast and the solution itself deploys quickly, it is up and running within hours.

The product is competitively priced and technical support is good.

You can easily and effectively scale this solution. It's one of the main selling points and one of the features that makes it far superior to competitors.

In terms of SolidFire's most valuable features, simplicity is the key component and key feature of SolidFire. It meant that the administrator or the user do not need to learn about storage RAID Groups or something like that, but they only need to provision the storage space that they need for the host. SolidFire's is being used in NetApp HCI(Hyper-converge Infrastructure)solutions that comes with a Deployment Engine to make the solution more simpler faster and easier to deploy.When you need a software defined storage system SolidFire's is really, really good.

When a customer need complete "Software defined Data-center Solution" with compute and storage; then NetApp HCI is far better choice than any other HCI Solutions.

SolidFire's really simple to deploy. you don't need to learn a lot. When you compare the NetApp storage system with SolidFire, both are very simple to deploy, but comparing to the other products from NetApp, SolidFire is even more simpler to deploy.

The only time I had an issue was with a motherboard. In fact, with the SolidFire technology, NetApp was able to acquire Active IQ. Active IQ is the software layer that is pushing all information on the health of the SolidFire platform. 

Therefore, the support is really quite proactive, in fact. Each time there was something to do, a component to change, or an upgrade to do on the platform, it was followed by emails from the NetApp support, who would remind me of necessary changes. Even with Active IQ, we've had advice on what we could do on the system to get better performance or better organization about the data that resides on the SolidFire platform. 

It's got really great proactive support, and we're quite satisfied with them.

The product is easy to manage and deploy. It's got full API functionality and the performance is pretty steady. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. 

The initial setup is straightforward. It didn't take that long to deploy. 

With respect to comparing other solutions, when you put all of the features in a box, leverage them and migrate your application to one of these arrays, it will give you a lot of benefits. Some people have compared benchmark performance tests against other arrays and from my point of view, overall as a whole package when you sum everything up, Pure Storage is the winner.

The problem is that we can only make a few groups, around five or six groups. I like groups and we need a lot of them. We had to put all the information in only a few groups and cannot make a more detailed separation of them.

This is the only problem that we have in the two years of working with Pure Storage and it is not an important problem. The interface that this solution has is really good. It senses all the errors. We get good support from the vendor. 

The price doesn't really matter. It's very expensive, it can be cheaper.

If I compare it to SAN Symphony, for instance, it's much faster, much reliable level. 

The maintenance is very good. The support is very, very good. If you do any maintenance on it you have the support, and it's nice to know they are there to assist.

It's a very good product. It's very easy to manage everything.

With a snapshot, you can schedule it and you can remove it afterward. You can do a kind of production cope. That's very, very good now, and it's performing very well. The storage is amazing. It's so fast.

The total reduction you can expect is excellent. You buy the bundle storage and they give you a ratio of what you can achieve within it.

The mobile app is very helpful. I have an application on my smartphone. I view the latency in real-time on my app. You can see everything on your smartphone. You can also set up alerts on it, and things like this. I don't think you can do this on Dell storage. 

The solution is stable. It's superb. We've done upgrades in which multiple controllers were involved and, while changing from one model of the array to another, a single controller was removed. It is swapped out and a new one introduced. Once it's stable they proceed to the next one. We have never experienced an outage in any of the three companies in which I've employed the solution. Even when the controller went down, the arrays remained up.

The solution itself is pretty solid. Perhaps the time available for selecting upgrades or for scheduling things could be improved. On a couple of occasions, the waiting time for an upgrade has been pretty substantial. 

In the next release, I would like for them to support file systems on the lower-end models, like the X-10 or X-20. 

The integration and migration features have been really good.

We're getting good performance, and the compression ratio is also very good in Pure Storage FlashArray.

It has an Evergreen model and always maintains the controllers, so the controllers never let you down.

We did the implementation of the solution ourselves with the supervision of the integrator.

We have a team that does the maintenance and operations of the solution.

The administration is very easy and quite minimal.

The performance is very good.

The installation is pretty straightforward. 

Technical support is good.

I'm a pre-sales architect. I architect, and I sell them as a partner with Pure Storage on the VAR side. Our customers use it for storage, mainly block-based storage and virtualization storage. Some solutions have both block and file storage, and some solutions only have file storage from Pure. 

There is definitely room for improvement.

Overall, the solution is pretty good, although it does have certain gaps. There are many features which need to be added, particularly on the replication side. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. The deployment took a couple of hours.

We did a PoC with the product and checked to make sure that it worked in our environment.

We have a group of about 6 to 10 people managing the system.

We've had different types of storage, and three things of this solution are valuable. The first one is its outstanding performance. The second one is its stability. In the about three years that we've had it, we've had component failures, but we never had a service interruption or any data loss. The third one, which is really critical, is that it is super easy to use in terms of provisioning, storage, and managing the arrays. I'm able to maintain a multi-site environment with a couple of dozen arrays with a single mid-level storage admin.

We do a lot of data replication as well, and the replication features are all easy to set up. The networking controls for setting up interfaces and sub-interfaces are also easy to manage.

The setup was extremely simple. 

The solution offers amazing performance. The speed and reliability of their flash arrays are great. In terms of flash storage, they're on it. The performance is there.

Their evergreen solution is probably the most needed in any industry. Especially today in unprecedented times and supply chain issues, their evergreen solution is amazing. 

Whenever we come out with a new feature for our system, we just swap out the storage controller. We don't change anything on our desk and we get the new features. That evergreen approach in your third year costs you nothing. 

It's a great company, great solution. They're dominating in their space for a good reason.

Even their management, their interface, is just the best in the industry. 

The solution can scale.

I have not contacted technical support.

My main point of contact has been the reseller.

FlashArray has many valuable features. It's very user-friendly and it has high availability, so there is comparatively less downtime. During maintenance, there is no shutdown procedure, so you can directly power off the Array and manage the shutdown process without any data loss, which is a unique feature. Managing replication and data migration is also very easy. 

FlashArray is our main repository for all our VMware.

It's just very easy for general block storage. Generally, the ease of use is what customers comment on. It's very user-friendly.

The initial setup is very straightforward. 

Scalability is possible. You can expand the solution.

The stability and reliability are great.

Technical support has been helpful in general. 

Pure Storage FlashArray is our main SAN solution. It's for SAN for service for data storage.

The low latency and the performance, in general, are very good.

The compression and deduplication features help to make the best use of the capacity.

Replication and active-active features are available.

One of the requirements from our developers and test and development team is that from time to time, they want to clone the production environment. We are able to accomplish this within seconds, using a script. This is one of the best parts that I have seen. This feature is not available with other storage solutions.

The solution is simple to implement. It's a new kind of storage, it is very easy to use. It is similar to NetApp, it is straightforward.

Deploying FlashArray is fast and straightforward. We can deploy the infrastructure in half an hour, but installing all the other things takes about two hours to provide the disk to the host. We don't need any help. We integrate the infrastructure with other vendors like Cisco, Veeam, Microsoft Hyper-V, etc., and it works fine. We only need one engineer to deploy FlashArray, but we have three Pure-certified engineers on our team.

Technical support needs improvement.

With respect to them being able to respond, they're more marketing people, less technical. Some of these technical SMEs who I've worked with on Pure Storage, they're really good. However, overall, some accounts still have that thing in their mind that the support isn't as great as some of the bigger companies like Dell or HPE.

That said, that's not the experience for me.

The availability and ease of use are the big features. 

Nimble storage is our primary Production storage vendor.  We use this with VMware on a daily basis including a new AFA5000 all flash array for our DMS system.

Straightforward and very easy, as always.

This product is definitely stable and we use it on a daily basis.

The solution requires a higher availability.

The pricing of the solution isn't ideal. They should work to make it more affordable. It's very expensive.

I'd like to be able to configure the solution from vCenter, which isn't possible right now.

It would be great if the solution offered even more integrations and plugins.

The problem is the price. It needs to be improved.

I would like to see an added feature to auto-fix, or a dynamic alerting system on storage. This is very important because we would like to prevent a disk failure before it happens.

If we had some sort of AI in place to alert us then we could replace the disk before it occurs.

Also, we would like to receive alerts if space is over the limits. This is necessary for us.

We have a team of five to maintain this product.

The dashboard can be improved. I would like to see more details on the dashboard in the next release.

Scalability is something we are looking into with HA and failover features at other locations. This is part of that project we are working on. I do not know right now exactly how scalable the solution is but I might know soon.

Our whole company SAN, uses the solution of approximately 700 employees.

When I'm competing against someone, I would like Nimble to be an active-active controller. As it is now, Nimble is an active-passive controller. If the customer is looking for an active-active controller, then we can't use Nimble and have to go with Primera. Nimble gives us a lot of good things, but without the active-active controller, it's pointless.

We use HPE Nimble for deduplication and to compress data.

We have a large number of customers that rely on high availability from this product.

I think the scalability of HPE Nimble Storage could be improved.

In Venezuela, we have to purchase the solution for two years and cannot obtain a secondary storage platform. So from my perspective, the scalability is not as easy as that of 3PAR StoreServ or HPE Primera.

I'm working with one of the distributors here in Indonesia, Helios Informatika Nusantara. Mainly I'm involved with managing the SMB company. 

I rate HPE Nimble Storage as a nine out of ten. 

The performance and reliability are excellent. Due to the fact that we are a provider, we need systems which just run and run and run the whole day and the whole night without issue. This product does just that. We are selling services, and therefore we need a system which works 24/7.

The initial setup is very easy.

The stability is very good.

The scalability is straightforward.

The installation is straightforward.

In general, the solution works great. We haven't had any issues with it.

It's very reliable. Even if one control fails, it automatically turns on the other controller and everything moves from one to the second instantaneously without any issues.

The product is quite robust.

HPE Nimble Storage is quick to release updates that fix bugs or problems and the failover has been good.

The first installation we did was at a mine in South America, Chile, in a place called Ike where the elevation was very high that spinning disks were failing, the meantime for failure was low. The main reason we put our first all-flash array was that it was solid-state which has no moving parts. This solution allowed our organization to operate in that location.

The solution is easy to scale, but there are some limitations. We would like to add more storage but there are certain limitations.

We have a small environment, and six people are using this solution in my organization on a daily basis.

We have two use cases for the solution. One use case is for our daily work. Another use case is our shared platform. We are a service provider and we have our shared platform to sell some power, some compute and storage to our customers.

The vendor has a lot of support available.

The initial setup is always complex, however, it is manageable. Of course, it could always be a bit easier in the future. 

The initial deployment is pretty fast and takes less than a week.

A company would typically need one or two engineers for deployment and maintenance tasks. 

HPE 3PAR provides fast and reliable storage for our critical systems like the database (MSSQL and Oracle). It also improved the availability of the system and at the same time provides a Disaster Recovery solution by using the remote-copy feature.

The adaptive optimization is also a factor in maximizing the capability of the system.

We paid for five years of support when we purchased the product.

The primary system comes with not too much software and is pretty simple and straightforward. You're not really using too much. The solution doesn't make things that are too complicated.

The replicating software is very good and the duplication part of it is very efficient.

Technical support is pretty good.

The solution offers good stability.

It has a good ability to scale.

It's stable. Although we experienced malfunctions where a virus was running and it failed. 

The initial setup was not complex or difficult. It was pretty straightforward and easy.

We use the StoreServ as our main storage device. We have one unit in the main site and the other in the DR site, with replication between them. We have a file server running, it hosts our database, and it acts as our Exchange server.

Its stability is the most valuable. It has soft alerts. When an alert is raised, we get a call from HP saying that there is this type of alert, and they need to do a remote session to check things. Similarly, for firmware updates, they get in touch to say that a firmware upgrade is required on your storage. They schedule a time and take control remotely to upgrade the firmware. In all such cases, there is no downtime. Everything is done when a full-fledged operation is going on.

Its user interface is also quite good. We are quite accustomed to this user interface. We can easily take a look at the current usage or the amount of storage. It is quite easily understandable, and I can present those things to my seniors or other people who are not that tech-savvy, and they can easily understand what we are trying to tell them. We can easily show them that we are using around 87% of the storage, so we need to plan for another tree and things like that.

I use 3PAR as the standard storage. The main production is VMware, and it is connected to 3PAR across fabric switch. The fabric switch between them is MDS Switch and Notebook 8. We also have a Hyper-V environment, which is connected to the same storage. The main service is the exchange service. I have a public cloud and a private cloud. I use 3PAR as a private cloud.

Our storage team deploys the HPE 3PAR system. Sometimes, we also need some support from the local HPE support team. Its maintenance is done by a vendor.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's not too complex. If you have any SAN experiences pretty easy, as you have to understand some of the terminologies so that you can pre-prep the architectural design that you're looking for. Overall, however, it's pretty easy from a GUI perspective. You can do everything from a GUI. You don't need to play at the CLI level. Of course, if you'd like to do that, you can do that as well.

The deployment and maintenance are done in-house.

We are always using the latest version because I upgrade every year.

The features which are most valuable are the availability of the system and the management.

I think the main thing of value to me is the intelligence around the solution and how data is taken care of on the storage side of things, with your LANs and your virtual volumes and how it sort of manages everything else.

We use HPE 3PAR StoreServ for data storage. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) had something in the contract because if you can compress data very well, you don't need that much capacity in your systems. If it was not possible to compress to a certain degree, they put some extra capacity in the systems. We bought that borrowed capacity but they separated the one-piece storage boxes added to our environment to get along with that bigger growth in capacity. Despite that, it is a wonderful system with an excellent graphical user interface. Still, new functions are being rolled out.

The initial setup was straightforward, it took approximately 45 minutes.

The initial setup is straightforward with the help of the technicians from the company.

The deployment was completed in one week.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We use the old disk and we can't make a VMO in HPE 3PAR without getting an upgrade. We activated a new disk but it failed, it's hard to manipulate and format it. The disk might be okay but when we put it in the storage array, it failed.

The main use for this solution is for storing large data in the backend. It is used in many companies, such as financial institutions. Unfortunately, it has come to the end of service life, companies are going to other solutions because there are cheaper products, it cost too much to maintain the 3PAR.

The initial setup is not overly difficult or complex. it's pretty simple and straightforward. 

The deployment is fast and within a day you can have everything up and running. 

We have engineers available that can assist with deployment and maintenance. 

HPE 3PAR StoreServ has improved our organization from its ease of use and high availability.

We have used HPE 3PAR Flash Storage in the past for all our IT data. For example, we have used it for claims, office management, business intelligence, business information. It can be used for a lot of purposes.

The GUI interface could be improved. I have been having trouble with one issue in particular. If you look at the DC and DR, if there is a communication break and the link went down—so the data is not replicating from DC to DR—there is no way to find out how much data is ready for transmission. Only the size of the data that needs to be transferred after the link comes up. If the firewall link is down, there is no way of seeing how much data is waiting to be transferred. This is a weak point of 3PAR. 

The installation is straightforward.

I work with customers all over demark, which consists of small to large companies. I normally make dual data centers with one HPE 3PAR StoreServ on each side. Our customers are mainly running with failover/failback mission-critical systems.

One of 3PAR's advantages is that it's easy to find a qualified technician. It's such a common device. We are using it in Turkey. France, Spain, and other locations.

The speed of the hard disk could be better. The performance is the main issue for us. The performance of the VMs is not comparable to desktop machines, for instance, and we might need another solution to improve the performance. Other than that, we don't have any issues. We already have a great part of storage with SSDs, and the performance is not as good as I expected. 

It's very similar to most of the other arrays, which are available there. 

The auto-tiering is something that we like. The provisioning is quite good. 

Very recently, we are able to do a lot of data center automation by being able to script some of the 3PAR actions for our private cloud. That's the other important aspect of using 3PAR.

The initial setup is simple.

The product is quite expensive. The costs involved are high.

We would like the product to make it more of a straightforward procedure when we need to configure storage. There were quite a lot of options and parameters that we don't have knowledge of. We used some external company to make the configuration for us, for the 3PAR storage.

The StorServ is the main storage for our infrastructure. Our ERP system runs on it, as well as 15 other servers including Active Directory, synchronization servers, and more.

We are a solution provider and I work with a lot of different SAN products, depending on the needs of the customers. we have implemented this solution, as well as the G series, for some of our clients.

I have a project right now that involves revising and fine-tuning a storage network. This network contains two Hitatch VSP G Series units. There is not a major difference between the F Series and the G Series. Both of them are enterprise-scale and efficient for many data centers. It is used as primary storage in industries such as banking, automotive, health care, and insurance. Large companies, or companies that have an IBM mainframe.

If the solution requires a very high IO/s (Input/Output per second) with sub-millisecond response time then they should select the F Series because it has better performance.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Hitachi should launch some small machines in Brazil. The smallest machine here in Brazil is VSP 350, which can be quite big for some of the customers. In China, Hitachi has small models of this equipment, but those models are not available in our region. 

Its pricing is a big issue for us. We are resellers, and we face some competition from other vendors. Hitachi doesn't always have a good position in terms of the price. Its user interface is also not as good as some of the other competitors, and it can be improved.

I have worked with this equipment for the last two years. When I worked before in Hitachi Data Systems, I worked for a data architect and designed complete solutions, so I have a lot of interaction with the clients.  I handle the solutions, the capacity of the disk, configuration, initial set up, definitions of the DP pools, assigning the volumes, creating the entire SAN, etc. Also, I manage the SAN switches. I worked for Pearson, Sonic, Mobiistar, Macromer, Mynorte, and Santander. Every time, I created the whole environment— all open and the mainframe in development. For example, at Ponavid, I created the whole solution, assigned the space, performed all the troubleshooting, as well as supported all the hardware and the performance.

Hitachi VSP scales pretty well, but it generally depends on storage costs. The high-end arrays have huge scalability limits. Generally, we are limited mainly by the array controllers' performance, not the array's capacity limits. 

Our environment is massive. We have approximately 15,000 users for virtual desktop solutions, about 16,000 email users, and approximately 6,000 to 7,000 servers running on VMware platforms. We also have a few hundred logical partitions on IBM Power servers.

We have three administrators who take care of the different applications and data that are hosted on this storage. We don't perform maintenance on a daily basis. We may extract some stats for the performance and for evaluating capability. However, when it comes to maintenance, we probably work on it once or twice a month.

They can include Amazon file system S3 protocol in the upcoming releases. It is a cloud file system. IBM FlashSystem doesn't have this feature in the box for high-end or mid-range. We have got requests for this from customers because we need to use S3 for EDI application storage. 

At the beginning of every year, IBM releases firmware. When I find any bugs in the firmware during the year, I am unable to find any information from IBM regarding the bug. I need to open a ticket, and the IBM engineering team makes a patch only for me. This patch is not public. By creating a customized patch for a client, they don't really solve the issue for everyone. If multiple users have the same bug, IBM should upload the patch on the official website so that we can download it.

IBM FlashSystem has a monitoring tool in the box, but it is not advanced. I need a more advanced tool for more advanced equations and monitoring. All top three storage vendors, that is, EMC, IBM, and Pure Storage, don't have a powerful monitoring tool. To monitor our box to show the statistics for I/Os and latency, I need to pay for extra software. The built-in monitoring storage is not mature enough to handle all requests and generate all reports that I need.

They can include the functionality to stretch a cluster natively without using any additional boxes. In addition, there are some features that EMC has integrated with the box. These features are not available in IBM FlashSystem.

There is always room for improvement, but IBM is less interested in on-premise storage or on-premises solutions going forward. 

They're highly focused on the cloud. I don't see IBM being a very major player, the way that they used to be because they are moving away from this and are trying to move all their customers to the cloud.

Nothing really comes to mind for needing improvement. Some years ago, there would have been an answer to what could be better about this product, but nowadays, virtually all of the companies are meeting all of the features.

More and more, we would like to see how it's easier for the solutions to be bought by the customer more on a pay-per-use basis. That is certainly an improvement.

The customer's expectations are what they get on the cloud, they're expecting even in the on-premises deployments, going forward. 

They want to pay-per-use and not own and get stuck with what they're buying. 

They want flexibility.

IBM does that in a few products, but then more and more you see the business model changing towards that. We'd like to see that in all IBM products.

The maintenance service and support from IBM is very good.

I have been in touch with IBM support, and I did it a lot. Normally, they respond within an acceptable time with a sufficiently detailed answer. Around 90% of the time, you will get the answer straight back. In some rare cases, you need to ask them more. You send them a mail asking to clarify something or get more details about how to do a specific task, but normally, they provide a satisfactory answer.

The initial setup was not complex at all. It's pretty straightforward and easy to handle.

The deployment was very fast as well and may have only taken about a day or two.

We had a team of three that handled everything. They don't just handle the storage, however. They're handling the servers and network as well.

I like most of the features. Its speed, performance, and availability are valuable. We are implementing the data reduction technology the most.

Recently, we deployed SS9100. At the core level that is deployed on that storage, it is not stable. We had an incident not too long ago. Both controllers rebooted simultaneously, within 15 seconds. There was some threshold value defined in the core level, and the system exceeded that threshold value. 

We logged the case to IBM. IBM did internal checks, which we deployed. The permanent fix will be available in the first quarter of 2021. It seems to be an issue on IBM's side. Obviously, we were surprised by how both controllers rebooted. We faced downtime on our applications and on our services. 

The issue which we had recently faced relates to the core level. It should be first tested at IBM labs and then introduced for general release.

IBM should improve its data reduction development.

The solution is primarily a file infrastructure. It contains all the virtual machines for our company.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

It is well documented.

The installation is straightforward. The solution is delivered with an operating system, which can be updated in about half an hour. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

We do the implementation and maintenance of the solution using our in-house team.

The initial setup was straightforward with a smooth installation.

The general use cases depend on the size of a company. I work with the commercial sector, the FlashSystem 5000 and its different models. It suits the small to medium, or SME, companies. The FlashSystem 9200 goes mainly to big enterprises, like banking or governmental sectors. The 7200 plays sometimes in SME and sometimes in bigger enterprises. 

The availability of the product is great.

I appreciate how well it can scale. 

The solution is stable. The performance is quite good.

It's very easy to manage. They make it very, very easy to add notes.

This product will improve your performance and it has helped us with that.

Also, in prior systems where we had mechanical drives, there would have been at least a couple of drive failures. With this solution, no drive failures have been experienced so far.

Compare to our previous system, space utilization has definitely been reduced. Our old system used two racks, whereas this solution sits in a single rack and initially took up 2Us. Post-upgrade, it is 8Us but even so, compared to what we had, it is a considerable energy saving. Also, when we upgraded, it helped us to mitigate a lot of our legacy issues present with the old hardware.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is easy to install.

It takes very little time to deploy. The initial implementation will take two days. The data will then be moved by wifi over a three-week period due to the implementation study.

The installation is being managed by a team of two engineers.

The stability of the product is very valuable. I also like the new system they use that improves the availability of storage.

My main use of this solution is for backup.

This solution is our main production storage system. It is deployed in a few banks in Ukraine, where it is used to store the core system data.

This solution is very stable. We use it for our critical workloads and it is used on a daily basis.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the performance of the database access.

It's simple in operating and for maintenance. Also, they provide a warranty for the I/O output.

The initial setup for installation was straightforward. 

The solution is very good. It offers very good performance, and very good data services to customers. 

The ONTAP is excellent. 

SnapMirror is very useful. It allows the customer to be able to see the entire relationship. It's one of the best features of the product.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

For the most part, the solution is stable.

The technical support has been pretty good for the most part.

NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays are used for system backups. We mainly use it to store our ERP.

We found the implementation to be very straightforward. It's not complex in any way.

The deployment didn't take too long. We had everything up and running in two days or so. It's pretty quick.

We have 12 technicians for the maintenance of all of our equipment in the enterprise. They would also handle any maintenance required for this product.

Good in-built monitoring tools from the System|Performance section Tab, from CloudIQ you can reach out to vCenter as well. ESRS (Call Home) on the service delivery part is valuable.

Remote Code update support (interactive or not) is free of charge , as you wish, nonetheless you are free to do it yourself as update are cumulative and retained on each new codelevel.

We have three people who maintenance and support the solution.

An area for improvement is the available capacity. If a customer goes with a base model, which would have its own limit, they could not go beyond the model-supported capacity, so an increase would be good.

It has good stability

It requires only one technician for deployment and maintenance.

Dell EMC Unity XThas helped our organization with the high availability. It has been working very well and the performance has been good with an old flash solution that we are using. It has improved the reliability and speed of virtual machines.

I have had no problem at all. I think this is one of the most important things. It is very good. Maintaining it and deploying updates require very low maintenance. We haven't had problems. We had to replace a couple of disks in all these years, but it was pretty straightforward.

We can use Dell EMC Unity XT for backing up SAN and NAS drives. Mainly for databases and for file servers.

Implementing Unity was straightforward. We were able to move through the process of setting up the systems based on the procedure the vendor provided without any problems. Once we got started, I think it was just a couple of days. 

The most valuable feature is reliability. At the end of the day, it just runs.

This solution is easy to work with and easy to maintain.

We do have Dell EMC SC storage, which is very simple and straightforward, which is good for our small remote locations. However, it doesn't have the performance or features that the XT would. As far as block storage, Unity XT is probably the best bank for the buck for us because we can get block and file storage in one package. We don't have to buy a separate Isilon for object storage.

Including VNX, SC, and Unity/Unity XT, Dell EMC has provided all the storage solutions at the company for the last 20 years. 

We went to the Unity because of cost. I wasn't involved in the purchase of it, but the VPLEX maintenance was getting costly and it felt like the Unity was newer technology. The technology was better, the interface was better, interacting with it was better. It is a lot easier to use than the VPLEX. We figured it was a better solution than what we had and one that gave us more flexibility

The technical support is good and quick.

I would like a little faster response, but I don't think that their response is really that slow. They respond fairly quickly, at least fast enough for most issues. If it was an emergency issue, it might be different, as they probably would move it up the ladder anyway.

• One of the most useful features for us was the deduplication. It had been challenging for us to store certain types of data and to use patterns of storage to reduce storage size.
• The IOPS and the speed were also an important part of the solution.
• In addition, there was a Unity machine that offers block-level and NAS, and we used the block-level storage.
• We also use the side-to-side storage verification for the recovery site.
  
• Finally, the device was flexible and we could change the configuration to meet our needs.

The initial setup was completely straightforward. Anyone who can handle "next, next, next, finish" can deploy Unity. It was deployed within half an hour.

We installed it, connected it to fabric, updated the software, went through the initial configuration dialogue, and that was it. Most of the time in getting it up and running was spent on the data migration.

For deployment and maintenance it requires just one person. In our organization that person is our storage and virtual infrastructure administrator.

We are a solution provider and the Dell EMC Unity XT series is one of the products that we implement for our clients. My role is in pre-sales and I help to design the solutions.

It is primarily used to provide our customers with an on-site, high-availability production server. It is also used to provide disaster recovery

On the Data Domain side, the most attractive feature is the compression ratio, which none of the other products in the market are currently able to provide. On the Unity side, what customers mostly like is the availability guarantee. 

I would rate Dell EMC support seven out of 10. We had to follow up a lot. We sent an email beforehand, so they knew the model and everything about our environment. We expected them to do better homework and engage with my team. If they had done the implementation like that we could have saved a lot of time. That is why I rate them seven and not nine or eight.

This is a great storage solution and a product that I recommend. That said, it's not perfect. More can be done from Dell to improve the Unity series.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Initial setup is very straightforward, very easy. We didn't have any challenges. 

There are some small things in the solution that can be improved. Supporting software is one of them and the integration with mainstream solution technologies could be better. They are small issues and generally the technology functions well. It's not an issue caused by the vendor but rather due to external circumstances and the cessation of cooperation between Chinese and US companies. 

We have some Huawei 9000 cases for our virtualization, and for the storage block-level and mass as well, For HyperMetro too, for 18560 and 6800, this solution is critical for our company. The product is the main one on the line, it serves the entire company. Our usage expands daily.  We are partners with Huawei and I'm the technical lead. 

We are a system integration company and we are working with Huawei OceanStor products. It is mainly used for virtualization.

Huawei OceanStor is priced very well but is a bit complicated.

You have a price list but have to wait for a discount, which depends on the distribution, where you get it from. This is intransparent, I prefer a clear price policy.

I would prefer having a price quote based on whether you are a reseller if you have silver or gold status, or a customer.

The price list is high and you get a large discount from the price list. I prefer a comparable price list and a smaller discount.

We purchased the HyperMetro feature, but we have not really used it. It would've been very interesting, but we have mainly used the option and clean features.

Scalability is fine you can add to cluster other superior version or older version, and the orices is the same as the identical model and version. The OceanStor support the fail until 7 of 8 controllers without lost data and wiht the minimal impact to the performance, so the performance has been very good.

The logistics can be improved because sometimes we have to wait a long time for the product to be delivered, despite there being stores available in Europe. Some of our customers are discouraged due to this long wait time.

The marketing for this product needs to be improved because it does not have enough exposure.

This solution does not support VMware VVols 2.0. However, I do not feel that this is necessary.

My company has an in-house team that handles the implementation and services for our clients. If the client purchases a maintenance contract then we take care of that, as well.

Huawei's technical support is very advanced. Customers can directly approach a Huawei technical person by logging a ticket and providing an email address. They will definitely respond in one or two hours.

The support is fast but the customer needs to understand what data they need for support.

We like that the solution is all-flash.

The solution has a sufficient amount of storage on offer.

The solution is very stable.

So far, we have found it to be quite scalable.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward and not overly complex. The installation and management are very easy.

The performance is very good. 

Technical support is quite good.

There are plenty of features available in this solution.

The installation is straightforward. The team did not do a lot of training and was able to handle the installation without issues.

So far, technical support has been great I have no complaints. they are helpful and responsive. 

We primarily use it for on-premises storage.

I'm using it with VMware and then with AIX systems, AIX power systems, and VMware as the VMFS.

Huawei claims if you choose their enterprise controller, such as the 8000, when you have a cluster of eight controllers, up to seven controllers can be down, and you can still be in operation. However, with their feature Metro Cluster that can be achieved by having 70 kilometers across two-site, you can have seven, nine.

The solution is stable enough as long as you do not do mistakes during implementation.

Most of the features which all enterprises storages solutions have are available in Huawei OceanStor Dorado.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is complex but straightforward. It takes approximately 45 minutes to configure.

The setup was straightforward. I implement it for my customers. It can be deployed within an hour. 

You only need one person for the deployment. One person is more than enough. There's no dedicated team required.

We use it for various type of data but mainly for virtual environments.

The solution is used for shared storage for the ESX cluster, VMware, or Vcenter cluster. It's a virtual machine and it's hosting space for virtual service. The primary reason we use the solution is to host the core infrastructure, the virtual servers including file servers, domain controllers, application servers, sequel servers, etc. Basically, the servers that run the business.

It's fairly scalable, as long as you size it properly, to begin with. The expansion options are pretty good. Our clients for this product range in size from small to large businesses.

We use it for multiple databases. We use it for Oracle and for SQL. We also use it for file systems — Oracle, SQL, file system storage. Most of our use cases involve Oracle, SQL, VMware, and large file systems.

I am a storage architect. have a state administrator that works with me as well.

Internally, within our company, there are a few dozen employees using this solution. Externally, we literally have millions of people that hit that storage system every day.

As far as our database administrators, they're always looking at the storage performance. Some of them actually have read-only log-ins to the storage array itself. They can log in and look at directly what the storage performance is for their database.

Currently, we are not using this solution extensively because it's becoming a sunset solution. There's no option to increase usage. It's like saying you want to buy a '65 Mustang — no, you can't get one brand new, they don't make those anymore. There's no expansion being done because the product's no longer available. 

The technical support is great. We have 24/7 support with a four-hour response. They are responsive and they stay to help until the problem is resolved.

One time, we had a drive fail and we were notified before we even saw it on the device. Then, the new hardware was shipped to us the next day.

We use this product for daily business and normal IT operations. We also use it for replication of one system to another system. We also use it for the hostings for HANA virtualization. Those kinds of replications and IT applications. We use a hybrid version.

The solution is mainly used for primary storage and in more than half of the cases, we use the Live Volume, the Synchronous Replication - this Automatic Failover. Its function is for primary storage on two sites.

In terms of what could be improved, I would say the lack of reporting would be the main issue.

The solution is automated, but we still don't get a complete speech from the disc. The flash speed should be addressed. 

While the scalability is good, there are certain limitations. Our racks are at their limit, so we do not have the requisite scalability to expand. 

We would like to see replication of the data storage without the need to resort to third party tools. Storage to storage repetition would be a nice feature. 

We only build the basic foundation and the basic installation for the end-user on Dell EMC SC Series. However, I'm not sure what they install on it. Our main use case for Dell EMC SC Series is for VMware.

One of the most valuable features is the capability to switch between all-flash to hybrid, which have have actually done for one of our arrays. We started with the hybrid, with the limited if I'm not mistaken, and then over a period of time, we swapped all the hybrids with the SSDs. This was one of the big features because it gave us the capability to not stick with just one kind of media. 

Secondly, since it has sorted clustering, we were able to bring in the newer boxes and have it all clustered together. These were the two main features that we really looked into, which benefited our use case from an expansion/growth perspective. Another valuable feature is the ease of management. 

In this solution, I like the option of clustering two storages together and that there can be HA availability. You can get two DM Series which is a 5000 Series, and you can cluster them and make a chain solution. This is a very important feature. If you want to build this solution with brands such as EMC, you should be paying a lot of money because it requires buying equipment like a VPLEX which is so expensive. With the other device you can launch as soon as it appears. But with this DM Series, you only need two of these. It's a very good feature. 

It's difficult to calculate pricing on the solution. Lenovo does help us, as a partner, however, there are different types of storage at different price points, and also certain items that are built into the cost already. 

Normally, they break down and show you how they get to the final price. Typically, a client will tell you what they need and you run some calculations based on workloads. Once you have a plan that aligns with the customer's needs, you go to Lenovo for pricing, and you need to negotiate with them to try to lessen costs. 

Once you have decided on the costs, there are no extras beyond that which a customer would have to pay for. It's all one set negotiated cost.

The advice that I would you give to others looking into implementing this product is that it is a good product if it fits your needs. Products in this category are not all the same and they all have something unique, but ThinkSystem is a good offer and can work out well if you can work with it to fit the use cases that you have.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate this product as probably and eight-out-of-ten overall. I would give it that rating because it is a good product. It is stable. It is well supported. It just lacks some depth in the area of features. That ends up not necessarily being a strike against the product because, price-wise, it is a good value. If you want all the bells and whistles, Lenovo wants you to move up the ladder on something else they have to offer.  

As we employ the VMware for three hosts, we are not able to scale it too much. But, for our present needs it is scalable. 

The solution could be more scalable and I believe we could increase certain resources should the need arise. 

Our use cases vary but usually we use the solution for cloud-based solutions. We use it for containers, which provide security on premises for our customers to test environments. Most of our customers are medium to large enterprises based in Bulgaria where we are located. We are resellers, distributors and system integrators. We have a partnership with FlashBlade. 

Compared to, for example, Hitachi NAS, the solution is not mature at all. It's just in its infancy as far as technology goes.

That means there are some features that just arent yet available on the product. When we ask for customization or certain features, we'll get a response saying "it's not available yet" or "that's in the pipeline". We have a complicated enterprise, therefore we need more features, perhaps, than the average user, and in this sense this product is limited.

We're on a dark site. We don't have internet access. This isn't great for FlashBlade, which needs to be connected to the internet. It's a website, so it needs to be connected in order to provide reports. Therefore, reporting isn't available to us.

We'd love a better dashboard that offers more accurate metrics. We'd like more details about what is happening on the system, so we can notify the clients as necessary.

At the moment, I can't think of anything that needs to be improved; however, the feature that we're waiting on is better integration with the cell services. I know Pure has a company that's working on the cell system, but it's still not completely there yet.

The initial setup is very easy.

We require a team of two to maintain the solution.

This solution is mainly used in a very performance-sensitive environment for enterprise software storage.

The initial setup is straightforward.

It took approximately 20 minutes to deploy.

It's just a file IO and we've used it for training AI systems. We also use it for network boot for a number of our diskless machines, and it's proven rock-solid on that front, as well.

FlashBlade is absolutely stable. As in all products from Pure Storage, they offer some best quality and are stable. They are quite good in terms of the hardware, in the software. 

We don't face any trouble during the installation process or handling maintenance. 

Based on the user experience, we expect that they will not have any issues in the future, we hope.

The product is scalable and easy to expand.

If you need high throughput the FlashBlade is the best solution for you. It is the only one on the market that can provide 15GB per second from one node. And if you have another node, it will be 30GB per second. So the throughput performance is excellent for FlashBlade. It's not about the capacity, not about the features - it's about the throughput differences.

We have limited deployment of Flashblade.

I was not present for the installation, but I believe that it is simple. I don't think that it is complex.

One person is needed to deploy and maintain this solution.

In my opinion, HPE is making good progress and moving ahead with InfoSight, which is predictive analytics and artificial intelligence. I think that this is one of the selling points for their storage products and it comes at no extra cost.

InfoSight is built by gathering intelligence from all of the storage solutions, worldwide.  If the AI is being used here in Malta, locally, as it would with InfoSight, then it would use baseline data from the whole world to make predictions. It is really robust.

Cases are opened automatically and they give you trend analysis as well.

Anything that helps administratively for a data center is important, and Primera gives you both efficiency and effectiveness.

The technical support is very well organized. There is a feature called Home, where the hardware calls to their NOC and reports and alerts or events. Then they have a pretty standard protocol to call back. They're quite insistent; they'll send you emails and if you don't acknowledge then they start calling.

The mechanics of the support is very well put in place. 

Tell us about your experience with customer service/technical support.

Technical support is very well organized. There is a feature called Home. The hardware calls their NOC center and reports any alerts or events. Then they have a standard ideal protocol to call back. They are quite insistent, they send you emails if you don't acknowledge and they start calling.

The mechanics of the support is very well put in place.

The initial installation, setup, and deployment were simple for Primera, versus other hyper-converged infrastructure.

HP Enterprise, simply with your Dell Technologies VxRail and HCI solutions, has done its job very well job, because you can deploy and start up your services and your new infrastructure in one or two days. One day for checking the specs and one day for deploying the whole infrastructure. This is because the solution is inside of the solution. Meaning the virtualization is already pre-installed, and they have already done the job.

Each customer is looking for high-end solutions. They may decide to purchase the Primera solution partly because of its installation and deployment. If it takes two days as is the case for HCI and three days in the case of Primera, there is no problem for the customer. It depends on the customer and their mindset.

The most important thing that we had found when we purchased this product around six months back was its 100% availability and uptime.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The deployment process was easy and it took between three and four months to complete.

We really like the HPE infosight. it is an AI driven interface for hybrid cloud. it gives some more insights into any virtualized infrastructure such as performance issues, proactive recommendations etc. for example, get alerts and items of that nature It's been quite helpful so far. 

The performance of the solution is excellent. It performs far better than you would expect.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex. 

It outperforms on latency. It's very fast. We're talking about 0.4 milliseconds. The faster, the fast data works, the faster you'll get the response. This is really low latency; it's a great performance.

The dashboards are very good.  It has a very user-friendly kind of dashboard that is easy to understand. There isn't any complex stuff or too much information. That said, it has deep integration in to HPE Infosight. It gives you so much information, even more than you want.

The customization capabilities are excellent.

We used HPE to do the full implementation of the solution. 

We have two engineers for the maintenance of the solution.

HPE Primera has high availability and is stable.

When taking into account the price, maintenance required, and performance of HPE Primera, it is an effective solution.

My primary use of Primera is as a storage solution for a huge conglomerate with multiple critical businesses including banks, airlines, and retail chains.

As per HPE, they said that it's pretty easy to add more storage in HPE Primera. With the existing controllers, I think it's pretty easy to add more storage. Right now we are using around 600 TB, not more than that, but it can support up to four petabytes.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It takes about half a day to one day for the initial deployment.

The primary use case is data storage consolidation for mission-critical applications, like billing, the charging system, mobile payment, and intelligent network. Virtualization and cloud infrastructure are where the customer is using many solutions for virtualization, like Hyper-V, Oracle Virtual Machine, OpenStack, VMware, Solaris, Linux, Kubernetes, and Docker. Disaster recovery was also the main focus of the customer to guarantee RPO and RTO. The last use case was a NAS solution through the eNAS provided by PowerMax. The previous eNAS hosted by VMAX 10K has its limits in term of size limit for a file system.

The deduplication of the solution is excellent and the compression is quite helpful. These are the most useful aspects of the solution for us.

The initial setup is quite straightforward.

Technical support has been excellent.

Uptime and availability are first and foremost. The deduplication and compression capabilities are also excellent, allowing us to be very efficient with the physical hardware that we need to deploy on-prem in order to fulfill our requirements. It has given us excellent value for money without compromising performance.

The solution's snapshot capabilities and replication are very good features. Snapshots are allowing us to quickly build analytical models directly from production data. This gives us amazing insights into market trends and allows us to build more effective trading algorithms. Replication offers us unparalleled levels of resilience.

The management overall is excellent. Dell EMC continues to build on very solid foundations, which have been evolving for over two decades. 

The REST APIs are great.

The solution exposes excellent automation opportunities.

We have found the performance to be very good so far.

There are so many ways it has helped. It provides efficiencies through compression and it provides high availability through its solid-state drives. We literally turn it on and it does its thing.

When it comes to storage provisioning, a lot of it has been automated. This was true even prior to PowerMax, back with the VMAX. The days of provisioning the mapping and masking, and doing all those things manually, are over. A lot of that is automated through their tools. Overall, that automation is saving us about four hours a week.

• The cost of the entire solution
• Their dedupe rates
• Ease of use
• Simplicity

Data availability is very high. Data security is also very good. There are a lot of encryption methods available.

We use the solution’s NVMe SCM storage tier feature. There is almost no overhead or management time involved. It was kind of set it and forget it.

We are a very large customer of Dell EMC. We have several different deployments or installations. The biggest use case is probably a multi-tenant or shared environment where we provide many petabytes of storage for multiple customers who utilize that same infrastructure. We are a managed services provider in the cloud sector so we have to deliver high performance storage for thousands of customers who have to be up all the time.

There are a lot of different use cases, in general: Having large quantities of storage available that is always available, because of this uptime is important as is performance. As a service provider, we deliver storage on demand for our customers. This is important because we can adjust storage needs on a per customer basis. Whether it be increases or decreases in storage, this platform allows us to do that very easily.

We are using the latest release.

It is a good, resilient product.  

The good thing that we have found is the enhanced data savings. For example, in an XtremIO, we were seeing the space savings was 1:4 or 1:3. With PowerMax, I have seen 10:1 and 12:1. This is something that has really come out as a distinctive feature and is helping us a lot.

The Unisphere GUI has been enhanced. A lot of options have been added to the GUI. Though, if somebody is planning to buy PowerMax, they should also have some associated training with that.

We would like more documentation, a guide to the features of the PowerMax. We needed to use the option to reclaim storage and we had to chat with the Dell EMC team.

Based on our experience with VMAX, there isn't any hardware failure or something like that in PowerMax. Performance-wise also, everything is fine. We haven't faced any performance issues or any hardware failure. Its performance is great as compared to VMAX. Its I/O per second rate is higher than the old model.

We can use it block-wise, and we can also use it at the file level. It is good for any environment.

I am the solution administrator for Telcel. I use it to analyze the host and for data availability. It is a useful tool for me. I use it a lot every day. It is used for mission-critical operations.

We use the NVMe SCM storage tier feature, and that's how we're able to do the service level capability (SLA). We have storage class memory as a part of our deployment, and we have about 10% of our storage sizing allocated to storage class memory. With that, we are able to create different service levels for the disk groups or loans provisioned from this storage.

It most definitely helps in improving storage-related performance in our environment. The way our core banking solution works is that we have what we call ODS blocks. So, for leveraging that SLA, we were able to implement some kind of priority for those ODS blocks. Oracle had said that this is something for which their Exadata has a special way of doing, but based on my own assessment, we are able to achieve relatively similar levels of performance by using PowerMax.

Before we deployed this solution, we used to struggle with processing about 100,000 transactions in 10 minutes. We are now able to process about 350,000 or more transactions. These are conservative figures. We did hit much more than that, but conservatively, we are able to see about 300% performance improvement as compared to the SSD storage that we had previously from IBM. We have metrics to show that. The performance is different, and it is better than what we were used to.

We are in our ideal environment in which the storage double acts as our UAT and our test environment. So, we've seen remarkable deduplication in that environment because we are able to expand the footprint much more than what we are able to do in production. The production environment is a bit more controlled, but in our DR UAT environment, we are able to stretch those capabilities. The metrics that we see and the number of environments that we're able to create is quite remarkable.

It provides NVMe scale-out capabilities, which is pretty awesome. We currently have a plan to scale up. We started off with about 100TB. Based on the performance that we've seen, we're consolidating more workloads on the storage. We need to scale up a bit, and we find it very valuable to be able to do that. The ability to scale out and scale up marginally depending on what you want is quite valuable to us.

PowerMax improved our storage performance and allowed us to consolidate our old storage into one platform. It's faster than the older EMC equipment we replaced. We had a few different storage arrays, and a couple of them were approaching the end of maintenance, and one was a year away from the end of its maintenance. So it was time to either spend a ton of money on renewing maintenance or replace them. At the same time, PowerMax has made storage provisioning more difficult because it's not as intuitive as other arrays, but it's still a good solution for our mission-critical workloads.

We're using SRDF, but it hasn't affected our storage network bandwidth requirements. We haven't had any issues, so we haven't had to increase the size of any of our connections. Inside the data, there certainly wouldn't be any issues. The only problem would be replicating to the other site, and we haven't had any issues. We have a reasonably large pipe between the sites.

I work in data storage as a senior administrator.

I use multiple Dell EMC protection and storage tools like VMAX and PowerMax network for data domains. This product is an onsite data center and we have two PowerMax boxes. One of them is for our main site and the other is for our disaster recovery (DR) site.

We use PowerMax SRDF as our main application.

Our primary use case for PowerMax is hosting our VMware environment with VMware SRM hosted on and connected to both. The PowerMax does the SRDF replication for VMware SRM, and some of the workload on it is for the physical environment that consists of Unix, AIX, and Sun Solaris. In addition to that, we have physical Windows and Linux servers as well. We have 1,200-plus virtual machines hosted on PowerMax.

We have two PowerMax 8000s, each deployed at a different site. The capacity of the PowerMax at the primary site is 500 terabytes, and approximately 200 terabytes at the DR site.

We value maximum system uptime because our projects are associated with a government customer. We have medical ERP, which is used throughout Russia, covering 8 time zones. If it fails, then we have big problems. Therefore, the stability of the system is important for us.We are using PowerMax and VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols).

We use Power Pass, which is an additional software from Dell EMC, alongside multi-passing in our SAN network. This allows us to balance uploads and optical links of our SAN network.

The main improvement for us is that we have seen up to 12x performance improvements after moving from earlier, mid-range Dell EMC storage to PowerMax. Some of our reports, which were long-running, are now completed in a few minutes. Something that would take two hours is completed in 15 minutes and that has improved productivity. 

We also used to get timeouts from our storage, but now, after migrating to the PowerMax, there are no timeouts because the latencies are in microseconds, compared to the milliseconds of our old solution.

Our bandwidth requirements have been reduced because of the compression and the dedupe that we are getting with the built-in SRDF. It is bandwidth-optimized. And the best part is the reverse replication. Suppose you activate your DR. When you have to come back to the main array, only the changes are synced. That is unlike many other products. Here, only the changed tracks need to be updated, making the reverse replication very fast.

Also, by enabling the compression and deduplication, we get a very good level of compression and dedupe, of 4:1, which means if you have 40 terabytes, you only need to buy 10 terabytes. There are cost savings there. And by default, thin provisioning is in place, which also gives you at least a 40 percent reduction. And because of the bandwidth optimization, the link required for the DR replication is also reduced, meaning you are saving on the bandwidth costs. We have easily saved 50 percent.

Overall, you are getting very high-performing and reliable storage.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It took two weeks from start to finish.

In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems. They should have direct integration available using Pure APIs. Good candidates would be Rubrik and Veeam.

Fundamentally, we have more visibility to what is happening in the storage for the databases. We can determine if the problem is something that is bound by IO or the problem is related to the database structure itself. 

The amount of time that a DBA has to spend figuring out whether it is a physical problem versus a programmatic problem has been reduced significantly. Before moving to this solution, when the database was running slow, we were asked to check our disks, but we had no way of verifying that. It was a nightmare. Now, we have reports that we can send on a daily basis, and they know what their performance is like.

We can now ascertain that it is not the physical problem with the array that is causing the delays on the database. The DBAs can then look at the database and figure out various reasons or solutions for this, such as maybe the tables are value structure, maybe they need to run optimal queries, or maybe they should change the way they are accessing the data. You can pretty much take out of the equation the fact that the hardware is the problem.

The software layer has to improve. The software is promising but not prominent.

We have upgraded more than 21 things. We have four artists and have had to upgrade the codes. 

There are several upgrades required, but we are slowly catching up to them.

There are not many drill-down options available. EMC is providing many reporting tools that are not available in Pure.

They need better reporting. Some of the tools are missing. EMC is a step ahead in that area.

The usage at the host level has some limited options.

Being able to have broken files on-site on the same appliance is quite useful.

The newer version of NVME has a really noticeable difference in quality versus the last generation. It's better in terms of latency. It allows for so much more input.

The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward. 

The stability is quite good.

We've found the scalability to be excellent.

The price of the product isn't too high.

The overall performance is great. The single workload performance available from Pure is higher than the SolidFire can provide. 

It's very simple to deploy and manage. Those are probably the two biggest aspects for us.

Everything has been very easy and very intuitive from a support standpoint and from a deployment standpoint. 

In terms of the upgrade procedure, we've gone through that in the last year and it was very smooth. It met expectations.

Technical support has been helpful and responsive. 

I have no complaints about Pure's customer service and support. I've never had a negative experience with these guys. They're always fast, gentle, and ready to help. They offer ample support, and [inaudible 00:06:16]. If you connect FlashArray X to the cloud, they will inform you about any potential issues before they cause an outage. 

Its speed is superior to our existing Unity x00 model. There are three different models of Unity. There is x00, which is the original model for Unity. There is x50, and now you have x80s. It has performed substantially better than our x00 model and a little bit better than our x50 model. I cannot rate it against the x80s on the Unity class, but from what we've got, it has beaten those two models performance-wise. This is bearing in mind that those x00 models were there before they had their own X-series with the NVMe flash.

The initial setup is straightforward and it usually takes about a day to deploy.

The administration is easy and very straightforward. It is the same software for managing both flash and non-flash storage. It can be managed using either the GUI or the command-line interface.

It is a high-performance product that serves our requests well.

The IBM Professional Services give us technical support that is both timely and of high quality.

The high performance and high availability improved our overall processes.

IBM's support is not good. I experienced a big problem where I opened the console IBM Storage and would see that something was broken. I called the call centers, and I said, "I have a problem. My drive is not working." They want me to give them the serial number, I gave it to them and they told me "I cannot find your product. Your product is not here."

It was unbelievable. I had purchased it a week prior. I was the first person in Turkey to buy it. They said they couldn't help me. I ended up fixing it myself. 

• Flexibility
• Performance
• Easy of use

It also has some very good compression capabilities. 

We were looking for a solution that was easy to install in our VMware environment, that was flexible. PowerStore X is a type of a VMware cluster that you install inside your environment. If you have a VMware environment, like we have in production, it's easy to install and use.

It enables us to add compute or capacity independently. We have also deployed some apps on PowerStore, even though the PowerStore we have is not the biggest one you can buy. One of the main characteristics of PowerStore is that it is like another piece of VMware, so you can run applications on top, applications that have direct access to the storage. The ability to add compute or capacity independently is great because it adds more flexibility to our environment. You are not adding only storage, but you're adding some not-so-big computing capability. You have the possibility of adding some virtual machines, running NVMe storage, and that is a real plus for this solution.

In addition, PowerStore's built-in intelligence for helping to simplify IT operations is incredible. When we approached PowerStore, we had an idea that it was a normative platform, but we were impressed by the capability of the solution. It's probably one of the best pieces of storage that we have installed here.

We've had no issues with the machines since turning them on.

The machine supports "six nines" of availability. Anything they could do to push it closer to "seven nines" of availability would be extremely beneficial.

The way you're able to manage all your PowerStores as one solution is very good for us. PowerStore enables you to federate or cluster multiple appliances with automated load balancing. In terms of management, it's helpful that we can do it from a single interface where we're able to manage multiple PowerStores. When you have multiple PowerStores, it works intelligently by running the workloads based on the needs of the infrastructure.

The solution's machine learning and automation work well when it comes to optimizing resources. It does inline deduplication which means that the net the amount of storage you have available is bigger. It can do all kinds of optimization in the system itself and that works very well.

PowerStore is joined to four application servers in a cluster. We're running an application that we use to monitor our activity in the financial markets. We collect all the data from the market—books, trades, orders—that we send to the market. In terms of volume, we are collecting about 100 million rows a day for the books, 10 million a day for the orders, and about 500 rows for public trades.

It is a mission-critical application because of compliance and the regulators. We have to maintain this kind of monitoring because it's a direct link to our activity in the regulated market.

We have a team of four engineers that do the implementation and maintenance of the solution.

We are very impressed by the power of the system. We have gained performance for all our virtual machines and our system is running very fast.

Another benefit, for us, is the dedupe rate.

VMware integration with the product is good. We use vSphere, which is one of the main VMware functions. In addition, we use vSAN for storage, and we have to use the SIEM.

This solution has helped us to simplify our storage operations, although we have a lot of storage devices and too few administrators. Because of this, we're looking for a software solution to assist us with administration. This is something that we will be doing next year.

Overall, we're quite happy with the product because we can move the data that is stored on more than 10 of our current storage devices to a single PowerStore. In terms of efficiency, this solution is the best choice for us.

PowerStore is easy to use. All the drives use soft encryption. To upgrade it, you download the app, and it runs by itself. It's very easy to deploy, share, and create volumes. It's active, so you can have two nodes on one appliance. If Node A goes down, you still get node B at the bottom running. 

I would rate PowerStore's machine learning and AI eight out of 10 because customer automation is very easy. It's just a click of the button, You can also use what they call Cloud IQ, which is an online storage and monitoring software. If you log on to the internet, you can check on your plans to see how much space is left. Cloud IQ analytics software is free as long as you have an account with Dell.

Dell's built-in intelligence is the best because it can also calculate how much data is needed for storage beforehand and if you need to add more drives or anything. The built-in intelligence can adapt quickly to changing workload requirements. We were able to migrate from IBM storage by uploading an image. With other devices, it's sometimes hard to migrate from different forms of storage, but PowerStore was very quick. We didn't have any downtime because once we were able to create the image, we just had to do a cut-over on the other side. 

Pretty soon it's going to be Meditech certified, so it's going to be able to run Meditech. Right now we are using a different solution to run Meditech, but once it gets certified, we'll be able to move from the other appliance. VMware integration is very easy too. PowerStore gives us leverage, we can tell how much space is allocated to the VM and what's happening on a VM.

PowerStore helps to simplify IT operations. At the site where it is installed, we have consolidated two tiers with the high-IOPS and lower tiers. We have enough capacity with lower power consumption and enough performance to handle the required overload.

It gives us the capacity and the performance we need. Before, things were on 10K disks, while this is flash. There is a very big difference. Previously, we were connected directly, with a back-to-back connection between servers and storage. Now, we have multiple servers connected to SAN switches and those switches are connected to the storage. For sure, the performance of the system is sky-high. In terms of IOPS we are fully satisfied by the PowerStore.

We use the solution’s built-in VMware hypervisor to run VMs and virtualized applications, directly on the storage appliance. We manage multiple sites and we don't have enough teams to allocate support at all sites. So our support team handles all our sites. It's very important for us to have a consolidated infrastructure that we can manage remotely, without needing someone available locally to do the patching/power-up/creation and life cycle management tasks. Having this box, along with the integration with VMware, and VMware's capabilities, gives us what we need.

The solution's initial setup was not complex at all. We found the process of the implementation to be very straightforward. It was easy to execute on.

The deployment took less than two weeks. It was a fairly quick process.

We don't really need to have any staff for maintenance.

It's a very straightforward installation and implementation. It's really very nice.

The time it takes for deployment is determined by several factors; it is not a simple, straightforward task because you must have a network ready from the customer's side and collaborate with the customer to develop a solution for his readiness of the site, such as the cabinet, networking, and cabling. Once everything is ready, it can take approximately one week to two weeks maximum.

We require two technicians for racking, and stacking.

NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is mainly used for data center storage. It is very good. It can handle applications well, such as Oracle, or any other application. It is good at keeping all types of data secure. It has a great security layer.

The rail system that Pavilion uses to mount up into a standard Dell or APC cabinet extends further back than normal rails, and they cover up the zero PDU slot. So, I don't like the rail system that comes with the device. That is my biggest complaint.

The solution's performance and density are excellent.

Typically, there is a trade-off. You can have incredibly dense storage in a small footprint sometimes, but the trade-off to that is you need a lot of horsepower to access it, which ends up counterbalancing the small footprint. Then, sometimes you can have very fast access to a storage array, but that usually requires a more comprehensive infrastructure.

This kind of balance, to somehow fit it all into one chassis, in a 4U server rack, is unheard of. You have the processing proxy accessing the data and almost a petabyte of flash accessible.

It's a very small footprint, which is important to our type of industry because we don't have massive servers.

We have benefited from this technology because we were able to centralize a lot of workflows. There is normally a trade-off, where you can have very fast local storage on the computer, but in a collaborative environment that's counterproductive because it requires people to share files and then copy them onto their system in order to get the very fast local performance. But with Pavilion, basically, you get that local NVMe performance but over a fabric, which makes it easier to keep things in sync.

We have been able to consolidate storage and as part of a multi-layer storage system, it plays a very important part. For us, it cuts down on costs because we essentially get an NVMe tier that's large enough to hold everyone's data, but the other thing for us is time and collaboration. Flexibility is worth a lot to us, as is creativity, so having the resources to do that is incredibly valuable.

If we wanted to do so, Pavilion could help us create a separation between storage and compute resources. It's one of those things where, in some environments, such as separation is natural and in other environments, there's an inclination to minimize the separation between compute and data. But to that point, Pavilion has the flexibility to allow you to really do whatever you want.

In that sense, you have some workloads where compute is very close to the data, such as iterative stuff, whereas we have some things where we simply want bulk data processing. You can do any of that but for us, that type of separation is not necessarily something we are concerned with, just given our type of workflows. That said, we have that flexibility if necessary.

This system has allowed us to ingest a lot of data in parallel at once, and that has been very useful because it's a parallel system. It's really helped eliminate a lot of the traditional bottlenecks we've had.

Pavilion could allow for running additional virtual machines on existing infrastructure, although in our case, the limitation is the core densities in our hardware. That said, it is definitely useful for handling the storage layer in a lot of our VMs. The problem is that the constraints of our VM deployments are really in just how many other boxes we have to handle the cores and the memory.

Performance-wise, this product is faster than pretty much anything we've seen. In terms of the density and how it compares, what we have in-house is not very extensive in terms of other things we use, but in terms of our research and actually, what we have used, the density is much higher than anything else we've seen.

We can basically store the entire company's data inside of one unit, when the unit is properly configured. As it is now, it's equivalent to replacing three or four racks of equipment. The density is incredibly high.

This solution provides us with flexibility in our storage operations. It's software-defined storage, so we can allocate capacity however we want. It uses thin provisioning, which is convenient for us, and all sorts of other enterprise features that come with it that we haven't used quite yet. But, we can imagine we'll be taking advantage of them as the usage against the unit rises.

Our use case is primarily about performance, so consolidation has not saved us in terms of costs or capital expenditures. Our implementation of the product is an add-on to what's currently at the company. We've taken data out of the existing infrastructure and just moved it. The migration has allowed us to use it a lot faster, but we haven't gone through a consolidation exercise where we've gotten rid of the old equipment and now just depend on the new unit.

Absolutely, we are able to run more virtual machines on our existing infrastructure. With respect to storage management, we've reduced the amount of work that was required. In fact, we can eliminate most of the staff that has been dedicated to doing that in the old equipment. Now, we need very few people to administer the entire company using Pavilion. We can basically have one person manage all of the company's engineering data.

In terms of cost savings, in our situation, the cost we're saving is not headcount but rather, engineering time spent doing those kinds of activities. Where we may have had to spend a lot more time administering storage and IT equipment, we now have to spend much less time doing it, even though the headcount dedicated to IT is the same. Basically, opportunity costs have improved dramatically, as we've been able to assign staff to more value-added tasks.

We probably had three people spending between 25% and 50% of their time doing related activities, whereas now, we have one person spending perhaps 10% of their time.

The initial setup was straightforward and it was ready to go within one day.

One improvement I am hoping for in the next release is unified storage. The other storage systems we use are unified, but E990 is not unified. Only block storage is available. To get the same functionality with the E990, you have to configure it through the NAS setup, which adds some additional costs. I would also like more capacity in a single box — expand the space up to 4 petabytes.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

We used the solution basically for all operations. We got our ERP, Citrix, email (there was about a two wall to 18 terabytes with email), et cetera, that we had on the hybrid and we had our ERP system, which demands performance. We had that on the solution's all-flash.

We have a significant amount of data that is stored and retained. We have a rolling 365 days' worth of data. There are about 35,000 to 45,000 events per second that come into this solution and then get stored, long-term. That data also needs to be readily accessible, meaning that it can be searched on at any point in time. We have real-time security metrics that are run against that volume of data, so we need the data to not only be persistent and stored long-term, but also on fast storage arrays that can be readily accessed in a minimal amount of time. We've leveraged Zadara to house that storage as well as have it available to us so that we can query it very quickly.

We use iSCSI and Object multi-protocols. These simplify our operations a lot because otherwise we would need a lot of different products or interconnections. With Zadara Storage Cloud, all of this is just one type of connection. It works only with Ethernet, which means no Fibre Channel nor other protocols, like InfiniBand. It is just Ethernet, which is easy and simple. You can just use the protocols that you need. Today, this means we are not using NFS. But, never say never. Probably tomorrow or one day, if someone would just ask us to implement something mounted via NFS, we are ready to go. This is good because we don't need to buy another hardware or additional features. The best part is the fact that the cost covers everything, so you don't have to activate features by license, e.g., we don't need to pay more to activate NFS, CIFS, or iSCSI because we are not using them today. We still have them. So, we are free to use them whenever we want, which is good.

All our customers report the same story when we ask for a case study. With Zadara Storage Cloud, you simplify the management, which is absolutely true. 

Zadara Storage Cloud's agility is the most important part because all customers want agility today. Everyone wants quick answers, support, and features as well as the ability to provide storage with just some clicks or a simple request. 

Zadara Storage Cloud is elastic in all directions. We create a lot of events (marketing events, technical events, and public speaking) with VMware. They have always been available to sponsor, participate, or just integrate their experience. Even with features, we requested some specific features for the Italian market, then they just put them into the roadmap, which was great.

Having dedicated cores and memory absolutely provides us with a single-tenant experience. We have use cases in both categories, but we have customers who have a completely dedicated and private environment and it is particularly important for them. For example, if they are dealing with medical or patient data then they have a dedicated core and a dedicated disk, which is essentially their own private cloud.

It is important that we also have the flexibility for some of the lower-end services that we can have multi-tenant storage because not all of our clients require completely dedicated cores and disk space.

It is very important to us that Zadara provides various drive options because we're more of a niche cloud player, and we don't compete with Azure, AWS, or other large providers. We tend to have bespoke solutions, so having the different drive options gives us the flexibility we need to do that.

Zadara has improved our business with the main benefit being that we generate quite a bit of revenue every month from the services that we provide others, and I don't think that would have been possible without this product. What really attracted us to Zadara was the fact that they have the pay as you grow model.

As a new cloud provider, say three years ago, it would have been quite a large investment for us to take on. Not just in the hardware but also in the skills and the knowledge required to set up and operate it. Zadara was a key enabler for us to be able to enter the cloud business because if it wasn't for them, it would have taken us a lot longer. We would have had to invest in more people and as well in more hardware. As it is now, we are generating revenue and it gives us some credibility with our larger customer base.

Although we only use cloud storage services, Zadara is an agile solution that offers compute and networking, as well. This agility means that they are very quick at turning things around, which is key for us because we're able to implement solutions for customers quite quickly. Ultimately, we can start bringing in revenue for sales quite fast, as opposed to some of our traditional business. 

If you take fiber, for example, it could take up to three months to realize the value of the sale before it actually starts to build. Whereas with Zadara, it is so agile and so quick and easy to set up that even in a few days, we can turn a sale around into billing. This quick conversion from sale to revenue is also important for the business.

We didn't have a cloud before we had Zadara so, in that regard, it has increased our performance by 100%. In fact, we have been able to redeploy people and budgets to more strategic projects because it helped us to enter the cloud environment and to offer new services to our customers.

Our initial application was probably the simplest one. We were sunsetting a product, but we needed to do some movement and we needed some additional storage, but we knew that what we needed was going to change within six months as we got rid of one product and brought in another. To handle this, we started deploying Block storage with Zadara, which we then changed to Object storage and effectively sent back the drives related to the Block storage as we did that migration. This meant that we did not have to invest in new technology or different platforms but rather, we could do it all on one platform and we can manage that migration very easily.

We use Zadara for most of our storage and it provides us with a single-tenant experience. We have a lot more customer environments running on it and although we don't use the compute services at the moment, we do use it for multi-tenant deployment for all of our storage.

I appreciate that they also offer compute services. Although we don't use it at the moment, it is something that we're looking at.

The fact that Zadara provides drive options such as SSD, NL-SAS, and SSD Cache is really useful for us. Much like in the way we can offer different deployments to our customers, having different drive sizes and different drive types means that we can mix and match, depending on customer requirements at the time they come in.

With available protocols including NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI, Zadara supports all of the main things that you'd want to support.

In terms of integration, Zadara supports all of the public and private clouds that we need it to. I'm not sure if it supports all of them on the market, but it works for everything that we require. This is something that is important to us because of the flexibility we have in that regardless of whether our customers are on-premises, in AWS, or otherwise, we can use Zadara storage to support that.

I would characterize Zadara's solution as elastic in all directions. There clearly are some limits to what technology can do, but from Zadara's perspective, it's very good.

With respect to performance, it was not a major factor for us so I don't know whether Zadara improved it or not. Flexibility around capacity is really the key aspect for us.

Zadara has not actually helped us to reduce our data center footprint but that's because we're adding a lot more customers. Instead, we are growing. It has helped us to redeploy people to more strategic projects. This is not so true with the budget, since it was factored in, but we do focus on more strategic projects.

We are a disaster recovery company and we used Zadara as a storage platform for all of our disaster recovery solutions. We do not make use of the computing and networking services they offer. Rather, we only use the storage facility.

Our main environment is Zadara Storage, and then we have multiple VMware and Hyper-V virtual clusters that run the services we provide to our customers. We've also got numerous recovery platforms as well, which we can recover customer's environments onto. Zadara is a key underpinning of that because, without that common storage layer and the services running on top of that, we wouldn't have a business to run.

It's key for us, as a DR specialist, that we have the confidence that all of our systems and services are available all the time. Picking a vendor, be it Zadara or any other vendor, is really important to us because we have to trust that they're going to be there 24/7, every day.

The fact that we have offsite storage that is provided to us using iSCSI as a service has allowed me to offload certain storage-related workloads into Zadara. This means that when I have a planned failover, if I need to maintain the local storage that I have in my data center, I simply shift all of the new incoming traffic into Zadara storage. None of my customers even know that it has happened. In this regard, it allows us to scale in an infinite way because we do not have to keep adding more capacity inside our physical data center, which includes power, networking, footprint, and so on. The fact that Zadara handles all of that for me behind the scenes, somewhere in Virginia, is my biggest selling point.

With its dedicated cores and memory, we feel that Zadora provides us with a single-tenant experience. This is important for us because we are aware that in the actual physical environment, where Zadara is hosting our data, they have other clients. Yet, the fact that we have not had any kind of performance issues, and we don't have the noisy neighbor concept, feels like we are the only ones on that particular storage area network (SAN). It's really important for us.

Zadara provides drive options such as SSD and NL-SAS, as well as SSD cache, and this has been important for us. These options allow us to decide for different volumes, what kind of services we're going to be running on them. For example, if it happens to be a database that requires fast throughput, then we will choose a certain type of drive. If we require volume, but not necessarily performance, then we can choose another drive.

A good thing about Zadara is you do not buy a solution that is fixed at the time of purchase. For instance, if I buy an off-the-shelf storage area network, then whatever that device can do at the time of purchase, give or take one or two upgrades, is where I am. With Zadara, they always improve and they always add more functionalities and more capacities.

One example is that when we became customers, their largest drives were only nine terabytes in size. A year or so later, they improved the technology and they now have 14 terabyte drives available, which is good at almost a 50% increase. It is helpful because we were able to take advantage of those higher densities and higher capacities. We were able to migrate our volumes from the nine terabyte drives to the 14 terabyte drives pretty much without any downtime and without any kind of interruption to service. This type of scalability, and the fact that you are future-proofing your purchase or your operations, is another great advantage that we see with Zadara.

As far as I know, Zadara integrates with all of the public cloud providers. The fact that they are physically located in the vicinity of public cloud regions is a major selling point for them. From my perspective, it is not yet very important because we are not in the public cloud. We have our own private cloud in Miami, and not part of Amazon or Azure. This means that for us, the fact that they happen to be in Virginia next to Amazon does not play a major role. That said, they are in a place where there is a lot of connectivity, so in that regard, there is an advantage. We are not benefiting from the fact that they are playing nice with public clouds, simply because we are not in the public cloud, but I'm sure that's an advantage for many others who are.

Absolutely, we are taking advantage of the fact that they integrate with private clouds.

Zadara saves me money in a couple of ways. One is that my operational costs are very consistent. The second is that the system is consistent and reliable, and this avoids a lot of the headaches that are associated with downtime, reputation, and all of that. So, knowing that we have a reputable, reliable, and consistent vendor on our side, that to me is important.

It is difficult to estimate how much we have saved because it wouldn't be comparing apples to apples. We would be buying a system versus paying for it operationally and I don't really have those kinds of numbers off-hand. Of course, I cannot put a price tag on my reputation.

We have two people that do the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

We offer ongoing infrastructure support on behalf of customers. Zadara is a customer of the bank, which I work for. I'm also a vendor of the bank, however, we are taking care of the day-to-day. We maintain the solution in terms of day-to-day operations.

We use it as traditional disk storage, just like a normal SAN. We connect it to our SAN switch, and then from the SAN switch, it is also connected to the servers. We present the Zadara storage to those servers.