To a certain extent, we offer the client basic tech support, meaning if a disc drive has failed we can send someone to replace it. NetApp has a very large tech support organization for their premium customers, where they will support third-party products like Rubrik, like VMware, like Combo - all kinds of third-party products that touch NetApp. 

Not every storage or NetApp deployment is open the box, put the NetApp in the rack, turn the on/off switch on, and click the wizard. It's got to interface in a hospital environment, has to interface with the medical imaging department, so in that regard, no product is easier or more difficult than NetApp other than how the storage device interfaces with what it's storing.

All tech support isn't great if they didn't do a good job setting up and all tech support is great if they did a great job for you, and I've had positive and negative experiences with every manufacturer's tech support. I would rate NetApp as one of the best. It's usually in-country. I have customers that are in South America, that are in the United States, that are in the UK, that are in Asia. I don't stay up nights worrying about their tech support.

The partner community, such as myself and my engineering team, usually get involved if there is a tech support issue that is not a manufacturing defect or a bug as we can't control that. We can only control the environment that we helped architect.

When it comes to backups, it has given us quick options when restoring things for customers, using the ability to mirror Snapshots onto another cluster, having managed status, and using previous versions in Microsoft. It gives the customer the possibility to restore their items too. Backup size, in general, gets much smaller since it is based on mirroring a Snapshot rather than being repetitive.

It impacts customer retention because of its overall ease. When you are running a business, where time is a factor, that is the biggest selling point. Things happen really rapidly, when they happen, and being able to say, "Yeah, we can get this up and running in a day, if you want," or even less time in some cases. Sometimes, that can be what makes or breaks our case.

AFF has helped to simplify our infrastructure, while still getting very high performance for our business-critical applications. Having all these things working well on one solution is really good. We run this as the backbone for both Hyper-V and VMware as well as an archive location for Rubrik. So, it is great having one solution that can do it all.

It does what it is supposed to do for SAP and Oracle. Because of the ease of it all, you have a highly tunable, high performance storage system that alleviates a lot of problems. With its ease of management, you can quickly get your work done and go onto the next thing on your list.

We mostly use AFF to support when we mirror data onto a FAS solution to immediately spin-off a new environment, e.g., if something happened to the prior data.

I have found the following features of NetApp AFF most valuable: Snapshot, snap clone, deduplication, and compaction. 

These features help with data protection. We host an exchange, so protecting our data and workloads is of prime importance.

This solution helps accelerate demanding enterprise applications. VMware workloads, the database, and Oracle Solaris are hosted on AFF, which means that our primary priority workloads are on AFF and that the secondary ones are on FAS. That includes the SAN national cloud.

Initiating Snapshot is not time consuming, and it is not tedious. That's the reason why FlexClone and FlexCache help us with our protection care strategy.

We are not using the NetApp cloud backup services. Instead, we have a storage solution on the back end and AFF on the front end. In this setup, we have high I/O with a low storage expenditure.

Our company is mainly concerned with software development and we have VMs as part of our infrastructure. We have a large number of VMs and they require a large data capacity, although we don't know which ones require high-intensity input and output. The reason for this is that some scenarios demand a high level of I/O, whereas, with others, the demand is low. We have AFFs set up at the front end, and at the backend, we have ECD boxes, which are the storage grid.

We treat the system as a fabric pool setup. When a high level of I/O is required, the data will be stored on NetApp AFF at the front end. We created a policy so that pooled data will move automatically to the lower-end capacity units, which are configured from the storage unit.

NetApp helps to accelerate some of the demanding enterprise applications that we have, in particular, our database applications. 

NetApp AFF has helped to simplify our infrastructure while still getting a very high performance. Prior to setting up AFFs, we had latency issues. Now, things are more balanced, including the volumes that are on SAS or SATA.

Using NetApp AFF has helped to reduce support issues, including performance-tuning. About a year and a half ago, we were experiencing some performance issues. Lately, this has not been the case, although occasionally, we still have problems. We are exploring whether it is the server hardware or an issue with VMware and drivers.

The ONTAP operating system has made things somewhat simpler, although we don't use it very much. I normally work on the CLI so for me, it is not a big difference. That said, as features are released with the latest versions, I review them to stay updated.

We also use NetApp's StorageGRID and the combination of it with AFF has reduced our overall cost while increasing performance. We see benefits on both sides. 

We use it mostly for user file data. We are also providing data stores for our VMware platform.

We were using a different vendor for virtualization, then we switched to NetApp. The feedback from the VMware team is that things have improved. 

We were using Oracle Veritas previously. Sometimes, their technical support was not that user-friendly. While the hardware was good, it needs to be good going end-to-end. So, if we had an issue, then they were not as helpful, technical support-wise, as we have seen from NetApp. Apart from that, the features that NetApp provides overall are better than what Oracle used to provide.

I have worked on HPE products, but that has primarily been on 3PAR, which is mostly for SAN protocols.

It's used for SAN environments and a lot of VMware utilization.

The solution is primarily used as an on-premises VMWare based application provisioning platform.

The performance with the QoS is its most valuable aspect.

The integration with VMware is excellent. There are different plugins to manage the SolidFire storage from the vCenter level. That I really appreciate. 

SolidFire even as a standalone storage platform is excellent. 

I would say in terms of architecture and in terms of functionality, the product is quite good. 

It's block access storage, however, for block access storage we have the guarantee of performance. 

We have the duplication and we have the encryption with this solution. We have almost all the standards needed for storage with SolidFire. In terms of protection, with the level of protection we can set between the SolidFire nodes, it's very good.

We put the solution onto the VMware environment and all the Microsoft SQL servers. We do the synchronization between two data centers, so that is has a very low latency. We just have a few milliseconds of latency which is a ready performance, and near perfect. 

We have FlashArray and FlashBlade. We're using FlashArray primarily for VMFS storage tools for the VMware environment.

We have its latest version. It is on-premises, but we operate a private cloud.

FlashArray is our main repository for all our VMware.

We are in the health industry and use this product for block storage. We have VMware hosted on our Pure FlashArrays and we have a Citrix environment. We also have Oracle running as our SQL database. Our VMs run from Pure.

We have also done a couple of PoCs with the Blade solution for using the file share system.

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.

It has allowed us to upgrade our DMS to the latest version and reuse the older array as the DR storage for VMware SRM.  The entire DMS system performance has improved compared to the old which was on a previous generation CS260G.

We are resellers. We provide products to our customers.

Unfortunately, we were not able to sell this product because it is too expensive. We use it in our own cloud. We created a VMware VCPP cloud to provide VMware services to our enterprise customers.

The companies that bought this solution from us use it for VMware. They have also used some Oracle in the Red Hat operating system. It's mostly used for the VMware environment. The companies we provide the solution to are generally medium size; one of them is a hospital and the other is an agency that controls the sale of gas. We are partners of HPE Nimble Storage and I'm the technical manager of the company.

For me, Nimble has two main problems.

There is no active-active controller, which means that we can only have one controller online at a time. Replacing the controller is what I see as the only major issue, although I'm not sure that HPE can do this.

Nimble has a limit for objects. We have it configured for VMware, so if you have a laptop machine then you have a problem because of this limit. Also, if you have a virtual desktop with a lot of VMs, such as 2,000 to 3,000, then it's a problem because the window has a limit.

HPE Nimble Storage has a simple management end-user. The customer will generally provide us with feedback about performance upon installation of the solution, including in respect of VMware. Our customers are helpful when our performance involves configuring integration such as that of vCenter with InfoSight. I am aware of the tech problem we encounter. The VM we have with high-class latency is, surprisingly, very helpful to manage. 

We use HPE Nimble Storage for VMware VMDK object workloads.

We use HPE Nimble Storage for virtual infrastructure by VMware and for Oracle databases.

We have deployed HPE 3PAR systems on all database-related storage including MSSQL and Oracle. All of the SQL databases are running on VMware, and the database-related storage is mounted as RDM. The Oracle database is mounted directly to HPE 3PAR with remote-copy enabled.

We are using it for Oracle Databases. We're are also using it for VMware and NetBackup. It's one of the storage solutions for NetBackup.

We use the 3PAR to host our SQL Database and Oracle Database. We also use it for VMware and vCenter.

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.

You have to be careful about exactly what your usage is. You really need to understand what you want to do with the controller. You need to understand what your total IOP performances will be, before you do any sizing so that you can size appropriately, otherwise, as with any storage, you could have an underutilized controller. That would then cause you frustration and business units would suffer as you would have slower performance than what you expected.

A lot of times customers get themselves in trouble due to the fact that they make a purchase or size a controller and then later on they undersized it. Sometimes the under-sizing can occur due to the fact that a company starts putting more demand on the new stores where they want to put one more device on the storage product or connect to it, and that wasn't what it was sized for at the time. If you didn't plan on the growth of the utilization of the controllers the product doesn't look like it's performing properly, however, indeed it is. It's just, not big enough to handle the new user profile that you have put on it.

Microsoft Exchange, VMware, SQL, and Oracle - those are the types of software or devices that are applications that were used within our environment. We have several different departments or groups that get access to that storage.

I want to build a MetroCluester in VMware.

There's a lot of good features. HPE 3PAR StoreServ is similar to Dell EMC. It is a high-speed system with automatic failover/failback, integrated with Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware.  These are the main reason for choosing HPE 3PAR StoreServ in Denmark. We have a very good consulting service together with the product. 

It is for shared storage for virtual machines running VMware.

Our primary use case is a hybrid private cloud that includes generic server virtualization based on VMware ESXi. The second use case is workstation virtualization — virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). The third is database systems with IBM Power and IBM IX logical partitions.

We are solution providers. We deploy solutions around VMware. Typically we deploy data protection, and disaster recovery of workloads in the cloud, and on-premises.

If I need to know about a platform or the base platform on which I'm working, I try to read up on their model. We are also storage integrators and solution providers.

The primary use case is for storage, enterprise workloads, and databases.

The price is very costly, which could be improved. In the next release, I would like to see some integration with VMware so that storage can be managed directly from a single pane.

I use IBM FlashSystem for all of my VMware and BDI environments. I use a fiber channel network for conductivity.

We use Dell EMC Unity XT for its normal application for DB, Oracle, SQL and VMware and the file system, too.

We currently have three Dell EMC Unity XT units, all used for different applications.

The primary use case is general, all-around storage. We use it for both unstructured file and unstructured block storage and a lot of it is attached through a few systems to VMware.

The applications are databases and other similar products.

One of the units is used for diagnostic imaging, and another is used for file services such as the Hospital Management System (HMS).

We use it for block storage for our entire VMware environment, which runs Windows, Exchange, and SQL Server. The Unity also provides block storage for bare metal Windows Server that run our backup software. We also use file storage primarily to store images.

I use it with three projects that I directly work with. Each of those projects has 80 to 100 virtual servers. We have sysadmins who are dedicated to each project and do all the admin tasks, like checking VMs, servers, storage, etc. There is a larger team of five or six systems engineers who backstop all three of those projects. We focus on architecting and configuring any servers, storage, and networking. We may also be called in to resolve performance concerns.

We use it for a virtualization environment based on VMware vSphere.

We are an IT distributor and this is one of the storage solutions that we implement for our clients. The primary use case is for VMware virtualization, although it is also used for database system storage. Oracle and other SQL databases require a lot of performance in terms of IO per second, which is met by using OceanStore Dorado.

We primarily use it for our VMware and some of our systems.

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.

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.

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. 

This is our SAN product for use with a traditional VMware setup, using VMware clusters. We have the 150 terabyte enclosure.

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.

What I understand is that this is a 13 year old architecture, so it has lived its life and they're phasing it out. Honestly, we were initially struggling with the integration with VMware (but it was fixed with the VMware 6.5) and, then, it was around a 10GB network. At that time, it had the longevity to go to 100GB as well. It got us thinking about, when we go into the containerized architecture, what do we need to do to fix the infrastructure? 

We sell the Lenovo ThinkSystem DE 4000 or 6000 series storage arrays. The clients that we sell the products to are mostly manufacturers and the use case for ThinkSystem is always production for storing and operating their virtual environment, which means the units are almost always used for VMware. It is just typical storage for production and virtual machines.  

We use the DE series, the 2000 and DE4000. It's DE, All-Flash storage.

We use Lenovo with the VMware solution. We have VMware with virtual machines and the production storage is the Lenovo DE4000 Hybrid. The solution for backup is Lenovo Storage 2000.

For the moment, we use the solution in respect of our three hosts, for VMware and for storage.

There really isn't any aspect of the solution that needs improvement for the customer other than its price.

It is a very good solution, but the Georgia Republic is a very small country and customers in both the government public sector and in the private sector do not have money to purchase enterprise or high performance solutions. They are looking at mid-range or mid-class solutions.

I can say that they need to simplify the solution. In SimpliVity, they need a lot of integration with virtualization technologies. For example, putting some add-ons or plugins in vCenter. vCenter is a management software of VMware virtualization. 

Secondly, it would be better if they cold simplify the deployment of Primera. Thirdly, if you have already purchased Primera and you need to scale your infrastructure and you are thinking of buying more hardware disks, you will need to purchase the Rebalance Service from HP Enterprise. They need to improve that methodology.

The customers need solutions that do not require a lot of administrative tasks.

HPE Primera is used to expand our VMware Cloud Service.

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.

What is most valuable to us is the fact that it has multiple engines, and each of those engines works in conjunction in a grid environment. That's important to us because we have so many different use cases. One example might be that a state trooper pulls someone over at 2 o'clock on Sunday morning and wants to go into the LEIN system, which is the law enforcement information network. He wants to see who this person is that he has pulled over and gather as much information as he can on that person. We can't predict when he's going to pull someone over, nor can we predict when backups are actually going to be taken against the volume that he's going to for that information. The PowerMax allows us to do backups of that volume at the same time that he is looking up the data he needs, and there's no impact on performance at all.

The performance is very good. Our predominant workloads are all less than 5 milliseconds and it's most common to have a sub-1-millisecond response time for our applications. In terms of efficiency, we've turned on compression and we're able to get as high as two-to-one compression on our workloads, on average. Some workloads can't compress and some can compress better, but on average, we're a little bit more than two-to-one.

The solution’s built-in QoS capabilities for providing workload congestion protection work pretty well because we actually don't even turn on the service level options. We leave it to the default settings and allow it to decide the performance. We don't enforce the Platinum, Gold, or Silver QoS levels. We just let the array handle it all, and it does so.

We also use VPLEX Metro, which is a separate service offering from Dell EMC. It does SRDF-like things, but it's really SRDF on steroids. Of course it copies data from one data center to the other, but with the VPLEX, not only does it copy it synchronously, but it also has coherent caching between both data centers. That means we are literally in an Active-Active mode. For instance, we can dynamically move a VMware host that is in one data center to another data center, and we're not just doing vMotion with the host. The data is already in there at the other data center as well. It's all seamless. We don't have to stop SRDF and remount it on another drive. It's already there.

It was a pretty complex process in the beginning: migrating data, verifying everything is good to go, standing up our volumes, and things of that nature. Once everything got going, it was a lot easier to understand and manage.

Deployment took about two weeks’ time, not including transfer times. With transfer times, it was closer to a month.

We set up our PowerMax, attached the source to VMware, and then migrated all of our VMs off of our old storage array into the new one. Once we verified everything was good, we turned off the old storage array and went from there.

We are using it for core banking systems and virtualized enrollment. So, everything for this bank is on PowerMax, including its core banking system, which is running on Solaris, and all the relevant applications running on VMware.

I would advise others to go for it. It is highly recommended for storage for enterprise-level and mission-critical IT workloads. It has fully met the expectations based on what is available in the market and from its competitors. They can do better with the price point to allow us to scale even more, but in general, the solution meets our expectations because one of our goals was to achieve a fine balance between the performance and the cost, and it seems we've been able to get that with PowerMax.

It has not enabled us to consolidate open systems, mainframe, IBM i, block and file, or virtualized data with cloud-connected storage because we've not had use cases for these. Our use case has mainly been traditional in terms of:

• Having data or raw disk groups allocated to all core databases.
• Using the disk for virtualizing VMs for creating virtual machines. We are allocating storage to a physical host that we virtualize with VMware to be able to create a virtual context. 

In terms of the built-in QoS capabilities for providing workload congestion protection, I would give it a 4.5 out of a five. The 0.5 point is because sometimes we see, even from the dashboard, that the defined SLAs are violated. It is only for brief moments, and it could be because of any reason, but for the most part, the QoS service works. 

We have not used its CloudIQ features. That was one of the things that actually attracted us to it, but we didn't get to deploy it. If we review the notes again and find that we aren't exhausting what's at our disposal, we'll take it up again. Because of remote work and the sheer fact that the platform has been pretty stable without any issues, the administrators are comfortable with what they can get periodically, so they're not really bothered with checking on the mobile or checking the storage so often.

We deployed SRDF but didn't utilize it fully. We use it for some of the use cases that have better tolerance for any latency issues. We also did the setup for MetroDR but didn't utilize it fully. It is because there is a bit of doubt around the infrastructure that we have in our country. So, MetroDR has not affected our storage and network bandwidth requirements because it has not been aggressively used.

I would rate Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe a nine out of 10.

We have two PowerMax arrays. One is at our primary data center. The other is in the secondary data center, and they replicate back and forth to each other. We use them to store a lot of databases and files, but we don't have as much on them as we used to because our CIO is outsourcing a lot. We have taken a lot out of the data center recently, so there isn't as much on them as we intended when we bought them but I think it's mostly databases, file shares, and some one-off applications. It's all virtualized on VMware as well.

We have faced problems integrating IBM servers and adding volumes. The capacity on the IBM servers was not the same and we needed to perform a reclamation process on the DR site to fill the same capacity on the storage site.

The SRDF software has an issue when it's used in conjunction with VMware. In the past, we were using SRDF for VMware but in swapping from VM to DR site, VMs take a very long time. In some cases, where the data on the main size was many terabytes in size, it took a very long time to replicate to the DR site. Some VMs power on automatically, without entering any schedule. We had to migrate to RecoverPoint, which is another solution from Dell, but we still use SRDF for things that are not stored on VMware disks. When we enabled hardware compression, things improved.

PowerMax Storage needs improvement in the area of monitoring tools. It should have more functions and more complicated analysis options inside the monitoring tools. For example, if I need the tool to analyze monitoring logs from one month ago, it can't be done because it retains data only for the past two weeks.

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 most important feature is the performance, because we have four directors, all of them Active-Active. (PowerMax directors support multiple functions including front-end I/O modules).

It is highly available because it has multiple controllers. All of them are unlike some of the traditional storage arrays, where you assign certain LUNs to certain controllers. Here, everything is Active-Active. You don't assign a particular disk or LUN to a particular controller. All the controllers are servicing all of the LUNs. So from an availability point of view, we don't even know if a particular controller or director has failed. And all the spare part replacement, including controllers, can be done online while systems are working. We don't need to do it during off-peak hours. We can do so during normal working hours because the performance you get from the service, due to the other controllers, is enough to take care of any failed components.

There is also a Call Home facility configured, so the system can send out alerts to the Dell EMC support team. They can dispatch spare parts based on these alerts, so it is a fully integrated system.

Another valuable feature is the DR replication technology, which is based on the Dell EMC SRDF solution. It provides a very good level of near-real-time replication. It supports synchronous as well as asynchronous. When it comes to activating the DR, it is very easy.

Then there are the compression and deduplication which are always on. We get more than 4:1 capacity savings using them. The efficiency benefits from compression and deduplication are through a specialized hardware module within the storage itself, and that means there is no overhead to the compression and dedupe.

In addition, the solution supports IBM Power Systems, Solaris, VMware—almost everything is supported. That's important to us because we are using multiple hardware flavors including IBM Power Systems, SPARC machines, and HPE Onyx. All of these are different classes of machines, and we have different operating systems. We have Linux and Windows on physical and we have it running on VMware. Oracle virtualization is also supported. It supports a wide combination of specialized technologies and hardware.

And the built-in QoS capabilities enable you to drill down to any particular QoS levels and define the type of performance you'll have: diamond, platinum, or gold. The result is that different performance levels can be set for individual disks. Using the QoS functionality, we can vary the performance or prioritize it based on the criticality of the performance needs.

Another nice feature is the CloudIQ app. You can even monitor things using the app on your mobile. Every five minutes, the performance statistics and the system diagnosis data are sent to the cloud and you can access them sitting anywhere. You get these statistics at your fingertips.

I would absolutely recommend using it. I would also suggest negotiating and testing it. I bought a very small system of 10 terabytes that I put in one of our labs for testing so that my team can learn it, and I could play with it. We tested it, and after we were comfortable with the capabilities of the system and building things in VMware, which is a really critical part of the whole integration, we tested three different solutions from HP, Dell, etc. After the testing, it was clear to us that the Pure FlashArray X NVMe was the easiest to manage and configure and had the best performance that we had seen in all the arrays. We are not testers, but we could tell. We could see the speed at which the databases came up and everything else. After testing, you will be convinced that Pure FlashArray X NVMe is probably the best box or right there in terms of performance. We tested in early 2019. There might be another solution that is doing better today.

I would rate Pure FlashArray X NVMe a nine out of ten. The only reason I won't give it a ten is the price. Its feature set is pretty complete. I'm pushing it right now. It is like you buy a sports car and then you complain that you don't have a big trunk to put a lot of luggage. You are complaining about the wrong thing here. You bought the thing because it is fast. Similarly, we bought it because it is fast. From that perspective, whether they can address NAS or other things like that is just icing on the cake for me. Its price is a little high right now. Otherwise, I would have given it a ten.

To be able to do the welcome files simultaneously on a lower version would be helpful. 

I general, we don't really have any pain points when dealing with the solution.

The solution should improve its logon requirements.

I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware.

The use case for this solution is based on VMware and that is why we chose PowerStore X. During the first period of the pandemic, we decided to use our VMware infrastructure for HPC workloads. We were looking for high-performance storage that could be inserted inside our VMware environment in an easy way. PowerStore, which had just been announced, seemed like the right solution and so we decided to buy. We have this storage environment inside the virtual HPC.

In our environment we are doing medical analysis related to genomic workloads. The data are acquired remotely from experiments and stored on the PowerStore. The PowerStore is exposed to the user through virtual machines, and the data are analyzed in this environment.

We replaced an older, high-performance storage device that was very expensive. With PowerStore, we were able to achieve the IOPS, and we were also able to get a data compression rate significantly above what we had expected. We were able to retire that older, very expensive piece of storage by bringing in the PowerStore. It's been faster and cheaper than we had expected, per terabyte.

Another reason that we were after this machine was PowerStore's VMware integration. We're a very large VMware customer. Some 98 percent  of our workload runs on VMware.

We use it for machines from VMware vCenter which we keep separate from the PowerStore. It is only the storage. They are connected with iSCSI and NFS. We have no virtual machines directly on the PowerStore.

Most of our PowerStore units are used for VMware VMs and vSphere. We migrated the VMs from our Unity storage.

We have two sites; the data center site (DC) and the disaster recovery (DR) site. We only use the PowerStore on the DC site. The project was put on hold due to COVID but we plan to continue with it this year.

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.

We use it to host all the VMware workloads in production. It has all the types of workloads that any data center would have, from AD to file servers as well as SQL, Exchange, and BI. It holds all our high-tier VMs.

We run a virtualized workload. Right now, we run everything on Pavilion, which includes our high performance databases and engineering tasks as well as Exchange and file shares. All that stuff runs on our Pavilion Hyperparallel Flash Array.

We use block storage for our VMware infrastructure and are a complete VM shop. All of our files servers run on VMs, which use block storage on the Pavilion device.

We are a data center located in Mexico. We use a wide array of storage solutions from different companies. Our largest storage installation is on Hitachi.

We use this solution to share storage between our cloud environments. We have a VMware Cloud in each of our data centers with two locations in Mexico City. We have a replica between these two sites. We also have another Cloud Suite for OpenStack. 

We use IntelliFlash for our virtualization environment. We use VMware, and it's used to show the virtual machines.

Once you started pushing it, it would start to not respond properly and then we would have to reach out to support, to try to figure out where these issues came from. They couldn't tell us where the problems were. Their advice was simply to take some load off and then it would work fine. 

Sometimes there was imprecise information. If there's an issue with the system, to kind of pinpoint where the issue was coming from, for example, if it was network latency or a load link to a VM or load link to some kind of switch, it would have been helpful to know. 

I know they can't look at all the networks, however, as the solution is connected to VMware and the SAN and the switch, there should be more information on the system. I can't pinpoint anything, which is a problem. Their reporting needs to be much better.

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.

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.

One of the most useful features is that they provide iSCSI as a service. That was very useful for us because it allows us to simply mount their storage into our servers and just utilize it as if the storage is local. That's number one.

Number two, their reliability and fault tolerance, is really unmatched. We were able to upgrade our storage, add more drives, add volumes, replicate volumes, and change sizes of volumes, all with zero downtime. It's very impressive.

These two features are extremely useful for us. The iSCSI as a service, as well as the fact that the system is highly resilient for fault tolerance.

We typically use iSCSI and to a lesser degree, object storage. We have not been using NFS, so I can't comment on that, but the fact that the solution offers all of those is certainly a big differentiator for people who are looking for those kinds of solutions. It means that they don't have to have multiple vendors or multiple systems to put together to support those different solutions.

For example, if I need to have S3, I don't have to go to Amazon or anybody else because I have it available within Zadara. iSCSI is exceptionally rare to find as a service and the fact that they support it is a major competitive advantage, and the same is true with CIFS and NFS. You would need extra plugins and extra add-ons from other vendors like VMware in order for you to do this, but Zadara does it out of the box, which is nice.

Zadara can be configured for on-premises, colocation, and cloud-based deployments and we use a mixed-mode. We provide our services in a cloud capacity but we're not in the public cloud. We're not in AWS or Azure, for example. We have our own private cloud and Zadara is working beautifully in this hybrid mode. They do have an on-premises solution as well, which we have not yet taken advantage of but we are planning to.

The fact that they can provide us services that are outside of our data center is of utmost importance. If something happens to my data center, I know that I have an off-site remote, either backup or remote system that I can tap into and continue my operations. The fact that they can provide me an on-premises solution, which is really the entire stack in my data center, where I need it to be low latency and high capacity storage, is certainly something that we'll be looking into. It's nice to know that those options are available from the same vendor.

At this point, we only use Zadara for storage, but we are about to use some of the other services. In terms of agility, the platform has been working flawlessly. All their SLAs have been met. We have been adding more storage, we have been upgrading from one engine to another, and all of that was happening without any kind of outage.

I would categorize Zadara as elastic in all directions for the fact that we can add more capacity on the fly. We can add more drives or more cache storage. We can increase the engine if we need to have it faster with more memory, or with more CPU power. The fact that we can do all of that with a click of a button and it happens, it's provisioned relatively quickly, and we pay by the hour rather than paying for it outright, allows us to scale without letting them know. It is easy because they don't have to provision special hardware just for us and it can happen fast. For example, if all of a sudden my business experiences an increase, I can react within the hour. Any change to the billing is reflected immediately.

Using this solution has increased performance in our environment because we can offload storage capacity elsewhere, which we know is infinite in size. This alleviates a lot of the headaches, it's been consistent, and it has worked pretty well. It would be difficult to estimate our performance increase because we don't measure it.

Our data center footprint has been reduced using Zadara. We have fewer storage systems today in our data center which means less power consumption, less environmental impact, less heat, and they take up a smaller physical footprint on the racks. I cannot say exactly how much, but it's definitely at least half a rack.

In terms of saving resources and redeploying people to more strategic projects, I can say that it allows us to support more storage with the same number of people. But, I cannot say that the next time I would have bought storage, I would have had to add another person. I really cannot make that kind of a distinction. The only exception I can say is that they are helping us in our West Coast data center because over there, I do not have any staff. The fact that Zadara is helping me with storage, certainly I can say that there would have been a staff member managing the on-premises storage locally. Instead, Zadara is taking care of that, leaving me with requirements for one less person.

The range of support of VMware could be better. It can support Windows, however, it cannot support other operating systems like IBM AIX. This needs to improve.

We're looking for platforms for implementing object storage. If Zadara can have that, similar to what they have in Amazon, the S3, that would be ideal. If they have APIs, I would like to see that feature be available, similar to the way an S3 or a Ceph object storage protocol. That could be developed or provided on top of the platform.