NetApp HCI [EOL] Reviews

In 2020, our site-based AS/400 infrastructure was going to the end of its life cycle. So, we started a market investigation for an appliance that could host our new SQL server environment. We also selected a private cloud data center inside the Telecom Italia facility in Rome. After the hardware selection, NetApp won the challenge, and we decided to fill the data center room with the NetApp H-series appliance. We went live with the new data center on March 6, 2021.

It has increased the availability of our systems from 12 hours for 6 days to 18 hours for 7 days. Because the NetApp system is faster than the ones we had before, so we need less time for backup and maintenance. We also have more time for applications availability. We are now saving almost 30% time.

It has helped to reduce or eliminate storage performance issues. There is a 30% increase in the performance.

In terms of the use of compute resources, it has increased our efficiency by 30%. 

The ability to size the available space in a way that matches our company's needs is most valuable. For instance, you can decide if you want 80/20, 70/30, or 60/40 space. Redundancy depends on your needs without changing the appliance. You just add space and decide the percentage of space that you need free and the percentage of space that you need for backup. It is all automatic, and you don't have to do anything. You just add space, and the system automatically configures itself with the chosen option.

Their after-sales support, SLA, and third-parties availability should be improved. NetApp's support is very difficult to engage. We have an SLA of onsite support within 24 hours. but they don't respect the SLA.

Its stability was very bad. It has been crashing continuously. In one year, we got three crashes, which is unbelievable for an appliance that is guaranteed for 10 years without any crashes.

In 2022, NetApp Italy, driven by the country manager Davide Marini, fixed all our issues and added additional computation power for free. This is a great example of customer care. They could have done it right the first time of course, but admitting the errors and putting in place such a remediation plan has been a very professional behavior.

I have been using this solution since 2020.

Its stability is very bad. We had problems with the stability of the appliance from the beginning. It has been crashing very often. I would rate it a zero out of ten in terms of stability. We have been very dissatisfied with its stability during its implementation and since it has been live.

Its scalability is very good. When we discovered that there was not enough available space, NetApp was able to install additional hardware. We can auto-configure it to get more space. So, we can easily and quickly scale if we need.

We are using it extensively. It is being used in the main data center for our group. Currently, 800 people from all departments use this solution. We do have plans to increase its usage.

We got three crashes in one year. NetApp's support was very difficult to engage with. We have an SLA of onsite support within 24 hours. They did not respect any SLA. They came after three days, and they did not have the spare part. They had to find the spare part. 

I also suspect that they gave me a reconditioned one and not a new one, but it is only my impression. I don't know whom to call in order to complain. Their support is not at all good.

From 2022 on, the support approach changed totally and now they are one of our best-performing vendors.

Positive

Its initial setup was complex. First of all, we had problems with the stability of the appliance from the beginning, and it was crashing very often. Second, NetApp's calculation of the available space after the installation was also wrong, so we had to add another hardware, which NetApp provided for free. That was absolutely fantastic, but it delayed our implementation process by three months. Overall, the deployment took six months.

There was not really an implementation strategy. We were not changing or migrating anything. We were setting up a new data center from scratch. We're building it from nothing.

We use a company from Sienna, Italy called Argon. The experience with them has been very good. They've been with us for years now, so they are a solid partner. Every time I call them, they are ready to answer. We had a good experience with them. They also provide post-sales support to us.

Without the crashes, I would have seen a return on investment because of the additional 30% availability. Considering the time that I have lost because of the crashes, our return on investment is now negative.

From 2022, our ROI started to gain momentum and now we are saving 20% of infrastructure TCO compared to 2019 while computation capacity has increased by 70%.

Its price is aligned with the market. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an integrator cost.

We evaluated HP, IBM, and Dell. We chose NetApp because our partner and the system integrator company strongly recommended to go for NetApp. Because we trust this company and this company was responsible for setting up the entire data center, we decided to follow their advice.

Overall, all of these solutions were very advanced. Technically, I would put NetApp and Dell at the same level of innovation. IBM and HP are more established technologies, but they are not as innovative.

In terms of cost, HP and NetApp were the ones that could make a bigger effort to reduce the cost. IBM and Dell were a little bit more expensive. 

My advice to those who want to implement this solution is to not go for this solution because it is not stable. I don't really know how we could have avoided this because you don't really get to know before buying a solution that it is not stable. The only lesson that I have learned is that rather than going for an advanced technology that is not yet properly tested, it is better to go for established technology, even if it is a little bit older.

I would rate this solution a three out of 10. Its instability destroys everything good that has been done during the implementation.

We are mainly using it for lab virtualization with GPU and everything else. So, it is mainly for the lab environment.

It is highly scalable. Their support is also extremely good.

The administration side of it needs to be improved. We expect an easier interface and a single upgrade for updating the infrastructure.

I have been using this solution for one year.

It is stable.

It is highly scalable. We have about 600 end-users from different departments. On the administration side, there are only four people. We plan to increase its usage.

Their support is extremely good.

We used HPE. The technology and the cost were the two major factors for switching.

It was not complex. It was okay. It took about one and a half months.

We had a resource integrator, and our experience with them was good.

Its pricing is lower than our previous solution.

You need to do a PoC before buying it because every use case is different.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

Our primary use for the product is doing demo presentations of it for customers. We show them the function of the appliance, the features, how easy it is to operate, and things like that. That is what our main purpose for it is as resellers.

The product has improved our organization by making it very easy to explain the product to a customer to show what kind of environment that they can use this appliance in. 

One of the most valuable features of the solution is that they have taken something like 400 steps and compiled it into like 30 steps to install it. That level of simplification is one of the best things I've ever seen in any appliance in the market.

Normally when you build an appliance, you have to go through an extended installation process. But once you collect all the IP's that you need to for this appliance, the NetApp engine does all the rest of the work for you. So instead of leaving it on the operator to do all the work, the appliance does it. That is one of the features that I have seen in any appliance that really simplifies a lot of the work you would otherwise have to do for setup.

An improvement I would like to see is if they could make it even more simple to set up. They were able to figure out a way to get 400 steps down to about 30 steps. Trying to reduce that down more would be an even greater benefit. 

Once the product is up and running with the build configured correctly, the product will run itself. It is highly stable.

It is scalable. You could add more nodes. You have to start out with the minimum number of storage nodes. But then you could scale up as much as you want on just storage or just compute.

The set up is pretty straightforward. If it does have any sort of learning curve the only thing is you have to be sure to get all the pre-checks done. I would say that has too many IPS (Intrusion Prevention System).

So that is a pre-check you have to do now and hope that they address in the future to somehow downsize that into a limited number of IPS. Right now it is like 16 to 24 IPS, which is a lot for one appliance.

The solution has reduced TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) for some customers — or really most. Because there is a hyper-converged infrastructure, you do not need to have that three-tier architecture with separate storage, separate compute, and separate network. It definitely has reduced costs. I would say at least by 50 percent in most cases.

The products that clients are usually evaluating are other hyper-convergent tools because NetApp HCI is a hyper-converged infrastructure. There are other parts of the market like Nutanics, VxRail, and Cisco (HyperFlex). When we help clients do a comparison of other products, NetApp wins because of the leading features. For example, they are the only product on the market that has independent compute and storage capability. No other the product has that.

Because our organization functions as resellers, we use the product features in demonstrations. We do not actually apply them to our own business. For example,
the solution's ability to scale on-demand and affect provisioning in an organization is something we demonstrate to those who are interested in the product. We do not use it personally. We explain that feature in our presentation and the customers want to see it. When they do they are wowed and want the capability. 

This solution's ability to scale compute and storage independently affects capacity, performance, and operational planning in our customers' organizations. The best thing about the product is this is the only appliance in the market that separates control of storage from compute. There is nobody in another OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) on the market that can do that currently. It is absolutely unique because you can individually choose the minimum and maximum burst on IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second). Nobody lets you do that independently like this appliance does.

The solution also has the capacity to reduce your hypervisor footprint. We do not actually have that many customers that use hypervisor because most everybody is in the VM world right now. It is a plugin in vCenter and it a very usable, very friendly tool as a plugin.

Being that NetApp HCI is a hyper-converged infrastructure a company with a data center will not have to have separate storage, special computers, and a special network for different purposes. This product does all of that in one central appliance. Which is why HCI is very popular.

The solution increases application performance. Because it works well with VM products and lets you independently choose how much of the resources each VM could use as far as IOPS. There is no noisy neighbor — no one appliance or application gets to hog the VM bandwidth and resources. So this one you can separate those roles out and silo it to make it a lot easier.

The solution affects the storage performance for organizations as well. We only work with it in a demo presentation environment and we do not have production data so the demos are just a sample of workloads. But no customers that we have come across have any issues and the pain points with storage performance.

Results show more efficient use of compute resources. Again, being the only appliance in a market that lets you independently choose compute and storage, you scale as you want. If you want more compute you can add more compute nodes. You want more storage, you add more. It simplifies a lot of things.

On a scale of one to ten where ten is the best, I would rate the product as a nine. The reason I give it a nine instead of a ten is because of the need for pre-check work. While it is simpler than most products, there is still a lot of configuration that needs to be done. If they make that simple it improves the product. When you have to rebuild the product, you have to go through that whole process again. If they could somehow make that simpler by keeping that configuration file in a way that you do not need to do that, we could just use that configuration file again. It should automatically rebuild itself instead of you going through the whole process another time.

Advice that I would give to a colleague who is researching this is to use the product. Do a proof of concept and that will open up the customer's eyes to imagine the possibilities and see how this product of NetApp works. If I was in that position, I would push this product more to show a customer proof of concept, show it and the environment, and then they would tell the reseller to leave it there because they will want to buy it.

We're mostly testing it out right now. We have some internal tools we're testing it on. We're testing it for production readiness in our facility. We have a couple of test VMs on it and we're using it for some data collection on our ONTAP systems. It's been testing for around a month. 

It has not particularly increased application performance but it's not a very demanding app either.

HCI has provided us with efficiencies and mobilities similar to that of the public cloud. It gives us some flexibility for the future if we do decide to go into the public cloud. We are actually considering Microsoft Azure for a lot of stuff going forward. It's kind of like an injection point into the cloud as well.

Maintenance costs have been reduced by around 20%. 

The most valuable aspects are that it's an all-in-one solution and it's very self-contained.

HCI's ability to scale, compute, and store independently is nice because we can expand either the storage or the compute. There are different ways to expand different pieces and not do it all-in-one. With some of the competitors, you buy compute and you have to buy storage, so that is an important differentiator for NetApp.

HCI has increased our hypervisor footprint. It's another system we have to manage. 

The elemental software has not enabled us to consolidate workflows or break down silos. It's still on test dev, it's not in the main production stuff, so we haven't really gone to that phase of it.

I would like for them to fall a little closer to like the VMware release model. The new features and new solutions tend to come from the VMware side. I would like for NetApp to follow along closely with VMware's release schedule.

It's worked very well for us for what we're using it for, so I have no complaints about stability. 

We're in the process of adding a couple of nodes now, we haven't completed that yet.

We haven't contacted technical support yet but we plan to soon because we need to upgrade. 

The setup was a bit challenging because it's a fairly new product and I think some of the stuff is not quite well baked yet. We had a lot of trouble connecting it up to our network and we had to go through a bunch of different setups. I think that some of the solutions are not quite ready for prime time. It's better now but about nine months ago we had a lot of trouble getting the network configs right on the Cisco side and on the HCI side.

There was a lack of NetApp community knowledge about exactly how to make it work, and then we actually had to change it with about five revisions of our networking setup before we finally got it right.

It's probably much better now. We were on the leading edge of the product. They've upgraded to the newer versions and the documentation is a little stronger and the community knowledge of it is a little stronger as well. 

We went through NetApp for the deployment. 

We have not evaluated other solutions but a lot of our sister companies have done Nutanix and some of the other products that are out there. I've heard it's a little more baked, a little easier to use, but it's also not as flexible as you grow. You have to grow in different stacks.

It is a good solution, I'm fairly happy with it. It's passed all of our tests, we're not really having any real challenges. 

I'm on the storage team and then we also have a VMware team and we have a network team, so there's a lot of other people that have to get involved, and I don't know how on board everyone is to one solution for everyone. All of us being in the same sandbox versus having our own sandboxes.

I would rate it a six out of ten but we're an early adopter so it's probably better now.

It works great now, I don't want to say that it's a bad product, it's just that we were early adopters of the product and there were some bumps in the road.

We are using it currently for all our "Tier 2 and Tier 3 storage" for all our business units.

On the storage nodes, we're using 11.0. On the VMware side we are currently @ 6.5 moving to 6.7 after our annual freeze period ending late January 2020.

From an infrastructure standpoint, we needed to have more cohesiveness between our teams. We set that out as a goal for our HCI team - realizing that's a concern and/or issue. We solved that, which helped us to deploy in a more efficient manner. Therefore, we can get the capacity for the customer in a more efficient manner in a much faster time frame than former methods.

We've done a lot of consolidation with far fewer storage side manipulations. Cluster-wise, I've been able to put more compute resources into one cluster versus maybe three or four in the older environment. It helps our organization from the standpoint of less administration.

The solution has resulted in a more efficient use of compute resources, because as far as our compute nodes go, we've diminished them by probably 35 percent. This solution reduced our maintenance costs. We were going to have to pay one to two million dollars to put in for storage and compute nodes. We are avoiding those costs.

When you are doing lifecycle management on your storage platforms, you can just swap out pieces of equipment - since it's a modular design from the ground up. We used to do one big iron to another big iron, and that's a major migration workload/resource effort.  Whereas, with this environment, you can go with small nodes, one at a time, and do a refresh.

There have been some drive type of issues where we have to apply a new code level. Storage nodes kick certain drives until they act as though they have failed when really they haven't. You just have to reinsert them, then they go on about their happy way. It is a bug fixed in 11.0 of the code for Element OS/Solidfire.

The option to pull in a config/text file to be used as input to the NDE process; rather than going through a lot of screens. The manual effort there is error-prone. This something NetApp engineering has been made aware of as a request and they say they're looking at that as a future enhancement.

As far as SolidFire, if you use the GUI, you can only create one line at a time or device at a time. That's ludicrous. I referenced earlier today to the NetApp feedback panel that this needs to be fixed. They said, "Yep. I understand that."

In terms of bandwidth and IOPS along with availability - we have not managed this environment long enough to put TIER1 environments under this umbrella; yet don't see why it couldn't handle the aforementioned especially if you create dedicated pods for those 'heavy hitters' (I'll just call it that.)  Thus, in time we'll look for more deployments upon the converged infrastructure of NetApp. 

Almost one year now

So far, (nearly one year) the stability has been good. 

We've grown both compute and storage and do it all online. There are no concerns around scaling. Only in the factor of how large do you scale before hitting limits within VMware and Element OS/Solidfire re: performance and bandwidth (# of channels for IO).

We have used technical support a few times, but not a lot. 

I don't have any concerns at this time.

Some of our applications were on solid-state/flash disks, and some of them were on a mix (hybrid). This configuration is all-flash/solid-state. Nobody should have any complaints about performance so long as you have the proper host-side settings as optimal for your environment.

The solution reduced our TCO since a big piece of our former infrastructure was Cisco SAN Fabric Switches, and those are pretty pricey per port. We were using Fibre Channel, and now we're using iSCSI. Able to use lower-end Cisco switches and rid ourselves of the costly per port value of a Director-class switch. 

The initial setup is lengthy and complex. However, there are some ways that we have talked to some of the guys at NetApp about how they're going to try to make things better and more efficient. They have done some of that already.

A lot of the complexities have to do with when you're initially setting the equipment up, there are a lot of values that you have to plug into various screens. Then, you also have to do a reboot to pick whether it's going to be a storage node or compute node. The NDE process only needs to inspect 2 files to determine it's personality (compute or storage).  The NetApp engineers are looking to fix status too. You have to do a reboot after it pulls those 2 aforementioned values.  There you lose 45 minutes as part of a needing-2-b-refined build process.  

If you have a large install, that's a lengthy time frame for onsite CE/implementer to put it into the stage of the process.

We used some of the professional services which were tied into some of the bundled packages. 

We also obtain our hardware resources through a third-party called WWT. They're a big partner of ours, and everything is great with those guys.

The solution has reduced our ESX node footprint by 35 percent.

From an all-flash standpoint (vs hybrid), performance has mostly likely increased anywhere from 10 to 20 percent.

We have seen two to three million dollars of OPEX savings by deploying this and getting rid of older equipment.

Setup costs in terms of resources (man-hours) is dramatically reduced via the NDE effort from NetApp; yet our organization still has to modify multiple parameters after the NDE is complete.  Thus, still takes some TLC to make the environment prod-ready. 

We evaluated various converged and non-converged platforms before making the NetApp converged decision over other top players in the magic quadrant (IBM, Dell/EMC, Infinidat, Pure Storage).  What's missing from all products is the need for better tools to bring capacity, performance, and upgrade planning together for viewing in one pane of glass.

I would rate the solution a nine out of 10.

NetApp HCI is used for enterprise-scale hybrid cloud infrastructure and we are using the standard version.

I have been using NetApp HCI for approximately three years.

NetApp HCI is a stable solution.

NetApp HCI is scalable. it is possible to increase the storage, nodes, CPU, and ram.

We have found the support to be good.

The price of the solution is okay but could improve.

I rate NetApp HCI an eight out of ten.

Our primary use for the HCI solution is so that we can have redundancy and resiliency for all of our critical systems that reside on VMware. We will be utilizing technologies such as vMotion, iSCSI, and data management to move the VM instances back and forth while they are still running.

We have purchased the solution but we do not have it running yet. We have encountered an issue after the setup was complete where the whole vCenter crashed. Professional Services had to come back out and install the solution a second time, but after they re-installed it, it crashed again. We are finding it challenging to get the system running in a stable condition.

The ability of this solution to scale on demand is good because with the organization growing, our data size is growing as far as our computer server is growing. The scalability will probably be the biggest factor in enhancing our environment.

Part of the planning for our system, or our environment, was that it has to have the capacity to scale. This means that this solution's ability to scale compute and storage independently is something that we took into consideration. We can add an additional chassis at any given time.

We believe that NetApp HCI will reduce our hypervisor footprint, but we have not seen anything as of yet.

When this solution is up and running we expect that the Element software will enable us to consolidate workloads.

We will not be using any of the cloud data services because for security reasons, everything is on-premises.

Although we do not have everything running yet, I am hoping that we will be able to make more efficient use of our compute resources.

Our goal with NetApp HCI is to have no single point of failure. That's probably the biggest plus for us because we're going to have our email server and all of our critical systems reside on that platform.

We are looking forward to high availability, redundancy, and shared storage.

The vCenter keeps crashing, meaning that there is no stability in our environment.

We have just purchased NetApp HCI and do not have it up and running yet.

We do not have a stable system, yet. The vCenter has been crashing.

According to what is advertised for HCI on scalability, we will be able to add additional systems on the fly. That should be a very good feature for us.

We have a lot of NetApp storage on-site, so part of the reason we are implementing NetApp HCI is consolidation. We are basically picking a solution that's on the same platform and from the same vendor, which will probably be better for us because we don't want to introduce too many different vendors. When that happens you have too many different things to support. We're trying to simplify the environment by just having one single vendor. 

NetApp Professional Services has been working with us on the implementation.

The licensing fees are renewed annually.

I cannot rate this solution more than about half at this point because we do not have it working, although I believe that in the future, I will give it a much higher rating.

If we can get this environment stabilized and if we can move our critical systems onto the platform, and we can maintain it, then it will probably be a big plus for us. We will have high availability, redundancy, and resiliency.

As it is now, I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

I'm not a user, I'm a distributor.

There are savings through software costs as storage is separated from the compute nodes, and the improved performance and QoS with Flash is also good.

I like how the solution gives you to the ability to basically to grow compute and storage separately.  There is no compute processing used for storage IO so that means that the compute is purely satisfying User workloads

The networking needs improvement.  There are a lot of cables, but I have been spoily by converged networking.  I guess the issue with the number of cables would also be evident in other HCI products.

In the next release, it would be nice if there were additional hypervisors supported out of the box. Currently it supports VMware but having end-to-end support for Hyper-V, KVM, Openstack and bare-metal would make it unique.  These other hypervisors would work (from my limited lab testing) but support would critical for production workloads.

I find the solution stable.

The solution is very scalable.

There's always been great technical support.

We didn't previously use another solution.

The initial setup is straight forward, but you have to get the networking right. Otherwise, you have to go back and redo it again. Deployment takes less than half a day from deboxing to running.  You only need one person for the implementation, two people if you have to lift a node once fully populated.

We do the implementation ourselves because we need to understand what our Partners would be seeing.  We are implementation certified.

Licenses run on a yearly basis, and there aren't any additional fees other than the standard licensing fee.

I would rate this solution as 8.5 out of 10.

Currently, our primary use case for HCI is testing the product to see if we can find a real business case in the hybrid, hyperconverged infrastructure. We are testing different products and HCI is one of them. Our use case is testing the hardware and the software piece of the product, leveraging the hardware part of the server and storage, in one piece. We're testing that to see how that works out for our infrastructure.

HCI has reduced the hypervisor footprint because it's an all-in-one box, where you have the server and the storage piece in one physical container, rather than multiple boxes or appliances. Currently, we have separate storage and separate servers. Now we can have server and storage in one box.

The most valuable feature, currently, is the density of the system as hardware. I'm able to leverage the density of the product and remove bigger hardware which requires more space, cooling, and power costs, obviously. There are cost savings, obviously.

My biggest pain point is the installation part. I would like to see the appliance itself remove the entire switch that goes behind it and figure out how to do all the cluster interconnects within the box itself. I don't know if that's possible or not, but that's something that could be very, very beneficial to customers because it adds another layer of complexity to the system, once you add the switches.

The stability has been good so far. It's worked just fine. Uptime: no problems. No failures at this point. It's still running, so that's a good thing.

From the looks of it, technically speaking, it looks like it can be scalable. But it's always easier said than done, until I actually bring more workloads and add more capacity to the system.

The tech support was fine. They came and they did the work. It took them a couple of days as well. The setting up was very painful, but once we got that going, everything was good.

We've been a NetApp customer for the last eight years now. They've been our product; they've been our main storage vendor. That's why I'm here [at NetApp Insight 2019]; to see what they can offer, future-proof. We hope to keep that relationship going.

From what I've experienced so far, the product seems to be fairly easy to deploy. The initial setup is very painful. That's my biggest pain right now, setting it up. It's not straightforward, requires a lot of knowledge to get it going. But once you get it going things work.

Our biggest issue was the switches that we had to install on top of the product itself, which have to interconnect into our main, core switches into the data center. That was very painful. Once we got that past that, things got to be a little bit easier. That was something that I, as a customer, could not do. I had to actually have Professional Services or someone from NetApp to actually come and do the work; a product specialist.

From our initial testing, it's doing what it's what it says it can do, but there are still some caveats that need to be worked out. In terms of making our compute more efficient when it comes to resources, the way we are using it, it's pretty much a one-to-one configuration. It depends on the work I would throw it at it. So it's hard to compare it, what my production environment currently is, to what I'm using HCI for. We are planning on using VDI with the solution. Once we get that configured, then we'll figure out how the workloads will actually be.

I would rate it a five out of ten because of the setup. Post-setup, it still needs a little bit of training and knowledge. It's not an easy product to use because it's got different modules. I'd like to see one single pane of management in a box. Once you get to know the product, I would give it a seven.

We use a catalog that can deploy virtual machines. It helps a lot because the users open fewer cases to provision the VM.

NetApp HCI has improved our organization by allowing us to put more time into investing in new ideas and spending less time in the administration of the solution.

The most valuable feature for us is the easy way you can administrate the solution.

In the next release of this solution, I would like to see better support for installing the operating system on the machine. If they increase the size of that it will be great. The issue happens when you upload an ISO. That there is a limitation when you need to upload software that it needs to have less than two gigs or four gigs, and some of the OSs are more than that. So it would be great if they tried to increase that limitation size for 10 gigs.

Probably the quality of the hardware should be improved. I'm not sure what exactly to point out because we don't know why we had several motherboard failures. But I think that was a hardware quality issue.

Because of the repeated failure of the motherboard that we experienced, we have doubts about the stability of the solution, but I'm sure that in the near future it will be a great, reliable solution for us.

The solution's ability to scale on-demand affects provisioning in our organization. It is automated provisioning. In the old days, they would need to send an email and request the machine and it would be done manually. But using those catalogs, we can provision automatically.

The solution's ability to scale compute and storage independently does not affect capacity performance and upgrade planning in our organization because of what we do.

In all, the scalability of the solution seems better than Nutanix.

I like the way that the company handles its technical support. When a node fails, an engineer connects to it easily from a remote session and he fixes it. The way they support the product seems to be to do something better than to do it too fast. We like the way they treat our issues.

As a reseller, I do prefer FAS (Fabric Attached Storage) to AFF (All-Flash FAS) because you can choose the types of disks and you are not tied to SSD (Solid State Drive). I also like the way it scales. So, if I could choose, I would pick FAS instead of HCI because I believe that FAS is moving towards the HCI (Hyper-Convergence Infrastructure). NetApp is saying it is like a hybrid-cloud infrastructure. We have a Service-Level Manager and other features. You can do the same catalog and support of upgrades. I think it is more seamless to scale the way we have it configured.

The installation was totally straightforward. We didn't need to study a lot in order to deploy. It was really easy and fast to deploy. If it was not as fast to deploy 12 nodes it would have been much more of a chore for sure.

I am a partner in resellers so we are the guys who do the deployments.

i'm not aware of ROI because I'm post-sales.

We are resellers and we do have some competitors, but I would not pick them in Brazil. We need to compete with Huawei sometimes, and on the HCI line, we compete with Nutanix also. I prefer NetApp because I trust the lineup.

Several things have happened during the time we have had the product:

• It reduced our hypervisor footprint because of the ISO support.
• It has enabled us to consolidate workloads and break down silos.
• The solution has increased application performance.
• This solution resulted in more efficient use of compute resources.
• The ability to automate the provision of the machines makes it faster and it's easier for the user to request.
• It has increased the requests and the quality of the delivery.
• The solution helped reduce maintenance costs.
• Deletions cloud data services (on-premises) used with the catalog is like a cloud provider, but it is not a cloud solution at all.
  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a seven, because of the motherboard failures. If we didn't have the issue on the ISO and then on the motherboard because the customer started to reduce the tourist on the solution. But now it's stable and it does not fail anymore. Every day he is happier with it.

Advice that I would have for people considering this as a solution is to give it a shot with HCI. It is a good product to try that works like a cloud-like service provider. It isn't perfect. For example, we had an HCI with 12 nodes and there was one node that had failed motherboards like four times and we replaced them. In general, it is easier to administrate. We are the reseller, we are not the user that bought the product. After that was resolved the client opened fewer cases with us. So the operational cost for us, as the reseller, is cheaper because they are not always open cases with doubts that it will be easy to manage.