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%. 

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.

We have 30 compute nodes and about 34 storage nodes that we're trying to consolidate down in a co-location area. We use it for all of our workloads outside of our main EMR system. It does everything from Oracle, SQL, all sorts of workloads, CIFS, and NFS.

HCI definitely improved how flexible we scale, and our entrance into the cloud. The features are very rich, in terms of both avenues. It's helped us flexibly move and shift our workloads around, back and forth.

Application performance has improved. 

It has helped reduce maintenance costs. Our old footprint was just huge in terms of the environment we need to run it, it was very bulky and old. It increased all costs. Even just operating the equipment, but the maintenance of it and how many people we need to take care of things has been reduced. The daily maintenance seems a lot more consolidated down to something easier. We had a team more of around 10 to 20 people doing everything. It's consolidated down to about seven or eight of us but it's a lot easier to manage.

HCI provides efficiencies and mobility similar to that of the public cloud. We chose it a lot because we're still trying to do the private into the public cloud, that whole hybrid cloud transformation. We're still in the initial phases of getting out of our private cloud and starting to work some more clothes into the public. That whole process is very experimental

The footprint itself and the amount of man-hours needed to run the whole thing has reduced our TCO. It's definitely lessened a lot. We started cutting costs. HCI helps do that on the operational side.

It definitely shortens the time for us to deploy in production. We have a lot more lead time to plan, execute, and do all that stuff. It makes our business move faster.

Our hypervisor footprint has been reduced for both storage and compute. We started out in a data center with almost 60 racks of storage and compute, and we consolidated down to almost five racks. It's a nice improvement.

The Element software has enabled us to consolidate workflows and breakdown silos. Application performance has also been improved. 

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%. 

We use all of the deployment models. That's the good part about HCI, you can choose whichever you want. Our cloud providers are Amazon and Azure. 

Our primary use case is for container storage. 

We use HCI's Cloud Data services. It affects the management of the infrastructure by making it one single pane of glass to provision and a single pane of glass to monitor. It makes my use easier.

The hope is that it will make the use of compute resources more efficient by 50%.

We are still in the testing phase so it's too early to see improvements in our organization. 

It has not reduced our hypervisor footprint yet, but that's the hope. 

The solution's Element software has enabled us to consolidate workloads and break down silos. Now you don't have to be a storage administrator to provision or do anything. Any VMware system administrator, with the ease of a button, would get storage provision. It makes their lives easier.

HCI has increased application performance in the test phase. It has also provided efficiencies and mobilities similar to that of public cloud which makes it take less time to reply. It's faster. 

It has helped to reduce maintenance costs by around 20%. It's definitely cheaper than our traditional storage solutions. HCI has reduced our TCO by around 25%.

We are slowly rolling out VMs to it. I'm not so much involved in that, the government side does that, but that's what we're using it for.

We also use HCI's Cloud Data services. 

It offers the ability to scale on demand which is important to the burst capability of scaling up and scaling down.

It has reduced our hypervisor footprint by around 20%. 

Our primary use for this solution is Virtual Volumes (VVols).

Since implementing this solution, we have to do less work.

This solution's ability to scale on-demand affects provisioning because it auto-provisions itself.

This solution's ability to scale compute and storage independently makes things easier for us because it does most of the stuff automatically, and we don't really have to touch it all that often.

Using this solution has enabled us to consolidate workloads, resulting in fewer service tickets.

This solution has increased our application performance, although I cannot estimate by how much.

HCI provides efficiencies and mobility similar to that of a public cloud, but I cannot say how it has affected our organization.

I cannot say whether the storage performance in our organization has been affected, although we don't have to worry too much about increasing or decreasing the storage because it does that automatically.

This solution has resulted in the more efficient use of compute resources, although I am unable to provide metrics at this time.

Our maintenance costs have been reduced but I'm not sure what our savings are with respect to this.

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.