NetApp HCI Reviews

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.

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 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. 

The ability to move the hardware around and the speed at which we're using all-flash are the most valuable aspects. All of our customers are very happy with the performance. We win on both sides of physically moving and the enhancements in the performance.

It doesn't have all the data points we need and all the historical data that I would like. I find that a lot of the performance analysis is done through support, where they have something that we don't have. It would be nice just to have all that on-prem. We haven't run into much else. It's pretty solid on the active IQ side and on the support side. I would like panes in everything.

We haven't had many issues with stability. We're still flexibly moving nodes left and right, so it's been stable to almost everything we need to do.

I use support almost every week and so far, no problems. That's a big reason why we left whoever we left from before, was the customer support, and NetApp's been great in all aspects of that.

We were previously using IBM but it felt like they were lacking functionality moving into the cloud. It felt like they moved very old school. They like to do things very 1980s and it was time for us to move on.  We were definitely looking into a lot of automation cloud, other HCI platforms, but I think we sold on NetApp a lot because of their data fabric transformation, their hybrid cloud kind of story. That's exactly what we were looking for.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward but we also had professional services and everybody there to help us deploy it. It was a pretty big deployment, plus it was kind of complex for us to be shuffling between three data centers. They helped us out and it was pretty painless.

We have a partnership with a vendor who helps us and we also work closely with NetApp. Our partner helped us. They have a lot of expertise, but it was kind of new to them. It was nice having a partner knowing who else has used this, where's this deployed, who we can talk to, some kind of the market in business use cases that we are able to use them.

Our accounting people are happy. We're starting to dig into some of our budgets, so I think on most ends we have seen ROI.

We also evaluated Nutanix. We checked out Cisco HyperFlex. We took a good, in-depth look at a couple of other companies but I think we just ended up sticking with NetApp. We had a small NetApp footprint. Just FAS stuff and we decided to go all-in and go with HCI and the AFF line.

In general, they've always treated us well. They've always been great. I like working with anybody at NetApp. In general, we have a good relationship with both our partners and with NetApp.

Dig into your workload and know your workload of what you're putting on there. HCI has worked great so far for just about everything but we did separate our performance-heavy, performance-sensitive EMR workload off to an AFF. We had to fix certain compliances with the application and HCI wasn't certified for it, so we couldn't run that on that platform.

I'd give it about a seven out of ten. It's not bad but we're still in our infancy, so we'll see. So far it's been pretty good. 

The use case is for a demo center, and then we load different kinds of workloads like Dockers, Citrix VDI, F5 Load Balancers, Virtualizers, all the virtual platforms, and virtual appliances. Customers would come to our demo center to take a look to see if they have an interest in HCI and then we would show them a showcase. 

It helps to consolidate our demo gear workloads because we have a lot of products that we take care of. We are a distributor in Hong Kong and we have other products like Cisco. It enables us to consolidate all of these kinds of virtual appliances onto the NetApp platform. At the same time, despite showing those solutions, we can also show NetApp solutions to our customers.

HCI has enabled us to consolidate workloads and breakdown silos. We used to have many down servers, a lot of kinds of servers that had no different portal solutions. Now, we consolidate all these kinds of virtual appliances in the same process. It saves us time and money to deploy the other servers. I don't really have very exact metrics but going from seven servers down to two servers helps to save a certain amount of electricity.

It has increased application performance because previously we were using single disks, like 10k's or 50k's. Now, we have a full flash SDS solution. The IOPS have increased significantly so that when many users come in to test at the center we don't have any performance complaints anymore.

NetApp provides efficiencies and mobility similar to that of the public cloud. NetApp is doing a good job with that, ONTAP can move data across the cloud very easily.

The most valuable feature is the software design storage that really provided a faster, agile, easier to scale up and out storage path.

The NDE Engine needs to improve because it will suddenly crash and I need to call the support and take it a look at that. The support in India also failed to resolve the issue and then we need to keep track of the restful APIs to see what is on before we can complete the installation at the first-time deployment. It was not a good experience.

The problem is that it needs to be much more stable, for example, when I want to do the upgrade to 1.7 that just released, I also need to issue a ticket to the support guy in India and he asked me to deploy another mblock. There are a lot of manual steps compared with other products.

It's easier to do with other products like Nutanix. It's very easy to upgrade with them. 

We did not need to scale up and out yet, but I think when we will have the need to have additional web load, it will be quite easy because of the reset button. You just add a log.

Their support is okay. For the service support part, it's seven or eight out of ten. But for the quality or the solution deployment part of the experience, I would give it about two and three.

There are many competitors like vSAN, Nutanix, and SimpliVity. Those guys are doing a similar job that tries to seamlessly give an easier experience for the users to operate and upgrade. The integration with the VMware part still needs a lot of improvement. 

Our primary use case is for multi-protocol access.

NetApp helps us with our backups and making snapshots of our backups for our secondary data center, which is very efficient for us. It's improved our recording time also.

The solution's snapshot copies and thin clones have reduced a lot of operational time. We do a lot of database refreshes and it has done this as dual clones and copies.

HCI has helped reduce our company's data footprint in the cloud, as well as our company's cloud costs.

The multi-vertical aspect is what is most valuable for us. The main reason we wanted a multi-protocol was because Amazon was not able to provide us with access to the same data as we could get from Linux and Windows lengths. That was our value proposition for this solution.

The solution's snapshot copies and thin clones make operations very fast and efficient.

It is highly stable.

The scalability of this product is good.

Their technical support team is amazing.

We wanted to adopt newer technologies, so we chose this solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy and fast to deploy. We used NetApp Cloud Manager to get up and running with Cloud ONTAP. It is amazing. I liked it. It's easy to use. It's simple and it basically did everything.

We used a partner called EBT to deploy this solution. It was smooth. They know what they are doing.

We have seen a return on our investment.

For our use case, because we are a big enough NFS shop, ONTAP is a great fit for us. If you have a highly NFS shop, I would recommend ONTAP.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten. There's a limitation with a block in the file. That's where I see that it's not very efficient for upgrades and for management. Otherwise, it would be ten out of ten.

The primary use we have for this product is collaborating with VMware in development.

The ease of management has helped our organization. We are able to move some tasks down to lower-level employees which frees up the architects to do more with their capabilities.

Ease of deployment is probably the most valuable feature for us because it allows us to easily pull nodes in and out for expansion.

Being able as a user to just go and look through tutorials and maybe opportunities to use a simulated environment where we can test things out. Maybe that exists and we just have not tripped over it.

The stability of the solution has been pretty good so far. Alerts have not been too noisy. We do like the Active IQ and the ability to look at statistics on the system.

I expect that the solution's ability to scale on-demand makes it pretty scalable, but I don't think we've gotten to that point yet. We are not pushing for performance so much, and probably ease of management is a bigger goal for us. That was one of the reasons we went with HCI. We were not stuck with doing compute and storage at the same time, so we can increase or decrease whichever resource makes the most sense to us.

Hopefully what the product is as advertised. We currently have four storage to computes. We're looking at putting a second HCI in another site to move toward replication.

We have had very good experiences with technical support.

I was involved in the decision process. We knew that we needed to invest in a new solution for better performance. Our team is relatively small and we were really intrigued by the ease of manageability of the NetApp system. Until this consideration, we did not previously use a different solution for HCI (Hyper-Convergence Infrastructure).

We went with NetApp mostly because our data centers are switching to NetApp pretty much across the board. It was a natural transition.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I think we had a little bit of difficulty with networking and routing which was not quite as straightforward but we obviously resolved that.

We did involve a consultant for the deployment. It was a NetApp consultant that came in. Once we got through the deployment, we realized that we could have done it ourselves just as easily. We just hadn't had experience with it so we figured it was a better way to go for the initial deployment.

The vendors on our shortlist were limited to Dell. Really the general organizational trend drove most of our decision.

The solution enhanced some application performance. We actually moved an application from a SATA disk and put it on NetApp. The user noticed and was surprised by the improved performance. I would say it was enhanced by 25%. The solution has generally affected storage performance in our organization by adding a high-performance storage option into the environment. The solution has also resulted in more efficient use of compute resources. As we have started small, it is only about 20% currently.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a nine. We have only had it in office for about six months, so that rating may change.

The advice I would give someone at another company who is researching this solution is to spending the time to really look at the datasheets and the use cases. Make sure you fully understand how it might fit in your environment before you get it there.

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 do not run NetApp HCI ourselves. This is a solution that we implement for our customers. The version that we provide is normally the latest, although a customer will sometimes request an earlier version.

Depending on how the solution is architectured to the customer, the deployment model can be on-premises, in a public cloud, or private-cloud based. Our team goes in and delivers against that architecture. When it is a public cloud deployment, Microsoft Azure is our preference.

For the customers that we talk to, their primary use case is normally to build their own version of the cloud with a quality of service where they can move workloads to the HCI solution while taking advantage of the Cloud and doing it in a more cost-effective way. The administration costs are lower and it is a simpler solution to run.

NetApp HCI's ability to scale on demand is a differentiator in the marketplace. The ability to scale storage and compute together or separately is one of the differentiators for the customers.

This solution can scale compute and storage independently, whereas in competing solutions if I need more compute, I have to bring more storage along with it. This means that I have idle storage. Conversely, if I need more storage then I have to bring more compute along with it. With NetApp, I get to look at each of those separately and then plan separately. It allows me to utilize my internal resources better because I'm not spending money on things that I don't need. It also allows me to tailor that solution and that platform more to my business needs versus working with a platform that does great things but I'm having to bring things in at a scale that I don't need.

The simplicity of the Element software, once it is deployed, is one of the things that draws people to it. The ease of management and the ability to provision toward the quality of service so that I can set parameters where I need them and walk away are big draws because it makes things easier for the customer.

I would say that using NetApp HCI has improved application performance, but not just where you would see it. I am not speaking about the IO of the applications, but rather in the teams that support applications within our organization. They're more effective and more efficient. They have a better solution and they're not having to spend time trying to keep it running. They set it up and then go on to work on other things, which makes their organization more productive.

In terms of storage performance, capacity utilization is probably the biggest impact. I've got what I need and I can get more of what I need, and then I can set it to perform as I need without having to necessarily manage it the same way. I would have a traditional storage management team or administrator. It's rolled up in the singular product. It's more of a one-button way of doing things. There's a lot of magic that goes on underneath, but the applications get what they need because I'm able to guarantee it through quality and service.

As far as maintenance costs go, I would think NetApp absolutely reduces them because you're able to migrate multiple things to a singular platform. You don't have as many footprints of support. Maintenance is a big cost from an operational standpoint for the customers and having a single platform where you can merge workflows and then have them all with a quality of service means there's no way that it can't save people money.

On the topic of TCO, I can't speak to it for any specific customer, but in today's environment with the cost structure and cost pressure on IT, if this solution didn't improve TCO then it wouldn't sell. You're looking at a product that's disruptive in the sense that it can change the way you deploy headcount within your organization. It changes the way you deploy applications within your organization. That's all measured by executives from a TCO standpoint. If it's having success and people are being drawn to it, and people who have platforms are growing them, then it is probably having a positive effect on the organization.

This is a strong product and it works very well, and the processes around it continue to grow and mature.

The user interface continues to improve.

I would like to see the implementation process improved. It's like the product is almost ahead of the ability for everybody to make sure that it's packaged right to go into a marketplace for a user.

My impressions of the stability so far are really good. The customers that we install for, seem to really like it. They've taken to it very quickly, have become very dependent on it, and are scaling out their environment.

The scalability is very good. This is a very common-sense approach to a platform that didn't exist in the marketplace. NetApp has been able to make it work where you can scale storage and compute independently of each other, and right now they continually push the upper limit of the number of nodes, but the system seems to be sized against most workloads that we see, adequately. So, they're ahead of the curve, and as they continue to push that forward and more people come to the platform, it should continue to be very successful. 

The technical support is very good. They have some great expertise that is geographically dispersed around the United States. For the rank and file, if you create a support ticket then it's a little clumpy because not everybody is up to speed. But, as you get to the resources who truly understand it, it's very good. As the platform gains broader acceptance, you expect that to migrate down through the organization a little bit.

Conceptually, the initial setup is pretty straightforward. The practice of it is rather complex because it involves so many different teams from the customer. You've got different networking teams, security teams, and operations teams, and all of those have to be orchestrated on the front end before successful implementation. Assuming that those pieces are in place, it goes pretty well.

We install NetApp HCI for our clients, and there are some changes that I would like to see. The biggest thing is that I think the paradigm could be changed. There's always a lot of focus on getting a date with a customer of when we can do an installation. There's a workbook that comes with it, which is essentially a listing of all the IPs, the addressing information, and the naming schemes for the systems. You have to have those before the net deployment engine, which basically launches the system, will launch successfully.

We have found ourselves getting onsite at the push of either a customer or a sales team, and then those things aren't in place. It makes the deployment very, very difficult and then kind of frustrating for the customer because now it's a scramble to get those pieces put together. If we did those things first and said, okay, make sure all these IPs are filled out and the networks are hot, which means all the ports are turned on, then let's talk about a date, I think it would be a much better customer experience. We found ourselves having to do a part of the installation and go back to finish it later, so it's just not as clean as it should be.

Speaking as a partner who sells the product, our standpoint is that data is ubiquitous. It's everywhere now. Everybody from our kids to our grandparents is creating data and consuming data. NetApp is the one company that has an ability to, from the creation or the acquisition of data, make it usable and available to you wherever you are, regardless of the platform given of ONTAP capabilities. They had these endpoint platforms, which is HCI, which is E series, which is FAS, which is storage created, that allows very robust systems to manage certain types of data. Then, you can use ONTAP with the cloud to make it accessible within your organization. So, the barriers that separated data are going away and NetApp is, from our point of view, ahead of many other people in the marketplace making that happen.

NetApp has a very good message and I think that it can be enabled to push an organization forward.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use NetApp HCI for our VDI infrastructure. We have thousands of VDI desktops that we deploy and we're currently testing it out. We use NetApp FAS storage, but we migrated all of that to the ACI platform.

We do not use Cloud Data Services at the moment.

Using NetApp HCI has made things a lot easier to set up. The main advantage is that the management would be shipped to our VM team instead of back to our storage team. They get all of the functionality and they can do all of their own restores. They can also provision on their own. Everything is done through the virtual center.

The ability to scale on demand is very helpful. It's customizable and we can expand if we get low on storage or compute. I love the fact that we can actually provision the LUN out to a separate vendor as well. We can also provide that storage to a different operating system.

The fact that we can scale compute and storage independently is great. We do it independently whether we need storage or we need compute.

With respect to our hypervisor footprint, I would say that this solution has helped us to expand it. NetApp HCI makes it a little easier for us to manage.

Using NetApp HCI has helped to increase application performance, although I do not have any specific metrics. I can say that we have a lot of desktop users that were complaining of slowness. The SSC backend helps with performance.

The effect on storage performance in our organization has been great. SSDs always give you the ability to add workload and not have to worry about managing it.

I would say that our TCO has been lowered because we don't have as many storage shelves to worry about. Everything is now better compacted, or compressed.

This solution is rock solid.

The most valuables features of it are the deduplication and the compaction because the ratios are much better than what we normally get on our FAS storage. 

The virtual center is a nice feature.

I would like to have the ability to replicate to multiple sites. Right now, we're limited to replicating to a single destination. We would like to be able to do it in non-production so that we can test data, and we can replicate it to our DR. 

The stability is rock solid. We have been through two upgrades and it didn't affect anything. We have had no downtime.

This solution is very scalable. We can expand storage nodes or compute nodes.

We were in contact with technical support when there were some things that we wanted to do, but we could not use the GUI and we had to use the backend. It turned out to be a bug, and it was just updated to the next revision. That's mainly the reason that we did two revision updates.

We did not use another solution prior to this one, but we were at the point where we needed to expand.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, once you get all of the subnets and networking working properly.

We used NetApp's professional service to deploy.

We started with NetApp and did the PoC with it. Things worked well in our environment.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is to definitely look at NetApp HCI. Compare it to whatever other vendors that you are looking at, but give it a good look because it does provide a lot of value.

I love this solution.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Initially, our primary use case for this solution was testing. We had a large deployment of Nutanix and we got NetApp HCI to test along with it. Then, we were going to use it for the office to get off of some of the older equipment for VMware.

NetApp HCI hasn't been used in production or for office applications yet.

We upgraded the solution and then took it down about three months ago. It was in our data center and we moved it because we wanted to put it into an office with newer equipment. Unfortunately, the networking couldn't handle what we were plugging into it, so we ended up taking down the office. Now, we've been waiting to get newer switches so that we can do it.

The ability of this solution to scale on-demand is great. It is easy to do. If you need another compute and another storage node, they're really easy to put into play and add into the original cluster that you have.

It is nice to have separate compute and separate storage for each node, but in some ways that it sort of a downfall, too, because in a true HCI environment the storage and compute would be together in a single node. I can see the benefits of having them separate in that you are able to take one down and not affect the other. But, I think that if you really want to go dense, then you'd want to have the true HCI, which has them together in one.

In the testing that we did, we found that application performance was a lot faster than having traditional storage like a NetApp FAS or AFF, and some Dell or HP nodes for vSphere. It was faster having that all combined on one chassis.

I think that NetApp HCI has efficiencies and mobility similar to that of a public cloud. We're strict on what we can and cannot go to the cloud for, and it is hard for us to use the public cloud with any product.

I would not say that we realized more efficient use of compute resources.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the SolidFire interface. The graphing is very nice, and it gives you insight into the VMs.

It is pretty straightforward to use.

The physical cabling was a problem for us, which is why we ended up going with Nutanix. Nutanix used two cables per node, whereas the HCI needs several to each the compute and storage. I'm not sure of the exact number, but it was a lot more than Nutanix and the amount of cabling would have been really hard to manage. I know that they have now changed it and bought it down to two cables, and this is what we're trying to get up and running now. As long as it works, this is a good option. If you want to have a really dense data center then it's hard to have a big chunk of cabling going through everything.

We did have some stability issues. However, we got it pretty early on. We did have a bunch of purple screens, but after we updated it, I believe those went away and it was a lot more stable. We have not had it up for a few months now, but it did get more stable.

Scaling this solution is pretty easily done. It's a new chassis or a new node that you plug in and add to the system. There is no downtime.

We had acquired a company that was bringing over a lot of VMs and storage, and we did not have much space in our data center, so we had to go dense. NetApp HCI was one of the options that we look at for going as dense as we possibly could.

The initial setup of this solution was pretty straightforward, although it was more complex than some of the other products out there. For example, Nutanix has a more straightforward setup where you just have one webpage to go to, add the rest of your nodes, set it up and you're done. With NetApp HCI, it was a little bit more difficult, but pretty straightforward if you read the documentation.

We had a consultant come to our site to assist us with trying to get hooked up and running when we were moving into the office. They were helpful.

I have been using Nutanix as well. I find that they both have their pros and cons, and we like the interface of NetApp better than that of Nutanix. Nutanix is easier and more straightforward to set up.

We went with a different solution and having run that for a while, I would say that there is a lot more than they could do to make it more streamlined.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is that if you want to go dense, then this is a good product. We ended up going with a competitive product, that I think is a little better, but NetApp has been around for a long time, they're a great company, and it's a great product. They just have to get past the issues with cabling.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

Our primary use case for HCI is for our customer's development team. They're building their own DevOp storage and compute node, so HCI is for the DevOp team to have an area to work with.

Simple setup and having the storage and compute right on one deployment is the most valuable aspect of this solution. They're able to get set up and ready to go and start having their DevOp team deploy to that environment.

I'm pretty new to NetApp but the setup was really simple as far as what I could tell. The simplicity of getting it set up and running is what was nice for the customer that I did the setup for.

Its ability to scale on-demand affects provisioning in their organization because now dev can do extra nodes and grow their environment. It's pretty simple.

The solution’s ability to scale compute and storage independently is pretty simple. They have their own development team, so they're able to do their patch releases in the DevOp environment and then do canary deployment into their production to do testing before they deploy the production.

It has reduced the hypervisor footprint. I don't know by how much but our customer does a lot of services and they have three data centers. They're at a pretty large scale but with this deployment, they're looking at reducing the hypervisor footprint down to 50%.

Our customer does not use HCI's Cloud Data Services. 

HCI provides efficiencies and mobility similar to that of the public cloud.

It has reduced TCO for their company. That is one of the reasons they went for it. 

It stood up and we had no issues during the setup of it. There hasn't been any downtime that I'm aware of. 

Our customer can add extra nodes and keep going. I think their plan is to build it out. They have a core in Las Vegas and then they're planning on adding other nodes elsewhere.

The initial setup was very simple. We spent one afternoon there and stood it up and it was ready to go.

I would rate HCI an eight out of ten. Not a perfect ten because there is always room for improvement. They could improve the packaging. 

Check out the product, see the capabilities, and compare it to the competitors. It stands up.

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%.

The NetApp Deployment Engine that comes with it makes the actual deployment and usage very easy. That's our primary focus and it's hyper-converged. That's something that we want to use as well. 

The deployment process has room for improvement. I would like for it to be a cookie-cutter deployment. Right now we have to still do the worksheet and then add all the IPS, and then provide feedback to NDE and then it deploys it. In the future, I would like to deploy it through NDE and that I don't have to work on the worksheet. That would be awesome.

It's pretty stable because you can independently add and remove storage nodes and our compute nodes. It's very resilient and scalable. That's what we look for.

It's highly scalable and we love the fact that we can add storage independently or compute and we don't have to buy an entire storage solution when we have to increase capacity. That's the good thing about HCI. You can pick and choose if you want to compute or storage. It's great.

It's fairly new. We are still working through the documentation and stuff but it's getting there.

We have to innovate to stay relevant in the organization and in our media and entertainment company, so this is part of that solution.

We previously used Tintri. We loved them but because of the innovation and ease of use of HCI we chose this hyper-converged solution.

The initial setup was straightforward but we had to redeploy multiple times because the parameters changed based on our requirements. We had to deploy multiple times, but that had nothing to do with the actual installation. It was our metrics change.

We used NetApp Professional Services for the implementation. They were awesome.

We haven't seen ROI yet because it's not in production. 

Since it's still in its infancy, I would rate HCI an eight out of ten with the hopes that it will get to a ten. 

I would say give it a try. You will love how easy it is to deploy. 

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%. 

I haven't used this solution long enough to know what needs improvement.

HCI has not enabled us to consolidate workloads or break down silos and has not increased application performance. It has also not resulted in more efficient use of compute resources.

It's very scalable. 

It's stable.

From what I've heard, technical support seems to be very good. 

We did not use an integrator for the deployment. 

We haven't seen ROI yet. 

I would rate HCI a seven out of ten. It's pretty good. Seven out of ten seems like a good rating for a good product. 

The advice I would offer to someone considering this solution would depend on what the company is. We're a federal sector and we have a whole different set of limitations. I don't know that cloud is really where we need to be but for a private company, it may be.

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.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the ease of setup.

I would like to see a better upgrade process, like the one that ONTAP has.

The stability of this solution is good. It's stable, and I haven't had to do much work with it. In addition, I haven't had many NetApp support tickets with it.

The technical support for this solution is good.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward. You just start up the OVA and the vCenter and go from there.

This is a good solution. It is easy to set up, and you don't have to do much work to get it to do what it needs to do.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

It is for high demand VMs.

We are deploying it on-premise. We are on the latest version.

Because NetApp usually marries capacity, performance, and upgrade planning together, there's not a whole lot that I need to worry about at this point. But I do know when I need to have high performance, I will use the HCI (for those few that I need it for).

It gives me a chance to have certain workloads on high performance for people who complain about performance. If they think it is their storage, I can put it on there.

The way we're using it is probably different than most. It's just to be able to move certain workloads. Because we're on the engineering side, we will do a distributed build which takes a certain amount of time to go through it. On the tools or application, people want to have something finished within a certain amount of time. If the current solution isn't working, we can move it to give it the best performance.

It allows me to move a VM set and require extra performance. I can easily move them onto it and have it just run.

It is easy to maintain.

Long-term, I would like them to add NVMe disks and possibly have a tiering solution built underneath it. Not everybody wants you to run things up to the cloud. By having a low-end storage attached to it, you can tier stuff up and down, as needed.

Because I like block mode, I'd like to see SAN connectivity. I would like to be able to easily put it into my current environment.

Unfortunately, the solution has not reduced our hypervisor footprint.

The solution’s Element software has not enabled us to consolidate workloads or break down silos yet. I need high-performance on a certain thing, and that is it.

So far, the stability is good.

I am looking at trying to scale it up by adding more blades and storage in the near future.

I've had really good luck with them.

We were running on a non-hyperconverged application. We were running off it of instead of using the SSDs. It was all based on SAS and Near-line. 

This just gives us a little better performance.

It was pretty straightforward. You've got a box and you fire it up.

We deployed it ourselves.

We had NetApp people walking us through a lot of it. They were part of the NetApp application group.

The solution has increased application performance.

Maintenance costs are the same because my infrastructure is still there.

Talk with the vendor. Get a demo box, put it in, set it up, and see if it works. Remember that you still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point. 

We evaluated NetApp and a competitor. What I like about NetApp is the storage wasn't defined to a particular node. I can expand the storage to increase across all nodes or I can have a minimal amount. Whereas, the competitor had a certain amount per node, and that was it. There was no expandability.

Just have a good understanding of what you have.

I would rate it a nine (out of 10). It is easy for me to go out there and configure the storage along with everything through vCenter. However, when you get into SolidFire or the hardware side of it, it'd be nice to have a quick, easy way to get into that from VMware.

We're actually an ISV that supplies infrastructural services to customers. We allow them to utilize NetApp in the cloud with Cloud Volume in Azure, AWS and Google Cloud. We use HCI and standard media technologies in our own data center, as well as supplying and setting it up for customers.

We supply all versions of this solution and we run a combination of public and private cloud on our own servers.

We like SnapMirror and we've been using it for many years. We also like the object storage tools, as well as cloud sync for customers wanting to integrate between the cloud and local.

I'm pretty happy with the product altogether. I'm pretty much a fan of the product. I think we've started to move more and more into Kubernetes and I think that's an area where we start to grow more I think.

Probably the engineering guys would know more than I would what could be improved. From my perspective, I'm happy with the solutions as is. As I said, we'll start getting more and more into the Kubernetes side of it and get the ability to move entire applications all over the place, but I'm happy with how we're using it at the moment. I'm sure there's always room for improvement, but at the moment, I'm pretty happy.

I think it pretty much does everything we want. Obviously, as environments change, I think NetApp will grow with them. I think there will be even more integration with their public cloud.

It would be great if they took something like kernel storage and integrated straight into the NetApp as well.

The stability is fantastic. That's why I've stuck with it. In my mind, it's one of the best storage products. The software around it also has got to be the best across all different storage environments.

The solution is incredible. We've been able to scale. We're in New Zealand, so it's difficult to say, but the progress we've seen here so far is easily scalable. I wouldn't know what it would be like in the US because we just don't compare to that scale.

Although we use it in our own company, it's mostly for our customers. We've got thousands of customers attached to it.

I've never had a problem with it. The NetApp guys and technical support that we've had for NetApp has been very, very good.

We were pretty lucky. We've probably got the highest qualified engineers on our teams. They seem to do extremely well, so we've got very, very good skills.

Deployment time depends on what you're talking about. If it's a simple installation, it can take a couple of hours. If it's a complex environment, it can take a couple of weeks. So it just depends on what you're trying to do and what you incorporate into it.

The best thing to do is to make sure that you understand exactly what outcome you're looking for because there's quite a wide range of technologies with NetApp. I believe they cater to all of the different environments, but you need to make sure that you build the solution according to the applications and outcome that you're looking for.

I'd rate it as ten of ten, from my perspective.

Our primary use case is for a hyper-converged solution. I'm a consultant and do the design for this solution. 

• Predictability. One of the biggest challenges in any data center is delivering predictable results, especially in the face of proliferating applications and workloads. Any time you have multiple applications sharing the same infrastructure, it’s possible for one application to interfere with the performance of another. NetApp HCI solves predictability challenges with industry-leading performance capabilities that allow the granular control of every application. NetApp HCI’s performance settings eliminate resource contention and variable application performance.
• Flexibility. The relentless pace of business change means you need maximum flexibility to adapt to any workload while using existing investments. NetApp HCI offers a highly configurable design that enables cloud-native application development and agile operations for virtualized environments.
  
• Simplicity. A common goal of IT organizations is to automate all routine tasks, eliminating the risk of user errors associated with manual operations. NetApp HCI streamlines installation so that it takes minutes instead of hours, and simple, centralized management with VMware lets you control NetApp HCI through tools you already use.
  

It's an all-flash solution. NetApp guarantees 3-to-1 or more than 3-to-1
It depends on the type of information.

Each node guaranteed performance, around 50K IOPS per node.

The price should be lowered. It's a little expensive.

NETAPP HCI's solution is placed high in terms of its price.
The solution is aimed to Enterprise and SMB\SME organizations that require guaranteed performance in high capacity in minimum space.(dense solution)

Unfortunately , the price is the expression of solution.

The solution is incredibly stable

It is scalable. You can scale it with compute nodes or storage nodes, you can choose.

NetApp HCI is a scalable, on-premises hybrid cloud infrastructure that transforms your private cloud into a deployable region of your multicloud. Bring your public cloud on-premises and develop anywhere, on any cloud, with one experience.

I would give their technical support a five out of five. 

It depends on the capacity & computes requirement of the solution which is require

I would rate it a ten out of ten.

It has a lot of solutions because you can do replication with Legacy storage nodes with NetApp and to the cloud.

What I really like about this solution is that it is a global facility and that the technology is provided by HCI. I like the possibility of modular scaling regarding your computer and the integration to continuation alignments.

I would like to have more variety, like GPU cards.

I haven't experienced any bugs, glitches or crashes, so it is a stable solution.

The scalability is great because it can scale independently. It's the best in its class when it comes to scalability. Our usages vary between 300 and a few thousand users.

When we tested the support system, they offered maximum support. The connection time was fast and they answered all my questions regarding integration to server environments. 

The complexity or ease of the initial setup will depend on the specific customer. The deployment shouldn't take longer than about 15 to 30 minutes if everything runs smooth.

All the licenses are included when you buy the program.

We evaluated and looked at other options. It depends on the customer, but we looked at something for our customer who had certain requirements for models and formulas regarding the criteria. The customer asked me to look at the most suitable solution for him.

My advice to others would be to test it and buy it if does what they want it to do. Everybody has to take care of themselves regarding this, and only they can decide if this is the best solution for their use case or not. There is no way that I can say that this will be the answer to all your problems. It would be ridiculous. In my opinion, HCI is a good product, easy to use and scalable. 

In the next version, I would like to see bigger GPU types and synchronous mirror between sites including transparent failover because in Germany or Europe it's quite common. Out of ten, my rating will be an eight.

Our primary use case for HCI is two-fold. First, HCI allowed me to provide the production engineering group with the performance they needed, pull my people out of chasing their performance and allow them to move the product on. Second, because for good or bad NetApp stuff lasts. We had aging infrastructure, an eight-year-old array, and some Hyper-V servers that were ten, eight, and five years old and they all just needed to be replaced. We needed to also do some security and updates of the underlying operating systems on the hosts. Both of those really came together with the HCI; on two separate HCIs, but they came together for us on both of them. 

If my people are chasing issues on old hardware, and in the weeds, we're not doing anything that management sees as value. They don't see any value in email being up, they expect email to be up. This solution has brought power and simplicity. Everything we've moved over runs two times faster and in some cases, a lot faster, far more than twice, which our users noticed. That's an immediate productivity boost. We've been able to bring a dead project up like a phoenix to start moving again. This also allowed our managers and our executives that had put their names and show as money behind that project, to save some face. It's allowed me to consolidate our infrastructure, saving electricity in the server room, and even saving heat, so I was able to use this project toward our environmental objectives.

The most valuable features that the HCI brought were power, simplicity, and flexibility. I don't have a staff of hundreds, I have a staff of seven. We're providing support for three companies across North America on a corporate level, and then providing all IT support for America shows a spread across five facilities in the US.

I would like to see higher level graphics support because we are going to be doing some virtual desktop for our CAD software, and I want to be able to support AutoCAD and Cantillo on remote desktop machines.

Less than one year.

Stability is one of the things we absolutely have to have, because if the HCI is down, our assembly lines are down, and that could potentially lead to our customer being down. If our customer is down, that's $10,000 a minute; and any time the assembly line is down, that could potentially lead to overtime. We don't get to charge one and a half times for something we billed just because we happened to build it on overtime. Any technology we bring in, has to be built for what I call "three in the morning." It can't be built for whenever everybody's in the plant, everybody can watch it, and everybody can babysit. It has to be built for three a.m. when we've got a skeletal staff there, and we just have to know that it's just running. As I stand here, right now, I don't have to check my phone, I don't have to check my email. I know it's running. Period.

It's scalable by design. We put in a compute unit, we've got leftover chassis, we need another one, we stick it in another compute unit. We need a bigger one, we pull the old one out, put a new one in.

Technical support has been good so far although we haven't used it much, which is very good. 

We had a project that was overdue by about two years, that couldn't get the performance that it needed. The vendor couldn't spec what we needed. The most valuable feature would be the performance. We kept chasing it. If we give it a little more RAM it would perform and then it wouldn't. Based on the goals that they put forward we got to the point that it was just never going to get there. Instead of a six second cycle time, they had originally said that it needed one second but it was taking somewhere around 40. We got it down to 20 and eventually down to one but that was using hardware that was completely stripped down with no backup or anything. It was not something we wanted. I needed performance, flexibility, and simplicity. I'd lost a lot of my own department's resources to chasing performance.

We also looked into Nutanix, Cisco, and NetApp. We chose this NetApp because one, we already had a relationship with NetApp and I know the quality of their work. Two, the unit was built from the ground up to work as a single unit. It wasn't things that were developed separately that happened to work together very well, they were actually designed to work as a single unit. Finally, the price point fit to where our budget was.

I would rate this solution an eight. We've only had it since March so I don't have much experience with it but I have no doubt that moving forward it will move up to a nine or ten. 

We want a hyperconveged setup and infrastructure in a cost-effective solution, based on the storage and network, with server efficiency. For now, we are just using independent Data Fabrics. We are at the stage of testing solutions with NetApp HCI products. Once it is approved we will recommend our customers use this HCI setup in production.

Every company runs on IOPS, bandwidth, and latency. Five or ten years ago, we didn't have much bandwidth and the latency wasn't great because of packet loss with the LAN technologies. Now, Ethernet has been developed a lot so that there are new technologies with data center bridging and they are coming up with better solutions for TCP/IP. It is becoming very good to use it for HCI to create a cost-effective solution. SAN is always costly. While there is a cost to HCI, it is becoming a cost-effective solution for data storage.

The most valuable feature is the convergence. If we were to go with a legacy SAN solution, SAN fabrics, we would have two independent data fabrics. With hyperconverged, we can have two separate fabrics with a cost-effective LAN technology solution.

To improve the product, they should make it more flexible.

Because we are testing the product we aren't able to talk about the stability yet.

These days, most products provide a scalable solution, so scalability is generally not a problem.

We have opened support cases with NetApp and they have provided good support for all of our problems and issues. They provide troubleshooting steps and there are Knowledge Bases, so if it is a known issue we can find it directly. If it is a new issue it will be forwarded to the storage engineering team. They have their own labs where they can recreate the issue to try to resolve it.

We were forced to move from our old product to the new product because of the lifecycle of the product. It expired after five or six years. Once we reached the end of the lifecycle, we had to move to another product.

We went with NetApp based on the cost-effective solutions, technologies, and protocols. We had detailed discussions with architects and engineers and narrowed it down to the product we would go with.

At the beginning of the initial setup, NetApp came to our site and helped us, but it was a very slow process.

We looked at Dell EMC, Hitachi, and HPE.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. I love HCI. It is a cost-effective solution and it is the future as well.

With my current company, the primary use case is because of the increasing costs of the logistics: floor space, maintenance of hardware, bulk hardware, and cooling. 

Primary use case for HCI with my old company was using SDTC. They use the hyperconverged devices over there to migrate from legacy to the software-defined data center model.

It has automated a lot of workloads. It has automated us from ticketing a large number to a very small number. Our legacy environment with the application base has improved. It also helps us with self-healing technology, which HCI is good for.

• Reduced floor space
• Low cost of operations
• Reduced manpower

• Application consistency restorations
• More database support
• More application-based features

There are some legacy applications which still cannot be migrated. That is why we have to keep two environments: legacy and the new one. We would like to see more compatibility to move stuff.

Because there is practically no downtime, it is stable. We haven't encountered any issues so far.

We can just push a button and increase, asking to scale whenever we need it. So, it is scalable to a good extent.

It was initially complex to understand, but once we got to the implementation phase, it was pretty much straightforward.

We had like three phases of Hypercare during the PoC: phase one to phase three. It was pretty good, and they worked well to address all the issues.

When comes to DevOps, HCI has saved our organization time and money, especially with the number of resources that we have cut down. The initial cost was there, but return on investment will be seen in two years of time.

There are the overall infrastructure costs. Even though the initial costing was higher, we calculated for year-to-year for five years. That brought us into a position where we decided, we have to go for HCI rather than having distributor systems.

Go explore the market. Don't just go with one vendor. Try to explore different options, because every environment is different. Test and do a lot of PoCs.

The solution is growing, and it's good.

We use HCI to help leverage microservices from AWS, such as, EC2 instances where we create some bucket links and move a tiering from on-premise to the cloud migration. We try to host applications on cloud.

HCI has helped with storage persistence across private and hybrid clouds for the last year. It's faster and more reliable with minimal downtime, as it doesn't require any maintenance.

My previous employer was on a DevOps model. We used to create, test, and migrate, then operate with the same team.

It is our main storage solution at our main office in Abilene, Texas, our satellite office in Pensacola, Florida, and our data center in Miami, Florida.

We only have the private cloud right now. We don't have the hybrid, but that is one of the things that we are looking at for the future. The private cloud has helped us with storage persistence. It is there all the time. It's extremely reliable and has been a lifesaver.

The integration that it has with some of our data recovery tools, like Veeam, has been helpful. We just had an incident where we had to recover the whole company. We were attacked, so it was lifesaving. Basically, we would be under now if we would not have had it. That is how critical it is for us.

• Its data literacy gives us so much flexibility for our development group to be able to stay on task. 
• The solution integrates well with all the other applications that we use on our environment.
• The GUI is user-friendly and intuitive.

It is difficult to get acclimated to all the new features quickly. The onboard process could be improved to bring clients up to speed faster.

It is a lifesaver, definitely an A plus stability-wise. All around, it's a great solution. 

Looking at the future, it will be one of our favorite tools. We will keep growing, and it's something that we want to take along with us for the long-term.

We have not used technical support yet.

We were not using a previous solution. We had a lot of feedback from our developers that they were trying to improve their DevOps operation. We looked into it, and it made sense. We adopted HCI, and so far, it has been a winner for us.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a reseller called Storage Solutions for the deployment. Our experience with them was great.

Where we lost nearly 75 percent of our infrastructure due to a malicious attack and were able to recover two and a half hours into it due to the integration, it saved us and all of our customers. Because we were able to recover so fast from the attack, the solution paid for itself right there.

This solution saved our organization time (35 percent) and money. We have a hefty group of developers, and if you multiply that by 30 to 35 percent, that is quite a bit of money.

We considered HPE, Dell EMC, and NetApp.

The solution is a lifesaver. If you ever have some type of disaster and need to recover from it quickly, you can't get any better than this solution. It made all the difference in the world.

We are in the learning phase of using Data Fabric for hybrid multi-cloud. We're still trying to get accustomed to it, but it looks like a great product. It should be helpful, especially, for where we're trying to go as a company. We're not there yet, but eventually, it should be an extremely useful tool for us.

We use HCI to accelerate DevOps. Our development group works with this feature, and I have heard nothing but good reviews. The development group definitely praises that feature. Every time they try to compile, it makes things easier for them. It has been night and day since we integrated it into our tool set. They definitely have improved their delivery time.

We do plan to use HCI to leverage microservices from all of our clouds in the future. We are still getting accustom to using the product and working it out for everyday usage.

We have the SolidFire Element OS, which is also their HCI. We don't use the hyperconverged part of it, but we do use the scale-out storage piece of it for all-flash storage.

The benefits for our organization are the performance that we're able to get out of it, as well as the guaranteed minimum performance from a storage perspective. They make life a lot easier to manage, for what we're provisioning out to customers.

We're trying to move to a much more API-driven management of all of our products, and NetApp's product is, from all the SDS providers we have seen, the most fully-baked API out there.

I'm not a fan of how they don't log you out properly from some of their web tools for management. There are some little things like that, that they're working on, still.

Replication is a big one that, I believe they're saying in version 11, is going to be able to accommodate our needs. That's three to six months away.

We're going to the 10.3 now and we haven't lost any data, which is a good thing. Some of the API calls were causing time-outs, but that's been fixed in the version we're moving to, so it's becoming more and more stable all the time.

Thirty-six nodes are as big as we go right now and we have scaled them up to 36 nodes. It was not challenging at all. Just add them in and they connect right up.

We have a guy that we work with, primarily. He's really good. Obviously, he's still one of their frontline guys, but he can escalate things, as needed. So they've been very good.

We're trying to move away from Fibre Channel as our primary storage method, so moving to the SolidFire HCI product is a step in that direction.

The initial setup was straightforward. When you get them all onto the network, they all see each other and you just tell it to add it to the cluster. It's pretty straightforward.

We used an integrator but I was not involved in that piece of it.

We looked at Dell EMC ScaleIO, their Ready Node stuff. And I think some of my peers evaluated Hedvig and some other SDS providers. We went for NetApp because of the API functionality that they really built into it. They're all-API first, and then they put everything on a wrapper around their API. Anything that can be done is done via API.

Take a look at the guaranteed minimum QoS's that you can push out to the LOBs or the people who are using it, and the API as well.

We don't use Data Fabric for hybrid or multi-clouds. We are trying to form a DevOps team to take over the operations side of everything; everything from a drive failure to everything else. Has this solution accelerated that? Not yet. And we don't use the solution to leverage micro-services from our clouds.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. They are delivering what they packaged it as. It's a high-performing and scalable storage system.

We had a long-running project that didn’t have the horsepower behind it that it needed, and the vendor couldn’t spec the horsepower that it did need. Rather than continuing to chase performance, I took a chance on a quantum leap and put the HCI box in to provide the flexibility, but also the power, that it needed, and it has worked out.

It significantly reduces downtime on two of our assembly lines. In addition, it allowed us to move forward on one of the products that we’re going to use to improve as a company, to potentially allow us to shore up some things.

In terms of helping us with storage persistence across private and hybrid clouds, we do store data internally and in Azure. It has allowed us to consolidate a number of workloads, across our old NetApp and a number of our older storage arrays, into a single unit and have that unit also working with Azure.

It was designed from the ground up to work together. It’s not disparate technologies that the vendors put together and decided, “These can work together.” It was designed from the ground up to work together. You get that slight economy of scale from that fact that it was designed that way. It becomes more than the sum of its pieces, rather than less.

I'd like to see some additional graphics capabilities because I'd like to look at some virtual desktop integration for CAD software.

The solution is incredibly stable. That was one of the specific things I was looking for.

Scalability was another thing I was looking at. The solution, by its very nature, is designed to be expandable and flexible, so you don't have to buy performance you don't need today, but you're also not stuck with something you can't expand.

So far, the technical support has been excellent. We only have to call one number. Whether it's an issue with the storage node, the compute node, or SolidFire, we're calling a single number. We haven't had a whole lot of issues, but we've found them to be responsive and knowledgeable for the few that we've had.

In the first use case, we weren't getting the performance we needed from the old solution. In the second use case, I had an aging infrastructure that I knew I needed to replace. It was simply finding the correct solution to fill those needs.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We used an integrator for the deployment. We purchased it through SHI, which is our strategic VAR, and they brought in a company called Arrow to do the deployment. Our experience with them was very good.

We had something that people worked on but was two years late and causing downtime on our assembly line. That downtime leads to overtime. If it goes on, it leads to downtime for your customer.

Using this solution, we have absolutely seen return on investment.

Cisco and Nutanix were the other big ones that we looked at. The reason we didn't go with Cisco, to be honest, was that they made it clear they didn't think a company of our size warranted their attention.

NetApp did a briefing for just me. That wasn't the only reason, but any company that is willing to stand behind their technology and can't wait to get it into your facility to show it off, clearly they believe in it. It checked all the boxes for what I needed it to do. It was also a company I have a relationship with, so I know that their gear is going to be here.

Definitely, have a look at this solution. It is simple, and I don't mean "simple" in a negative way. If you're not a company with a staff of hundreds, and most IT departments don't, you need something that allows you to do more with less overhead, provide better performance, and this is going to check all those boxes.

We don’t use Data Fabric for hybrid or multi-clouds. We are not currently using this solution to leverage microservices from our clouds. We don't yet use it for Dev Ops, but when we start to do so I expect it will save us time and money.

I rate the solution at about eight out of ten. The reason I wouldn't rate it any higher is that it's only been in our facility for less than a year, so I just don't have that long-term experience with it. I have no doubt that it will go to a nine or a ten out of ten. It's simple, flexible, powerful. We've been able to move most of our workload to it. We've seen increased performance across the board. We're pretty happy with it.