If you pick any Epic upgrade, the faster that it can be done than the sooner you can turnaround the environment to your end users. This means less downtime and paperwork with better service to our customers, who happen to be patients.

When planning to build the service with the HPE GreenLake team, we knew what our minimum requirements were. We laid that out, then there will always be a statistical anomaly where you're going to be above or below. So, the fact that we can put in what we need and have added capacity that we are not paying for eliminates any overprovisioning.

Our IT team is more productive. There is more engineering work, because it takes a lot of the planning out of the picture since it has already been done. It allows the engineers to do their job rather than the added stuff that is above and beyond. 

It has made the security and compliance of our IT operations better. We are able to stay up to date with everything. In our organization, we don't want to see emails from compliance saying that we are behind on a report which came out, that we need XYZ firmware update, or a Windows update. When you have that added capacity, you can upgrade as you go with with very little downtime, if any.

It gives us compute and storage. The biggest thing that it gives us is reportability; that's the critical component. By giving us a monthly bill that is expandable based on usage, we're able to report back to the organization on the value that we're actually getting out of the hardware platform.

The best way that it's providing benefit to how the organization functions is that it has cut the legs out from under the executives who are trying to push all development into R&D, increasing our costs. I believe it was five times more expensive to do that.

In the next four years over the lifespan of the first segment, it's going to be saving us approximately $1.2 million in just hardware purchases and software support costs. 

In addition, we're seeing about a 15 percent reduction in the time it takes to deploy IT projects. For example, when it comes to deploying to R&D, which is the purpose of the stack, by going with an all-SSD array, and with the automation which is built into the platform, we are able to get machines out to the developers at a much faster rate. We are able to destroy them and then re-deploy them to the developers again. It's significantly faster than on our old, spinning disk configuration.

In terms of the administrative aspects of our IT operations, GreenLake has definitely assisted in some ways because it comes with Datacenter Care Services. They're there fixing it before we even know something is broken.

The performance of our batch workloads with SLAs (for our batch reporting) will start to be met.

It helps with our IT team's productivity, as they can focus on their day-to-day jobs rather than adding the management of the infrastructure into their task list. Thus, they can focus on the more business critical components of their role.

Many times in the past we ran into a situation where we need to add a bunch of space for our engineering department when it was developing something. Now we can just add that on the fly without any interaction from HP.

It helps us figure out what we have and what to do to plan ahead. If we see a trend, we can plan our best architecture for the future.

This solution has eliminated over-provisioning because we know we have storage at hand. We don't have to over-provision. We can just add as needed.

In terms of IT productivity is less of a hassle administratively. We won't have to worry about if we're going to have enough space or if we need to expand. We can do it right on the fly and our storage administrators can do that easily.

The service has eliminated the need for overprovisioning. If we do not have this type of service, we would have to buy storage for five years and use maybe 50 percent of that storage right now.

Our IT team is more productive right now. We eliminated the need for doing some manual tests.

It has brought newer technology in more quickly. This comes with an associated lower risk of failure, as we can replace older gear that we might otherwise have been stuck with.

It has helped us with the planning, and in concert with this, we are doing a lot of virtualizations. For a lot of cases, we are bringing in less gear and equipment to be able to accomplish the same things. It makes better use of what we do bring in.

Eliminating the need to overprovision ties into just using the hardware more wisely. If you are dealing with a lot of standalone Windows Servers, studies have shown they don't get used all the way. Since we are bringing in virtual hosts and running VMware on them, then building guests on top of that. We are packing more out of the same hardware.

The service decreases the time it takes to deploy IT projects when we have several sites going at once. Once we get it in-house, we have our own processes for installing and configuring, so it hasn't really changed that much, as we are using the same standards processes.

It has made the administrative aspect of our IT operations easier. Going through this faster, we are keeping the generations closer. We are not winding up with four, five, or as many generations or iterations of hardware. Everything is staying much closer together, so it is a more consistent infrastructure.

We haven't had great success with it. Both times that we've had to increase the hardware, the deployment took way longer than expected. In addition, we haven't yet gotten to a use point where the cost is below what it would cost us to provision the same set of services on HPE hardware outside of the GreenLake service.

In terms of our capacity management efforts, it's actually provided us too much capacity at this point in time, and we're working to try to fill that capacity. We're currently over-provisioned in that service.

It hasn't increased the flexibility of our IT operations because in that platform, on that set of racks, we're not able to add in different solutions that we would normally buy internally and deploy on that set of gear. So we have to create a separate set of gear for anything extra that we want to add into the environment.

I think the solution has cost us money. It hasn't decreased the time it takes to deploy IT projects.