The solution's initial setup is straightforward. In addition, it is easy for customers to do its maintenance themselves. Our team of two technicians provides second-level support as well.

In order to implement Storage Spaces Direct, you need to have a very comprehensive understanding of storage. High-speed storage networks require fine-tuning in order to function optimally. For this reason, all storage, aisles, and tiering need to be finely-tuned.

Technical companies and vendors that only have Microsoft training, will only implement the software side, ignoring the hardware side. 

The documentation when we built (as soon as Server 2016 was RTM) was not as good as it is now, but it was still relatively straightforward with the exception of Cisco/Mellanox RDMA interoperability.

The initial setup is very easy.

In the initial set up, if you have the right hardware, the setup is actually very straightforward. There are a lot of step-by-steps available online that you can follow, so it is not an issue getting it set up. I think that the problem is there are not enough details. We can use many different types of hardware and the different types of hardware have different specific requirements. Like for example, with the HBA (Host Bus Adapter) card, different brands use different models. Dell has their own line with the HB330, HP uses its own brand of HBA and RAID controller cards. Lenovo, of course, uses their own brand of cards as well — Qlogic. So different brands have slightly different requirements and as a result, the setup is probably not a friendly as probably could be.  

The initial setup is more or less straightforward. It's not too complex. 

I am a Linux administrator and have a lot of experience with the command-line interface, so it was easy for me. However, for Microsoft administrators, it may be more difficult because there is no GUI.