We run our data warehouse on it and batch processing needs to happen in a certain time frame. If we can’t deliver data processing in eight hours, then we have to keep the system closed for end users at that time. Ideally, we need it done by the start of business in the US, because if we finish late, people can’t start working until after that. Our batch processing time went down from 14 hours to seven hours with this solution.

When we have certain standards for performance, the customer experience is much better as well. They expect to have that kind of performance maintained or improved in the future. If there's a glitch, for example, whether it's storage or network, that's where customers start complaining about performance and the business goes haywire after that, for a while, until we fix the problem.

NetApp maintains the very high performance that we want to have. We work very closely with their engineer to make sure that every update they have will line up with what we require, or to fix whenever we have found problems in the past. We don't want to run into issues where, this is the price to upgrade to a certain version, and there is a certain impact.

The end-user experience has improved the organization as a whole; the customers that the DBAs serve. All the application folks are happier, now that their databases are running better.

We're able to quickly roll out close to 2,000 VDIs with very little setup. I've had familiarity with a different model of the NetApp device. It was mostly a matter of rolling it over to the new one. It was very easy to work with. The familiarity with it and the speed of it; I can't complain.

Cost: it's a lot cheaper. It's a lot cheaper than what the other vendors have for the same type of environment. It saves us money.

The solution allows us to segregate one storage unit from another.

We use if for low latency, high performance, OLTP database. It's dedicated to a single application.

The benefits are better up-time, better response time.

It's easier to set up so I don't have to spend a lot of time administering it, and setting it up. Whereas the FAS systems are a little bit more difficult to set up. So it's the ease of operations.

Ideally, the organization is trying reduce the footprint. Our current footprint is all on Lazy Theta and flash hard drives with Flash Pools and so on. To have one consistent platform that takes the same amount of data in less amounts of space is key. It is just a matter of getting to that next level of datacenter integration.

The primary use case for our All Flash EF-Series is currently being used for Vidya, with all subjects, Zinap, using our server to allow us to increase performance of our user experience on Vidya. We have high use cases for SQL databases. Most of our business critical applications use SQL to allow us to complete the DoD mission needs, so we have been using the EF-series for about two years now and everything has been going smoother and faster. We currently purchased 20 efi 60s with 1.92 terabyte SSD drives and it has been pretty effective, so far.

Part of our business is data processing. Any time we can take processes that are slow, find the pain points and speed them up, it helps a lot of different parts of the business.

I can be less proactive about monitoring it. We don't have to mess with tweaking it as much. On the production SAN, for instance, we're always on there, monitoring performance, checking how it's doing. Whereas with the EF, because there's only one thing running on it, it runs so fast, we just let it go. We had to monitor previous solutions more; it's not that there was ever really a problem.

Almost all of our infrastructure is on cDOT, and now we are able to have a single point of management for all our data.

The database queries on our old system (HP EVA) took nearly 32 hours, but on the new one in under 10.

It's quick. That was our big requirement, it had to be fast enough that there's no latency in our applications between when the end users are logging in through Citrix, and then those servers all talk back to our back-end servers. There can't be any major latency be it disk I/O or network I/O. So, it's all pretty quick.

More things get done faster. Time is money. If we have systems that are down for more than 10 minutes, that's $10,000 out the door, basically. They want true speed and being able to get up there.

The NetApp EF-Series gave our organization easy access to our databases. What's great about this solution is that it speeds up our data store because it is a cheap solution for flash performances.

It increased the speed of our current hosted VMs and their performance. It has provided a little bit of ease on the management.

We have an older disk-based system that is working in tandem with it and it definitely has better performance. Because of that, we put all of our VM's on it, which we can.

• Performance
• Reliability

The primary use case for our EF-series system is High Performance Computing (HPC) big data analysis. The AF system is dedicated to multiple applications.

The product allows us to configure and manage the services we choose to provide and to offer the service to the customers. In our organization, there are at least ten people using this solution to service many customers. This solution is dependable for us and our clients and that is what we needed to have.