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.

Its initial setup was complex. First of all, we had problems with the stability of the appliance from the beginning, and it was crashing very often. Second, NetApp's calculation of the available space after the installation was also wrong, so we had to add another hardware, which NetApp provided for free. That was absolutely fantastic, but it delayed our implementation process by three months. Overall, the deployment took six months.

There was not really an implementation strategy. We were not changing or migrating anything. We were setting up a new data center from scratch. We're building it from nothing.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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

The initial setup was straightforward.

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

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.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

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

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

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.

It was not complex. It was okay. It took about one and a half months.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

It is easy by using NDE.