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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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. 

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.

We used HPE. The technology and the cost were the two major factors for switching.

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.

We didn't previously use another solution.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.