When you are doing lifecycle management on your storage platforms, you can just swap out pieces of equipment - since it's a modular design from the ground up. We used to do one big iron to another big iron, and that's a major migration workload/resource effort.  Whereas, with this environment, you can go with small nodes, one at a time, and do a refresh.

The ability to size the available space in a way that matches our company's needs is most valuable. For instance, you can decide if you want 80/20, 70/30, or 60/40 space. Redundancy depends on your needs without changing the appliance. You just add space and decide the percentage of space that you need free and the percentage of space that you need for backup. It is all automatic, and you don't have to do anything. You just add space, and the system automatically configures itself with the chosen option.

The most valuable aspects are that it's an all-in-one solution and it's very self-contained.

HCI's ability to scale, compute, and store independently is nice because we can expand either the storage or the compute. There are different ways to expand different pieces and not do it all-in-one. With some of the competitors, you buy compute and you have to buy storage, so that is an important differentiator for NetApp.

One of the most valuable features of the solution is that they have taken something like 400 steps and compiled it into like 30 steps to install it. That level of simplification is one of the best things I've ever seen in any appliance in the market.

Normally when you build an appliance, you have to go through an extended installation process. But once you collect all the IP's that you need to for this appliance, the NetApp engine does all the rest of the work for you. So instead of leaving it on the operator to do all the work, the appliance does it. That is one of the features that I have seen in any appliance that really simplifies a lot of the work you would otherwise have to do for setup.

This is a strong product and it works very well, and the processes around it continue to grow and mature.

The user interface continues to improve.

The NetApp Deployment Engine that comes with it makes the actual deployment and usage very easy. That's our primary focus and it's hyper-converged. That's something that we want to use as well. 

• Reduced floor space
• Low cost of operations
• Reduced manpower

• Its data literacy gives us so much flexibility for our development group to be able to stay on task. 
• The solution integrates well with all the other applications that we use on our environment.
• The GUI is user-friendly and intuitive.

The most valuable feature is the convergence. If we were to go with a legacy SAN solution, SAN fabrics, we would have two independent data fabrics. With hyperconverged, we can have two separate fabrics with a cost-effective LAN technology solution.

The ability to move the hardware around and the speed at which we're using all-flash are the most valuable aspects. All of our customers are very happy with the performance. We win on both sides of physically moving and the enhancements in the performance.

It was designed from the ground up to work together. It’s not disparate technologies that the vendors put together and decided, “These can work together.” It was designed from the ground up to work together. You get that slight economy of scale from that fact that it was designed that way. It becomes more than the sum of its pieces, rather than less.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the ease of setup.

The most valuable features that the HCI brought were power, simplicity, and flexibility. I don't have a staff of hundreds, I have a staff of seven. We're providing support for three companies across North America on a corporate level, and then providing all IT support for America shows a spread across five facilities in the US.

This solution is rock solid.

The most valuables features of it are the deduplication and the compaction because the ratios are much better than what we normally get on our FAS storage. 

The virtual center is a nice feature.

We are looking forward to high availability, redundancy, and shared storage.

We're trying to move to a much more API-driven management of all of our products, and NetApp's product is, from all the SDS providers we have seen, the most fully-baked API out there.

It is highly scalable. Their support is also extremely good.

The most valuable feature, currently, is the density of the system as hardware. I'm able to leverage the density of the product and remove bigger hardware which requires more space, cooling, and power costs, obviously. There are cost savings, obviously.

Simple setup and having the storage and compute right on one deployment is the most valuable aspect of this solution. They're able to get set up and ready to go and start having their DevOp team deploy to that environment.

I'm pretty new to NetApp but the setup was really simple as far as what I could tell. The simplicity of getting it set up and running is what was nice for the customer that I did the setup for.

Its ability to scale on-demand affects provisioning in their organization because now dev can do extra nodes and grow their environment. It's pretty simple.

The solution’s ability to scale compute and storage independently is pretty simple. They have their own development team, so they're able to do their patch releases in the DevOp environment and then do canary deployment into their production to do testing before they deploy the production.

It has reduced the hypervisor footprint. I don't know by how much but our customer does a lot of services and they have three data centers. They're at a pretty large scale but with this deployment, they're looking at reducing the hypervisor footprint down to 50%.

Our customer does not use HCI's Cloud Data Services. 

HCI provides efficiencies and mobility similar to that of the public cloud.

It has reduced TCO for their company. That is one of the reasons they went for it. 

I like how the solution gives you to the ability to basically to grow compute and storage separately.  There is no compute processing used for storage IO so that means that the compute is purely satisfying User workloads

The most valuable feature for us is the easy way you can administrate the solution.

The most valuable feature is the software design storage that really provided a faster, agile, easier to scale up and out storage path.

The multi-vertical aspect is what is most valuable for us. The main reason we wanted a multi-protocol was because Amazon was not able to provide us with access to the same data as we could get from Linux and Windows lengths. That was our value proposition for this solution.

The solution's snapshot copies and thin clones make operations very fast and efficient.

Ease of deployment is probably the most valuable feature for us because it allows us to easily pull nodes in and out for expansion.

It allows me to move a VM set and require extra performance. I can easily move them onto it and have it just run.

It is easy to maintain.

What I really like about this solution is that it is a global facility and that the technology is provided by HCI. I like the possibility of modular scaling regarding your computer and the integration to continuation alignments.

We like SnapMirror and we've been using it for many years. We also like the object storage tools, as well as cloud sync for customers wanting to integrate between the cloud and local.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the SolidFire interface. The graphing is very nice, and it gives you insight into the VMs.

It is pretty straightforward to use.

It's an all-flash solution. NetApp guarantees 3-to-1 or more than 3-to-1
It depends on the type of information.

Each node guaranteed performance, around 50K IOPS per node.

It is scalable, and NetApp Deployment Engine (NDE) makes its deployment easier.