Currently, the return on investment is being recognized, whereas initially, it wasn't apparent at that level due to the higher one-time cost. However, once the storage is introduced to the market and sold to customers, the sales uptake increases, leading to the realization of ROI typically within a timeframe ranging from three to five years.

We expect that it'll take some time but we expect that it would reduce our operational cost, absolutely.

I think one of the reasons we chose SolidFire is because it is definitely giving us good results on the costing part of it. It definitely has an impact on it. To be straightforward, it works for that.

I can't really speak about SolidFire's impact on operational cost compared to other storage platforms because all our other storage platforms are NetApp. The scalability for us, it is a cost-savings, so if we hit a certain number of IOPs within an AFF system we have to add another pair of controllers and we have to add more disk. There are also bottlenecks for AFF, for how many SSD shelves you can run for those specific clusters, whereas with the SolidFire side we are just able to add nodes on and get what we need. They're both great solutions that fit the use case a lot better.

I'm not sure it's uniquely valuable to an enterprise-type company like us but I think it's unique in how it operates. That whole "add a node, add compute, add storage" has been done before but I think they really do it right with their all-flash technologies. Some of the other vendors don't do it with all-flash and run into bottlenecks for IOP and the like. I think SolidFire has really done a great job with that. They have done a really good job with storage efficiencies versus a lot of other vendors. A lot of the other vendors are add-ons for things like deduplication or compression/compaction. So I think SolidFire has done a great job with that.

I cannot speak for the cost. The cost is actually on a higher level than I am at. I'm actually the administrator, so I look at what and how the product works. The cost is for my manager. He takes care of the costs.