From an infrastructure standpoint, we needed to have more cohesiveness between our teams. We set that out as a goal for our HCI team - realizing that's a concern and/or issue. We solved that, which helped us to deploy in a more efficient manner. Therefore, we can get the capacity for the customer in a more efficient manner in a much faster time frame than former methods. We've done a lot of consolidation with far fewer storage side manipulations. Cluster-wise, I've been able to put more compute resources into one cluster versus maybe three or four in the older environment. It helps our organization from the standpoint of less administration. The solution has resulted in a more efficient use of compute resources, because as far as our compute nodes go, we've diminished them by probably 35 percent. This solution reduced our maintenance costs. We were going to have to pay one to two million dollars to put in for storage and compute nodes. We are avoiding those costs.

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Massimiliano Bartolozzi

Chief Information Officer at Lucart S.p.A.

We got three crashes in one year. NetApp's support was very difficult to engage with. We have an SLA of onsite support within 24 hours. They did not respect any SLA. They came after three days, and they did not have the spare part. They had to find the spare part. I also suspect that they gave me a reconditioned one and not a new one, but it is only my impression. I don't know whom to call in order to complain. Their support is not at all good. From 2022 on, the support approach changed totally and now they are one of our best-performing vendors.

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Scott-Hansen

Storage Engineer at University of California, Irvine

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.

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Valuable Features

"It is scalable, and NetApp Deployment Engine (NDE) makes its deployment easier."
"It is highly scalable. Their support is also extremely good."
"NetApp HCI is a stable solution."

Room for Improvement

"At the moment, I am not looking for new features. Quality of Service (QoS) and capacity efficiency are the two things that I want to resolve in my customer's environment. QoS improves the performance of each tenancy, and with capacity efficiency, the customer can achieve more capacity as compared to the normal capacity."
"The administration side of it needs to be improved. We expect an easier interface and a single upgrade for updating the infrastructure."
"Its stability is very bad. It has been crashing continuously. In one year, we got three crashes, which is unbelievable for an appliance that is guaranteed for 10 years without any crash."