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.
Storage Engineer at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2019-11-18T10:14:00Z
Nov 18, 2019
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.
Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2019-11-05T05:28:00Z
Nov 5, 2019
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.
Senior SAN / Systems Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
2019-11-05T05:28:00Z
Nov 5, 2019
When you are doing lifecycles for your equipment, you can just swap out pieces of equipment. We used to do one big iron to another big iron, and that's a major migration hassle. Whereas, with this environment, you can go with small nodes, one at a time, and do a refresh.
Senior Project Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
MSP
2019-11-05T05:28:00Z
Nov 5, 2019
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.
Storage Operations Manager at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2019-11-05T05:28:00Z
Nov 5, 2019
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.
Storage Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
2019-11-05T05:27:00Z
Nov 5, 2019
HCI definitely improved how flexible we scale, and our entrance into the cloud. The features are very rich, in terms of both avenues. It's helped us flexibly move and shift our workloads around, back and forth.
System Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
2019-11-05T05:27:00Z
Nov 5, 2019
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.
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.
Senior MIS Manager at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2018-12-19T07:16:00Z
Dec 19, 2018
Stability is one of the things we absolutely have to have, because if the HCI is down, our assembly lines are down, and that could potentially lead to our customer being down. If our customer is down, that's $10,000 a minute; and any time the assembly line is down, that could potentially lead to overtime. We don't get to charge one and a half times for something we billed just because you happened to build it on overtime. Any technology we bring in, has to be built for what I call "three in the morning." It can't be built for whenever everybody's in the plant, everybody can watch it, and everybody can babysit. It has to be built for three a.m. when you've got a skeletal staff there, and you just have to know that it's just running. As I stand here, right now, I don't have to check my phone, I don't have to check my email. I know it's running. Period
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.
Senior MIS Manager at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2018-10-23T12:29:00Z
Oct 23, 2018
In terms of helping us with storage persistence across private and hybrid clouds, we do store data internally and in Azure. It has allowed us to consolidate a number of workloads, across our old NetApp and a number of our older storage arrays, into a single unit and have that unit also working with Azure.
It is scalable, and NetApp Deployment Engine (NDE) makes its deployment easier.
NetApp HCI is a stable solution.
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 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.
Our goal with NetApp HCI is to have no single point of failure.
This is a strong product and it works very well, and the processes around it continue to grow and mature.
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 most valuable feature of this solution is the SolidFire interface.
When you are doing lifecycles for your equipment, you can just swap out pieces of equipment. We used to do one big iron to another big iron, and that's a major migration hassle. Whereas, with this environment, you can go with small nodes, one at a time, and do a refresh.
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.
It is easy to administrate the solution, and the company handles its technical support well.
It is a unique product with simplified setup and independent control over storage and compute.
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.
The ease of deployment is a positive feature that allows us to scale easily.
It is easy to set up, and you don't have to do much work to get it to do what it needs to do.
It has reduced our hypervisor footprint by around 20%.
HCI definitely improved how flexible we scale, and our entrance into the cloud. The features are very rich, in terms of both avenues. It's helped us flexibly move and shift our workloads around, back and forth.
The most valuable feature is the software design storage that really provided a faster, agile, easier to scale up and out storage path.
The most valuable aspects are that it's an all-in-one solution and it's very self-contained.
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.
It allows me to move a VM set and require extra performance. I can easily move them onto it and have it just run.
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.
It's an all-flash solution. NetApp guarantees 3-to-1 or more than 3-to-1. It has guaranteed performance, like 15K IOPS per node.
The scalability is great, because it can scale independently.
The solution is very scalable.
Stability is one of the things we absolutely have to have, because if the HCI is down, our assembly lines are down, and that could potentially lead to our customer being down. If our customer is down, that's $10,000 a minute; and any time the assembly line is down, that could potentially lead to overtime. We don't get to charge one and a half times for something we billed just because you happened to build it on overtime. Any technology we bring in, has to be built for what I call "three in the morning." It can't be built for whenever everybody's in the plant, everybody can watch it, and everybody can babysit. It has to be built for three a.m. when you've got a skeletal staff there, and you just have to know that it's just running. As I stand here, right now, I don't have to check my phone, I don't have to check my email. I know it's running. Period
It has automated a lot of workloads. It has automated us from ticketing a large number to a very small number.
The solution integrates well with all the other applications that we use on our environment.
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.
In terms of helping us with storage persistence across private and hybrid clouds, we do store data internally and in Azure. It has allowed us to consolidate a number of workloads, across our old NetApp and a number of our older storage arrays, into a single unit and have that unit also working with Azure.
The most valuable feature is the convergence.