What is your primary use case for NetApp HCI?

I am a consultant, and it is being used in our customer's company. We are a partner and reseller.

NetApp HCI is used for enterprise-scale hybrid cloud infrastructure and we are using the standard version.

In 2020, our site-based AS/400 infrastructure was going to the end of its life cycle. So, we started a market investigation for an appliance that could host our new SQL server environment. We also selected a private cloud data center inside the Telecom Italia facility in Rome. After the hardware selection, NetApp won the challenge, and we decided to fill the data center room with the NetApp H-series appliance. We went live with the new data center on March 6, 2021.

Currently, our primary use case for HCI is testing the product to see if we can find a real business case in the hybrid, hyperconverged infrastructure. We are testing different products and HCI is one of them. Our use case is testing the hardware and the software piece of the product, leveraging the hardware part of the server and storage, in one piece. We're testing that to see how that works out for our infrastructure.

Our primary use for this solution is Virtual Volumes (VVols).

Our primary use for the HCI solution is so that we can have redundancy and resiliency for all of our critical systems that reside on VMware. We will be utilizing technologies such as vMotion, iSCSI, and data management to move the VM instances back and forth while they are still running. We have purchased the solution but we do not have it running yet. We have encountered an issue after the setup was complete where the whole vCenter crashed. Professional Services had to come back out and install the solution a second time, but after they re-installed it, it crashed again. We are finding it challenging to get the system running in a stable condition. The ability of this solution to scale on demand is good because with the organization growing, our data size is growing as far as our computer server is growing. The scalability will probably be the biggest factor in enhancing our environment. Part of the planning for our system, or our environment, was that it has to have the capacity to scale. This means that this solution's ability to scale compute and storage independently is something that we took into consideration. We can add an additional chassis at any given time. We believe that NetApp HCI will reduce our hypervisor footprint, but we have not seen anything as of yet. When this solution is up and running we expect that the Element software will enable us to consolidate workloads. We will not be using any of the cloud data services because for security reasons, everything is on-premises. Although we do not have everything running yet, I am hoping that we will be able to make more efficient use of our compute resources.

We do not run NetApp HCI ourselves. This is a solution that we implement for our customers. The version that we provide is normally the latest, although a customer will sometimes request an earlier version. Depending on how the solution is architectured to the customer, the deployment model can be on-premises, in a public cloud, or private-cloud based. Our team goes in and delivers against that architecture. When it is a public cloud deployment, Microsoft Azure is our preference. For the customers that we talk to, their primary use case is normally to build their own version of the cloud with a quality of service where they can move workloads to the HCI solution while taking advantage of the Cloud and doing it in a more cost-effective way. The administration costs are lower and it is a simpler solution to run.

We use NetApp HCI for our VDI infrastructure. We have thousands of VDI desktops that we deploy and we're currently testing it out. We use NetApp FAS storage, but we migrated all of that to the ACI platform. We do not use Cloud Data Services at the moment.

Initially, our primary use case for this solution was testing. We had a large deployment of Nutanix and we got NetApp HCI to test along with it. Then, we were going to use it for the office to get off of some of the older equipment for VMware. NetApp HCI hasn't been used in production or for office applications yet. We upgraded the solution and then took it down about three months ago. It was in our data center and we moved it because we wanted to put it into an office with newer equipment. Unfortunately, the networking couldn't handle what we were plugging into it, so we ended up taking down the office. Now, we've been waiting to get newer switches so that we can do it.

We are using it currently for all our "Tier 2 and Tier 3 storage" for all our business units. On the storage nodes, we're using 11.0. On the VMware side we are currently @ 6.5 moving to 6.7 after our annual freeze period ending late January 2020.

Our primary use case for HCI is for our customer's development team. They're building their own DevOp storage and compute node, so HCI is for the DevOp team to have an area to work with.

We use a catalog that can deploy virtual machines. It helps a lot because the users open fewer cases to provision the VM.

Our primary use for the product is doing demo presentations of it for customers. We show them the function of the appliance, the features, how easy it is to operate, and things like that. That is what our main purpose for it is as resellers.

We use all of the deployment models. That's the good part about HCI, you can choose whichever you want. Our cloud providers are Amazon and Azure. Our primary use case is for container storage. We use HCI's Cloud Data services. It affects the management of the infrastructure by making it one single pane of glass to provision and a single pane of glass to monitor. It makes my use easier. The hope is that it will make the use of compute resources more efficient by 50%.

The primary use we have for this product is collaborating with VMware in development.

We are slowly rolling out VMs to it. I'm not so much involved in that, the government side does that, but that's what we're using it for. We also use HCI's Cloud Data services.

We have 30 compute nodes and about 34 storage nodes that we're trying to consolidate down in a co-location area. We use it for all of our workloads outside of our main EMR system. It does everything from Oracle, SQL, all sorts of workloads, CIFS, and NFS.

The use case is for a demo center, and then we load different kinds of workloads like Dockers, Citrix VDI, F5 Load Balancers, Virtualizers, all the virtual platforms, and virtual appliances. Customers would come to our demo center to take a look to see if they have an interest in HCI and then we would show them a showcase.

We're mostly testing it out right now. We have some internal tools we're testing it on. We're testing it for production readiness in our facility. We have a couple of test VMs on it and we're using it for some data collection on our ONTAP systems. It's been testing for around a month.

Our primary use case is for multi-protocol access.

It is for high demand VMs. We are deploying it on-premise. We are on the latest version.

We're actually an ISV that supplies infrastructural services to customers. We allow them to utilize NetApp in the cloud with Cloud Volume in Azure, AWS and Google Cloud. We use HCI and standard media technologies in our own data center, as well as supplying and setting it up for customers. We supply all versions of this solution and we run a combination of public and private cloud on our own servers.

Our primary use case is for a hyper-converged solution. I'm a consultant and do the design for this solution.

I'm not a user, I'm a distributor.

Our primary use case for HCI is two-fold. First, HCI allowed me to provide the production engineering group with the performance they needed, pull my people out of chasing their performance and allow them to move the product on. Second, because for good or bad NetApp stuff lasts. We had aging infrastructure, an eight-year-old array, and some Hyper-V servers that were ten, eight, and five years old and they all just needed to be replaced. We needed to also do some security and updates of the underlying operating systems on the hosts. Both of those really came together with the HCI; on two separate HCIs, but they came together for us on both of them.

With my current company, the primary use case is because of the increasing costs of the logistics: floor space, maintenance of hardware, bulk hardware, and cooling. Primary use case for HCI with my old company was using SDTC. They use the hyperconverged devices over there to migrate from legacy to the software-defined data center model.

It is our main storage solution at our main office in Abilene, Texas, our satellite office in Pensacola, Florida, and our data center in Miami, Florida. We only have the private cloud right now. We don't have the hybrid, but that is one of the things that we are looking at for the future. The private cloud has helped us with storage persistence. It is there all the time. It's extremely reliable and has been a lifesaver.

We have the SolidFire Element OS, which is also their HCI. We don't use the hyperconverged part of it, but we do use the scale-out storage piece of it for all-flash storage.

We had a long-running project that didn’t have the horsepower behind it that it needed, and the vendor couldn’t spec the horsepower that it did need. Rather than continuing to chase performance, I took a chance on a quantum leap and put the HCI box in to provide the flexibility, but also the power, that it needed, and it has worked out.

We want a hyperconveged setup and infrastructure in a cost-effective solution, based on the storage and network, with server efficiency. For now, we are just using independent Data Fabrics. We are at the stage of testing solutions with NetApp HCI products. Once it is approved we will recommend our customers use this HCI setup in production.