Both products work but have their own characteristics, I wouldn't even call them pro's or con's. Nutanix does a great job in a multi-hypervisor environment and even offers their own "good enough" hypervisor. If you are accustomed to enterprise class features and…

Some great feedback from the other users here, I agree with all of it. Even though there are two clear frontrunners in the category, Nutanix and SimpliVity, there are some others to consider that are more "software defined". There's Cisco's offering recently released in…

Hello, full disclosure, my background is on the consultant side... I've only had experience working with Veeam and AppAssure (now called "Rapid Recovery" but we can still call it AA) on your list (I've worked with a few outside of them as well), but never with ShadowProtect…

Great review ICTManager672, this lines up to what I've heard from clients and peers in the field Alexander, based on tech specs the max RAID (DP) group size is 28 SSD drives, or two shelves. I'm sure there are some workarounds by clustering heads in CDOT to accommodate…

Re: Setting up Sharepoint. Contact any NetApp sales engineer, they can point you to one of two things, either KB documentation or NetApp has a 'helpline' that you can call and ask for information on How-To's such as this. I agree though, they do not make guides easy to…

It is a tough job as you said. The hardest part is understanding from the top down, what the business requirements are. To get people outside of IT to answer the questions "how much downtime is acceptable for file and apps" and "if there is an outage, how much data loss is…

Sorry for jumping on an old review, but I'm curious... have you found storage admins reluctant to adopt vSAN, and perhaps that's been the attraction of evo (there's still a job in it for the "storage guy")? Also, it could be a "merge" strategy to software defined. Rather…

Hi Eric As you said, many variables. "Mileage varies" is the common saying when discussing things like dedup, compression, and even IOPS and throughput. If you are seeing 7:1 in a POC, and that is a copy of your production data, I would expect that in production. From…

Not sure the details, need to know more, but if this is all file data only (unstructured), DataGravity could be a fit potentially. They do inline indexing and content scanning. Full disclosure: I worked there, but users that implemented in SMB markets saw positive results…

Good to know about Nutanix, thanks. Re: Maxta, looks the same as Springpath, both very new and overall a new concept (SD-hyperconvergence?), could be great but definitely need a POC to prove out, would you agree? VNX overhead isn't much better than FAS, RAIDDP is a…

I'd say it depends on what the rest of the environment looks like and what expertise you have in-house. If you have NetApp already for your server or NAS needs, AFF is "relatively" simple add-on. If you don't have NetApp it might be a bit difficult to learn just for VDI…

Fair review SysAdmin935, I feel like VMware has made slower/no progress on DRS as they are spending time and focus on NSX or vCloud Air. My gut tells me because it looks like 3rd parties are taking on the responsibilities that DRS provides, like VMTurbo or having similar…

Hi Mark, great write up. I was a reseller of netapp for almost 5 years and almost always led with fas because I knew if would serve my clients well. Regarding your second item that you'd like to see from the line, detaching drives from controllers... I think this is…