Time-to-Value: One of Three Benefits Driving NetApp HCI Conversations and Adoption

In this video, Long View Systems CTO Robin Bell discusses why NetApp HCI is gaining market momentum and how customers are saving thousands of dollars, while gaining business values delivered by an accelerated deployment strategy.

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is by far the largest segment of the storage market, delivering increased operational efficiency overall, while reducing virtual machine sprawl and increasing data center resource utilization, according to IDC.

Because the NetApp turnkey cloud infrastructure eliminates complex management associated with traditional three-tier architectures, you can deploy in minutes instead of days, weeks or months.

“The time-to-value case is vital, because many customers have to borrow money for the upgrade,” says Robin Bell, CTO of Long View Systems. “In one instance, the interest payments were significant, costing tens of thousands of dollars per month. Getting it into production is hugely important because it saves significant capital.”

Productivity and agility are as important as the need for increased enterprise features. Customers expect to see unified, on-premises private clouds and off-premises public clouds. They also presume all this convergence will lower their costs.

Less Infrastructure

“For every dollar spent on a server today, another four dollars is spent managing, operating and cooling that server,” says IDC analyst Eric Sheppard. “Over the past 20 years the relationship between CAPEX and OPEX has reversed. It used to be $1 CAPEX to 50 cents OPEX. Today, only 20% of IT staff time is spent on new things; 80% is spent on keeping the lights on.”

As a result, IT teams seeking greater operational efficiency are shifting investments to new types of infrastructure. Facility costs fall when you reduce provisioning, which shrinks needed floor space within the data center and lowers operating costs.

Sheppard notes that in the last three years enterprise server and enterprise storage sales have remained stagnant while during the same period spending has increased on all-flash storage systems, public cloud, software-defined storage and hyperconverged infrastructure.

The business case for hyperconverged infrastructure supplies three valid motives:

1. Lower CAPEX
2. Lower OPEX
3. Lower risk

There’s also no need to manage physical SANs or entire systems of silos. By removing silos, NetApp HCI reduces the need for over-provisioning. You can scale as needed rather than struggle to predict future needs, and you can focus on the application instead of the infrastructure necessary to support it.

Workload Flexibility

“It isn’t just about the infrastructure,” Bell says. “When you think about cloud volumes, that’s incredibly relevant. A customer can utilize a workload and then move it to wherever they need, regardless of cloud provider. The suite of offerings NetApp has provided is pretty powerful, and that’s what’s compelling to us.”

Long View Systems’ customers that have embraced NetApp HCI run multiple applications, with the predictable performance demanded by enterprise users. They scale computing and storage resources independently, so they use and pay for only what they need.

Integration into the NetApp Data Fabric means they can unleash the full potential of applications with the data services required, across any infrastructure or cloud.

Curious about how NetApp HCI enterprise clouds deliver a public cloud consumption experience to hybrid multiclouds, and do so with simplicity, dynamic scale and operational efficiency?

Then discover more at Long View Systems.