Research Library

NetApp HCI – Product Brief

This document is retired and is no longer being updated. Concise 6-page review of NetApp HCI. Covers highlights, use cases, potential, and strengths/weaknesses. Download the full Product Brief now!

Note: This product is no longer marketed so this document is no longer being updated.

NetApp HCI is a turnkey, compute and storage solution based on software that runs the SolidFire scale-out all-flash arrays. Like other products in this space, the NetApp HCI pools physical storage capacity on each node, providing native iSCSI access for hosts connected to this virtual SAN. It runs on industry-standard Intel x86 server hardware and commodity storage devices, but has a disaggregated architecture that separates storage and compute resources into separate nodes, allowing for a more granular expansion than most other HCI solutions.

SolidFire has developed and marketed a line of enterprise-grade, scale-out, all-flash appliances for several years. The operating system for these SF Series appliances, called the “Element OS”, is the foundation for NetApp HCI. NetApp also offers this software as the eSDS (Enterprise Software-Defined Storage) product that runs on industry standard servers with internal SSDs. Both SolidFire storage nodes and eSDS storage nodes can be connected into a NetApp HCI cluster, providing storage-only expansion.

NetApp HCI clusters contain a minimum of two storage nodes and two compute nodes, but can expand up to 100 nodes in most any combination. Four HCI nodes fit in a single 2U chassis (half-rack x 1U each). Storage nodes (H410S) come in a single configuration with six SSDs, in three capacity points and compute nodes (H410C) support dual CPUs with three core and memory configurations.

The H610S Storage expansion node adds 12 SSDs in three capacity points into a 1U chassis. The H610C supports two GPUs, with 32 CPU cores in a 2U footprint. The H615C Compute expansion node is available with three GPUs, up to 48 CPU cores and additional memory in a 1U chassis.

NetApp HCI Product Brief Includes: 

  • Overview
  • Highlights
  • Usage and Deployment
  • EvaluScale Product Review Methodology
  • Evaluator Group Opinion

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