archiving data to a private or public cloud. NetApp HCI NetApp Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) or sometimes referred by NetApp as Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, NetApp HCI is based on commodity blade and rack servers, NetApp Element software and VMware vSphere. NetApp HCI includes a web-based GUI with installation wizard called NetApp Deployment Engine (NDE) for configuring vCenter, IP addresses, login and password, and storage nodes. NetApp HCI is different from conventional HCI designs because it has dedicated storage nodes, while other HCI systems like Dell EMC VxRail or vSAN do not have dedicated storage nodes and utilize disk drives installed in each server. Dedicated storage nodes allow the cluster to grow or decrease storage capacity and performance separately from compute nodes. Minimum NetApp HCI configuration requires two compute blade server nodes and additionally, Element software requires a minimum of 4 storage nodes but is available to customers as four physical storage nodes or two physical storage nodes and two nodes as a virtual machine playing witness role on compute nodes. 2U HCI Chassis with four half-width blade servers Each storage node drive set consists of six SSD drives directly connected to a dedicated storage node and installed in front of the blade chassis. Each storage and compute blade nodes have 25 Gigabit Ethernet ports which could be used as 10 Gbit/s ports as well as dedicated 1 Gb ports for management purposes. Network switches were not included, and in NetApp HCI with Element software release 11 NetApp announced H-Series Switch as part of HCI, so all hardware components must be bought from NetApp. ONTAP Select available as SDS on NetApp HCI for customers interested in NAS protocols. The self-service portal allows automating common provisioning and management tasks without involving the IT team. NetApp Kuberneties Service will support NetApp HCI with the acquisition of Stackpoint. NetApp SolidFire storage and NetApp HCI can be expanded and mixed in a single cluster. At the NetApp Insight 2018 conference in Las Vegas NetApp presented two new compute nodes: H410C and H610C, where H610C includes additional GPU cards which can be used in VDI environments. Starting with Element OS version 11, automatically detected and enabled by default with the upgrade, HCI has Protection Domains functionality to provide resiliency into HCI chassis. In the case of maintenance or chassis failure, helix algorithm spans data blocks workload will automatically fail-over to another operational chassis. SolidFire SolidFire storage system