Performance would be a good return on investment indicator — the performance of the array. High availability features are a good indicator of the ROI. Those are probably the top two, the performance and availability.

We just had a customer that ripped out a whole cabinet of spinning disks and they're down now to one shelf of 24 flash disks and three shelves of spinning disk to replace all that. We're talking about a huge return on power, cooling, rack space, and cost of maintenance, because they do charge by the shelf for their maintenance. Now they've got four shelves as opposed to 18 or 19 that they had before. That maintenance cost goes down quite a bit because of that and that's all because of the SSD drives now, being able to add those in.

About four or five years ago, they finally brought on the what we call the hybrid and full SSD to existing customers. Initially, it started off that only new systems could be all-flash, and now we're going back and we're seeing a lot of our customers who add the flash in and revitalize their whole storage system, completely.

Our support costs are less.

To be honest with you, as a financial institution, I don't think we spend a lot of time thinking about ROI. We are so large, and our scale is so huge, that the economics that we're able to get out of Dell EMC when we go to the table, are quite remarkable.

For us, once you put a five-year depreciation cycle on top of that, we really don't have an ROI issue. What we're really about is ease of management, about automation, about understanding performance impacts, and that densification piece which really helps to pay the bill. 

The one thing I can say, from an ROI perspective, is that the overall densification increase that we've seen, because of how flash seems to be operating with some of these application profiles, has definitely lead to a much better ROI. But it's not something we spend a lot of time thinking about.

The value that we've seen is a reduction in costs: virtualization versus physical servers.

I think our ROI has been good. We used Compellent for seven years and it worked great. We didn't have any major downtime or major performance issue. We're already three years into the SC Series, so I hope I can use it for four more years. That would be a good ROI.

It is one of the most cost effective systems for us. We have been able to run it longer than most, getting the most benefit and money out of it.

We've been able to take them and run them completely to end-of-life. For us, storage side, that's about five years. We consider that the best turnover rate for us, while for server hardware it's three years. With support contracts, they've all made it to the end of those time frames.

The ROI is good.