We looked at Kaminario as a storage vendor. We also looked at NetApp as well.

The reason why we didn't go with them was due to the price and the features that they had at the time. The feature set that the SC series had was better than the others.

We have looked at different solutions over the years. We represent quite a few: EqualLogic, the SC Series, NetApp, and, now that HPE has Nimble, we sell Nimble. About the only ones we don't sell are Pure and Tintri.

We looked at a lot of others, back in the day, that are gone now. Going with the EqualLogic and the SC Series was a wise choice because they're still here, seven or eight years later and people are still buying them and people are still upgrading.

We don't want Dell EMC to be a monopoly, as our only product. So we do have a competition, which helps with price negotiation. We have NetApp products as well, that's the main competitor. Technology-wise, we compare a few workloads there, a few workloads here. Doing so also helps us avoid any major downtime, any major outages.

We'll attend trade shows, and Dell EMC will also call us to give us a technical briefing. At that time they explain the differences between the old and new products. Then, we'll look at the budget we have and the anticipated production with that solution, and go from there.

We have an internal process. We have to go through all the vendors and weigh metrics we have defined. From there, we have to explain to our internal architecture team what the differences are between the competing products. They will then approve or reject at that point.

NetApp and Nimble were on our shortlist.

We're a multi-vendor shop. We do that on purpose to make sure that each vendor gives us their best. HPE was on the shortlist as well as some, what I consider to be up-and-comers, like Pure. They had a play but it wasn't a serious play. When it got down to the last two, HPE was the competition.

I don't really have experience across different vendors. 

We were looking at HPE, and we had looked at a product called OSNEXUS. They operate in the same town as us so we thought we could get support from them. We looked at five or six products.

We actually went with two solutions. In India, we are using OSNEXUS, which is located in the Seattle area. We use Dell EMC in our headquarters.

We did do some comparisons between HPE 3PAR as well as Dell Compellent, but we choose Dell, as I mentioned, because of the cost factor.

None.

The pricing for solutions by HP is also competitive.

We are a Dell EMC shop, so we always go with Dell EMC and Vmware as we have never been in a situation where we were unable to find a Dell product that suited our requirements perfectly. 

We looked at several vendors. I work in public education so we have to consider alternate sources for every major purchase. Dell EMC gave us the most bang for the buck and we are comfortable working with them as a company.

When we look to work with a vendor, the important criteria are follow-through, ease of communicating with the vendor, and the quality of technical support.

Yes, IBM's and HP's tiering solutions, but there are too expensive and bulky.

We looked at Nimble and NetApp. We went with Dell EMC. We have a good relationship since most of our stuff is on VMware. When Michael Dell bought VMware we said, "Yeah, we should increase our usage," and, of course, we have been using EMC for more than a decade.

Only Dell EMC products were on our shortlist.

We did look at Nutanix, but they did not fit into the way that we are organized. We also looked at NetApps, but quickly dismissed them.

When it comes to upgrading, we are contemplating a move to TISON, TI-1, TI-2 and TI-3. There may be a need to move between the TISON. 

We've used everything from HPE to UCS. We've used a lot of different stacks.