Our clients evaluate all competitors, such as EMC, Huawei, and Pure Storage. Price is one of the big issues concerning the competition between these brands. Hitachi is the most expensive, followed by Pure Storage and EMC. Huawei is the cheapest.

Hitachi is one of the traditional brands for storage. People had Hitachi at a certain point in time in the past, but they couldn't continue with Hitachi because of the price. Last December, we sold a solution to a customer who didn't buy Hitachi for maybe seven or eight years. We were able to put a good proposal, and they acquired another Hitachi solution.

We are in the process of evaluating the solution at present.

We went through an RFP-type process to select a flash vendor, and we're just in the process of implementing that storage today. It was this same sort of process six years ago when we replaced our existing Dell EMC solution with the Hitachi product. Hitachi had a better offering.

Dell EMC VMAX

Ten years ago we evaluated Hitachi, NetApp, EMC, and IBM high-end storage. Hitachi and NetApp won. 

It was just the EMC Unity with VPLEX, i.e. two Unity VPLEX machines: the VSP 400. We required two machines to support the VSP 400. It was all about money. The bottom line. 

You first need to qualify the technical requirements. Both of them qualified, so it was money related. The bottom line was whether another solution was better, so long as they met all the requirements and they were the cheapest.

If the solution is not compliant with our demands, we can't offer it to the company. Because of that, only two vendors got the chance to offer the solution. It was down to VSP and DELL/EMC Unity didn't meet the requirements.

We evaluated three different solutions, products from EMC, IBM and Hitachi. The vendors provided several configurations including all Flash and hybrid configurations.

I have researched many products in the Enterprise area to find the best suits for my customers. These include high-end products by NetApp(FAS8060), EMC VMAX, the HPE XP P9500, and the HPE XP Series.

For instance, for one of my customers comparing the details of these products and my customer requirements has led to scoring each of the features. Ultimately, I chose the Hitachi VSP series. The second choice was the HPE XP P9500.

This type of comparison is not easy because there are a lot of companies and a lot of brands. However, I just wanted to find the best solution for my customer.

I researched the internet for our customers to find the right solution for them, and I compared products in this category. In this comparison, I included:

• Dell EMC VMAX
• HPE 3PAR F-Class Storage

I started to research details, compare, and score each feature, until coming across the Hitachi VSP Series. The number two option was the HPE XP P6500 Series.

It was challenging, and it took five to six months to persuade our manager.