We previously used a different solution but switched to HPE Apollo for its local support.

We knew we had to invest in a new solution as we were looking at designing a system to serve the national research community. We knew what their application needs are, and what their scientific goals will be. So we were imagining what that system would have to deliver to meet those needs. So that's when they told us the kinds of servers we needed in the system. We have the Apollos, we have the L580s, with three terabytes of RAM, we have Superdome integrity with 12 terabytes of RAM, and we have a number of GL360 and other service nodes.

But it was really looking at the users requirements and looking at where high performance computing, high performance data analytics and artificial intelligence are going through about 2019, that that's what caused us to select the kinds of servers that we did, the ratios we did, and the topology we chose to connect them in.

We previously used the DL380s. Compared to those, Apollo has roughly four times the amount of space per server, which means we can really do a lot. We technically could have four DL380s, but the licensing cost would have been significantly more.

So for a long time, we were storing our documents on a traditional NAS, through NetApp, and that got to the point where NetApp couldn't handle PB scale affordably. We're talking about tens of millions of dollars in order to buy a NetApp that could do PB scale on the number of IOPS that we needed. And on top of that, it was cost prohibitive to be able to scale out on traditional NAS, so the Apollo line became the clear choice, I guess. And deciding that we had to go to something like an object storage, that decision was made long before we decided on Apollo. It turns out that Apollo fit our decision to go to object store.

I have used Dell solutions.

We were previously using the older DL 380's with MSA drives. We knew their limitations using the fiber channel in terms of the transfer rates we could get out of it, for example, but we needed something that would work with the move to a 40-gig network environment.

This is the only solution we have used. It was implemented from the beginning.

We actually had a business case. We were looking to address this business case with standard IT storage solutions but they were way too pricey for us. So we figured we needed a way to use a standard service, make the most of these standard services, and came across Apollo Systems. Apollo Systems provide stuff that standard services do not. More HTDs, more compute power, at very reasonable pricing.

We made a transformation from enterprise storage to an open-source distributed storage architecture. We switched because the pricing is better.

We have a strong relationship with HPE. So HPE was proactive in proposing this solution. We had a PoC, as I said, and we were happy with it and decided to implement it. It satisfies all our needs and is the perfect solution.

Standard Proliant servers (DL380s) with internal storage. We also looked at SAN and NAS solutions, as well as VSAN technologies from VMware, HP, and Citrix. None could hit the pricepoint to compete with AWS S3.