We switched because Epic told us to do so. Epic laid out their roadmap and told us when the Gen9 blades would be going off their roadmap. They do a great job in testing and telling you what you need to implement to make the service run properly, much like Apple does. While this is good, as an IT professional, it drives you crazy because things constantly change.

With our first implementation of Epic, it was 15,000 users. It was a large environment, so by the time we implemented everything, it took two years to reimplement again. Then, we were already two revisions behind. When you looked at the cost, we were pretty much doing what we had just done, then doing it again. 

We talked with BlueAlly and HPE about the cost of a capital purchase. BlueAlly recommended looking at GreenLake to help with our costs and TCO. When we looked at it, the yearly costs for us with GreenLake far outweighed the one-time capital cost.

HPE GreenLake is unique in its own way because you have your cloud applications in an on-premises client infrastructure. Most clients have to go to AWS or Azure, and the hardware required to support such cloud services, so the customer pays very heavily in terms of the total cost of ownership. Customers also doubt data security in the cloud services, and such fear is eliminated if one has HPE GreenLake.

We use Dell products as well, and it is preferred over HP for its professionalism and ease of administration. While HP is straightforward to use, there were instances where unknown configurations required support from HP, and the experience wasn't satisfactory. Dell's support is considered better overall. While there may be differences in latency between HPE and Dell, it does not significantly impact performance or decision-making.

We were using c7000 chassis with VMware.

We were doing the same thing over and over again and it was costing us more money. We would let support contracts lapse and things would not be covered and then, of course, they would break. It would always be a rush. We looked at it and said, "This is a solution where you're always covered by support, there's no way of getting around that, so we can't have someone in management nickel and dime us out of support." We've got 5,000 to 6,000 VMs running and we have developers all over the world - over 1,200 of them who have to access these things 24 hours a day. Without having that support it was always killing us.

This service enabled us to make sure that we have support at all times, no matter what.

It is replacing an existing, legacy SAN and compute stack. The existing stack, Fujitsu, was coming out of support, and we couldn't get parts for it anymore.

Our decision was made through our constant conversations with our HP representatives and IAS (Integrated Archive Systems) working together to make a plan to fit our needs.

As far as a different solution, that would have been to just have a storage system where we'd have to call in HP to come in and add more storage every time we needed it. We didn't want that because we wanted to evolve from that direction.

We are a solution provider, and we bought new storage to provide services to our customers.

Things were getting old, and we had to replace hardware. Back in 2010 and 2011, we bought a ton of hardware worldwide. We were at a big conversion. We would put off refreshes for a while. It all needed to be dealt with. Some of the stuff that we are replacing even now is seven to eight years old. It was bought back then, and we haven't been able to get back to it until now. We knew, sooner or later, some of this stuff was going to start failing and hurting us.

We had heard about GreenLake at conferences and thought it might be an opportunity for us to use more HPE resources. We chose to try it at this particular deployment, versus our normal, self-provisioning of the equipment.