My company evaluated Hitachi, but it was like choosing between the devil and the deep blue sea. The company chose the sea, which was HPE OneView.

The interface of Hitachi was very complicated, while the graphical interface of HPE OneView, including its backup features, was easy. Anybody could understand the HPE technology because it was easy. 

HPE OneView was also easy to deploy, while Hitachi had a complicated deployment process, apart from its challenging interface. Though Hitachi had more features than HPE OneView, my company didn't need all the features, and HPE OneView could meet the company's requirements.

I believe the Dell MX7000 is a better solution than OneView because it has the option to divide app administration that OneView does not have.

We used Virtual Connect Manager before OneView. We evaluated Cisco UCS before that. There were some things we liked about that. We've been an HPE shop for eight or more years. It was a very easy transition to move over to that, rather than having to rip and replace all our hardware and all of those things.

When selecting a vendor, a lot of it is finding out if they are going to solve a problem for us. That's our biggest thing. So typically, if we're looking for a vendor, we're looking for a solution that's going to solve a specific problem for us. Then you need to find out about the reputation of the company. Is it a start-up? Is it someone that's been around for a while? Do we have an existing relationship with them?

We usually look to work with our existing vendors or partners before we go outside of that, unless they can't meet our needs.

OneView looked to solve that. We looked at Cisco UCS and we looked at HPE's OneView. We didn't really look at anything else outside of that.

We chose HPE, and the biggest reason was that it was a very easy transition. We did the evaluation over a year ago. The engineering team determined that UCS was the superior solution for us. But there were a lot of things that it offered that we did not need, nor were we ever planning to need. Do we have to rip and replace an entire infrastructure, retrain staff, new support models, and everything across the board?

When OneView came out, we determined that the gap was no longer an extreme gap, but rather, a small gap. Virtual Connect Manager didn't meet everything that we wanted when we compared it to UCS, but OneView was in the 90% range. So the gap was 10% and that 10% was stuff we weren't really planning to do anyway. It wasn't going to require retraining. It was just changing the way that we ran the solutions.

We were contracted with the solution so did not evaluate other products. 

We didn't consider alternative solutions. We are strictly HP.

When I'm looking for a vendor of management tools, specifically management tools as opposed to just looking for a vendor - when I'm looking for a management tool vendor, I want to use the software or hardware manufacturer first, because they usually do the best job and have the best insight into how their equipment works.

I didn't actually look for alternatives. I've been pretty happy with HPE and their solutions for a long time. But our prior leadership was looking at Cisco UCS, Dell, and Nutanix.

We have been an HPE shop for a very long time and we've been very satisfied with their solutions. So we didn't really have a problem we needed solving with HPE. Prior leadership wanted to look at other vendors, just for the sake of competition. You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. But, if you have the best upgrade solution, why would you look at an alternative?

We decided to use HPE instead of some similar solution because our company has HPE infrastructure. So, that's why we prefer to use HPE OneView.

Choosing a vendor really starts with R&D, i.e., an organization that puts a lot of their money back in investing into new products and trying to make sure that the research is funded and moving forward is pretty important to us. Of course, that speaks to their brand. Outside of that, certainly support and then, really at the end, after all of those features cost is going to be the next factor that we look at. As long as they're competitive in the market and I am not looking for the least cost option, but definitely, having that runway to know that the roadmap is going to continue where we want to go and it's not just going to get dropped off/acquired. These are the factors that sum up as to how we look at a vendor when we're going to buy something.

A long time ago, we put HPE in the blade environment against other vendors: Dell, Cisco, and IBM. Cisco had just brought out their new blade at the time. By far, HPE was easier to use and simple as far as adding memory. We can boot from SAN. It seemed like a very good product all around for doing everything that we wanted it to do.

We did not look at other vendors.

When looking at vendors, I look at ease-of-use. Cost is always an important factor, as well as how it integrates with our environment and meets our regulatory requirements.

We spoke to several different vendors, including Dell and Hitachi. It came down to the whole idea of the partnership that we'd built up with HPE over the last 15 or 20 years.

It was a management decision. They prefer only HPE Synergy. We didn't evaluate any other solution. We are using it in a lot of data centers. We are using something else only in a couple of data centers.

I would say the only competitor is probably Cisco solution. Their competitive or comparable product, in the OneView space, is kind of the manager of managers, is UCS Central. It has been out for some time. I feel, in some ways, OneView's doing a little catch-up to them. That's just my opinion, as I've used that in the past. 

My company is a very HPE heavy company. They have been way before I came to work here. I think in many respects, you kind of go with what you know and what you are comfortable with. That's what they've always been used to, so they have a good relationship and they've continued on that path.

We didn't evaluate other options for this space. OneView is kind of the direction given by HPE, and we were using HPE servers. We didn't really have any necessity to look at other vendors.

We were also looking at EMC but for what they want money, finance, and everything else for it, is probably about 45% more than what I paid for the same system through 3PAR, and the 3PAR can do more than EMC solution could do. It's not hard for me to use file persona. It was just get the licenses, set it up, and run.

No. We are strictly HPE products.

We actually looked at UCS and HP. We were looking for a converged environment, but we really didn't want just a canned approach to that.We had some limitations from our networking side on what gear they would allow us to use. We're a Cisco shop for networking. And, so most of the HP converge systems come with their own network and everything. We couldn't use the network.

So, we really worked with HP and they worked with us, and we actually came up with a custom converged environment where we used Cisco for the networking. But then, it's a great powerful storage and everything else is what they had.

We built a new data center. We needed something that was going to be a little more progressive than just racking a server, racking a server, building an application. We needed the capability to do site-to-site replication on not just virtual machines, but physical hardware. That's why we looked at the two systems.

To be honest with you, OneView was the deciding factor on going with HP, opposed to the other vendor, because with the other vendor, like I was saying, you had to go to the origin. This is mine. And we want something that we can just do everything in one pane and be done.

First and foremost when selecting a product, its got to fit within our environment. So, it can't be something that's kind of left out there that's just way off of what we do with standards and things like that.

We've been an HP shop for a long time. We've been in an enclosure shop for a long time. So, familiarity was another piece. Trying to teach your team, or have your team try to learn new equipment or new technologies that are not in line with what they're already doing can be a very large undertaking. I think familiarity and just a fit within our environment are a couple of the keys that we really look at.

So, I'm an X86 person. We also have an AIX environment, as well,along with Linux. They are obviously on power, so IBM for the AIX stuff. On X86, we're all HP hardware.

Obviously, we use Cisco, we use Brocade, Citrix, Microsoft. Those are our short list of vendors that we deal with a lot.

There wasn't really and option for alternative solutions as we're an HP partner.

When considering vendors it is important that they have support for their products. If you buy one solution, you want to be able to manage that and maybe other solutions so they're starting to pull in the rack mount servers for OneView as well, so that will become a nice ecosystem. You can deal with storage networking and other various servers with the same interface.

HPE was a big one on our short list. We also have reseller relationships with Dell, Nutanics, and Pure Storage. We represent about 50 different vendors. We chose HPE, because we feel like they have the most complete kind of eco-system level vision.

I think in general, we looked for responsiveness, and the ability to get to the people you need to get to when you have an issue or a problem. Obviously product quality, I think is going to be another huge consideration. Then for me, reselling this, a lot of the management products are going to be a big key.

We evaluated HPE, just because they're prevalent in our environment. From the hardware perspective, we looked at SHI, on the networking side we evaluated Cisco and on the virtualization side, we evaluated Veeam, Microsoft, and Red Hat.

The reason why we decided to choose HPE is because, from a server-hardware vendor, their R&D budget is the largest and they invest the most than any other vendor, that's out there right now. So, that was the primary reason. They appear to be more cutting-edge than anybody else in terms of both the hardware and the software right now.

No.

There were no other vendors on our list besides HPE.

There are no other real products out there at the moment which do the same thing as OneView. 

We did not evaluate any other options.

We have tested HDS, CMC, and Nimble.

We looked at other solutions namely IBM, Dell, and Cisco. It was a business relationship for choosing HPE, as well as their price-point, was strong. At the time, the Gartner reports indicated HPE was the leading vendor from a server/hardware perspective, so that is why we selected this solution.

We were still using the HPE equipment before the ConvergedSystem.

The stability and support are important factors while selecting a vendor.

In my pre-sales role, I see other customers looking at competitive solutions, be it Intel, EMC, or Nutanix. They all have some strengths.

The Nutanix solution is cool, because it's simple. But it's software and I'm not convinced about any of the hardware underneath it. Some people say, "Yeah, the hardware's not important." However, I have some real-life scenarios, cases with customers, in which it was proven that they had the software, they had the hardware, but they had a hardware issue and the software screwed up.

I prefer to go for the HPE solution. This is not because Nutanix is bad, but they are just a software company, independent of the hardware. I feel more confident with HPE because I know they build the hardware and the software. If I have a problem, I can contact one person with one phone number and I can make contact. I know the hardware guy and I know the software guy.

With Nutanix, for instance, this is not the case. They also say, “we have one phone number," but if they have a problem with the rate controller in their server, they have to call Dell or Lenovo. They have to escalate the case. They are not going to be able to solve my problem. They are going to escalate it. I'm with HPE. I know that HPE will solve my problem directly.

We did look at other vendors namely Dell, since we had other Dell dashboards.

The reason we chose HPE was to have two different vendors for security considerations. We wanted to have separate vendors within the security space. We want a good mix from different vendors with different architecture.

No. We are a big HPE site. We use HPE SA and HPE OO for OS provisioning.

We have partnered up with HPE. We are historical partners, so HPE proposed to us to integrate OneView because they knew that we sell a monitoring solution. We were told that we would get a good integration with our monitoring system.

HP came in with Pricon and showed us the OneView demonstration and we thought that was a really cool product. What really sold me on it was auto support. That was what I wanted, auto support.

We needed a technology partner that could help us move forward with our company. Help us with product decisions. I think HP and Pricon have been doing good on that.

We checked with IBM a little bit. We went back to HPE because most of our infrastructure is HPE service and also cloud solution

We looked at CISCO's DCS platform, but we're an HPE shop and there was no major direction to change.

The hardware's reliability and manageability are important criteria while selecting a vendor.

We evaluated all of them. We had many recommendations from many companies. We just thought that we made the best decision with HP, the Synergy and the OneView.

They give great service, and it's a great product, at a good price. Those would be the big three.

I think we only looked at OneView. We knew what we wanted to do.

The most important criteria to me when choosing a vendor and a product are customer references, how have other people have found it. Price is always an important one as well.

We looked at VMware Operations Manager, Dell Management, System Center Configuration Manager, and others.

We were not really looking at other vendors, because OneView is for HPE products. You couldn't use another product. We want OneView because we want to automate things and to manage our systems easier.