We are working with the customers in government and defense, where HPE already has a foothold. The requirements come from the customer, and they use HPE, so we do, too. We have to consider the customer's stability and comfort level. 

We worked with Dell and IBM, but we chose HPE.

We have used IBM and Compaq back in the day.

For us, an important factor while selecting a vendor is that the actual company backing the product. We know that we're a company that has been around a long time in the industry.

In addition to HPE server products, we also evaluated Dell EMC and found the two to be equally stable, although the former does not have a strong presence in Qatar. This said, we evaluated Dell EMC VxRail and Cisco HyperFlex for their virtualization player or hyper-converged player capabilities, but did not consider HP for these features.

Due to Dell EMC's strong presence in Qatar, I would recommend use of this product over that of HPE. This does not owe itself to any technical issues, only that Dell EMC has a stronger presence. Of course, the level of support is an important feature for the end-user.

IBM fell off our short list of vendors because they just gave up the business.

Dell didn’t have the same level of stability, maintainability, and range of products that we have with the ProLiant series.

We also looked at Dell EMC and IBM. The most important criteria when selecting a vendor, apart from costs, is service. Service will ensure stability. 

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor are the costs and then, the other long-term factors such as reliability and quality.

We do actually evaluate solutions every year. We still buy other servers but not as many as we buy from HPE. Still, we do buy some stuff from Dell, just because we're in three regions of the world, but most of our stuff goes through HPE.

We are doing another evaluation cycle right now. We will be evaluating Dell, Super Micro, and UCS.

When choosing a vendor, honestly, it’s the support that I’m looking for. Everyone gets their hardware from the same couple of places in Taiwan or wherever. What really matters is being able to get the hardware delivered on time. We've actually built relationships with the manufacturers and vendors for support. If we can't get things replaced in a timely fashion, then we have to get our heads around it and say, "I know we're a five grade data center, but we may be down for another 12 hours, or whatever, because we can't get the part in". They chose HPE before I got to the company. We've continued to work with HPE because we've had a good relationship with them. Maybe 80% of our servers, our server hardware, our storage hardware, and switches, etc. are HPE.

I don't know why they chose HP in the end. I think it's just experience and it was the right company at the time.

We look for experience, stability and the ability to support our customers' requirements from a security perspective. Also the availability of documentation. Documentation that can be supported by even new staff members that have never touched the system.

Mostly we look at reliability, maintenance and support. Those are the big ones to consider when choosing a vendor. Since we have a relationship with HP, that's it regarding any alternative vendors.

So the two biggest competitors are primarily, obviously Dell and HP. If I had to compare the two - I was at the Dell conference not too long ago just for investigation purposes - I would say that HP, in the long run, from my experience as I've worked with companies that have both, HP is just more stable, in the long term.

Like I said before, you want to avoid hardware fails, right? That's just a part of IT, but how the customer is being handled is important in terms of if we have a bad blade or we have a bad motherboard, because every now and then we get a blade that's just bad out of the box, right? The fact that the customer or the vendor, whoever that is, if they come out and do the right thing, just swap the part out with very little hassle, that's all right.

I don't have to go through a purchasing program where I have to do a repurchase or return process, and that's really helpful in terms of just doing the right thing, getting the parts swapped out, reducing our downtime, and that's our biggest paying point with the customer. Because we have customers too that scream when our stuff goes down, right?

We haven't looked at competitors in a very long time for those. We basically have stuck with HPE. It's a known name, so I don't want to give my customers something that might work, I want something that will work.

We've looked at moving away from HPE in the past, and we were lured away. But HPE, for the requirements of our customers, for our own requirements, especially security, was key.

I think security is one of the first things we look at, and HPE has that covered.

We evaluated Dell. We chose to stay with HPE but we almost switched to Dell.

Before choosing this product, I also evaluated Dell and IBM rack servers.

We've got two vendors that have comparable products. We have essentially the same as the ProLiant with our alternative vendor. They have the same processor, the same type of memory, and the same memory speed. In terms of performance, we wouldn't really see that there's much difference between the two. The main differentiator is the manageability and getting it to and onto the floor.

Dell was the primary competitor. We do have some plants that have Dell systems, but we probably are 90 - 95% HP, as far as company-wide. We've just been happy with the product, and there's not been a business reason to switch.

We looked at Dell versus HP. Proliant versus the R-series on the Dell side. When you look at product to product, servers are fairly closely matched. The supportability, or the management of the HP, versus bringing in Dell into my shop was a cost, from an educational perspective for my staff. Understanding the product inside and out was more important than bringing in a new partner.

We also looked at Dell and Lenovo. We always look at multiple vendors to compare pricing, which, for the public sector, is extremely important. With HP, the prices weren’t too different from other vendors, but for us it was the right choice when considering the total cost.

We evaluated some other options. While we were purchasing a lot of HPE hardware we did consider other vendors but it isn’t always easy when you have invested in HPE tools to manage your server hardware. We have considered DELL and Lenovo.

We are willing to look at anything. Just now, we do have some Dell and some Cisco kit. We tend to go with major suppliers, rather than any bespoke vendors. We certainly don't have any of the kind of model hyper-converged kit, like SimpliVity, or Nutanix. So across the board, it's either HPE or Dell. We went with HPE because their technical support is of a higher grade. You would get more reliability and better support through HPE.

I've used them for over 15 years now and all data-server solutions and there have been issues, but they have always been solved quickly. Dealing with HPE as a company is always nice to do.

No, we were just looking at HPE.

We select a vendor based on their statistics. We check if they work with other companies or other industries similar to ours. We see if they work with applications that we use, as well as the price. 

Right now, we have HPE from the service perspective. We do have HPE on our shortlist. We currently have IBM as well. 

We are looking into other service management companies. We have HPE at the moment, but we are looking at other service management options.

We also considered Dell rack servers, Lenovo, and Fujitsu. In the end, we chose HPE because of price.

We've looked at a lot of IBM systems as well as Lenovo and Dell. We also looked at converged systems like Nutanix.

We looked at Dell, Lenovo, and IBM.

Oracle Sun Servers and IBM. Based on past experiences (we’ve used both, and were previously a mixed environment), they weren’t quite as stable as HP.

For the blade offerings, most of the competitors have similar capabilities. However, they probably have evolved them only within the last five years, whereas I would say HPE has a much longer runway into that. They have a much more established, esteemed platform there. The C class of BladeSystems is something that's there for years now. I think we have the second procurement of those. At the end of its lifetime, we're running it for 10 years, whereas others have changed their blade strategies two or three times. I think that's the worst thing you can do, if you have to change it on there.

The C7000 and C3000 have been around for 10 years, maybe 15 years, already. Everything that came afterwards, such as Synergy or the Superdome X, they all build on top of that. The C9000 and whatever they call the Synergy enclosure, it really takes the best from the established path and then just adds the latest technology to that.

If you have that knowledge and ability, and you can leverage that, you have a big advantage over all the others who come to the market with a new solution and try to find customers.

I think we looked around, but really it was Dell servers or HPs were about all that we had considered. Since we weren't going to buy Dell anymore, we said, "Well, we want to go with HP." We were never going to be one of those, "I'm going to go buy parts and make something." And, I know some guys do that and it's great, but we like to have at least the ability to go call somebody to get somebody to come and help. That's been probably chief on why we did that.

Before choosing HPE, we looked at Dell. Between Dell and HPE, I think you get a lot of similar bells and whistles but I think in the end HPE is the king.

We have some IBM machines, but we're mostly an HPE shop. I believe the only reason we bought the IBM was because at the time, HPE didn't have the feature we needed.

We were considering Dell and some other vendors.

I left my position as a system engineer at HPE into this company, and I knew the ProLiants inside and out. That was the selling point right there, and we didn't look at anything else.

They give us the storage requirements and then we coordinate with the teams to do it. As far as competition, I don't get involved.

At this price range we've bought Dell and we've bought IBM. We wouldn't go back to either of them. We would, however, go back to HP with no problem. If someone really wants a cheap server, they should go with Fujitsu because it's good value for money. But you can't compare their build quality to HP. HP build quality is much better.

Dell servers are very nice although sales service is diabolical. IBM -- just didn't like the build. Very fiddly, not easy to put together, wasn't intuitive. HP servers -- you get the parts and it's intuitive. You know exactly what you're doing; it's easy. Also, the IBM servers were very, very noisy. With Fujitsu, it just comes down to price.

It's quite hard comparing other solutions because I've been solely on ProLiant for so long now I don't have too much to compare to. Although, I looked at Fuji Systems a couple of years ago and it's just massively complex for no apparent reason. I don't see a better fit for our company.

Actually, every company that worked with have preferred vendor according to what systems integrators gave to them,  in Thishknet I did the evaluation and select HP again according to performance, usability and price.

We have very specific standards, and only HPE met them.

The most important aspect when selecting a vendor is ease of use. Probably the most important. We evaluated HP, IBM, Lenovo. We have a better relationship with HP.

There is very stiff competition from Dell in recent times. One could go the other way based on the purpose and ROI you are seeking.

We always look at other vendors, Dell, IBM. Right now we are checking into the option to buy storage so we are looking to, of course, 3PAR versus NetApp and EMC.

We always look at other vendors, such as Dell and Supermicro. When looking for a vendor, usually price is important, obviously, as well as the stability of the products.

We're pretty much an HP shop.

When comparing HPE ProLiant DL Servers to other solutions we did not see much of a difference in features. The attractive aspect of the solution was its price. It was less expensive than other OEMs.

They evaluated solutions before I came on board. I believe they looked at Dell. We have a few Dell machines in our environment.

We're strictly HPE at the moment so we haven't looked at anyone else.

We evaluated other vendors and compared them with the same configurations, same amount of memory, same CPUs, and HP servers performed the best.

Yes, we looked at equivalent products from SUN/Oracle and IBM. We chose HP for specific deployments and pricing comparison.

• IBM
• Lenovo
• Dell

We chose HP because they had the right combination of factors and willingness to partner.

We evaluated Dell and Cisco. We liked the cost of this solution. We liked the software, even though you had to buy it separately.

When selecting a vendor, the reliability is the most important factor, followed by cost.

We evaluated Dell and Lenovo.

Dell, IBM, etc. They fell short on the product baseline.

We evaluated few other technologies. We chose HPE because we've had good experience with them. I worked with them in the past and so far, HPE has proven to be reliable.

We looked at HPE and EMC. We chose HPE because they were a more innovative solution for us, as far as operating servers.

When selecting a vendor, I look for onsite engagement and the hands-on invitation for out-of-hours support.

Often our customers consider Dell as an alternative solution because of the price. Customers say that HPE is much more advanced technically, mainly in terms of storage. It also has much more storage compared to Dell.