We also looked at StorMagic and VMware vSAN.

HPE StoreVirtual is more affordable. It's cheaper. In small deployments, it's cost-effective. That said, vSAN from VMware is built into the ESX host. Therefore, the vSAN is a little more complex. The difference between StoreVirtual and StorMagic has a dedicated host, however, in VMware, it's integrated into the operating system.

Three of the four solutions we researched were HyperConverged solutions, and there wasn’t the same support and cost as we had from HP. HP was the best for cost savings per performance, year over year. We looked at three other solutions though for our RFP, and we selected HP. We evaluated the cost per user once you scale out.

I run a 100% vSphere environment, and KVM. I actually built my own iSCSI server that was for ESXi and I used it to upgrade all my SANs. I have a SAN, as well - a fibre channel SAN - and when I upgrade that, I've upgraded it three times; it's a rip and replace, and the other one was rip and replace all the drives. I just moved everything to my local iSCSI server, but that was unstable.

We did go through an evaluation process. It was quite a few years ago. There was definitely competitors to StoreVirtual, actually, it was LeftHand at the time, when we made the decision to go with the product. We've stuck with it since and nothing has come up that has challenged that to make us rethink yet. There was definitely Dell, and as it was a number of years ago, I can't think of any other.

It wasn't EMC, but I think it was a NetApp product, because they do iSCSI as well, but again, then that would fall back onto the storage team and we want it to kind of stay away from that.

NetApp.

We started using this before HPE purchased it. It was LeftHand Network before. It was them versus HPE's SAN, so technically HPE was the other vendor. Now HPE owns it. We chose this solution because it was cluster storage, so for us and our size, it was a better product line.

I am currently considering Tintri VAS and Nimble as well as reviewing certain hyper-converged technologies such as SimpliVity and Nutanix.

We looked at a number of products from EMC, Nimble, and Dell, but only the HP VSA could automatically run the VMs from the other SAN in the event of a SAN site failure.

We didn't evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

We're interested in evaluating other solutions such as Red Hat and IBM Spectrum.

I don't want to name competitors because we have had excellent support from various vendors through our journey, but what we've found was that all of our requirements were met by HP. They gave us a good road map for the future and price-point wise, HP gives us more value.

We do 3PAR. That's another HP product that's really nice and solid. That's what we sell more of than even StoreVirtual.

We also considered VMware VSAN because of its integration with the hypervisor/console. We decided to go for the HP solution because of the stability of the product as the OS, LeftHand, is already fairly old and well established, so HP have more experience there.

We compared VMWare VSA to HP StoreVirtual VSA. At that time, the VMWare solution was limited to a single VSA per datacenter, and we use two of the HP VSAs between four hosts, so that was our deciding factor.

I had a guy from EMC call me once and his whole sales pitch was, "Well, we've got the biggest marketshare." And I told him, "That's a load of crap." Our deal is, we can't afford that stuff, and we don't want it. Even if Dell's got them now, we still don't want it. One of the things that we really love about HPE in all phases is the ability to continue maintenance, to continue coverage. Where we got the word from Dell that five years after the day you bought your EquaLogic you're out of luck. We won't sell you anything, we won't sell you parts, we won't sell you ... and we're like, "Okay, we won't buy your stuff." And we haven't. We got real close on 3PARs, we may still do that again, but we went a different direction. But, you know, "Treat us fair and we'll buy." That's what we love about HP, we really have no complaints.

It was a recommendation from the vendor that we said, "This is solid." When we first bought them, we'd actually gone two or three HP events and listened to the whole talk of, "Here's how, what it's put together, here's how it works." So, that's kind of what lead to it, was that we pretty much just said, "Okay, we'll trust you. Let's go with it." And we've been happy.

We use this product for easy redundancy over two locations. No other solution could make this happen as easily. We also resell EMC SAN and the business case of the customer is the most important to fit the best SAN.

Some of the main differences between Cisco and HPE are the single configuration point where you can control the entire system. Both the hardware and the converged infrastructure. Cisco's management interface seems to be a bit better.

We had a few options like Lenovo, Fugitsu. We went with HPE because it had the best price to performance ratio, and service as well. 

It's been a good experience, so far.

We perform an analysis of the customer scenario and needs, and then we suggest a product, but we only sell HPE. The decision is which HPE product they need.

We didn't look at other options.

There were no other solutions looked at.

We also looked at EMC. We chose this product because of the ease of scalability and ease of support.