This product is quite specialized, so we didn't evaluate other options in this case. It is a very unique proposition by HPE. 

However, we use a lot of products from HPE in general. We have other HPE products. We have DL380 machines, HPE ProLiant DL385s, and models 160 and 360 in our environment.

We have a range of HPE machines.

I have evaluated other solutions and HPE Superdome X is very good compared to the competitors.

We did look at other solutions. However, there are not many vendors in the large shared-memory space, but we did look into the other one or two that were out there. We felt that the HPE's solution offered the best performance of the group.

Selecting a vendor really comes down to:

• Reliability.
• Their place in the marketplace to assure that they will have early access to the products for us.
• The engineering so as to be able to deliver it reliably in very high-quality implementations.
• The price-performance aspect as well.

We always look at different vendors, but we've had very good experiences with HP and their robust, comprehensive offerings. We looked at Dell and IBM, but we're sticking with HP.

Superdome X is a system that can compete in terms of performance and uptime, but it's now standard. That is the great value. There are competitors like IBM, for example, but IBM has a propietary operating system. With Superdome X, you have a system that can run Windows, Red Hat, or VMware which are standard applications and operating systems, but in a mission critical server.

We have other products that looks similar to Superdome, from IBM. IBM Flex Chassis. We chose HPE because of our experience with c7000.

We run a lot of environments for various products, some on OpenStacks, some on VMware, some on Windows, some on CentOS. We were looking for something that could scale and grow as we need it to across different product lines. We looked at traditional BladeCenters, and although this was a bigger investment upfront, over the longer term we felt it would scale and grow with us better.

There's a different architecture behind it from a BladeSystem. It's unique in that regard, that's why we chose it.

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.