I don't know if we compared anyone else. We have a very heavy blade-centric architecture right now. All of that knowledge and experience rolls right over into Synergy management. Whereas, with another vendor solution, it would not. We would be learning from ground zero. For us, it was more of an easier transition to Synergy than looking at another product.

We looked at a composable system from Dell EMC. That was about the only one that is in the same type of league as Synergy.

Synergy is an established product, which is the main reason that we went with it. At a time, Dell EMC had just released the PowerEdge MX7000. We are a more established HPE partner already. We received a good price and have a lot of support from HPE and the partner. We also bought an HPE Nimble at the same time, as well. The two products went together quite nicely.

We like HPE because of the technology they bring to bear. Other competitors have blade systems, but they don't have graphics enablement. HPE also has a product called RGS, which we use very heavily. That partnership alone is huge. Thus, we have a huge investment in HPE.

I worked with Oracle and Salesforce. Both of those solutions are easy to customize to the needs of each of our organization's structures. They each have some unique needs. Oracle and Salesforce are ready to provide those types of customizations quickly. HPE Synergy does not accommodate these types of customizations.

We vetted out everything under the sun from the UCS side, the Cisco side, the Dell EMC side. They had new chassis coming out, chassis which hadn't been released yet, which they were showing me. 

We really landed on Synergy because it was the most flexible out of all the solutions. We were able to get the power we were looking for in the chassis. Our data center is really built on density. We can run 52 kW in a rack, but with all the other platforms we were limited on the amount of power we could push in there. We liked Synergy because we could put four chassis in, running two 8280 processors, and running 1.5 to 3 terabytes of RAM per blade, making it a super powerful, 42 to 50 kW cabinet. We couldn't do that with any other platform.

We also shortlisted Cisco and Dell. We went with HPE because we are pretty comfortable with it. The price was also competitive enough to beat them.

We looked at Dell EMC, VCE, and HPE. We went with the newest technology, which was composable infrastructure. The others were just hyper-converged infrastructure.

We've been an HPE shop for a long time, so we really didn't have any other vendors. We knew everything was rock-solid. It was an environment that we were comfortable with. All my staff is trained in it and it didn't make any sense for us to really look at any other product.

But honestly, I don't think there's any other product that is at that level today. Most products are probably two to three years behind. I had no problems. I was very comfortable with it.

It was pretty much between Dell EMC and HPE. We are an HPE shop, and the Synergy chassis and the Dell EMC offering were pretty similar, so there was no real reason to change.

We looked at Cisco UCS.

We always looked at HPE. It was really a choice between a blade chassis or Synergy.

We evaluated HPE and Dell EMC.

We have a long standing relationship with HPE, between the technology, pricing, and so on. It was a good fit.

We did not look outside of HPE, as we're exclusively an HPE shop on the compute side. We looked at the available offerings and wanted to make sure that they fit our needs through a proof of concept.

We looked a little bit at Nutanix. We looked at the Cisco UCS chassis too. We went with HPE mostly due to the fact that we're already an HPE shop. We already had OneView. We were pretty happy with the c7000s. They were always solid. Synergy seemed pretty mature. I'm not a huge fan of some of the marketing around it. It works very well for what it does. They try and build it up to be things that it's not, for most people.

We did look at Cisco UCS only because we thought it might be a good time to change things up, but we are really an HPE shop.

HPE and Dell EMC were on our shortlist. We chose HPE Synergy because it was the superior solution.

We have a dual-vendor strategy, so HPE isn't the only vendor that we have. We're running Cisco and HPE, the two major vendors, and I don't think that any of the alternatives outside of those two have anything that can match the scale and ease of use of those two platforms.

We have looked at Dell EMC MX7000 offering. In the interest of time and familiarity, we stuck with HPE. Bring in an entire new set of hardware infrastructure was not a good idea. There would be too many moving pieces, and we wanted to stick with something we knew. We have Gen9s in the c7000s, and we will eventually put them all into OneView. If we bring in Dell EMC, we now have two management platforms operating side-by-side, which is not a good idea.

Top of the list was HPE. I didn't consider any other vendors.

We're also looking at the Dell EMC MX chassis. When we finished our HPE proof of concept, we started the Dell EMC proof of concept. That's what we're doing currently.

We were looking at Nutanix, as well as the HPE Synergy. The Nutanix platform came in a little more expensive than the Synergy. Overall, we are pleased with Synergy.

We didn't look at any other vendors for this solution.

HPE was the only vendor considered.

We did evaluate other vendors but they fell short in value for money. There were vendors that were cheaper, but their solutions weren't that cohesive. And the match-point of all the RFPs was the complete software that is behind the hardware. That was something that really persuaded us to give them top technical points from all the RFPs.

We have looked at other vendors from time to time, but we have been an HPE shop for the last six years.

The architecture was part of our decision to invest in a full venture.

We consider performance and reliability to be the two main factors in choosing a vendor. In Synergy, we saw both of those, performance and reliability, being delivered.

For us, it's all about up-time and a good performance experience for our customers and Synergy helps us do that.

We knew that we needed to invest in this solution, because it was just the next step. We started with DL servers and we moved to the c7000 Blade Infrastructure. Synergy just seems to be the next logical step up. We haven't seen anything else in the market that competes with this kind of product.

When looking for a vendor, we look for support. We want to know that we can call somebody and get support when we need it. We want to know that the parts are available if there is an issue. If there is a configuration problem, we know that HPE will fix it.

I can't say that I had a shortlist because I've only got two vendors that I use: Cisco and HPE.

it was pretty much the top three: HPE, Dell EMC, and Cisco, when we started looking at new compute. 

We decided to maintain our partnership with HPE because it's been around a long time. We know each other really well. We do a lot of business which is not server-related. They came to the table with their pricing models, investment strategies, and the partnership that they wanted to do to make their products fit better for us, which is why we chose to stick with them.

I evaluated a lot of options like Dell, Nutanix, and more before choosing HPE Synergy.

I would go with Synergy. It is better than the Nutanix solution. Nutanix was really hard to implement, and it was very pricey compared to what we get from Synergy.

No. We are an HPE outfit, so everything is HPE.

In Brazil, they have a culture of reusing things, they don't like to dispose of a server every three years or so. I know in Europe and United States, a refresh cycle of three years is absolutely normal and they are ready to scrap their G7, scrap their G8, and get the G9. But in Brazil you can find G5 easily, G5 and G6. They have this culture of extending the lifetime of the product as much as they can or until it breaks.

With Simplivity, I think that we can address that very nicely, because as you can expand, it's the latest technology and you can put so many things in it. You can put storage, it can present every compute node, you can support satellites and expand the chassis. I believe that this will address this behavior that the Brazilians have and they'll say, "Okay, so I can invest in this platform now and believe that seven years from now, it will be the same. I will still be able to put hardware on it, I can still use it." And that will create fidelity from them for HPE.

The only driver, I cannot state this strongly enough, the only driver that I face when with I'm a customer, and I meet Dell or I meet Lenovo there, is money. They like them because they're cheaper.

I have never heard a customer saying HPE has a better product. I have never heard anybody say a Dell server is better than an HPE server; a Lenovo server is better than an HPE server. I always hear them say it's cheaper. This is what compels them to buy Dell, on whichever level, whether it's networking, storage, servers.

We evaluated Huawei, the Chinese company. When we select a vendor, we want one who can support and also deliver in all countries in the world where we do business. We don't want to have a vendor that can only deliver in Germany, for example. HPE can deliver in the USA, in Europe, and in Asia. That's important to us. We define standards in our headquarters. These are standard building blocks. We want to buy those in all of our data centers, all over the world: in Asia, in India, in China, and in the USA. That's important for us.

We did not evaluate other options before settling on HPE Synergy and, besides, this decision was not in my purview to make. 

We really didn't have a shortlist. We are an HPE shop from start to end.

We went with Synergy because it was the best-in-breed and the next generation, from the existing c7000s. We're exclusively an HPE shop, so we didn't really fish around.

It still sort of comes up occasionally against some of the HCI competitors, but it's a totally different approach.

Synergy is chosen based on that mix of being able to do bare metal, multiple types of virtualization and the fluidity of the resource rather than it being all virtualized, then fluidity.

I have not evaluated other vendors. For me, HPE is in my DNA.

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 didn’t look at any competitor’s solutions.

We did evaluate other options before choosing this solution, including Dell PowerEdge M1000e and Cisco UCS.

Cisco. 

We evaluated Dell and Lenovo. We chose HPE because Synergy is innovate in the way that it delivers its services and I think that is very interesting.