I didn't pick out XIV personally, but we looked at a bunch of different storage vendors. The technical people really wanted to go with IBM compared to the other vendors, mostly because we had already been familiar with it, but we did several in-house PoCs for other vendors too. The IBM just worked much better with the stuff we had. The GUI was much better. The CLI was better. For us, it was much better.

For our stuff, we looked at 3PAR, NetApp and EMC.

We evaluated Hitachi, NetApps, and EMC, and based on the support levels and the price, we decided it was cheaper to go with IBM.

I am not the direct customer. We can only recommend various solutions to the customer.

No, as we were moving away from our old CX3 Clariion arrays.

EMC VMAX 10K, 3PAR, DS.

We were pretty tied to IBM, so only DS units. Lately, we have been considering the V-series units, as well.