I used 3PAR, sort of, in a test mode, NetApp in a test mode, and the SVC. All three of those we tested in-house. We didn't test the EMC in-house.

The 3PAR was actually OK. In my opinion, it was the best of the other ones that we looked at, but the GUI was a little bit difficult to use. The IBM GUI is much easier to use and the SVC provides a lot of features that just aren't in the 3PAR. You could use anything behind the SVC and the SVC would make it easy.

I found the NetApp fairly cumbersome. We use OpenVMS and that was another problem with the NetApp: trying to use that with VMS.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are reliability; ease of use in managing the storage because we manage it a lot, we have a lot of changes to make; and interoperability with the systems that we have in house, such as OpenVMS.

No, DS8K or SVC has always been the primary solution for this customer. For all my customers, XIV has always been a backend storage.

We switched to XIV as it was marketed as being almost a high-end array.

Working with VMAX. Company changed due to economic reasons. (They still use multi-vendor storages).

DS8000 and ESS. Cost was significantly higher on the DS platform, and the management was much more complex.