• Pure Storage
• EMC XtremIO

We went with NetApp because price per performance was better.

At the time, 7-8 years ago, we were looking at flash, because we have a need to reduce performance lag. There were many solutions back then, such as Violin and all the vendors that provide flash storage, IBM, TMS, Nimbus, and so on. We were evaluating a lot of companies at the time. At the same time, NetApp purchased the company that was running the EF Series. We evaluated everything that we had at the same time. We came up with the solution to continue with NetApp because of the support and the relationship that we had with NetApp, rather than invest our time to go with another company that we don't necessarily know what they're doing.

For example, Nimbus; we don’t know what they're doing. They’re just a startup. We didn’t know if they were going to stay in business or not. Violin might also be gone, and then all of the time you invest working with that company, is also gone.

We use the enterprise support model, where we can rely on almost like a partner. We know that NetApp is a stable company that we can rely on.

In general, when I look for a vendor, the important criteria that I basically look for are the roadmap of the products, support and the customer base. When you have a lot of people that trust the company, you know that you are choosing the right solution.

We looked at NetApp flash vs IBM. We compared EMC vs NetApp Flash. There were a few other smaller vendors.

We eventually went with NetApp because we had a previous great relationship with them.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are stability, direction, and service/support; great support. Those are the big ones for me.

If we compare this storage solution with Concurrent, the price is the same, but the performance is much better.

The pricing is comparable with other competitors and similar in mid-range solutions, and for high range solutions, it would depend on our requirements or needs.

I think it came down to Nexsan and Net App. 

We also considered all-flash solutions that offered storage efficiency features, but EF seemed to fit our needs; plus the price was really good.

In some cases, we do consider Oracle ZFS.

Oracle ZFS is one of the vendors that's in our market arena because they don't have a maintenance policy. They have a contract internally that allows when they submit their cost estimates or their notes there is no maintenance because they have another contract vehicle that takes your maintenance. If NetApp had a similar contract vehicle to allow the maintenance to be excluded, that would significantly increase their business because their maintenance cost is killing them, or the major complaint I hear from my customers is their maintenance cost is insane.

So, in one instance we will go with NetApp. In the other instance, we will go with ZFS, because it is cheaper.

There weren’t any other vendors on our shortlist. We pretty much turned to NetApp very quickly, once it was clear that they had a product that we could afford and would meet the need.

When I choose a vendor, support is a huge consideration. I want to have a stable product that, when there are issues, they are prepared to take care of them; they understand what they are doing; they understand our needs. Affordability is also very important for us too. We found all of those things in NetApp. The pricing was reasonable. I have no complaints there. It could always be cheaper, of course.

We looked at EMC and IBM, but we chose EF because of the need to take snapshots and to save it to another system.

At first, we thought we could expand the 7-Mode FAS for our client, but the workload was not matching to the system, so we chose the EF.

I actually wasn't involved in that process, so I don't know the answer to that.

Before choosing this product, we did not really evaluate other options. They’ve looked at IBM and EMC. They've looked at that for some servers but most of the time, everything we stick to is with NetApp. We don't go all over; we stick strictly with NetApp.

We considered all flash solutions that offered storage efficiency features.

We had two other vendors on our short list. One was a rebranded RAID inc. solution. I don't remember what the other brand was, but there was one other that is fairly new in the market.

We chose NetApp because most of our environment is NetApp. The unified management helps a lot. We've had really good results with everything that we've had with NetApp, therefore it works out.