We evaluated various converged and non-converged platforms before making the NetApp converged decision over other top players in the magic quadrant (IBM, Dell/EMC, Infinidat, Pure Storage).  What's missing from all products is the need for better tools to bring capacity, performance, and upgrade planning together for viewing in one pane of glass.

We evaluated HP, IBM, and Dell. We chose NetApp because our partner and the system integrator company strongly recommended to go for NetApp. Because we trust this company and this company was responsible for setting up the entire data center, we decided to follow their advice.

Overall, all of these solutions were very advanced. Technically, I would put NetApp and Dell at the same level of innovation. IBM and HP are more established technologies, but they are not as innovative.

In terms of cost, HP and NetApp were the ones that could make a bigger effort to reduce the cost. IBM and Dell were a little bit more expensive. 

We have not evaluated other solutions but a lot of our sister companies have done Nutanix and some of the other products that are out there. I've heard it's a little more baked, a little easier to use, but it's also not as flexible as you grow. You have to grow in different stacks.

The products that clients are usually evaluating are other hyper-convergent tools because NetApp HCI is a hyper-converged infrastructure. There are other parts of the market like Nutanics, VxRail, and Cisco (HyperFlex). When we help clients do a comparison of other products, NetApp wins because of the leading features. For example, they are the only product on the market that has independent compute and storage capability. No other the product has that.

We considered HPE, Dell EMC, and NetApp.

We looked at Dell EMC, Hitachi, and HPE.

We also evaluated Nutanix. We checked out Cisco HyperFlex. We took a good, in-depth look at a couple of other companies but I think we just ended up sticking with NetApp. We had a small NetApp footprint. Just FAS stuff and we decided to go all-in and go with HCI and the AFF line.

In general, they've always treated us well. They've always been great. I like working with anybody at NetApp. In general, we have a good relationship with both our partners and with NetApp.

Cisco and Nutanix were the other big ones that we looked at. The reason we didn't go with Cisco, to be honest, was that they made it clear they didn't think a company of our size warranted their attention.

NetApp did a briefing for just me. That wasn't the only reason, but any company that is willing to stand behind their technology and can't wait to get it into your facility to show it off, clearly they believe in it. It checked all the boxes for what I needed it to do. It was also a company I have a relationship with, so I know that their gear is going to be here.

We also looked into Nutanix, Cisco, and NetApp. We chose this NetApp because one, we already had a relationship with NetApp and I know the quality of their work. Two, the unit was built from the ground up to work as a single unit. It wasn't things that were developed separately that happened to work together very well, they were actually designed to work as a single unit. Finally, the price point fit to where our budget was.

We started with NetApp and did the PoC with it. Things worked well in our environment.

We looked at Dell EMC ScaleIO, their Ready Node stuff. And I think some of my peers evaluated Hedvig and some other SDS providers. We went for NetApp because of the API functionality that they really built into it. They're all-API first, and then they put everything on a wrapper around their API. Anything that can be done is done via API.

We are resellers and we do have some competitors, but I would not pick them in Brazil. We need to compete with Huawei sometimes, and on the HCI line, we compete with Nutanix also. I prefer NetApp because I trust the lineup.

The vendors on our shortlist were limited to Dell. Really the general organizational trend drove most of our decision.

We evaluated NetApp and a competitor. What I like about NetApp is the storage wasn't defined to a particular node. I can expand the storage to increase across all nodes or I can have a minimal amount. Whereas, the competitor had a certain amount per node, and that was it. There was no expandability.

We evaluated and looked at other options. It depends on the customer, but we looked at something for our customer who had certain requirements for models and formulas regarding the criteria. The customer asked me to look at the most suitable solution for him.

I have been using Nutanix as well. I find that they both have their pros and cons, and we like the interface of NetApp better than that of Nutanix. Nutanix is easier and more straightforward to set up.