I've compared NetApp OnCommand Insight with several tools. One is a tool for heterogeneous storage monitoring, and I've also compared it with EMC ViPR SRM and RxScan. I've also evaluated IBM tools, but NetApp OnCommand Insight is the best.

EMC ViPR SRM has lots of issues in terms of the uptime, and device discovery, and its operational issues are quite high. In the petabytes of storage being managed by my company, there are thousands of ViPR SRM backend servers for the collector servers, and I can only discuss ten to fifteen devices among the collector servers, yet my environment has thousands of devices because it also has discovered servers, and there are around 25,000 to 30,000 devices which I need to discover, so I require thousands of servers as collectors to monitor if the server is up or down, which server isn't reporting, and when was the last report.

EMC ViPR SRM also has performance issues and its reporting is very scattered. My company has multiple front-end servers and there's the need to integrate reports onto another server if you want to try to run certain reports. Because of performance issues, even executive level reporting isn't being sent. There are a number of issues with EMC ViPR SRM that you won't experience when you use NetApp OnCommand Insight.

The last dozen years, nobody's been on our storage list. It used to be Digital Equipment Corporation, but that was so long ago.

We didn't know that there was anything else out there. Balance was their predecessor. We used the heck out of Balance. Balance was free but it became an unsupported product. OCI we bought, but we couldn't, like I said, at the beginning, get OCI working. So we were relying a lot on Balance. One day they pulled the rug out from under Balance and said, "We're done." That's when we really started looking at OCI hot and heavy.

The option there was HPE OneView. We were looking at it but I think NetApp came out much more detailed.

We were looking at - I believe it's now Brocade - but it was Riverbed that had a solution, and that had some dynamic performance monitoring. But I think OCI probably just made sense because we're using NetApp and vSphere most heavily, and it seemed to tie into it the best, of everything that we looked at.

I would not have been privy to that. When those decisions were made, it was before I started.

I was not involved in the evaluation process. However, one is the compatibility matrix: the larger, the best.

We have evaluated other organizations, like Hitachi and Dell EMC.

I administrate IBM, Dell EMC, and NetApp, and I prefer NetApp.