Alongside NetApp, we were using Dell Storage solutions.

I am familiar with Huawei and HP. It becomes harder and harder sometimes to convince people to spend double when they can get away with less. A lot of people, they go in, and then the second time around, they just get a Huawei, they get something cheaper. They might get an HP and back it up with SIEM, and then they're good.

We found ourselves looking at what we wanted to do with cloud and how we would like to build it, then maintain it, etc. We decided on two competitors: EMC and NetApp. We made the decision to go with NetApp, which has proven itself over many years as the right decision.

On our shortlist, we had HPE 3PAR, EMC, NetApp, an IBM storage solution, and another storage by Dell. We chose NetApp because we saw the innovation. We saw they are making it possible to install new features and get better results from those features.

When it came time to replace, we evaluated EMC, NetApp, IBM again and chose NetApp and have not regretted it. It has been a very good decision.

The evaluation of NPS in our organization included me, my German counterpart and a few others, our DBAs, our VMware guys, the infrastructure team, the datacenter team. Approval for the purchase was all the way up to our CIO. Our particular company purchases, up to that big, have to go up to that high. It was the management chain up to the CIO.