When comparing NetApp with its competitors, such as Dell, there are notable differences in terms of both advantages and drawbacks. Dell tends to be on the pricier side, while NetApp's pricing is more comparable to industry standards. Additionally, when looking at competitors like ECS, which has been established for a long time, there have been numerous instances of last-minute issues and hotfixes, leading to frequent challenges in dealing with the product.

We're also a Hitachi partner and sell Hitachi products. I'm certified for Hitachi as well. Obviously, I haven't explored other products extensively. But compared to the Hitachi Content Platform, NetApp is even better. 

However, Hitachi Content Platform is costlier than NetApp StorageGRID; the initial cost is still higher. Scalability is similar, but marketing really favors Hitachi Content Platform here. Every customer seems to go for it. From Hitachi's perspective, they market the Content Platform heavily, unlike NetApp with StorageGRID in Pakistan.

We used to use tapes as backups. We have heaps of tapes lying around. Now, we don't need to use tapes. We have our own backup solution and it integrates well with the tool that we use. It is compatible with most of the tools out there, especially the leading tools for backup. StorageGRID is easier to use and has saved us a lot of time, storage place, logistics, moving tapes around and placing them in a third location, shipping tapes to our DR site, etc. It creates our own private cloud.

We also had a local storage solution, which we still have, as a backup (just in case).

We moved to this solution because we wanted a hybrid cloud solution where we owned our data, not having to request it from third-parties.

We were using something else (EMC Atmos), but it got antiquated and we decided to switch. There were a number of factors for switching: 

• The experience wasn't that good on the platform. 
• We had some bad vibes with it. 
• We saw this as an opportunity to integrate a bit more with some of our other NetApp systems. 
• The market was going in a different direction for services.

We had to get out there with a product as well.

We had to go with something bigger because of the amount of projects that we had going on and the increase in storage data.

The previous solution didn't have enough storage space to keep 30 days. Therefore, we had no choice but to go with a different solution.

There was new legislation put in place in North Carolina where we have to keep a certain amount of days of security videos. In the past, it was just a recommendation that we kept 30 days. Then, they legislated it, and it has to be 30 days. We were only keeping about ten days, so we had to get a much larger storage infrastructure with more speed on it to be able to keep up with all videos.