When we came to the point of looking at upgrading our original VBlock to the new generation we have now, we did look at other options. But due to our experience with the VBlock and how well it fit our needs, we decided to replace the older version with the new version.

We considered hyper-converged solutions and building block solutions, but none were as good a fit as the VBlock-- or possibly a FlexPod, which is a VBlock with a different Storage Solution. But no single source for support and ongoing maintenance upgrade tested the way VCE did.

The FlexPod solution is a general idea with building block solutions. But once it is assembled, you are on your own to maintain the upgrades. If something does not conform, you would have to be on Cisco to work out why your VMware does not like the drivers, etc. The building block solutions like Nutanix and SimpliVity, the EVO solutions, and even other solutions using the VCE offerings like the VXRail and VXRack systems did not fit our large data / disk capacity needs. These solutions may work for smaller sites and offices, but not for our centralized way of running VMs.

Currently we are approaching our 3 year renewal and are challenged with continuing support via VCE / EMC or go 3rd party support for hardware but not have any upgrade / VCE matrix validation updates.  

We looked at other options, but at the time it was the best solution that fit at that time. Ten years ago there were not that many choices, besides building your own.

I was using mainly HP and IBM technologies (over 1000 physical blades), and I’ve also tested Dell blades as well. None of them were simple to use without prior implementation of tools to administrate the solution (OpenManage/HP Insight).

Some of them like Nutanix do not fit our needs and can still be a blackbox. I can’t go into detail, but hyperconverged infrastructure was not a good choice for our deployment specific needs. You can’t scale out computing regarding storage (a Nutanix node is bundled) or simply build bare metal blade for specific use (Oracle RAC for example).

I’ve looked for a long time at white papers and success stories on Nutanix regarding large scale VDI deployment (+40K) and did not find something relevant. With VCE I was able to have everything on a simple vBlock. IaaS as standard, VDI with XtremIO, Linux Oracle on Bare Metal, and the whole solution is fully supported by VCE.

No.

We evaluated NetApp, FlexPod, and IBM Pure Storage

We looked at IBM and HPE.