Our original VMware environment was a hodgepodge of rack mounted servers, a FC SAN which used an older EMC SAN, and inexperienced admins piecing it all together. Once this was deemed insufficient and the SAN needed a replacement, the VCE VBlocks came along and it was the best combination of an all-in-one virtual data center in a box with SAN, Network, and Compute that used VMware to drive the whole package.

Previously, we used standalone VMware on separate hosts.

We switched for the consolidation of equipment into a single system that included storage, host, and compute. All of that improved reliability.

We did use a different solution, but it was at the end of its life cycle and policy, which is why we switched.

We switched because we thought it was going to be less troublesome, in the end, for us.

I have experience with several similar solutions by IBM and Dell EMC. VxBlock is the higher-end version of Vblock.

I was working a long time ago with IBM BladeCenter-H and HP-C7000 Solutions, when I discovered the Cisco UCS technology. It was fast to provision, easy to deploy, & easy to manage! I was completely seduced by UCS and began to industrialize the implementation!

So I’ve try to find the best solution working with UCS. At first it was FlexPOD with Netapp. But there wasn’t a unique support entry point and I had to go all providers to find a solution on my issue that was a waste of time & money. Finding a fully bundled solution with engineering and unique support was really attractive!

No.

We were looking to move to a strategic and consolidated tech stack and support model, which could support our ambitions of a private cloud.

We were using Aberdeen NAS and combining that with Cisco switches and VMware. We switched as Aberdeen was an expensive way to go, and choosing Vblock was done at a more regional level so it gave us the chance to compare it to the rest, and it's good.

We use to use HPE but the monitoring side of it and the different tools you needed to buy, invest in... This system is much better, including the storage, which is much better as well. And the speed, compared to the different tools HPE was using, we found this is much better.