Wow,,,just wow....I see you didn't even attempt to address any of the XtremIO weaknesses, best to just ignore those and move on and hopefully they'll get lost in the noise eh ?
I would hope EMC agree that Customers running a POC for an AFA product should really test more than just the all out speed of the box. Yet outside of that rather narrow measurement XtremIO just isn't competitive, it lacks not just enterprise but basic features and putting a VPlex in front to address those challenges is just going to increase your latency, it will also lower your IOps whilst increasing overall complexity and cost.
Now you mentioned FUD, so please if any of the above is then please enlighten us as to which bits are FUD.
Lets not pretend EMC has some kind of exclusivity in the banking and financial services sectors, 3PAR has plenty and already had a few even before HP made the acquisition and yes there are also 7450 AFA's going into those and net new accounts, but that's OK I'm sure HP haven't been keeping you up to date on each deal. Not sure about Pure but I see them everywhere at the moment mainly banging on the door of EMC accounts, but given the noise they're making and EMC's panicked response I'd assume they're having some amount of success.
I had to laugh at your suggestion HP somehow engineer benchmarks in their favor. The irony of this coming from EMC who A. won't publish benchmarks, B. tie their own Customers in so many T&Cs that they can't publish results themselves and C. are brazenly touting a benchmark kit to Customers specifically engineered to make XtremIO look good, sometimes the truth is much stranger than fiction.
Since you brought up the AFA report from Gartner it's probably worth mentioning that EMC are heavily reliant on their position in that MQ on their legacy VNX-F rather than some miracle performed by the release of XtremIO. Have a look at the opinions of that particular MQ on some independent blogs outside the EMC cheer leading crowd and and you'll see it's seen as pretty useless as the market just isn't mature enough yet.
If you really want to compare then you should, be looking at the Critical Capabilities Report not the Magic Quadrant but then that would expose all those XtremIO shortcomings all over again wouldn't it ?
"I remember well how HP used to brain-wash us daily" Touche I heard exactly the same from an ex EMC guy only a few weeks ago. So extreme was his belief that it took him several months to make it out of denial :-)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
