Reply to post: as a former dell customer

as a former dell customer

(Sonicwall customer, not sure if that division is spun out from Dell or not yet), I have no wish list for Dell or EMC myself. I do like Sonicwall though it has worked well for me over the past 5 years. Our usage of it is mainly for site to site VPN but it's been very reliable, fast, very easy to manage, and trouble free for the most part. Their SSL VPN solution wasn't flexible enough to do what I needed it to do, so never got to deploy that.

My wishlist is fulfilled by HP. (Servers+storage+FC storage networking anyway(HP also provides us with front line vmware support), I haven't bought into any of the converged stuff yet, maybe will get blades some day, I had a fully populated Dell blade chassis 6 years ago at another company for vmware (free ESXi only the cheap bastards), it worked ok, though the lack of integration with the management between the chassis and the iDRACs on the blades was very surprising. I'm sure Dell has improved on it since then.

As someone else mentioned I do hope Vmware gets their quality back up again, while the problem hasn't impacted any of the systems I run(still run vsphere ent+ 5.5 and vcenter on windows, deploying a new vcenter soon going with windows again there too, even though I am a linux guy). At some point I may upgrade to newer things from vmware and it would be nice to continue the track record I have had with them with good success across ESX/ESXi, vmware workstation(on linux), and before that VMware server, and GSX before it was renamed to vmware server.

Maybe will be an EMC Isilon customer soon too (one of their smallest boxes, need something highly available and high level of support for maybe 2-4TB of critical data, and HP doesn't have a good enough NAS in that space), been using ZFS to-date(a couple different solutions) and it does the job but is a very hacky solution. Basically set it up and don't touch it afterwards. Tried HP StoreEasy which is HP's answer in this space but it sucked really really badly, even had the failure of a single volume (due to internal file system problem with dedupe on the windows storage server) take out the entire cluster instead of just taking down one volume. Turned off clustering after that.

I don't use HP for ethernet networking either (Extreme networks is my switching company of choice), though if I do go the HP blade route at some point I'm sure there will be some HP networking in the chassis.