What is the best solution for an enterprise-level storage environment?

Hmm, this is tough. You wouldn't have enough granularity to get you close to an optimized solution. Your best bet will be to document at least your top 10 requirements for compute and storage, then use that to identify plausible options to explore. So for compute, for example, what kind of processing do you do, will it be just for office work or server workloads; if server workloads, what type of workloads are they, and so on and so forth. For storage, what will be your needs, file or block, high transaction rate, replication requirements, do you need an object, so many questions.  Sorry, I can't be of more help, however, all I am saying is you need refined requirements.

Ben, what you are talking about are advanced selling skills. A bit much to provide you an answer, so I will paraphrase as best I can. You need to understand in-depth, several aspects of the customer's problems you are attempting to solve from their perspective: 1. How are they solving those problems now? Make no mistake, they are solving them in some way. It may be with spit, chewing gum, and baling wire, but they're solving them. 2. Where does the current solution fall short and when does it hit the wall? 3. Why are other solutions inadequate, too costly, unsustainable, or all 3? 4. How is your solution a better fit in solving those problems now and in the future? The key is in the questions you ask. Remember none of us buy logically. We always make buying decisions emotionally and justify them with logic. No one buys on price. We reject on price when it does not match the value. Price is an issue when the prospect cannot distinguish between different solutions.  There are always different factors in the buying decision. Your organization's job is to show how other solutions will not achieve what they need or want based on all of their parameters, requirements, considerations, etc., but yours will. You must spend more time talking about the problem you're solving than the solution you're selling. You are driving their self-induced anxiety about their problem and making the devil they know worse than the devil they don't. As to the specific situation you described. Keep in mind that IT pros are very risk-averse. They will over-provision and overbuy to cover themselves. A typical IT philosophy is "it's better to have the resources you may not need than to need the resources you do not have." Remember, it's emotional. No one wants to be caught with their pants down. By over-buying, they give themselves headroom for the unexpected.  There are methodologies to deal with this. Several vendors have implemented cloud-like on-demand elasticity and pricing where the customer can automatically utilize more resources that are on their premises and only pay for what they use. Dell, HPE, Pure Storage, Infinidat, NetApp all have programs like this today. And more vendors are following. This is one of the driving forces behind public clouds. Sorry for being so long-winded here. This is a complicated discussion that takes more than a short answer. Good luck.

I would recommend IBM solutions, these are the most scalable in the market. I personally have installed, configured and migrated to IBM V7000 Unified (2000M of files) in the past. These products are discontinued, but the Elastic Storage solutions are much more powerful. Anything based on Spectrum Scale/GPFS is much more scalable than anything else (I've installed and migrated 5000M or so of files to these products too). And these can be purchased software-only.