IT Engineer at a government with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Aug 24, 2022
Our biggest pain point during the buying process was trying to sort through all of the vendor's proposal documentation to determine which solution was best for us.
Every vendor claims their solution is the best and trying to determine which best served our needs was challenging.
Our solution was to create a checklist of the critical features and capabilities that were essential to us as well as a list of desired capabilities.
We then called in each vendor and went through our list of critical and desired features. Any vendors not able to meet all of our critical requirements were eliminated.
We then compared the remaining vendors on the number of desired features they could provide versus the pricing.
This process greatly facilitated the vendor selection process. It goes without saying that factors like vendor reputation, local support, warranty, etc. were considered before even getting to the checklist.
Head of Information Technology at Baker Tilly BVI & Baker Tilly Cayman
Real User
Aug 29, 2022
The biggest pain point for me was a general lack of suggested configurations for certain workloads. For example, if I am doing HCI for Hyper-V or VMware hosts, I would hope that the vendor(s) would have a ballpark configuration that I can build from. Let me drag some sliders around or use a sizing calculator to come up with a baseline configuration that I can start with.
To overcome this, I make sure to work with the vendor to share my needs. I send them a document of my existing configuration/workload, a DPACK, or I just have in-depth conversations with the vendor(s) so that they know my needs.
Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) integrates compute, storage, and networking into a single unified system, simplifying data center operations and management. It enhances agility, scalability, and lowers costs by using a software-centric architecture.HCI solutions offer a dynamic approach to IT infrastructure by combining essential components into a simplified platform. This approach reduces complexity, enhances system efficiency, and supports seamless scalability. Organizations can spend...
Our biggest pain point during the buying process was trying to sort through all of the vendor's proposal documentation to determine which solution was best for us.
Every vendor claims their solution is the best and trying to determine which best served our needs was challenging.
Our solution was to create a checklist of the critical features and capabilities that were essential to us as well as a list of desired capabilities.
We then called in each vendor and went through our list of critical and desired features. Any vendors not able to meet all of our critical requirements were eliminated.
We then compared the remaining vendors on the number of desired features they could provide versus the pricing.
This process greatly facilitated the vendor selection process. It goes without saying that factors like vendor reputation, local support, warranty, etc. were considered before even getting to the checklist.
Doug
The biggest pain point for me was a general lack of suggested configurations for certain workloads. For example, if I am doing HCI for Hyper-V or VMware hosts, I would hope that the vendor(s) would have a ballpark configuration that I can build from. Let me drag some sliders around or use a sizing calculator to come up with a baseline configuration that I can start with.
To overcome this, I make sure to work with the vendor to share my needs. I send them a document of my existing configuration/workload, a DPACK, or I just have in-depth conversations with the vendor(s) so that they know my needs.
Hello all,
This is my point of view/feedback about an HCI buying process experience.
- Selected an IT-Business Partner which can cover your region/country for the rollout (if you don't buy it locally).
- Collected an order (it can help to receive a bigger discount).
- Plan for 3/5 year Care Packs for NBD Service and Warranty.
- Keep an eye on the local country tax/customs/transport insurance/import regulations for HCI Hardware (like battery, vendor patents, ...).
- Build with IT-Business Partner a Service/Health/Check Service on a yearly basis (if you do not want to make it on your own).
- Full pre-, post-, and installation tasks included with technical documentation.
That was a quick overview.
Greets,
Hannes