FlexPod Reviews

Our primary use is mostly for footprint consolidation — reducing the number of cables and easing the management model compared to just working with monolithic servers. Having access to the UCSM (Unified Computing System Manager) and managing that way seems to be a lot easier.

Going from the old monolithic server and silo storage that they used to use is an improvement. With the FlexPod solution, just being able to manage and monitor the overall environment helps. It saves a lot of money on all the various tools that are required to manage a traditional solution. Most of the necessary management and monitoring tools are included with the FlexPod solution. So, that's nice.

Potentially through the use of NetApp technologies on the back end — like the FlexCloning and the Snapshots — we have changed the way we do our development workflows and actually the way we do DR (Disaster Recovery) as well. So, we are using UCS (Unified Computing System) on service profiles and leveraging all their servers for test development in normal operating conditions. In the case of DR, you just have to switch service profiles. You boot to a different line off of that and you are able to turn the development test into the DR environment. That's nice.

For me, the most valuable feature is probably just the orchestration and automation that can be done around the whole solution from top to bottom, from servers to storage, networking, and using UCS Director. With the FlexPod solution, you are able to quickly provision all your hosts and all the resources that you need for the environment.

In the next generation, I'd just like to see bigger, faster, and better. I think that's partly there. Just shove more memory in them, throw a faster proxy in them, use 100 gig infrastructure. Having more hundred gig ports and AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup/Modeling Language) workloads would be very nice.

Scalability is nice. With this product, you can just add more compute, buy another chassis, and it might be fairly inexpensive, but you plug it in and away you go. There is no more dedicating ILO (Integrated Lights-Out) ports or track ports or whatever, out-of-band management, et cetera. So, that makes the opportunities for scaling nice.

I give both Cisco and NetApp a ten for their efforts in technical support. I have used a lot of other vendors' support services, and pretty often it is an absolute joke. If there is an issue, the FlexPod support team is there to fix it.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. Once you get the understanding of how the system works, it is fairly easy to set it up. 

We do the consultations, so I set it up myself.

There are a lot of hyper-converged solutions out on the market these days, a couple of our customers have tried those and they felt a little constrained within those environments. The FlexPod is nice because it is still made up of separate components but it is centrally managed. 

I actually used to manage the FlexPod at one company I was with. It was great there because it was all Cisco UCS. We leveraged Cisco UCS director to provision and add capacity when we needed to. Another company I was at used a Blade infrastructure along with fabric switches so that was the same sort of model. It is just easier when compared to other solutions. Fewer points of entry make it more manageable.

I used the Gen4 FlexPod at a previous company and we are reselling Gen5 to a couple of other companies. All using 40 gigs. It would be tough to quantify how much is actually saved, but I know it is a significant reduction in the number of cables, number of switches, and number of servers that they have to use. On $1 million billing for materials, I'm guessing they're probably saving at least $25,000 to $30,000. Overall they see a bit of return on investment.

We have talked about getting a hundred gig infrastructure so we can incorporate AI or machine learning, but they are not there yet.

The efficiency of data protection and data management goes back to leveraging UCS director and UCSM. Just the ability to provision the environments quickly is significant. I would say that FlexPod simplifies IT operations for unifying data management. Our customer is not currently using any cloud right now. I personally have not used any cloud, but I know there are opportunities for some integrations. 

They are leveraging SnapMirror to replicate all their source data and their production data center over to DR, as well as test development. It is easier than a host-based copy. Keeping all the switching within the FlexPod environment instead of having to go up to the core all the time probably helps out.

In terms of switches, cabling, the chassis — being able to fit eight servers in 6U obviously, helps out in terms of data center savings.

The advice I would give to people considering this solution is to certainly leverage all the tools and applications that Cisco and NetApp have developed around the FlexPod solution. You could certainly buy things separately and piecemeal it together, but things like the CSA and the solutions support becomes a nightmare. When you get a nice certified FlexPod solution, all the tools come with it. It makes a big difference in the environment and usability.

On a scale of one to ten where ten is the best, I would rate FlexPod as a nine or a ten. I love it. Again, there are obviously a lot of new HCI products that are coming out. But in terms of being able to manage it, I think that FlexPod is pretty solid as is.

We have a VMware solution that we use with our servers and we also use it to see if it might be a solution for us as an exchange server.

The improvement of our company is in terms of viability. The solution helped us implement capabilities we did not have previously. We do not have any issues right now. However, we are starting to outgrow the current setup. It is not as robust as we might need in the near future. We are coming up to a time where we can renew the solution and have more nodes for storage and we are considering expanding our use of the product.

Availability is the most valuable part of this solution. It is not the only solution out there that we could use, but it is a very good solution. We have not had any trouble since we installed it.

In the next releases of FlexPod, I would like it more integrated with some other HCI solutions. We are currently struggling with what to do for a solution moving forward. We can either continue with FlexPod or go directly to a different HCI solution. We have attended this conference to ask questions and to understand the differences between available products. We have found that FlexPod is already planning to move closer to having more features like NetApp HCI features than we thought, and that would be awesome.

We do not have any trouble with the product since we installed it. It is always available and it is always stable.

The scalability of FlexPod is very good. We are now on a mission to get this product renewed. Also, we are exploring how to use it with other HCI. In terms of scalability, over the last three or four years, we have scaled up and added storage and scaled hardware. So it has improved and it works very well.

When we were deciding whether to bring on FlexPod as our solution, we did look into other vendors and other solutions. FlexPod was far more advanced than other solutions that we were introduced to at the time.

The primary reason we selected FlexPod is that we understood that the solution was secure and could upgrade and manage day-to-day work. This is why we decided to go with them. 

The initial setup was very straightforward.

During the initial deployment, the head of the department worked with a partner and the support of the reseller that provides us with the solution. They are very good. The partner's name was SouthGate.

Over time, FlexPod saved our company money because the old storage and network solutions were more expensive to maintain, so we save on that front. I don't have exact numbers, but I am sure of the savings.

We are a team of five members and we also work on our storage solutions. We are all here to learn about and understand new products and see what we can do to progress either with the same product or with different solutions. We are evaluating everything as long as it is appropriate.

The validated designs for major enterprise apps in our company are very important. It helps us in using a lot of Microsoft applications.

FlexPod simplifies infrastructure from edge to core to cloud, and that is one of the main reasons we chose FlexPod. We want our environment to provide for users, power users, and service providers in several ways. That is why we developed this FlexPod solution.

The solutions unified support for the entire stack is also very important. We analyze the way the support for our products is utilized. So we need to be with a solution that integrates with support for software along with the storage.

Our team is more efficient since we started using the product as it has enabling them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward. We don't have to spend time matching each resource to its use.

The advice I would give to someone at another company who is researching FlexPod is that I would recommend that they go straight with FlexPod and not worry about it.

On a scale from one to ten where ten is the best, I would rate FlexPod as a nine-out-of-ten.

Things got a lot faster. We can pull and test in DEV systems much more rapidly and are clearing up a lot of DBA time. In the past, every time we tested it, we needed to be refreshed. In the past, it would take a day of our DBA's time, and now it's just point, click, and ten minutes later it's done.

FlexPod has improved our application's performance. It is now ten times as fast. 

Unplanned downtime incidents have decreased. We've had two and a half years with zero downtime. 

The most valuable features are the reliability and tools such as SnapCenter and SnapManager. We use them a lot. They make life easier.

On the surface, validated designs for enterprise apps are not that important but it's knowing that they work, and if they don't work, I can get support for them. We did have some pretty nasty bugs early on, around four years ago, but we haven't had problems.

It is 100% stable.

I don't have any problems with scalability. 

Support is able to fix our problems but we don't use them much. 

I haven't had many problems, so FlexPod's unified support hasn't been that important. But if I did have a lot of problems, it would be important. I'd rather just not have problems, so that's a good thing.

It worked for me at my last company so we went with FlexPod. It's what I know. It's what I trust, it's comfortable, and it's worked well for me in the past.

It was more expensive than others but the reliability in the tools has saved us money in that regard, so it's worth it.

It is more complex than just basic storage systems. That's intimidating to some people but it works well for me because I've learned it, I know it, I've been using it for ten years and it's not a big deal to me. But it is intimidating to some people and if you push past that, and just learn it, it is worth it. Especially for the additional tools and the environment it allows you to utilize.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. Not a ten because it could always be cheaper, it could always be faster.

We are using it internally for one of our departments to provide the platform in which our employees are working to support our customers.

For us as an IT department, it helped us a lot. Before we implemented FlexPod, we were using different solutions all based on a virtual infrastructure. On VMware, before implementing FlexPod, we had a lot of problems doing backups with disaster recovery. After integrating it, it enabled us to have shorter maintenance windows, instant backups, instant recovery, which also minimized the number of alerts that we get from the application team and from the employees who were working on the application that something is not working. Most of the time the reasons for the alerts were backups that had been done or there were some problems with them. Constantly getting snapshots in a virtual infrastructure. Thanks to FlexPod and thanks to NetApp snapshot technology, we were able to reduce it. Even now at this moment, we do not have any kind of information that there's some kind of issue because of backups.

Unified support for the entire stack is really important. It was one of the major points and one of the major decision-makers. FlexPod offered unified support. Before, when using various companies and providers, we had a lot of issues with support. For example, whenever we were opening a case with one of the vendors, they always said that it's not their problem, it's not with their application. Our solution is because of them. With FlexPod, now we do not have that issue. We can go to one of the partners or one of the vendors and tell them we have a problem and they will help us directly. Then they will tell us that they do see a problem that we have. That it's not with Cisco, please contact NetApp, give us the ticket number from NetApp and then it will work jointly or the other way around. Now it's much easier for us, for the technical teams to deal with all the issues, that we have in our environment.

FlexPod has enabled our staff to become more efficient. We have more time. We have been working with FlexPod for around 10 years now. Since then, we've grown three times. We are still managing the difficult infrastructure with the same number of people. I think it is the best proof that having a unified solution can minimize the admin effort.

It is hard to say by how much FlexPod has improved our application performance but we do see improvement. We do see a lower number of tickets coming to us saying that there's a performance issue with applications or there are some latency issues. Once we switched to FlexPod, especially for the last few years, when we are using AFF, we do really not see any kind of tickets coming saying we have performance issues.

FlexPod has decreased unplanned downtime incidents by a lot. With FlexPod, we have the opportunity to do un-disruptive upgrades. Since we began using FlexPod, I did not see any kind of disaster or any kind of maintenance that would really impact applications or end-users. We could do it basically on a daily basis without any kind of problems because of the redundancy, which we have there and the way the upgrades can be done.

Our data center costs have decreased as a result of having FlexPod. We could reduce the number of racks in which we are using in the data center because of the way FlexPod works. I think that at this moment, compared to what we had before using FlexPod, we still have a lower footprint in the data center as we had 10 years ago.

The validation designs, which we are using, are mostly for the deployment of FlexPods, Cisco, VMware, and NetApp. We do not use any validated designs for the application because most of the applications that are hosting our in house-build applications. Wo do not have any validated designs as those are only done internally.

In the next release, it would be really good to have some kind of unified update manager or something, which would allow us to update the whole infrastructure from beginning to end. All together like VMware, NetApp to go with Cisco, so that you don't have to do it separately in upgrading the NetApp, separately everything to UCS infrastructure then going with VMware. Something that will allow us to do it together in some integrated manner.

The upgrades should be improved. We would like to have the ability to do unified upgrades of the whole infrastructure from beginning to end. 

Stability is really good. We do not experience any kind of stability issues. I think the best proof is what we have now. We are now with FlexPod for a few years. Now we are running the third deployment of FlexPod and we are planning to do another one which will come next year.

Scalability is just fantastic. There's no problem to go vertical or horizontal. It's quite easy, modular, and can be done online.

Technical support is really good, especially when it comes to cooperation between various vendors like VMware, Cisco, and NetApp. At this moment, we do not have any kind of problem with support so we can easily get the kind of support that is needed.

Before, we were using a service with VMware, but there were various vendors. We had storage that was delivered by a different company. Your compute by a different company, networking by a different company. We had a big footprint in our data center. Secondly, we had a lot of issues with support, as I said. We were looking at solutions to help us solve the problem. Minimize the footprint in the data center. Minimize the discussions with vendors whenever we are buying something, so that we would not have to go to many different vendors and ask for the pricing and negotiate the price for the solution. 

Compatibility and basically going with FlexPod enabled us to resolve those issues. We can talk with one partner whenever we're buying FlexPod for us. It's just one vendor, it's FlexPod. The support works, we do not have any issue with that. When it comes to integration, we know because of the validated design, that it will work and it will suit our requirements.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. We didn't have many issues with it. Of course, 10 years ago when we were starting with it, it was quite a fresh thing. There were not many documents available or validated designers like we have now, but we didn't have any major issues implementing it.

We are using one of our partners, with whom we have been working with for many years. It's a German company, and we are getting really good support from them. Not only when it comes to integration and deployment, but also consulting and design.

We did the research. We went through different vendors when choosing a FlexPod solution. For us at that time, and today, it is the best solution on the market when it comes to converged infrastructure. It has a really easy implementation, which gives you a lot of flexibility with the server profiles, which gives you easy disaster recovery with snapshot technology. If you are looking into such technology, have a look at FlexPod and you'll see that it will suit your needs.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. It gives us all the capabilities that we need. It gives us good performance. It gives us easy disaster recovery. It gives us easy modular upgrades and extensions. Basically, everything we need.

Our customers use this solution. It's a validated design and there's one solution for compute and storage. The validated design is an advantage when you take all of the separate parts.

The flexibility between Cisco and NetApp is valuable. When there are new parts of new devices like the new AFF 400, then the speed is not fast enough to implement what the customer asks for, but the design is not validated. It's faster to validate the design for new equipment.

FlexPod's unified support for the entire stack is very important. Before, the customers would log a ticket by Cisco and a ticket by NetApp. It's better when vendors can partner and look for a solution together. 

It improves application performance for our customers. Before FlexPod, you could make a design and that design was not strong enough for some applications and now there is a good validated design. The validated design gives space for the applications to run or not. Performance has been improved by 50%. Before we had to make separate designs, now, we are more confident that a design is good to work for the type of application. 

It has decreased unplanned downtime incidents. 

It's easier to sell to a customer because it is a validated design but sometimes the customer wants another feature and then it's a problem. You must build each block separately, that's a disadvantage sometimes.

The stability is good. 

It's very scalable. 

Sometimes we reach out to the NetApp support from the NetApp part or the Cisco part but the engineers by us are also certified to install FlexPod. We have had good experiences with them. They speak the same language as us which is an advantage. 

Our customers choose this solution because of the validated design and for the one-stop solution where it's one contract. It's one building block which is an advantage for the customer instead of buying separate items.

Our customers also look at Dell EMC. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We have multiple use cases for it. Most of it is just based on the fact of its reliability and its performance. We have customers in the insurance industry, financial industry, retail and they mostly use it for compute and storage. 

FlexPod simplifies infrastructure from edge to core to cloud. Everything becomes easier. Everything is more collapsed. Everything is easier to manage and migration into the cloud becomes seamless.

With respect to FlexPod's unified support for the entire stack, it's always good to have a single pane of glass to work from. 

It has improved application performance. Anything that runs on instance nowadays is good. I suppose if you're going from spinning media to SSD you're guaranteed to see an improvement.

FlexPod has enabled our staff to be more efficient. Once it's working, it's working. There's not a lot of break-fix. It gives you time to be proactive and not necessarily reactive. I haven't come across a time when it's not working. We have the normal disk failures and hardware issues but everything is so redundant that it doesn't affect it. 

I see the most value in the UCS portion. I love Cisco UCS.

Its ability to scale seamlessly makes adding anything so much easier than having to run by separate new hardware from the get-go.

The validated design in the architecture is an ongoing debate. You don't need to buy FlexPod itself. You can borrow FlexPod based on the reference architecture. I wouldn't say that the validated design plays such a big role because you can just reference the architecture and technically have FlexPod as well.

At the moment, our customers don't use storage tiering to public cloud but there are plans for future use. 

Possibly the UCS could get a bit better. Other than that, overall I don't necessarily have any sorts of constraints or issues with it. It's done the job that it's been bought to do.

It's never given me an issue. Stability is perfect. 

I haven't yet used their technical support. 

The initial setup was quite straightforward. As with anything nowadays, the workflows are just so good that it's easy to configure one thing and just move on to the other.

Initially, it might cost an arm and a leg but the return on investment is going to be worth it. It's going to be worth in the long run. So taking money upfront now to make make money over the long run just seems to make sense.

It has reduced our data center costs. Having everything in a single cabinet versus multiple cabinets can reduce your cost.

Our customers also evaluated Dell ECM VxBlock. They chose NetApp because it's cheaper and during a POC it always performs and gives them what they want.

I have experience with Dell EMC, HP, and NetApp. NetApp is a bit more complicated to set up than everything else. Once it gets going, it's so much easier to manage than all the others. The others on the flip side are very easy to set up but then troubleshooting can be a bit tedious and complex at times.

The advice that I would give to anybody considering FlexPod would be to just do it. It depends whether you know NetApp or not. If you don't know NetApp, when you get into NetApp it's a bit confusing based on storage, virtual machines and stuff that other storage vendors don't necessarily use. Do a lot of reading and researching.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. Not a ten because it's not like it hasn't broken. There have been issues, but it's not major issues. 

We use this solution for backing up and storing banking and financial data. It is especially important for protecting data mirroring between multiple data centers using a hybrid cloud type approach. We have our own cases for what we use but we do like the input we get from the manufacturers and their suggestions on how we should deploy things.

Before we had FlexPod, we had just stacks and stacks of servers. You know, every time you wanted to build a server you had to go buy a whole pizza box (case for computers or network switches), put it in a rack, plug it up. We had EMC, we had a bunch of different storage providers, the way it connected was makeshift, a couple of late servers here and there. So to be able to put everything in one rack, one solution with the storage, was a big step up. Plus, every time we need to expand the storage for the old system, it wasn't easy. Cisco blades simplify everything from a compute standpoint and you can easily upgrade the blades. All you got to do is add a new chassis, change out your blades, and the blades are done. If a blade dies, you pull it out, you get a brand new one or you change the motherboard and you just slide it back in depending on the policy that you create for the surface profiles and you are good to go.

A valuable feature of the FlexPod solution is that it is all one architecture and I can call one number and get support for Cisco and NetApp without having to jump through open TAC (Technical Assistance Center) cases and do multiple things to get issues addressed. When integrating with VMware, I know all the parts that came with it and all the parts and when I need to update something in it, I can just get the complete package, do all the firmware stuff and the fabric interconnects.

The real improvement I could see on the FlexPod side is it falls on the NetApp components. The upgrades that they had to go through from 7-Mode to CDOT (Clustered Data OnTap) did not make for a good transition. I'm pretty sure they learned the lesson from that because you basically had to stand up a side-by-side system, copy your data over, upgrade your stuff and move your data back. No one wants to do that and it is a nightmare.

It would also be nice if you could manage everything through a single pane of glass — but that won't happen. With a single pane, we could look at everything at once in the UCS (Cisco's Unified Computing System) components as well as VMware and the NetApp components. It would be good to be able to do that without having to navigate into four different web pages.

The solution has decreased downtime incidents by close to 100%. With the resiliency built into the system, one component fails and the others still work. I mean, you just can't get any better than that. So the stability of the solution is really good.

We have lost a blaze server here and there. But we run about 30 servers on each side, so, losing one isn't that big a deal. Besides that, we don't have that many issues with it. It just works. This is our third iteration. Obviously we bought it the first time and we liked it enough that we bought it again.

Scalability does have some issues being that NetApp is all part of the FlexPod. It could limit how much you can scale. Depending on what head system you bought that came with NetApp it will make a difference for you to be able to scale. I don't remember off hand what the step-by-step is to upgrade. But I know sometimes that it can turn into an issue. If you didn't gage right and you bought the wrong piece and you went too small on your storage and you need to expand, you might have to change stuff out.

The technical support is good. We've never had an issue with them. We paid for a service and we have a dedicated support person. We call him, he opens the case, then the engineers call us back. We don't wait on hold or do any of that. So it works really well for us. I like that. The solution's support for the entire staff has been very important. That I can get the help that I need and help find solutions to fix issues that happen between the stacks is really valuable.

Before we started using FlexPod we just had a regular old hodgepodge of different IT systems. A couple of Dell servers, a couple of HPs, a couple of IBM blades, and that kind of network doesn't really function well as a solution once your organization starts to get to a certain size. You need to commit to a solution that you will be able to grow with for the next five or six years.

The fact that the product integrates with all major public cloud services did not influence our decision to go with FlexPod, although I think that maybe the case with some people.

In the end, we went with FlexPod because of everything that they offered. The complete scalability of the system, the recovery capabilities of it, and the whole integration opportunity. The NetApp part was a big deal and a component we wanted because the NetApp storage solution could do everything that we wanted it to do. We didn't have to buy 60 licenses just to make it do what it was supposed to do right out the box. That was a big thing.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was a bit complex. It was complex at first because I mean it was a new system and stuff and there were some parts that we had not managed before that we had to learn. Using the UCL software was new to us. We can easily manipulate the fabric interconnects. You don't have to get the networking people every time you need to do something. They just have to touch the 9k or the 5k or whatever you running.

We integrated through Sigma Solutions as a reseller and consultant. They were excellent. We enjoy working with them. They worked with us on the first installation and then again when we redeployed our data centers and helped us get the FlexPod solution. They actually took us and brought us to California and we actually went to the EMC shop and we went to the NetApp shop there in California. We toured the main offices and looked at the solutions there and where we ultimately went for the next NetApp FlexPod instead of the EMC FlexPod version.

Our shortlist included a Dell EMC.

We have found that the solution simplifies infrastructure from edge to core to cloud — although we have not really implemented the cloud yet.

The solution has made our staff more efficient and enables them to spend more time driving the business forward. It's primarily what we do. We don't really have other tasks. But as far as not having to worry about daily maintenance on the network very much — it just works. I'm not messing with it every day and trying to get something to work right. It is set up, it is configured, We have got our policies in place and you pretty much roll. We can focus on doing other things like analyzing the data, mixture throughput, things like that when you don't have to worry about the hardware tripping you up.

I think the integration improved application performance in our organization. The back end on the FlexPod with the 40 gig connections on the NetApp makes the DB admins life a whole lot easier with a lot less latency for them. And not only that, with the components, we can monitor it and see where they are being affected and then we can fix those issues for them without a lot of back-and-forths.

I'm sure the solution has saved the organization money. Because it creates a smaller footprint you do not need as many servers. I don't know offhand how much power and storage and residual costs we saved. But the solution has decreased organization data center costs.

The solutions have affected our operations with the opportunity to use things like All-flash, CI, Private and HyperCloud. I'd say that one of the biggest improvements was All-flash. Before we were still using mechanical drives and actually we did on the first generation of FlexPod. We are on our third generation. They did have mechanical drives in the first iteration. So for us to move to all-flash, which we have now, was a really good step up.

On a scale of one to ten where ten is the best, I would rank the product against the competition as a ten.

My advice to anyone considering this solution is that they really start out looking at their needs depending on the size of the company. The product is kind of expensive even from an entry-level standpoint. I know they have the edge systems for branches, but if you have a small to medium-size business you probably have to have a lot of data to make it worthwhile. I would say FlexPod would be the way to go if you are a larger business or one with large data volume.

In our case, we were building out a brand new data center. They were rolling out Epic, which is a big healthcare application. So, we bought 200 UCS servers. This was five years ago when we first implemented this, and the FAS 8060 has been serving this customer very well. It has allowed them to start with what was 26 hospitals and grow up to 45 hospitals, all with the same set of infrastructure over the last five years. 

With FlexPod, it is about the synergy of the server, the storage, and the whole management layer. Together, it is really about minimizing staff. You don't have to hire more people. You can work with the minimum level of resources and the availability is really good. We have had very little downtime.

1. Scalability. We knew that we needed to grow, but we allowed them to start with a footprint. Then, we were able to add shells and drives. With the way that ONTAP works, it was seamless migrations throughout. 
2. Ease of use. They were familiar with NetApp and some standalone environments, which made it a lot easier for them.
3. It is cost-effective.

There is always room for improvement. I believe we can do hot swaps on the fly. On the release upgrades, if there was a way to do a release on the fly, that would really be cool because it does take some downtime. It takes restarting. It is more of a software thing. Customers hate doing releases. 

An area for improvement would be on Level 2 and 3 support when there is a release issue.

On the whole, this Flexspot environment is very stable. We have had hiccups. Over a five to six year period, one could look at any environment, and say, "There have there been hiccups." However, for the approximately 90 percent availability that we are looking for. we are very happy with the results.

The technical support is very good. There are times when we get stellar support, then there are times when you get an individual who may not have had the right sense of urgency when we had a sense of urgency. But when we escalate, the response is very good. So, we are happy, and that is why we continue to invest in NetApp.

We have a different storage platform running cache database, which is its main application or database for their healthcare environment. Due to a number of future proofing. scalability options, and simplicity, the customer chose to go to with NetApp from a competitive platform. So, we have just finished the migration off the competitive platform that went very smoothly. They are in GenIO testing right now. Within a few weeks, we were able to migrate them off, and it's going well.

The way that we do the initial setup, there are a lot of volumes. There are multiple copies of the same database. 

Let me speak specifically about our recent migration, where the customer actually has four copies of their production workload. In this specific environment, it is complex. Could my customer do it by themselves? No. We helped with that implementation. Their scripts are written in just to help automate the process. This enabled the migration to go very smoothly.

We were able to optimize utilization. We had NetApp over two data centers and in the secondary data center we noticed that the utilization of storage was not optimal. So, we broke up the clusters, which was really easy to do. We were able to repurpose a lot of the drive sets that were in the secondary data center and move them to the production data center. That was a huge cost avoidance at the two and a half year mark which saved the company money and still met the production requirements without having to buy anyone else's storage.

The NetApp portion was a $5 million investment five years ago. That has served the customer well over five and a half years. They are having to do another upgrade. But, if one could forecast as well as we did five years ago, that is pretty good.

I came from IBM and my customer had IBM in place before. So, we can't do FlexPod with an IBM. We can't do FlexPod with a Pure. Dell EMC is a probably the closest one that can do the whole converged environment. But, in this case, my customer would not choose to do this with Dell EMC. 

The synergy that Cisco and NetApp put together initially for FlexPod worked very well together from an availability standpoint, minimizing staff to manage the environment, keeping costs down overall, and just enabling the whole environment to work smoothly.

I would give it an eight (out of 10). I always think there is room for improvement, especially with technology changing as much as it is. 

Our primary use case for this solution is for VDI.

We have offices across the globe in some 20 to 22 countries and there was a time when people from Singapore needed access because they experience similar issues as we do. When we implemented this solution, all 250 VDI sessions seamlessly were accessed over the internet. That's the benchmark.

It simplifies infrastructure from edge to port to cloud. It proves that deployment is easy and straightforward. There isn't any need to do extra work. 

We are definitely getting good progress and good improvement from them. It has decreased our data center costs by around 8 to 10 percent. 

FlexPod has improved our application performance by 40%.

With FlexPod, Cisco UCS compute-wise accessing is much faster.

FlexPod's validated designs for major enterprise apps are really important because we can go with our SAP HANA solution, our Hadoop solutions, our HP solutions, and our Media solutions. A vendor-specific solution is always preferred.

In terms of unified support for the entire stack, UCS hardware-wise is much faster. The storage and NetApp are good. We use Cisco switches and the connectivity and other aspects have improved. 

The GPU based VDA solutions could use improvement.

We don't have any issues with stability. 

We can scale up whenever we want.

Their technical support is good. I would give them a ten out of ten. 

We used to do it by ourselves but we got a really good intro and demo for this product. We got a strong marketing push from NetApp. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It's all built at the factory and it came put together as a rack. Everything was straightforward. 

We used an integrator and the process was seamless. They took all of our requirements and from there it was straightforward. 90% of the process was done at the factory. We only had 10% to do and it was done within hours. 

We haven't seen ROI yet. 

My advice to someone considering this solution is to go for it. 

I would rate FlexPod a nine out of ten because this is definitely a huge improvement based on what we saw. 

We use on-prem for our unified network communications solution, which is basically a Call Center. We have a Cisco call center running Cisco software on FlexPod. That is our primary and only use case right now for it. We use HP as a computer hardware solution for the enterprise. We'll probably expand our use of FlexPod and we use it for everything else including the entire production environment.

The components we are currently using are Cisco Blade Server Chassis. The blades are M4, Fabric Interconnect 6248, I believe. The very first version. They are very old. We'll probably be upgrading in a few years, or maybe next year. We have MDS switches, 9148 — they are pretty old too. We will have to upgrade them. And then we have NetApp FAS8040 disks.

This is a solution that's designed by Cisco and NetApp together. We have our reference designs, so we pretty much can skip the part where we need the implementation delivery. We can work directly with the vendor like NetApp, and tell them "We need this, and here is your validated design." But that's what helps right there.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the flexibility in configuration and the setup. We have not had any major issues so far.

I would like to see the FlexPod infrastructure get updated more often. Things like the firmware, the software packages, and the compatibility matrix have to update more often and seem to lag in development. We are kind of dragging on this. Because we were not performing all those updates more often, we are kind of delayed a few years.

For example, we are using the FlexPod for the Call Center and Call Center has specific versions of their software. Cisco has recommended that we use NetApp version 91 as the final version for the Call Center software. We can not go beyond 91 and 91 is a two-year-old OS. There have 96 out already and will probably be presenting 97 in a few days. So we are literally lagging behind by years.

We had a problem with the stability at one point. We found it through Cisco tech support while they were helping us to troubleshoot this solution. We found a drop in the Fibre Channel frames. This drop occurred on the HBAs (Hot Bus Adapter) of the NetApp controller. But we had to troubleshoot every step of the way to figure it out. Because basically what was happening was that the Call Center virtual machines were crashing.

However, the hardware stability is very good. We have no hardware issues on the server site.

The scalability of the solution is brilliant and works great. With the fabric interconnects, you can scale it horizontally. I don't know the actual stats, but I believe with the newer fabric interconnects, you can scale indefinitely pretty much.

We did not purchase this product with the support contract, but I would like to try it. So our next purchase would be for sure including that part number for the FlexPod support.

When we went to invest in a new solution we were looking for ease of implementation, peace of mind, future reference, and stateless design. That is the ability to take out any hardware piece, replace it with a new one, reboot and — boom — ready to go.

The initial setup was very straightforward, but you have to know the integration document for the Cisco validated design. It is a must to know. Basically, the guy who performs the implementation should know it like the bible. It is actually the bible for those guys, and for the people who are using it. Those validated designs make our engineer lives, much easier.

We did involve a reseller. I can't mention them by name but they are a very well-known company. The process was great. They set up everything, and they are still helping us with the architecture and the new features, and so on so forth. As a matter of fact, they would be helping us updating firmware on the fabric interconnects in the next few months.

Our return on investment is that the solution has made us more efficient. It is a ready-to-go solution. It's like you can start using it almost within a week of the delivery.

Our company makes purchases like CapEx (capital expenditure). So we do not have to maintain the license.

Because I don't have experience with the Cloud integrations, that did end up affecting choices initially. For now, we are going to be staying with NetApp but we are also looking at other products like Pure Storage and Nimble.

The solutions that validate the designs for major enterprise apps is a nice thing to have because there are many components. For a single person or even for an entire IT department, it will be impossible to correlate software versions, hardware versions, firmware versions, and everything else. It's a huge matrix.

The vendor has to provide the compatibility matrix, obviously and has to provide the complete vertical to give those numbers, per each component, for all software, and for the firmware. The customer can't figure it out by themselves. So, and that's the reason for the FlexPod, so they can buy and integrate everything together.

We are not on the Cloud yet at all. I would say we'll be looking into it when it's time because I understand this is inevitable. So we understand the push on us into this territory, and I know it is all about the Cloud now. A few years ago it was completely different. Now, it is all Data Fabric Cloud, Azure, and Usenet.

The product has decreased the unplanned downtime incidents in our organization. Even the incident I mentioned about the crashing virtual machines was identified and solved in one day.

On a scale of one to ten where ten is the best, I would rate FlexPod as a ten. I love it all. I could give it an eleven. 

My advice to people considering the solution is simple: read the Cisco validated design, remember it, and use it. It is a must to have and must to know, and must to use.

Our primary use case is for all of our data storage and so primarily VMware virtualization. We run over 95% of all of our computers running on VMware.

We initially started out with siloed clusters and now we've been able to cluster everything together so that we have multiple nodes in our clusters. We have multiples on different data in different data centers. We've able to do replication between data centers. That's been very beneficial for us as we look to derive a mature DR model.

Our data center costs have been lowered. We are in a bit of a unique position where we have a different group that actually pays for the costs of the data center, so we don't see a specific benefit. It's been cost savings in terms of a far smaller footprint in two data centers and then also the associated fewer networking costs as we're just consuming fewer and fewer ports as we've gone to the FlexPod model.

Unplanned downtime incidents have absolutely decreased in my organization. We went from having somewhere around three to five outages every year to us not having had any outages in the past four or five years. That's been very, very beneficial for us.

We've always appreciated the value of the NetApp because it's been incredibly reliable. It's at a decent price point. We are a local government entity and so we have funding issues that probably some commercial entities don't have, but we've been able to buy cost-effective solutions. We feel that this has scaled in terms of technology improvements over the years, but ultimately we're a small team that manages all the systems and we're split in a thousand different directions and so storage management's a very small part of my day or week. The reliability and the relative ease of use, are the real things that keep on bringing us back to NetApp. It's been the reliability and ease of management.

In terms of the importance of FlexPod's validated designs for major enterprise apps, we are a big consumer of SAP, so it's important that we have all products that fit into the SAP hardware compatibility list. 

It simplifies the infrastructure from edge to core. It's been an easy configuration for us. We have separate teams that manage all pieces of the infrastructure and I think that it helps the collaboration be a little bit easier.

FlexPod's history of innovations has maybe helped us in the context that we've traditionally always been a spinning disc environment where that's the price point that we've typically been able to afford to spend our money. We're starting to deviate away from going with the SaaS layer and SATA layer to more of an SSD layer and SATA because of flash pools, which is a new technology that we were able to leverage on the SSD discs. That is working us into a position where there's less and less demand for us.

The unified support for the entire staff is very important because we've been a NetApp partner at my current company for at least eight years and we have 95% virtualized on VMware and we transitioned away from multiple vendors to a Cisco UCS server stack almost exclusively. We're very dependent on those technologies to keep our business running. We run 911 services for multiple jurisdictions and these old services have to be available 24 hours a day.

It has improved the performance of our application by around 50% because as the models matured in our data center and we went from a lot of local storage to centralized storage. We made a big investment in storage, so we're also putting a lot of confidence in the system to deliver the IO that we need and that's proven to be the case.

Something that we struggle with because we're a relatively small scale organization and the administrative effort is spread across so many different pieces of infrastructure, it would be nice to have a set of tools that enables us to get a little bit more information out of our system. Right now we're in the process of looking at OCI. We have free trial licenses for a two year period and we're investing quite a bit of time into writing reports and allowing it to tell us more information about our systems because we don't have a lot of time and we don't have a lot of sexy tools out there to give us information. We're going to go through this exercise with OCI, but at some point, that tool's going to go away and we may not have the funding to keep it on-premises. There are metrics and there's information in the system that a normal consumer like ourselves, a smaller organization, would probably not be privy to that information. It would be nice if some of those reporting capabilities were available just as a part of the ordinary suite of software that people buy.

I have been using FlexPod for the last eight years.

We deployed it in conjunction with several VARs. We worked with Peak Resources. They are somebody that we've had a relationship with for quite a while. We are very happy with the engineering staff. We feel like it's a good working relationship and they've served us well.

We are a consumer of Cisco UCS, we constantly adding blades into the infrastructure as needs arise and we're constantly purchasing storage multiple times a year. We know that the solution scales well and is very flexible in that regard. We can add SSD as we need. 

The technical support is fantastic. We're in Denver, Colorado and we've got a really good strong team out there associated with NetApp, so we are happy with the partners and we are happy with NetApp themselves. It's all been great. No issues.

We feel the ROI is good. It's really helped us get rid of a few hundred physical servers that were unreliable and had inconsistent performance. Now we have a platform that is consistent and has a lot of native high availability capabilities built into it. Snapshots, RDP, just simple things like that that offer us an immense benefit.

We've been highly supportive of FlexPod and we continue to be highly supportive. We've had a lot of go-arounds with the peers and other state and local government organizations and we've had some people abandon what they've done and go the same route that we've gone. We feel that's a bit of a success story for us because we believe in the product.

I would rate it a solid eight out of ten. Not a ten because there's always budgetary issues. Specifically related to the Cisco side of things, we've seen very, very strong fluctuations in some of the pricing of the hardware and being a local government entity where we don't have the ability to just find money for things out of thin air, which a lot of commercials and the prices seem to do, we have very, very fixed budgets and so that's a frustrating process to go through. But the NetApp pricing's generally been pretty consistent. We generally have a four year replacement cycle. So the money that we allocate for replacements generally is pretty right on cue for what our capacity needs are.

Our primary use case for this solution is for custom applications. 

FlexPod has improved my organization in the way that it has given us much greater flexibility for getting our apps rolled out.

It simplified infrastructure from edge to core to cloud. We aren't doing anything to the cloud but within the infrastructure, it's much simpler because anytime we roll out dedicated applications, we are essentially deploying dedicated FlexPods for each application.

The solution's IT support has been key for it because we're able to size appropriately depending on the application and the flexibility to grow out each FlexPod depending on the application requirements.

It has also enabled our staff to be more efficient. Previous to this, the infrastructure was all outsourced and so when we were bringing everything insourcing, it enabled us to essentially start fresh. We were moving off of the legacy block storage from a specific vendor and this allowed much easier siloing of our applications so that we didn't have resource contention between the applications.

The application performance has also been improved. I don't have exact metrics but we're moving from legacy hardware to essentially new hardware, so there's a big jump in the actual overall hardware quality that we've been doing.

Unplanned downtime incidents have decreased. We haven't had any unplanned outages that I'm aware of since we went to the FlexPod model.

The ease of expansion is the most valuable feature. 

The solution's validated designs for major enterprise apps are very important.

In terms of what needs improvement, nothing jumps out at me. It is meeting our requirements and so I'm pretty happy with the way it is right now.

It would be helpful if they sold a pre-boxed option so that you can buy a rack and everything's already there, everything's connected.

FlexPod seems very stable so far. We haven't had any unplanned outages so far.

I am very impressed with scalability because, given the applications that we're running on it, it's much easier to ensure that the resources are dedicated for each application and we can scale each application's own pod as we need to.

We went from an outsourcing model to an insourcing model. It was a good time to make a conversion from legacy, just standard blocks, a lot of physical servers and convert over to a virtual environment and have everything integrated into a nice little box.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We've got all our reference documentation and we had everything planned out. Our VAR did do a good job of saying, here are the components that we're using and here's how everything goes together.

We used a VAR for some of it and then just for the purchasing. After the first couple of rollouts, we just use them for the purchasing piece and we started doing all our own integration. 

They were a bit slow. They were taking two to three weeks to roll out a pod and we were doing it in a couple of days.

We have not seen ROI yet. 

FlexPod was pretty much the way they wanted to go from the start.

I would rate it a solid eight out of ten. It's not perfect. Everything's already plugged in when you get it out of the box. Obviously there is a bit more configuration involved than a VCE where everything comes in and you're buying a box, essentially. But that's a pretty minor knock on it.

It is a really solid solution. The pod flexibility along with the containerization of each pod is very nice.

Our primary use case is for virtualization, the VMs.

FlexPod has enabled us to consolidate some of our stuff. 

The validated designs for major enterprise apps are an integral part of our company. We only do validated designs in our thing and then we remove our data center consolidation and move stuff onto that.

It simplifies the infrastructure from edge to core. It simplifies the configuration metrics and saved time. FlexPod simplified and saved time overall for all of the configuration and deployment.

Backup, restore, and ease of deployment are the most valuable features.

It hasn't changed the application performance in our company but obviously the new hardware gives it the performance increase. Overall nothing more changed.

I would like to have the installation of the top virtualization on its own rather than doing it through the admin. For example, if FlexPod is configured after the configuration of the host, the ESXi is installed also, but it should be part of it rather than doing it as a separate system.

It is pretty solid.

It's scalable. 

I don't remember having needed to contact their technical support. 

We knew we needed to invest in a solution like FlexPod because we were growing and we have evaluated different solutions and after that we decided.

The initial setup was straightforward because we did not do it, Cisco did it.

I deployed through Cisco. We had a positive experience with them.

We have seen ROI. 

It actually initially increased our CapEx.

We looked at Red Hat, VMware, HP, Cisco. We chose FlexPod because of the consolidation and reduced footprint.

If configuration, unification, and standardization are the concern and if they are using it with Cisco as a network edge then I think it will be a good solution to go with FlexPod.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. Not a ten because a seven means for me that it is more than a five. A 10 would mean that I don't have to do anything else to improve. Improvements could be ESXi installations at vCenter installation and all of that. I have this to do it. It is a solution, but it has stops at a certain point. It is not a complete solution. 

We use it for everything except for ERP. We use it for VMware, VDI, SQL, and a mix of Windows and Linux.

FlexPod has enabled our staff to be more efficient. They spend less time managing multiple tickets with multiple vendors. If we open a ticket with Cisco and the issue needs to have NetApp pulled in or VMware pulled in, our contact is still Cisco and they still have ownership of the case, as opposed to, without FlexPod, the process would be opening a ticket with Cisco. Cisco would need to check something on the NetApp side. Then we would have to engage NetApp, open a NetApp case, coordinate some time to get everybody together on a WebEx, and then they could say that it's a Windows problem. Then we would have to open a ticket with Microsoft and do the whole thing again. The support is nice to have.

It has decreased the unplanned downtime incidents by around 10%.

Knowing that everything works, having a single place to be able to find out compatibility and things like that are the biggest benefits of this solution.

FlexPod's validated designs for major enterprise apps are very important in our company. For example, running our SQL clusters, being able to have compatibility information, and validated design information, for everything from SQL versions, OS versions, switching, firmware versions, and UCS and models of whatever hardware we're using, having all of that pre-validated and available is nice.

We do not use their storage into public cloud.

We have found that it simplifies our infrastructure from edge to core. It's just nice to have that single source of pre-validated designs and reference architectures.

The history of innovations has not affected our operations. We've been pretty stable. We haven't really done a whole lot as far as, being on the bleeding edge of anything.

Unified support for the entire stack is pretty important. It's nice to have. It makes it a lot easier from our perspective, to be able to make or have a single point of contact, for issues that are kind of gray as far as where the problem lies.

It hasn't saved us CapEx.

It's been stable. 

It's scaled easily to what we need it for. 

Support has been good. There were a few hiccups early on but it's pretty well streamlined now.

The initial setup was straightforward. It would have been set up the same way if it wasn't called FlexPod. We're using Cisco Nexus, which is Cisco UCS, NetApp storage, and VMware are all things we would have done anyway.

We did the setup ourselves. It was piece by piece and it was built by us and then validated.

If you're a Cisco, NetApp or VMware shop then go for it.

I would rate FlexPod an eight out of ten. Not a perfect ten because it could use better integration on the network side between UCS and the switching layer. The fact that LACP is not supported on UCS blades isn't so great. It would be nice if it was.

We're using a FlexPod cluster with Cisco UCS and NetApp AFF. It's a four-node cluster. We use FlexPod for everything in our company. We're a financial company.

Our previous solution used to take 24 hours and now we're down to seven hours. It has really good performance. 

It simplifies infrastructure from edge to core but not to the cloud. We have five people running operations and they are quite busy. But for the scale of VMs for the customers, we need to have at least two more men to deal with infrastructure.

We just got AFF so we've got all flash on the environment now. This really speeds things up from something like eight milliseconds for I/O latency to under one millisecond which is great.

FlexPod has definitely made our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks. We're going more into automation now and we don't have to build all the VMs by hand. We automate this.

It has also improved application performance by around 50%. We're getting back more scale. I'm very happy with the performance of the database now. It has also decreased our data center's costs. We don't use so many racks anymore. We compressed all the stuff and we have a higher compute and more IOPs in the smaller racks.

Support of the firmware is the most valuable feature. The solutions' validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization is very important. It ensures our ERP system runs smoothly on those machines.

We don't use the storage tiering to the public cloud.

FlexPod has not decreased the unplanned downtime incidents in our company. There was a problem with the back-end configuration and we had a downtime of three hours. We encounter more downtime on procedural tasks we have to do than on technical tasks.

In the next release, I would like to have a better monitoring option in which I can see the full stack and can then decide which steps to take.

In terms of the stability, once it's up and running, it runs really smoothly.

Scalability is excellent. 

Their technical support is good. It would be better if some P2 cases would be looked at from P1 guys as well, to give more experience to these orders. Last time we had four weeks on a P2 case, which wasn't very good. We have a task force and within three days, we managed to get through the problem. So this could have been resolved actually two weeks before.

We chose NetApp because we've used them before and we trust them.

The initial setup was complex. We are implementing ACI as well, application centric infrastructure and this is complex to the network. We are pushing a virtualization layer on to the network which is really complex.

We used an integrator who was great.

We looked at Dell EMC and NetApp but Dell EMC was expensive. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. An eight because it's very reliable but there are some flaws which you need time to tackle them. There are some things that can be better. Better integration would make it a ten. 

I would recommend this solution to someone considering it because of the support it comes with and the high-performance. We can scale it up to a level which we will never reach.

We use FlexPod for all of our tier two and tier three storage, in all of our business units.

The ability to scale on demand allows us to get the capacity for the customer in a much more efficient manner in a better timeframe.

From an infrastructure standpoint, we have more cohesiveness between the teams. This was a concern to us and we're working to solve it so that we can operate in a more efficient manner.

From an ESX node standpoint, using this solution has reduced our footprint tremendously. I would say that it has decreased by approximately thirty-five percent.

We have done a lot of consolidation on the storage side. We have been able to put into one cluster what would have taken three or four in the older environment. It benefits us because there is less administration.

Some of our applications were on solid-state flash disks and some were on a hybrid platform. This new configuration is all-flash, solid-state, so nobody should have complaints about the performance.

The storage performance has most likely increased anywhere from ten percent to probably twenty percent, attributed to the all-flash, solid-state hardware.

We have seen a more efficient use of compute resources because we have fewer nodes committed. I would say that we are probably thirty to thirty-five percent more efficient.

Our maintenance costs have absolutely been reduced. We were going to have to pay between one and two million dollars, and by putting this in, we're avoiding those costs.

Our TCO has been reduced because one big piece of our former infrastructure was made up of Cisco SAN switches, and they are pretty pricey per port when you're using fiber channel. Now, we're using iSCSI, so we're saving a lot of money.  

The most valuable feature for me is that you can swap out pieces when you have to lifecycle your equipment. You never have to go through a big freeze, but instead, do small pieces at a time. It reduces the migration hassle.

The tools bring the compute and storage together so that we can see it in a single pane of glass.

I would like to be able to pull in a file to specify a configuration upfront, rather than go through a lot of screens. There is a lot of manual effort there, and that is one place that mistakes can happen.

In the SolidFire interface, if you use the GUI, you have to create one run at a time, or one device at a time, which is something that needs to be fixed. Having to do that is ludicrous.

The stability has been good so far. We have had some drive-type issues where we had to apply a new code level, but in my opinion, it is just part of the normal business transactions. The storage nodes cause certain drives to act as though they've failed, but they really haven't. You just have to remove them, re-insert them, and they work again. It is a bug.

We've grown and grown, and we've done it all online, so there are no concerns around scaling from a storage standpoint.

We have been in contact with technical support a few times. Not a whole lot. I don't have any concerns with them.

The setup of this solution is lengthy and complex, but we have been speaking with people about how to make it more efficient.

The complexity has a lot to do with when you're initially setting the equipment up. There's a lot of values that you have to plug into their various screens, and then you also have to do a reboot to pick up whether it's going to be a storage node or a compute node. Then, they're looking to fix status too, and you have to do a reboot after that, so you lose forty-five minutes and if you have a large install, that's a long time to build the environment.

We used some of the professional services that were tied to the bundled packages.  We also obtain our hardware and resources through a third-party called WWT, and everything is great with them.

ROI is difficult to figure out but I can say that we have had two to three million dollars in OE savings by deploying this and getting rid of older equipment.

Even though this is a fairly new product, it is very appropriate for business solutions, and not just your mom-and-pop shops. It scales rather well, and to me, the big thing is the rolling upgrade scenario as far as when it comes time to lifecycle your equipment. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We have been using FlexPod for a virtualized environment, mainly for virtual machines running on VMware or Hyper-V with database solutions, application servers, and web servers. In general, it is for all data center infrastructure. 

It is our integrated system between NetApp and Cisco.

FlexPod gets very strong performance and efficiency from NetApp storage as well as it is very simple to install and implement. We can be up and running in two or three day after we get the rack.

CVDs reduce risks for implementations. We always make sure that all installations are based on best practices.

FlexPod has so many versions and capabilities. So, we can simplify the data flowing between edge, port, and cloud.

FlexPod can improve with a single control management interface to manage all aspects and components of the solution.

FlexPod is very stable. It has redundant components and the uptime is 100 percent.

FlexPod has a long history of innovations in each release. They introduce each new functionality into FlexPod, like cloud integration and All Flash FAS. We are seeing all the time NetApp and ONTAP working together to create new features. 

FlexPod allows you to scale as your business grows because they support a lot of expansions from the network sites.

In Brazil, there is a special chain to support FlexPod technical support issues. It is a special chain that is integrated between NetApp and the software layer.

The unified support is very important because we have a single point of contact. Whether it is Cisco, NetApp, or VMware, they work together in order to solve any problem that the FlexPod has.

The setup is very straightforward since all our installations are based on CVDs. So, it is very easy to install.

FlexPod can decrease data cost costs because it is an integrated solution. 

We fear high availability so we can't buy from different providers.

I would rate FlexPod as a 10 (out of 10).

The primary use case that we have is we like the support model of the FlexPod. We like it being converged with NetApp storage, Cisco, UCS, and VMware. We like having a single point of contact phone number for all support inquiries. These are some of the main selling features that we enjoy about FlexPod.

The validated design is really important for us because it gives us a model on which to base our architecture and continued support for all firmware upgrades. It also provides consistency throughout the environment.

FlexPod is making our staff more efficient. They don't have to spend as much time validating infrastructures and designs because that has been already taken care of out-of-the-box. The support model makes it a lot more efficient in the case of incidents.

The unified support is the most valuable feature. What I really enjoy about FlexPod is the support model. You have a single point of contact number for all troubleshooting issues and the vendor that you call takes ownership of the case. It goes with the NetApp validated designs, which are based on Cisco, which is really interesting.

The features of FlexPod that have had an impact on us are the new additions that we have made with the all-flash arrays: added performance, and flexibility management. These are very nice features. 

If they could reduce some of the complexity at the system manager level for ONTAP. I find it gives a lot of flexibility. You can do as much or as little as you want. But to be able to do as little as you want, you do have to do a lot. So, if they could bring that down to a more manageable effort level, that would be nice and simplify it a bit.

Stability has been awesome. No outages to report throughout the whole stack since we implemented the whole Flexspot solution. So, it's been really stable, which is nice. 

FlexPod has reduced the downtime in our environment because of the fact that we have a validated design and all the firmware is up-to-date, validated, and matched up across the entire platform.

We will see if it can scale, because it's still fairly new.

FlexPod is improving our business by giving us rapid support and rapid response to incidents.

The FlexPod unified support was really important for us in a case where we contacted one of the associated vendors. They redirected the case, taking charge of it, and really speeding up the process of troubleshooting with the other associated vendors, who are included with FlexPod

The initial setup was was very well coordinated between NetApp and us. It was very smooth and very painless. 

We leveraged NetApp services to come and install the solution in this case. It went very well.

FlexPod has saved data center costs, due to the fact that we reduced our footprint for storage in a big way. We went from three complete racks down to a 2U storage array for more than 300 terabytes of storage. 

We immediately saw a return on investment due to the fact that replacing our legacy storage arrays with the new AFFs reduced the footprint and maintenance costs. Overall, we saw an almost immediate ROI.

The short list was a essentially Dell EMC and NetApp. We chose NetApp because of this FlexPod support model.

Look at the end-to-end solution. Examine what the needs are. The solution is so flexible, and there are so many options. If you plan it well, you can plan a very cost effective cost-effective solution throughout the whole gamut of storage arrays available through NetApp.

I would rate it a nine (out of 10) because there is always room for improvement. I can't be perfect.

We don't use tiering to public cloud.

We have a bank customer in Brazil who sells a lot of credit cards.

The solution simplifies infrastructure from edge to core to cloud.

The solution has made our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks that drives our business forward.

The most valuable feature is the one support. Anytime that a customer buys a solution for a server, storage, or network, once they have trouble in their environment, everyone wants to find out who was wrong. With FlexPod, everyone is wrong and there is unified support. The best way to solve the problem is have it be everyone's problem, not just one person's problem. For FlexPod, you can call NetApp or Cisco, and I think it's the best way to solve the problem that the customer has.

The best improvement is the validated designs. Everything has compliance. Sometimes when you have a trouble with a machine, or in your switch or storage, you can just call one place to solve the problem. 

The all-flash with the fabric interconnect, along with the connections between the solution, that is the most important aspect.

It is not easy to implement. 

The networking configurations with UCS need improvement.

The application performance has improved in our organization. The configurations of the networks are very substantive. If the customer has trouble, we just have to make the configuration one time, then everything is okay.

The scalability is good because if you want to grow your environment, then you can do it. It has compliance, stacks, and nodes.

I would rate the technical support as a 10 out of 10.

The solution has decreased the unplanned downtime incidents in our organization because of the high availability of the solution. Sometimes, customers have talked about how good the support is. When they call to open a case, we can solve it in two days. To solve a problem, it use to longer: two weeks. Now, it can be solved in two to three days.

The initial setup is a little complex.

We are the integrator. We have five or six people to implement it. In our company, we are segmented, like networking, server, storage, etc.

Before this solution, the customer had around 15 people managing the environment. After purchasing the solution, they had just one. Their OPEX was better after this solution, and the ROI was very fast. ROI happens in about two years.

I think it has reduced data center cost but we don't have this feedback from the customer.

We would like everything in one piece of hardware. This way we can just sell the product like a silo by putting everything in a stack together.

I would rate it a nine (out of 10). It is the better way for the customer to has less troubles and problems.

You have one configuration and one compliance with two companies, Cisco and NetApp. I think this is the best way to make solutions.

Two hour production products are fully running in AWS. For the FlexPod, we just run everything on it.

We bought all the parts separately. So, we are running a certified FlexPod design with the AFF A700, UCS chassis, and Cisco Nexus FIs.

We are using both AWS and Azure.

The solution makes our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward. The environment is more homogeneous, so there are not as many technologies to study and learn. People can focus on improving their knowledge in existing technologies.

It simplifies our lives.

We use a smaller footprint of equipment right now.

• The compact design
• Cost savings

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization are very important. We use all certified designs to be eligible for the enterprise support and to receive support promptly. That is why we extremely rely on the certified designs and best practices.

There were a lot of elemental failures, like RAM or blades.

Hardware stability needs improvement. We replaced a lot of RAM this past year. We had to replace the complete blade once after extensive troubleshooting. Any given time, we have approximately one blade down within the entire infrastructure, unfortunately.

The stability is good. It breaks sometimes.

The solution has decreased the unplanned downtime incidents in our organization. We have almost eliminated downtime (by 90 percent) since using FlexPod.

The scalability is very expensive.

The technical support is good. We haven't needed to contact Cisco support regarding FlexPod as the entity. For NetApp and UCS, we receive a lot of attention.

The solution’s unified support for the entire stack is very important. With FlexPod, you receive a higher attention level when you ask for support. This is very beneficial in a time-sensitive business.

We did not have FlexPod before. We had a bunch of standalone HPE rack servers.

We switched after analyzing the performance needs and what customers wanted to spend.

We reduced the environmental footprint, like reducing electricity costs and heating. However, we are hosting our data centers from somebody else. We reduced our footprint of equipment by approximately 80 percent. Meaning that about 70 percent of our cabinets right now are empty because we switched to FlexPod.

For the deployment of UCS, we uses an integrator and fellow reseller. Our experience with them was very good. Everything works.

The application performance improved by 50 to 70 percent.

Cisco and NetApp were on our shortlist.

I would rate it an eight (out of 10).

For both data centers, everything that we use IT-wise is run on both of them.

We currently use versions 4.1 and 3.2.

The solution simplifies infrastructure from edge to core to cloud. It makes supporting it, troubleshooting it, and documentation a lot easier. Time to resolving a problem goes down quite a bit as well.

The most valuable feature is the one call number for support and the fact that all the documentation comes with it. They have all of the preprepared plans for the deployment model and we can just choose which one we want for VMware, etc. The hardware is all listed. We buy that and away we go. It's called validated design.

The validated design is nice if we have issues with anything. We can call the vendor, or if anyone says anything, we can say, "Well, we're already running by the certified design to the verify design. We're not doing anything out of the ordinary." It makes support a lot easier.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization is very important because of the whole troubleshooting problem, or if we run into any supportability problems. We say, "We've done what was asked of the company. It is all verified. We shouldn't have any funny things happening." As for management, if they come down and ask questions, we can say, "We're following best practices."

Mainly, the interface needs improvement. I'm not a big fan of UCS Manager, sometimes. I believe they released the new one, and it seems like in every version something changes and something else doesn't work. When they switched to HTML5, I believe we had issues in version 3.2. They fixed it in the next version. The amount of work to upgrade a system for change control is tedious to have issues every time. I would recommend more regression testing, then testing the different browsers in that.

The solution decreased the unplanned downtime incidents in our company because it's newer, more supported. HPE had a lot of bugs in the system. Our guys would go to make a change, then all of a sudden, they would run into a bug. Next thing, we are down. There is a lot better documentation and support behind the FlexPods.

We haven't had any issues yet. Anytime that we've ever had to scale, we just add another blade chassis, and away we go. We throw in more blades. It is very easy. We reuse all of our templates for that. So, it is very quick to deploy new hardware.

The technical support is the best out of all the ones that I'm responsible for calling, e.g., compared to Dell EMC. We've had issues with Dell EMC in the past, HPE as well. 

Anytime that I have called NetApp, they have an answer right away. Before with Dell EMC and HPE, we've been bounced around in their Tier 1 and 2 before you get to talk to someone who knows what is going on. That doesn't seem to happen with NetApp, or if it happens behind the scenes, we don't see it.

The solution’s unified support for the entire stack is very important to us. When we have trouble with Fibre Channel or networking, it's just one number to call. You get someone who knows the whole stack versus having to chase down Brocade, Cisco, or NetApp.

Before, we used to run on HPE Blade Centers, so we had a networking guy, an HPE Blade Center guy, and a VMware guy. Using UCS and FlexPod, we now have two people at the company who run that whole stack, so there is no finger-pointing. It eases a lot of troubleshooting, because it's just two people versus multiple teams.

It has improved the application performance in our company. For us, it was about replacing old hardware with new hardware. The application performance was slow before, and it is better now.

It was straightforward because I have done it multiple times before. I've had to do it probably four times now. Now, I just know what I need to do versus the first time I had to it. We worked with a reseller and basically read all the documentation the first time.

The process for deployment is rack and stack, then upgrade to the latest firmware. We go through all our templates and gather what we're currently using compared to what the latest version of UCS offers. We make any updates, as necessary,  then reconfigure, redeploy, and away we go.

We did it ourselves.

We went from two racks down to one at one location. We stayed the same at another location. Power-wise, we never really paid attention to it. With cooling, there is less hardware.

The solution has saved our company time.

We decided on NetApp mainly cost because of cost and the fact that we already have the in-house knowledge and expertise. Therefore, it just made sense to stay within the ecosystem we were in.

Usually, we have a look at other vendors, like Dell EMC and HPE. However, currently, it was based on the time cycle of the hardware refresh. It made sense to just go with what we already had.

We are looking at going down the next refresh with NVMe, and NetApp is the only one who offers that end-to-end solution.

I would rate the solution as an eight (out of 10). There is always room for improvement, but it's the best technology that I have used so far.

Genuinely have an understanding of where you want to go. We've had issues before at other companies where people like a hardware. Don't look at the hardware. Instead, look at what you want to do, then work backwards.

Right now, all of our needs are currently being met. I know we're going to move towards NVMe with the one data center once we update. However, that is pretty much the newest thing on the radar for me.

It is mostly for small remote sites. The WAN link isn't good enough for them to come to the enterprise site at this time. So, we do a lot of file shares, VMs, etc. It's to run the local business.

Our FlexPods are NetApp FASs, Cisco UCS, and Cisco switches. That's our version of a FlexPod. We call them ROBOs (remote office/branch office). We have about a hundred throughout the world that we deploy in different regions. For us personally, I do the NetApp side of it. We're running NetApp version 9.5P6. That is the lowest version that we run in our ROBO environment. 

While the deployment model is on-prem, we are moving to a backup model in the cloud for them for DR. In the next month or two, we are going to start that.

It's done really good things. A lot of it for us is being able to have that storage with the whole solution onsite at a small site, which may not have the WAN capabilities to use the corporate servers for their applications. So, that does help.

A lot of what we've done with the FlexPod is to replace hardware that was failing. We had a lot of UCS solutions go into replace IBM Blade Servers which were majorly failing. We had all types of problems with those. 

We've also had challenges in the beginning where we didn't size sites right. We just totally blew it. We took their monthly closing down to a crawl, then ended up replacing it with an AFF solution, which was great. It really helped us out a lot.

It's just been a little bit here and a little bit there. The biggest thing is being able to have that remote site, and that they can keep running. If they lose the WAN, they can keep running. It's helped not having P1s and P2s at sites because they're dependent on corporate to be able to get something and they lose network connectivity. E.g., we had a site where the roof went. The site is in Fargo, North Dakota. They had a roof collapse at their site, but they kept going because, while they had other problems, they weren't reliant on going to a corporate data center to run their apps in the factory. They were sitting there able to keep continuously running even though they had a roof collapse.

We have done the all-flash at some sites. The one site where we totally blew the configuration, we came in with an All Flash FAS, and it went from them not knowing if they were going to be able to do year-end closing to year-end closing happening because they're an Oracle site. They had been on SAN previously, and all our ROBOs are NAS. We don't have any SAN in our ROBO environment, which is our FlexPod environment. So, they went from a SAN environment to a small FAS that didn't meet their needs, then with that AFF, we've had no problems since then. We installed it right before Christmas, literally two days before Christmas by pulling out the old and putting in the new.

For the entire stack, we have what we call a ROBO team in each of the regions. I'm part of the U.S. team. We have the same team work on this stack for every installation in the Americas, which includes places like North America, Mexico, and Brazil. It's really helped us because we've done documentation that we can push off to our separate teams that do the support, like server support, UCS support, and our storage support. This helps us out. Everything is the same. We've tried to keep everything the same and keep them as common as we can, so it helps with our operations team, which actually is in India. They know that if they can go to any one of those sites and there should be very similar setup.

For the longest time, with all the failures that they had with the IBM Blade Servers, our server staff was rushing to bring in storage and servers because of all the failures. Because of this solution, we now don't have very many problems. The only problems that we do have is sometimes storage gets a little out of control. They need more than they thought they needed. Other than that, it's been very smooth. We rarely have major problems at that size.

We've gotten it down to a science to install. So, it's been very easy to install. It has been very flexible for us because some sites don't need as much storage as other sites. Instead of going for a regular four terabyte, 12-drive solution, we can take it down to a two terabyte SaaS solution if the site doesn't need that much storage. Because we're trying not to have storage just sitting there, doing nothing, it's very flexible for us. We do have sites that have over a 100 terabytes. So, it's been a very flexible solution for us.

We do a little bit of Oracle at some of the sites, so the validated designs have been very good. We've had very good results. We have no complaints about latency or anything like that. Most of it is a lot of just file shares and stuff like that. But we do have Oracle and SQL at some sites.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. It does depend on what model you get. For example, we don't try to put a small model in a site that we think would be growing.

The technical support has been very good. I have had a few calls with them. I had one problem at the site where I had an aggregate that would not shrink after I had deleted some stuff. It took a few tries to get the right guy on the call. We do have a NetApp SAM with our company, and it really took getting to him to get the solution fixed. 

They were trying to replace all the older hardware with new hardware, getting some new sites as well. At some of the sites, they used the IBM Blade Servers, which were having high failure rates. That was a big wreck. We were going to a UCS solution, so they were trying to integrate into the UCS solution as well.

Three or four years ago, our management decided they were going to put in EMC VNX at a site that had a lot of Oracle in it. It was one of our bigger sites. They do big trucks there, and for the three years that VNX sat there, they had all types of Oracle problems in terms of latency issues, but could never get that latency issue fixed. We brought in a ROBO solution, and I didn't do any tweaking on it. I just put it in and put the Oracle on SAS drives, then separated them out by themselves. We've had no complaints in two years.

We did not use WWT for the initial setup, and we did have problems. A lot of it had to do with the gentleman who worked on the program left. From our perspective, it was a lot of trial and error. It took a couple deployments to get a rhythm to it. After that, since the first two to three deployments, it's been very smooth. With the same team, we know what we're doing. We have the same project leader.

We did the deployment, but we did use our WWT. With WWT, we have them set up the basic configurations on everything. For the storage solution, they set up by the IPs and made sure everything is connected correctly. They don't get into the deep dive into the software or deployment. That is something we do.

They get it so when it's at the site, it gets plugged in. The network guy gets the ports plugged in and gets support set up. Then, we can get onto the storage and UCS, provision VMs, etc. Once that's setup, we can start working.

We have seen ROI.

The solution has decreased the unplanned downtime incidents in our organization by 25 to 30 percent.

Everything is purchased, so we do not do any leasing with this product.

I would rate the solution a solid nine (out of 10). The solution has been good for us. Nothing is perfect. That is why I wouldn't give it a ten. However, everything that we have done with it has been spot on. We've had very little problems with it. We're able to integrate it really well.

I would recommend going for this solution.

Our primary use case for this solution is virtualization with Hyper-V.

We are using Cisco UCS and NetApp together in our FlexPod solution.

The validated designs for major enterprise applications are very important for our organization because we are part of the local government, and this solution is a critical platform for a broad array of applications and services that we provide to the public.

The history of innovations, in particular, the inclusion of all-flash, has had a positive effect on our database performance.

We are using the solution's tiering to AWS as a backup target for all of our data. It is essentially our DR and it is being sent out to AWS using SnapMirror.

In terms of making our staff more efficient, we have had a mixed experience. It isn't necessarily FlexPod, per se. Rather, we chose the wrong hypervisor. Hyper-V is not well supported. NetApp and Cisco don't know as much about running Hyper-V as they do VMware on top of the platform. It was really our choice of hypervisor that is the negative point.

We have been able to reduce our data center costs since implementing this solution. Three or four years ago, we were able to shrink our data center by fifty percent. This was a co-location leased space that we were able to reduce.

Our capital expenditures have been reduced, I would say, although I do not have exact figures.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the integration between NetApp and Cisco products. 

From the Cisco side, the most valuable features of this solution are the data center density, the deployment, and the management of the servers and the networking.

Hyper-V is not as well supported by NetApp and Cisco as VMware is, which is something that should be improved.

Across the board, this solution is very stable. We're very happy. It is very resilient and fault-tolerant. Downtime would usually be due to human error.

On both the storage and the compute side, this solution is very scalable.

The solution's unified support for the entire stack is significant. In my experience, I've had situations where we built an architecture that did not have that model. It was difficult because as a customer, we ended up coordinating the support of the multiple vendors.

Our experience with them has been positive. We do have a technical account manager on the Cisco side, and the coordinated support is available if necessary.

Prior to this solution, we were using a multi-vendor storage solution that included HP Blade servers with equipment from EMC. We switched to Cisco, which was a strategic management decision.

The initial setup of this solution was complex because we were doing it for the first time. We have some very experienced Cisco engineers on staff, which was key to implementing Cisco UCS because it was familiar to them.

We had a reseller assist us with the deployment, eight years ago. Because this was new for us, NetApp was involved to make sure that it was successful.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing FlexPod.

There have been some improvements on the Cisco UCS side since we began using this solution. In the earlier days, it was more difficult to upgrade, and there was pain involved during the process. That has gotten a lot better over time.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of product is to consider their requirements. If their need is for a dense data center that is scalable, then this would be the choice because it scales easier than any other product I'm aware of.

This is a good solution, but our experience hasn't been perfect.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our solution includes 7K switches, an 8060 as our filer, and Cisco 1610 as our interconnect switches.

We are not on the cloud yet, but we are currently exploring all of our options.

We use our FlexPod for all of our work, including our company applications.

This solution has been helpful to our organization in many ways including provisioning storage, provisioning applications, and maintaining applications.

The validated designs for major enterprise applications are very important for us. They help with time availability, architecture, and security. From an application uptime perspective, it's important.

This solution has helped to simplify our infrastructure. All of these individual components integrate well with each other, and from a customer standpoint, I don't really have to worry about compatibility and other things on my end.

The unified support for the entire stack is something that is important to us.

This solution has decreased our unplanned downtime.

The best thing about this solution is the tight integration with VMware, Cisco, and NetApp from both a hardware and software perspective. The integration of the products works seamlessly.  If you have a mismatch in versions then FlexPod can help you with that, otherwise, you may have problems.

I would like to see more storage-related features.

This solution has not reduced our capital expenditures.

The stability of this solution is good. We have not had any downtime, nor issues in terms of application performance.

Scalability is good because we can add blades to our system.

The support for this solution has been good. The support team maintains applications on all of these products. Their training is good and the support is good.

We purchased this solution to increase our capacity.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward and easy.

We had consultants from EBT assist us with this solution, and our experience with them was good.

My advice for anybody who is researching this type of solution is to consider their requirements. If they're looking for an on-premises solution, with everything integrated, then I would recommend FlexPod.

This solution is good, but it is not perfect.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is virtualization. We run both VMware and Hyper-V.

We currently have an AFF8040 that is running with Cisco UCS in our FlexPod solution. We have a four-node cluster, where we have the AFF but we also have a second cluster with spinning disks. It's nice to have them clustered because I can move my high-performance workloads over onto the SSD, easily. If we have things that we determine aren't taking advantage of the SSD, I can volume migrate it back to the spinning disk and not waste high-performance capacity on workloads that aren't utilizing the speed of the SSD.

The solution's validated designed for major enterprise apps are very important to us because we would prefer not to open support calls, and with the validated configuration, it just works.

We are not yet using this solution for tiering to a public cloud, but it is something that we're looking into.

This solution has improved our organization in that we have reduced administration time and reduced troubleshooting time. We know that the performance is there when we need it.

The history of innovations has had a positive effect on our organization. NetApp is always coming up with features that I want before I know that I want them. For example, it was helpful when we no longer had to dedicate a certain number of disks to our root volume.

In terms of application performance, bringing the AFF in has made a huge difference in some of our manufacturing and labeling applications.

With the Cisco UCS, having the profiles and being able to swap hardware in and out is super valuable.

This solution is easy to set up and maintain.

I like the fact that NetApp has fully embraced the cloud and the SaaS backup is available. I always hear from my other cloud engineers that Microsoft backs it up, but I don't trust that. I want my snapshots.

The only support call that we have had in six years was related to an ONTAP upgrade, where one of the controllers didn't patch properly.

This solution is incredibly stable. In the past six or seven years that we have been using NetApp, aside from the disk replacement calls that we get occasionally, I have only had one other support call. We see disk failures once or twice per year.

The other support call was related to an ONTAP upgrade where one of the controllers just did not patch properly. The other clusters were still working fine on the other controller, and we got support involved. It was a known bug and they took care of it. The cluster was back up and running with full stability in under an hour.

We have not had to scale this solution much, although our CAO has tasked us with being fully cloud by 2025. 

I haven't had to open up any support cases recently. That said, the unified support for the entire stack is very important to us. If we ever did need to open a support call, we know that NetApp and Cisco are going to work together for a solution. When you get solutions that aren't paired like that, a lot of the time you get vendors pointing the finger back and forth at each other and bounce the support tickets back and forth. Knowing that NetApp and Cisco have worked together to verify this solution and are committed to working together to solve problems is very important for our organization.

On the occasion where we needed to use technical support, it was excellent.

We were using IBM SAN and HP servers before this solution, and our uptime has increased from about ninety-five percent uptime to five-nines or six-nines.

Our IBM SVC SAN was over-engineered. The person that brought it in didn't want to take the time to properly size the solution, so they just overbought. We switched to this solution because management wanted us to look for ways to cost-save.

I had a very small amount of experience with NetApp while I was with a previous employer, but the storage people at the company spoke very highly of NetApp. We brought them in to compare cost, features, and performance, and NetApp was brought into the environment after that.

This solution is super easy and straightforward to set up. It is almost "set and forget", and everything works really well. It actually took longer than it should have, simply because I stopped the engineer and had him walk me through every single step so that I understood what he was doing and why he was doing it.

Without my interruption, he could have spun it up himself in a couple of hours. However, it was important for me to understand how the system was deployed and why things were set up the way that they were so that I was able to support it going forward.

We brought in a company called MCPc to help us deploy initially. Interestingly, the technician from MCPc who helped us with the deployment ended up becoming our NetApp sales engineer, so I still work with him to this day. I knew nothing about NetApp at the time, so he got me up to speed initially. Then I went to a couple of NetApp Insights and took a couple of certification courses, and I am very comfortable with it now.

The total cost of ownership with this solution is good.

Prior to choosing this option, we looked at a smaller IBM solution, as well as solutions from EMC. The big winning factor for NetApp was cost. At the same time, since we've brought NetApp in, I've found that NetApp's storage efficiency is unparalleled.

I recently had a discussion with a business unit in one of our remote sites that needed some more performance out of their 2650 and they were telling my bosses that they could get an IBM SSD solution for $10,000 USD. Their cost of adding a NetApp shelf would be $26,000 USD. I have no idea where they got those numbers, but never in my entire career have I experienced IBM being cheaper than anybody else.

When we factored in storage efficiency and cost savings that we get from using Commvault IntelliSnap for backups, it makes absolutely no sense to use anything other than NetApp.

When we originally looked at bringing Commvault into our environment for backup, using Commvault streaming technology, we were looking at several million dollars for backup. When we went through this with the NetApp rep and actually looked at how much streaming backup we needed for Commvault, and how much could be done natively with IntelliSnap, that cost went from several mission dollars down to a quarter of a million dollars. That was huge.

We are a very lean organization, so this solution has not necessarily made our staff more efficient. If we were not already that way then we wouldn't get anything done.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is to make sure that you include FlexPod and be sure to consider the costs in the evaluation. I cannot imagine a situation where the total cost of ownership is not comparable. 

This is a solution that makes my life easier and I can always count on it being up. For me, that is the most important thing.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Everything with NetApp right now is our DR and restore strategy. We have all of our VMs installed in an on-premises FlexPod.

We have another filter down in our DR site and everything is replicated using SnapProtect and SnapSuite.

The validated designs for major enterprise applications are very important to our organization. We have to make sure that everything is fully supported, end to end, and that we're not going to have any problems. When people have trouble they resort to finger-pointing and complain about the network, servers, or storage. With the one validated design, we contact NetApp and get support for everything we need.

This solution has had a serious impact on our organization. How do you measure not having outages? It has allowed us to do business without any interruptions, which means that I can sleep well at night. After the last hurricane, we were completely up once it ended because we just brought up all of the VMs using VMware.

With respect to the history of innovations, the strategy that NetApp has taken with Cloud volumes online, Azure NetApp files, and all of those things, is good. We've already started using cloud volumes online and we're putting in a new solution with NetApp where we're going to be tiering everything off to Azure because we have a huge presence there. For example, we have an SQL server there, and we're going to be replacing the drives that are on SQL with Cloud Volumes Online so that we can leverage efficiencies. Other data, such as shares, are also going to be tiered off to Azure so that we don't have to be using production cycles, production backups and IOPS and everything, locally. We're instead going to send it to cloud storage.

Using FlexPod has absolutely made our staff more efficient.

This solution has increased our application performance, but we have been using this solution since 2003 and no longer keep metrics.

Our data center costs have been reduced because we've been able to shrink our data center. About ten years ago, we were at about one hundred and seventy servers. Now, we're down to eight blades. We've gone from seven racks down to two racks in the data center, and if you think about power, cooling, and everything else, it's a significant saving.

The most valuable features of this solution are efficiency and simplicity. You don't have to waste a lot of time managing things.

We have had some problems with SnapSuite and the replication functionality.

This solution is extremely stable, rock-solid.

We haven't had any failures, hardware-wise, in several years. The only issues that we have had were with SnapSuite, and it was related to replication. For this issue, we engaged with technical support.

This is a very scalable solution.

The unified support for the entire stack is extremely important for us. Anytime we have an issue, even though we haven't had any recently, we need to get it resolved as quickly as possible. Having a single vendor to go to for everything just makes it that much easier.

When we have had to contact technical support, they were very responsive, they follow up, and they take ownership of the issues right away. I would rate them a five out of five. 

We have always been using NetApp, although about twelve years ago we went through consolidation. We had Dell storage, some Hitachi, some IBM storage, and then we had a NetApp filer. Our multi-vendor hardware came about from purchasing the cheapest thing that we could get when something else was needed.

When we met with our NetApp rep, they came in and suggested that we consolidate. We had been having trouble with backups, using Syncsort, and they suggested that we move to SnapProtect and get everything on NetApp. They helped us to take everything off of all the other storage, consolidate down to NetApp, and then replace our entire backup solution with SnapSuite and SnapProtect. After that, they made sure that everything would replicate back up to the DR site.

The initial setup of this solution is fairly straightforward. Obviously, you need to know what storage systems are being used, etc, but in general, it is straightforward.

We use Insight, formerly Datalink, to assist us with the maintenance of this solution. They are excellent. They helped with our implementation and they help us to deploy all of the solutions. If we have any questions about designs, where we are going in terms of the roadmap, etc, then between Insight and NetApp they are invaluable when helping us to make decisions.

I would say that we have seen ROI, although I do not have numbers to support it.

I am looking forward to using the cloud enablement that they have been working on.

In the last three years, I lost money that was budgeted for capital expenditures, meaning that I have had to give it back because I literally have nothing to buy. We do have operating expenses and we have the capability, but everything that we are doing is moving into Azure, using managed services and software as a service. This means that we've been reducing our hardware footprint significantly. Especially with the efficiencies that NetApp brings, we don't need as much storage space.

My advice for anybody researching this solution is to evaluate your workloads.

NetApp is definitely the way to go.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We have a custom-built FlexPod with a Cisco 6332-16FI and an AH-700.

It is being used as our primary network infrastructure.

The solution’s validated designs are pretty important for major enterprise apps in our organization. We follow them to make sure that we're compliant.

This solution runs our VMs. Our SQL databases, for example, are in our VMs, so everything is virtualized.

Implementing this solution has made our staff more efficient because once it is built, it's a matter of provisioning additional VMs. It's pretty simplified.

I think that with the new all-flash array, our application performance has been improved.

We did not have very much unplanned downtime before implementing our current solution, so I can't say that our new solution is much different in that regard.

This solution has probably not reduced our data center costs because our previous solution was relatively small. It was just one rack.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the stability.

I would like to see a more centralized support model.

To this point, stability has been good. We have had no downtime since I built this solution.

In our previous FlexPod, I think that both of the UCS-FIs went down during the firmware upgrade. That caused an outage. I do not know all of the details because that was before I joined the company.

We can expand using additional chassis and additional disk shelves.

The solution's unified support for the entire stack is beneficial. Basically, it's kind of all-in-one.

The technical support for this solution is ok, although we dislike using the online robot. It's caused delays in us reaching out to a real support engineer.

I built the current FlexPod and it was pretty straightforward.

We had another FlexPod that was built by somebody else. It's easy to build and we are in the process of migrating all of the workloads over. We're always refreshed.

I also have experience with Vblock.

We do not use the solution’s storage tiering to the public cloud. We are not using the cloud at all for the moment.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to engage some type of professional services just to set it up if they are unfamiliar with the technology.

This is a solution that I recommend, and if you're already familiar with other similar technologies then it is pretty simple to put it together.

We do not have the license for NDME yet, and we would like to see how much improvement it is over our current setup.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

We use this system for the performance, cost of ownership, agility, expandability of it, and the automation.

I manage this solution, but I don't think of the FlexPod solution on a whole. I manage all of the individual components including Cisco UCS Manager, UCS Director, and UCS Central. I work with all of the storage devices including the flash arrays and the filers. I work with the switches via Flex channel or on the ethernet side.

We use the solution's tiering to a public cloud for archival purposes. We have everything in-house for the most part, but there is some data that is not that critical but needs to be archived because of government regulations. We have to keep it for quite some time.

With respect to the history of innovation, it has affected our ease of use, cost of ownership, we use less manpower to manage it, and we have better uptime. As far as disaster recovery, that's been a really big plus because we have the two fabrics. 

This solution has definitely simplified our infrastructure from edge to core to cloud. It's a simple process, for example, the way you create the cloud pools. It's not complicated and very transparent.

Our staff has been made more efficient by using this solution, enabling them to spend time on other tasks. Basically, they have time to do things other than managing FlexPod. It includes day-to-day operations, working on and closing support tickets, and other mundane activities.

Our application performance has increased since we implemented this solution. One a scale of one to ten we were probably at five, and now we're at a nine.

The number of unplanned downtime incidents has absolutely decreased since we started using this solution. We went from having maybe a hundred tickets a month down to perhaps ten.

This solution has helped reduce our data center costs because everything is centralized now and we don't have to have multiple data centers, with equipment from different vendors, different support contracts, and so on.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the automation point because it's a lot less staff to have to manage it.

We would like to see the automation improved because there has been a learning curve having to create the workflows. They're looking at other automation tools, including one from Red Hat called Ansible. 

This solution is very stable. It has never gone down. We've had issues that were attributed to user error, but if everything is done correctly on it then you're not going to have to worry about any downtime.

This solution is very scalable. UCS, itself, will scale up to twenty chassis and you have eight slots in each one. That's scalability. The same thing with storage. If you need to add more disk shelves then you just add them. As far as bandwidth goes, we have seven Ks up into the core, which is over a terabyte worth of bandwidth right there.

The solution's unified support is very important to us. It's just one number to call and then we get supported on all of the different components.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate their technical support a nine.

Prior to this solution, I had experience with Vblocks. It is basically the same product, but on the storage side it uses all EMC and the compute is all UCS. All of the networking is still Cisco, VMware is still VMware.

The initial setup of this solution requires some training. Once you learn it then everything is simple, but in getting to that point, there is a bit of learning curve. The complexity comes from having so many different components.

The need to have skills from several different backgrounds. You need to have experience as a network administrator, a network engineer, a storage administrator, and a virtualization expert. It is a four-technology domain that includes network, compute, storage, and virtualization. Then you have a server administrator, and you have to combine all of these roles into one person. That is where the learning curve comes from.

On the Vblock side, they use VCE, but I don't know who they use on the FlexPod side.

We use Cisco validated designs but we don't do our own designs.

Our decision to implement this solution was not influenced by the fact that it integrates with all of the major public clouds.

FlexPod gives you the ability to manage the system in a simplified way. It gives you automation capability, which means a lot less manpower to manage it. Power and cooling requirements are lower. The total cost of ownership is lower. Finally, it just gives staff more freedom to do some of the other mundane day-to-day operations.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We're in a financial institute and we have two data centers. We use this solution for all of our applications.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps are very useful for us from an engineering standpoint.

In terms of simplifying our infrastructure, we do not use the cloud right now.

FlexPod has saved our organization in terms of capital expenditures, although I cannot say by how much at this time.

This solution makes it easier for us, as engineers, to do a lot of design and a lot of the pre-work that goes into things. It is good in that respect.

This solution's history of innovations affected our operations because by using all-flash, we've sped up applications that couldn't do what they do because they were inefficient. These inefficiently-built applications needed more resources, so we used all-flash to compensate.

Generally speaking, application performance has been improved through the use of all-flash storage.

Using this solution has made our staff more efficient because they are spending less time fiddling with the backend stuff. It is more intuitive.

This solution has not had much effect on our unplanned downtime, but we did not have much before.

The most valuable features are the integration and ease of use. The integration is intuitive.

This solution is easy to learn. There is nothing hidden, and it's all available for you.

This is an expensive solution.

We have run into any issues yet, so as far as I can see, stability is good.

This solution is easily scalable, and we have scaled quite a bit.

We haven't had many cases where we have needed NetApp technical support. When we have, it has been quick and efficient.

I was not involved with the initial setup, but I can say that the work we have done with revamping the solution has been straightforward and simple.

We used a reseller to assist us with our original implementation.

Since that time, we have done half of the work ourselves.

FlexPod is expensive but from my perspective, it is worth the cost. I say this because of the ease of use and performance benefits.

The fact that FlexPod integrates with all major public clouds did not specifically influence our decision to go with it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It's a tenant environment. We sell it off to customers who need an environment, depending on the scale of their company, where there might be a couple of servers or 100 to 200 servers.

We are our own cloud provider. We use VMware vCloud Director because we provide that to our customers.

For UCS, we are on version 6.2. For NetApp, we are on 9.5.

Our private cloud sector of our company has grown exponentially thanks to the ease of deployment of the FlexPod architecture. We are also able to deploy a console to customers who want on-prem environments in a smaller deployment structure with a UCS Mini and direct-attached storage. So, it's helped us exponentially grow the business.

All-flash has helped the company a lot, especially for business critical applications. We found that customers want more performance than ever based on what is out there in the market. We find that innovation and integration with the whole FlexPod design has helped a lot.

The guides that we use to install FlexPods are always up-to-date. This is really helpful, especially if there is a new product with NetApp moving so far forward and Cisco as well. For them to join together and update a centralized document for the install process, it is really good. It helps us understand if there are features from the first version that we installed while upgrading that we need to implement. Those are in the document. So, we find that document useful and helpful when moving forward.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization is very important. It helps us to understand what we need to do and deliver, doing it at a supported level for our customers.

It would be nice to have something like an automated, upgrade solution The tasks needed to upgrade the hardware within FlexPod are still quite behind compared to some of its other aspects. That's more on the Cisco side. For the NetApp side, the upgrade process is quite simple. It's been simplified. So, that's something that could be looked at.

It has gone to HTML5, but it's still quite a bit bland. It still seems a bit like there were some features in the Java version that are quite hard to get into in the HTML5 version of UCS Manager, where you go to a profile and you need to drag it in. You can't move the box across. All the boxes are different sizes. If you have a lot of names, then you can't move it across, which is quite annoying when you're trying to do it.

I would like more with the integration pieces, e.g., more with the REST APIs to be able to access it remotely.

The footprint in the data center is quite large, especially when you scale out. Maybe find some hardware in the future, where if a new blade comes out, then Cisco can say, "Look, we'll buy those blades back off you, and we'll give you this blade for X amount of money." A buyback scheme would be good for hardware, and even NetApp as well. Something like a buyback scheme for blades and stuff moving forward would be good, because I know that they're going to put more power into them. E.g., replacing four blades might equal one blade, which would be awesome, but we are still going to have those four blades around. Maybe having something where it will give you this much money for these blades so we can upgrade. That would be perfect. 

With the upgrading, making that a little bit more streamlined and a bit easier to do, so it doesn't require as many man hours to do. I would like prerequisites for an upgrade.

It's very stable. Since we've had it in, knock on wood, it's been absolutely flawless. We've had some issues, but that's to do with the upgrades and mainly with the fabric interconnects, and they can be a bit finicky. They're not as robust. They're robust in a way if you don't touch them, they look fine. But, in the upgrade process, we've had a lot of issues where there would either be corrupted images or they wouldn't upgrade, which would cause one of the switches to fail. Some of that stuff is very worrying. But from a performance perspective, it's worked as it should.

It's highly scalable. It scales really well, but that also comes back to how you want to scale it. In terms of whether you want to add more chassis and if you want to add anything more to that. Then, that comes under the costings of the data center because the chassis are quite big. However, the scalability of it is perfect. We haven't had an issues with it.

The technical support is pretty good. I would give it a seven or eight out of 10. A full 10 would be having the automated upgrading, getting them to do the upgrades, as that would take a lot of time off us having to do them. I am sure that there is a team you can get for that support, but it's quite expensive. Maybe that type of support for upgrades can be bundled in when someone buys a FlexPod deployment. Most of our time on the environment is spent on upgrading of the infrastructure.

We have really good support from NetApp. We get really good, really fast support from Cisco, as well. E.g., if there is a failed memory chip in one of the host servers that needs replacements, they are always on time. They send it out when they need to, and if the problem is not resolved, then they move that forward to the next tier.

We used NetApp from the start. Before my time, I'm not too sure what they were using. I think before it was just storage on servers, like integrated in. As long as I've been here, I've been using NetApp. 

At the time we went with that solution, public clouds didn't exist. However, knowing that it does integrate with public clouds is an absolute bonus. It's awesome because we're moving towards that type of integration. Knowing this makes our lives a lot easier because we don't have to move from where we are to get to where we want to go. We've already got what we want, which is absolutely amazing. So, it's great.

We are very strong NetApp partners.

The initial setup was straightforward. Complexity was added more from a customer perspective, where you need that custom setup for what they require. With the bundle, we did get to go to training for FlexPod's deployment and that sort of area. That also helped us a lot to understand the nuts and bolts and detail of what it is as well, which helped a lot with that knowledge.

We work with Cisco and NetApp for the deployment. The guides are absolutely intuitive. You go from start to finish, deploying it all in one. In terms of time, we have used them to reference different aspects of how we should set it up if there are custom requirements, because not all deployments are put it in and deploy it as we go. We have had some custom requirements over time, but the initial one was just straight in and cable. It was quite intuitive for us, which was good. We didn't need for anyone to come out and install it.

I haven't seen ROI.

From an application point of view, customers have seen an improvement in response times for mainly database-based applications, and the need to have a lot of reads and writes for all-flash storage. The upgrades with the hosts from UCS to the new blades with PASA processes and more memory have also improved.

From a flexible deployment and scalability point of view, we got NetApp. From enterprise and beyond, they are doing above and beyond anything that anyone else is doing at the moment.

Cisco are the leaders in LAN technology. With their hardware for unified communication of the UCS bundle, it's so straightforward and easy to set up. It integrates with a lot of other major vendors, which makes our lives a lot easier.

I would definitely support integrating FlexPod within a company, depending on their requirements. Even if it wasn't a a full, flexible deployment, just having a smaller deployment of the UCS Mini with a smaller NetApp for a customer, it is so scalable. You can do it for a smaller customer to an enterprise customer. I would fully support them implementing this into a data center based on their requirements.

The solution has made our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward, but there's still a lot of manual overhead that needs to be done. We're installing new chassis or upgrades. Upgrades is a really big one.

We find that the UCS shells are still quite power intensive. Maybe moving forward to the new releases of the blades that they have in their FlexPod deployment, we might be able to change a couple of blades to one blade because the power is exactly the same. They have the same quality of processing and memory. Right now, we find that it does take up a lot of space and power. Hopefully, in the future, once we do go through the upgrade process, pull out the old blades, and whatever we need to replace, we might do that.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. Nothing is perfect. You always have that one percent where you say, "Aw, I wish it was doing this," but at the end of the day, it can't. You're always going to be a bit picky.

Our primary use case is healthcare for billing applications. With FlexPod, we use it mostly on some databases and billing applications. We are also using it now for containers, mostly with VMware.

We have the Cisco UCS M4 Blade Server, 6300 Series Fabric Interconnect, and NetApp AFF A800.

The number one feature is easily support. It is all converged. If it something breaks, it is easy to fix. It is easy to upgrade. These are some of the key reasons why we deployed it.

The majority of the time, if we need more storage, then we need to work with customizing the NetApp deployment. Right now, we just do a generic deployment, then wherever we have a need for storage, we have to move some application out of the next FlexPod deployment. One thing is to customize based on the requirements, but the requirements change so frequently, they are absolutely obsolete in six months.

I would like to see more artificial intelligence and machine language baked into the environment on the healthcare side. Right now, a lot of people are not leveraging AI, but we are in the insurance business and would like more flexibility by offering AI as a feature set into the healthcare environment.

The stability is pretty good.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization are very important. With upgrades and fixes, we can't afford downtime. That is number one. When you have multiple systems coming together there is always a chance of something not being compatible or something goes wrong. With this converge infrastructure, we know it has been tested by the companies. We know the issues beforehand, which is critical.

The firmware is all pretested and published. So, we do not have to go through the same process. That is how it impacts downtime.

The scalability from the computer is pretty good. On the storage, they need to do something. They have to come up with some other options to scale both on the computer and also on the storage layer. An idea to fix this is possibly connecting the NetApp high availability model with a FlexPod by having them sit right next to each other. 

We have used technical support a few times. I'm mostly on the architecture side. The engineering team uses it. I hardly use the technical support, though I've used it in the past. It's good depending on the support level you get. We have enterprise level support. We have the highest level support from Cisco and have never had an issue.

The solution’s unified support for the entire stack is critically important because we cannot afford downtime.

Before, it was on a Cisco UCS C240 M5 Rack Server, and we moved some of the applications on a very limited use case. With the innovation of the AFF A800, its ease of management, and supportability, we have seen some performance improvement with the solution. The performance has improved by two or three times.

The setup was fairly complex because of the sheer number of servers, more than 30,000 servers.

Once deployed, it is set up and forget it. We do not have a dedicated FTE to manage this solution all day long. That's a good thing.

I highly recommend if you're deploying this, do not deploy this on your own. Definitely work with partners. That is my number one recommendation.

We don't have a TCO model right now.

We have a very strong Cisco partnership. All our networking stack and some of security stack is all Cisco.

VxBlock was also on our shortlist.

We chose FlexPod because we already had NetApp deployment onsite (on-prem).

The history of this product's innovations affects private hybrid cloud, mostly. We have a VMware cloud foundation running on FlexPod and want to take this to the next level, either VxRail or on HyperFlex. Those are the solutions that we are looking at right now. I think they are working on SEEBURGER as the next step, but maybe we might introduce NetApp HCI.

I would rate the solution as an eight out of 10. I would suggest or recommend FlexPod for deployment if you are moving from a predefined converged infrastructure or validated design architecture. Though, you have to customize it based on your requirements. Right now, do not just jump in. Work with a partner to build out your requirements, then deploy it properly.

Our data center is huge, so it has let us reduce some cost, but nothing significant.

The primary use case is storage for medical imagery.

We have significantly less latency now with our imagery.

It certainly has increased the speed of operations.

The solution has made our staff more efficient because it is easier to manage. This has enabled them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward. From a management perspective, the interface is much easier to use.

Reliability and convenience are its most valuable features.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization are fairly important. Speed-wise, we are not having any latency issues.

The solution has not reduced our data center costs.

I have no issues with the stability at all. It's a very stable platform.

The solution has decreased unplanned downtime incidents in our organization by 15 percent.

I'm very impressed with the scalability of the solution. It can be expanded almost infinitely.

The technical support is very good.

Our old solution was horrible and slow. We were using Dell EMC. We switched due to perceived latency.

It was very simple and straightforward. I had it racked within half a day and connected.

For deployment, we used NetApp personnel and a reseller. The experiences with them were good.

The solution has improved application performance in our organization by 30 percent.

Our licensing costs are about $50,000 per year.

Dynamics was on our vendor shortlist. 

We chose FlexPod after consulting with the vendor and NetApp.

Definitely consider NetApp. I would rate the product as a 10 out of 10 because it is fantastic. 

We are using for the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for our hospital.

We are using a primary and secondary data center model. We have two locations where one is the primary and the other is the DR.

Essentially, it's reduced some of the overhead from our team of administrators, so they can focus on other areas.

The solution has simplified infrastructure from edge to core to cloud, which has given us some bandwidth to focus on some other core initiatives that we have.

The solution has made our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward. With the administration, it's given us a bit more time to do research and process development, even investing some time in automation.

We had everything that we needed to start it, stand it up, and get it working, then develop a proof of concept to see how it works. We could also scale it out to meet our business needs over time.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization are very important. It's basically become critical to our organization to have that system functioning a 100 percent of the time. If that system is not functional, then our doctors and nurses can't provide the care to the patients in an effective way. So, it's important that it is stable, works, and easy to understand.

There is a history of issues with hardware availability. For example, we'll buy an array or a filer with a particular configuration and particular size of drive, sizing it appropriately. Then, as we grow, they're like, "Oh, you can always get more." Then when you go to get more, that model or type of disk is no longer available. 

It becomes this big process to try to figure out what we need to get, how it'll work, and how that'll integrate into the system. That could be simpler. They could do a bit more to guarantee the availability of parts. Obviously, not being the largest storage vendor, I know they can't sometimes control what the hardware vendors do. However, a bit more transparency and communication about this would be helpful.

The solution has decreased unplanned downtime incidents in our organization. So far, it's been very stable. We haven't really had any issues with it.

We did have one issue which was related to a misconfiguration with the power that did cause downtime. That was the first issue that we had since we put it in about two and a half years ago.

There was a misconfiguration with the power configuration. This relates to UCS where it was set to the grid incorrectly. Then, based on the population of the blades, it was overpopulated and there was a power issue. One of the circuits was actually connected to a low voltage circuit which caused some issues. With that, we lost almost the entire chassis for a period of time. It was not fun.

It is just a system that we can scale as we need.

The scalability is good. We're in the process of systematically replacing all of the desktop computing environment in our health system with the VDI. Our plan is to take what we have and grow it to meet that need.

We have used technical support a few times, mostly just for questions. 

The solution’s unified support for the entire stack is really important. We can't ever find ourselves in a situation where something is down, and it's integrated with another vendor application and we're looking for support, that all the vendors are pointing fingers at each other. One of the requirements that we have for standing up a system like this is that it has this type of support.

We had primarily used another vendor for our Tier 1 storage applications, then when the all-flash options came out, they were seemed to be doing better. It was a more reliable, well-developed product. We actually switched when we upgraded our existing arrays to the all-flash offerings that NetApp had.

I wasn't the primary person for a good portion of the time that we've had it. Now that I've taken over that role, I'll be digging into it a lot more.

The setup is complex, but not unreasonable. There is a lot to learn. There is a lot to do to make sure that all of the versioning is compatible. I know NetApp offers some tools if you're not familiar with it or you haven't done it before. I'm not sure that I've seen everything or know all the places to look for that information. So, it can be a little anxiety provoking in that sense.

We have a partner through NetApp who does consulting for us. They came in and helped us configure it. The experience of working with them was good.

The main return on investment would be that instead of having to refresh all of our desktop hardware we have been able to go reimage existing machines and use those as thin clients, then also purchase new thin clients rather than buying actual hardware. It also reduces the overhead of having our technicians deploy those systems and maintain them.

If there are cost savings, they are are minimal, whether it's CAPEX or OPE. They balance out, as the vendors get paid one way or another.

Develop a relationship with a partner. Those resources for us have been invaluable.

I would probably rate it about an eight (out of 10). That's just because it does meet the needs, but It's not perfect. Nothing is. There are some features or advertisements about what its capabilities are, but when dig into it or you get down the road, it's not exactly what it was advertised as.

We are experimenting with the solution’s storage tiering to public cloud right now. We haven't really gotten too far into it, but that's something that we're actually looking to do.

It is our primary on-premise infrastructure.

It runs our VMs. Our SQL databases are all on VMs, so everything is virtualized.

Once the FlexPod is built, managers provision additional VMs. So, it's pretty simplified.

With the all-flash array, I think it did improve application performance in our organization.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization are very important. We just followed them to make sure the CVD was compliant or matched to what they designed.

The solution’s unified support for the entire stack is beneficial. It is all in one.

I would like to see more of a centralized support model because we have all the FlexPod components and we hand build them. So, if we have issues with one particular stack, we're talking to individual vendors, e.g., for UCS, I have to call Cisco, and for storage, I have to call NetApp.

So far, the stability has been good. We haven't had downtime or issues since I built it. 

The old one did have some outages. The old UCS FIs went down during the firmware upgrade.

Our stuff usually doesn't go down, so the unplanned downtime isn't worse or better than before.

Our department is pretty small.

Our models are pretty small. So, we'll be able to expand additional chassis in place, then additional disk shelves.

We have had to file tech support cases. Our experience with them is okay. We dislike going online with the robot stuff. Many times, it has delayed our reaching out to a real support engineer.

When I came onboard, they had already purchased it. I just put everything together.

The setup is pretty straightforward. 

My recommendation: If you are not familiar with the technology, you probably should engage some type of professional services to set it up.

We hand built our FlexPod environment. It is composed of a Cisco UCS 6332-16UP FI, NetApp AFF A700, and an NDS.

It was easy to build. We had an old FlexPod built by someone else and I built the new one. We're in the process of migrating all the workloads over.

It hasn't decreased our data center cost by much. It just one rack replaced by another.

I heard the NVMe stuff is coming around. We don't have that license or that feature yet. So, we probably will try it out and see how much improvement that's over our current setup.

Give it a shot. If you are experienced with other types of technologies already, it's pretty simple to put it together.

I would rate the solution as an eight (out of 10).

Over the last year, we've implemented several solutions with FlexPod. We implemented whatever the latest version is. I know we just put one in that was the latest version in a New Jersey school.

Our customers are using on-premise. It's all on premise, but we have implemented solutions that are more hybrid where they are deploying a model where they want their app dev groups to be able to deploy resources much easier to an on-premise infrastructure, as compared to an AWS subscription.

Generally, it's a mix between Azure and AWS. That's what we're seeing from customers overall. 

For a large food distributor using FlexPod, we were able to move them away from traditional server storage, networking, etc. This allowed them to have the ability in both data centers to have hybridity where the FlexPod infrastructure was local and wasn't hosted, then using cloud automation (mainly AWS) and being able to deploy company resources for their teams.

This really opened up a lot of doors for them. Their CIO's mantra was sort of cloud first. Well, here's a way to start on that journey and keep some of your stuff local. I think everybody knows you can't just forklift everything to the cloud. You need cloud readiness assessments: What are your application dependencies and tools that are you using? This is how we came up with the FlexPod approach.

The solution has decreased unplanned downtime incidents at our customers' organizations, specifically in the database and SQL realms. We are talking to some of our customers about containerization as well.

The most valuable features is its ability to be able to have multiple options. It can be fully on-premise, it can be hosted, or it can be the hybrid model. For customers, this is the biggest windfall. 

Having the combined Cisco/NetApp platforms. Having the configuration options to tailor it a certain way. This Is a windfall as well, having options for configuration: small, medium, large, etc. Because every customer is different, and there's no cookie cutter.

It is very important that the solution validates the design for major enterprises. We rely on the validated design, specifically for the customer. When you look at the designs and what you have in mind, the prerequisites have already been done for you. So, it was easy to make the fit a little easier for each customer. Each customer being different.

The solution simplifies infrastructure from edge to core to cloud. It definitely simplifies it and aids in going to that journey. Cloud is the last piece of that route and this gives a seamless way to do this.

The solution’s unified support for the entire stack provides one stop shopping.

Data centers are shrinking. These solutions are part of that. Being able to have these solutions which will shrink your footprint in the data center and allow for easy cloud interaction, migration, and deployment.

I would like more support for different platforms, possibly different database platforms. I don't know if it supports Oracle today, but that would be a big improvement.

As the product matures, being able to support the things that customers are really looking at. FlexPod is supporting more containerizations, and that's a step in the right direction.

I just started working with it. I have only been with my company for about six weeks.

It's increased exponentially over time. I'm hearing a lot of this from my peers, as FlexPod has been out for a while now. With the improvements to the different versions, the stability has improved quite a bit.

It is very scalable. Though, I don't had any case examples of where we've had to scale it in terms of customer experience.

This is my understanding, since I don't deploy it. The initial setup is very straightforward compared to its competitors. Compared to an HPE solution, it is exponentially easier to set up. I know that as a fact.

It's sort of the one throat to choke philosophy. The customers in particular don't have to call here. If it's easy to get support, it isolates the problem on whatever stack you're running on. So, FlexPod supports multiple stacks. It doesn't just support one hypervisor or site.

The solution has saved our customers' organization in terms of CapEx. E.g., with the cloud availability, it's turned into sort of a hybrid CapEx/OpEx model.

I'm only delving into this solution over the last six weeks or so. I don't have the same level of expertise with FlexPod as I do with other solutions. I'm getting there slowly; trial by fire.

I came from a much larger integrated reseller. I worked more with FlexPods competitors where they really want to have these connectors and bolt-ons in place to be able to deploy something to Azure. As easy as it is to do it to an on-prem infrastructure, that's really where it's going for a lot of the commercial space.

For my current organization, it's opened up a whole new door for us as a NetApp partner to be able to have a competitive product against Dell EMC, HPE, etc., and to what I think to a degree is a better product in most cases, to go after that business. We go after the different verticals as well because we are in both the public sector and commercial space. So, these are much different verticals. Thus, you need to be able to the scalable solution. You need a solution that can meet the needs of these customers. When you're dealing with a healthcare versus a hedge fund, it is very different. Certain other companies they didn't have the same, they weren't able to scale or fit in these verticals.

Put them side by side. Do your diligence. There are other vendors out there. There are three other big players in this field: Dell EMC, Nutanix, and HPE. Obviously, each customer is different. But, if you're really looking at a true solution for hybridity with the ability to deploy to the cloud, take a real good hard look at the FlexPod CI solution.

We sell other products, and there are times because of the customer's relationship with another vendor that we might go with a different solution. However, we certainly look at putting them side by side.

The product improves over time, it's definitely helped in all-flash CI, private and hybrid cloud deployment, secure-multi-tenancy, end-to-end NVMW, and cloud storage tiering.

We are talking to customers about the solution’s storage tiering to public cloud, but we haven't implemented anything yet.

I would rate them a nine (out of 10). I don't think anybody rates a 10, but FlexPod is close.

We use FlexPod for customer data center solutions — as well as internal solutions in our data center — to host customer data.

FlexPod is easier for us to maintain and do build-outs with scalability. We're able to install a lot of the build-outs and service profiles more quickly and it takes a lot less time to have all that stuff set up for the customer. It cuts down on the man-hours it takes to get an implementation done.

The ease of setup is probably the most valuable feature for us. When we're bringing out a new solution, it's easy to get everything in the rack. When we need to add into it, later on, it's easier to have all that stuff available and then just adding to the installation as we need to in order to build it out. It's easier to bolt on components that are already created than to make them from scratch or retrofit them or replace components. The integration between the pieces is a lot easier on the setup side, too.

There are not really any additional features that I could think of that are not available already. As technology is enhanced, that may change.

We don't have any issues with stability as far as the product is concerned. It's solid. Issues are not directly related to the product itself.

We can scale the solution really easily. We've been doing that fluidly. We were probably one of the first Cisco customers to come online when the UCS line came out. We have a lot invested in our architecture and we pass that on to clients.

Scaling is easy to do. We can pretty much have any one of our clients do it on demand.

We use technical support from time to time. Most of the time if we really need assistance we end up having to get above the tier one support. We're able to do a lot of the tier one troubleshooting on our own. We have a lot of engineers who can handle that. We spend some time trying to get past tier one when we already know the issue is more complicated in order to get to the support we really need.

The setup is generally pretty easy and faster than most other systems.

We do our own installations as we are the ones who install for clients.

We have historically been a really big Cisco partner. We started doing more with hosted client opportunities for data. When they came out with that line, it was something that we moved right into as a natural progression. Once we thought it worked and saw how easy it was to scale it out, we decided to go that way and save a little extra money while scaling out the usage of what we already had in place.

I would probably rate the product as a seven out of ten. The amount of time it saved us on the setup, maintaining the system and the fact that we haven't had to do a whole lot of troubleshooting with it makes it valuable. 

As far as people entertaining the solution, they should go look at their equipment, know what their pain points are and then get in touch with somebody at Cisco. Reach out to an account manager or see a demo. I know when we were first looking at it, an account manager came out to us and brought a systems engineer with him. We had the opportunity to see the solution and they went over the potential benefits in great detail. It was easy for us to see the gain that we would be getting by implementing the product. 

People need to do their own due diligence in researching new solutions. Exploring other solutions is important to determine which particular solution is the best fit. Once you get the possibilities down to two or three solution sets that may work for you, compare them rigorously before committing. One will probably stand out as the best be it because of budget, features, capabilities or application.

Our primary use for this product is for virtual desktop infrastructure and for virtual server storage.

Since going to all Flash, employees are much happier working remotely in our VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure).

The most valuable asset of the product is the use of all-flash storage, low latency I/O (quicker Input / Output).

No really good opportunities for product improvement come to mind. For our organization, it does what we need it to do.

The product is very stable. I don't think it's failed once since I have worked with it within the organization.

We have a pretty stable workload, so we have not had to consider the scalability of the solution.

We did an upgrade during my time but that was just moving to a newer version of the same product.

The initial installation was straightforward.

We implemented through Paramount.

Return on investment is not always tangible. The workload for individuals is faster and our employees are happier for being able to accomplish their responsibilities in less time.

Before this solution, the organization used some Synology products that were more appropriate for small businesses. The organization had many remote sites and it was not centralized. We also considered VMware vSAN as a solution.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate this product as an eight. That is mostly because the cost is comparatively high for what it does.

Storage I/O is pretty important for enhancing user experience and utility.

We use this solution in our data center. It runs all of our ESX environment with SQL and Exchange servers on it.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that there is one call for support.

It is good to have validated designs, so at least supposedly it will work.

It would be helpful to have more flexibility for adding other components. It is always better to have more possibilities.

This is a resilient solution that keeps running, and we haven’t had any problems.

We haven't had to really increase its capacity, so I don't really know how scalable this solution is.

Technical support has helped us out when we needed. When you call for support, at least you don't have a finger pointing session of one vendor product versus the other.

We had to upgrade because our previous equipment was hitting the end of its lifespan. We went to an integrated solution.

The setup of this solution is a little bit complex at first. After you understand the major components, it gets easier.

We purchased our system through a reseller, CDW. However, there wasn't any special value added. They created a bill of materials.

We have a lease for approximately $10,000 USD per month.

This is a stable solution with good technical support. However, there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case for FlexPod is Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). We sell multi-tenancy services to our customers.

We appreciate having the validated designs because it takes the guesswork out of piecing it together. The solution can be innovative when it comes to cloud computing storage and networking.

The most valuable features of the solution are reliability, scalability, and support. 

Having the validated designs helps because it takes the guesswork out of piecing it together.

It works well in private and hybrid environments. Multi-cloud, I have yet to see.

The solution saves us engineering time, which translates to savings in money and it streamlines our IT admin.

The FlexPod service and support could be improved. The integration of the different storage equipment could be improved because NetApp is the biggest piece and it seems to be well covered, but not so much on the Cisco side.

FlexPod has been very stable for us. It is resilient. 

The scalability is one of the key features in this solution.

Technical support is reasonably good. It simplifies our support experience.

I don't have as much insight into the NetApp side of it, as compared to the Cisco side.

We were looking to build a fully-certified data center to provide our IaaS solution to customers.

I wasn't part of the initial setup. However, I have been part of the expansion and it's very simple.

The deployment time has been reduced, although I cannot say by how much.

We are a system integrator, so we use our in-house team.

At the time we deployed FlexPod, there wasn't a whole lot else available other than Vblock.

It just came down to a strong relationship with the key vendors that make up the product, NetApp and Cisco.

The biggest lesson that I have learned, working with this solution, is that it's better to go with something that has been vetted, tested, and designed by people with knowledge, as opposed to trying to go on your own. This is why we chose a certified, validated design.

This product has all of the big players behind it. Overall it works, and the reliability is top-shelf. I don't know what's better.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The primary use case for FlexPod is for our websites, intranet, internet, internet facing sites, compute storage, and processing power. We have a NetApp storage device, we have FlexPod, and we have flash storage which is part of the app. It's mostly for internal storage and compute needs.

We are more than likely going to be moving to the cloud. We'll probably do some sort of hybrid cloud solution. We're looking at AWS. Cisco has FlexPods that work with AWS. More than likely we'll do something like that at the end of the year. We'll probably integrate with AWS or whatever cloud provider we go with. We have thought about it. They have an excellent platform idea.

FlexPod is perfectly capable of supporting what we have. Our needs are mostly clients that are based off an internet website. All the computer requirements that we have are more than sufficient. For now, this is all the solution we need.

The solution can be innovative when it comes to compute storage and networking. FlexPod is very flexible and innovative. We can design it as we like. We can do just a single tenant, multi-tenant, whatever we need. It's very helpful. 

FlexPod is exactly what we're looking for as far as performance is concerned. For our use cases, this is more than ample. It has all the flexibility and the performance capabilities that we're looking for right now. FlexPod helps us meet the needs of diverse workloads.  

We have seen a major improvement in application performance by around 30%, even though we're running in a hypervisor and we don't have a dedicated service for it.

The solution reduced the time we required to deploy an application. It's almost instantaneous. It's not as fast as the cloud, but it's close enough. It's very good. It has been reduced by at least 50%. 

FlexPod reduced our data center costs by around 20%.

For staff productivity, FlexPod helped with some of the manual tasks that we had to monitor within the infrastructure. We don't have to do it now because FlexPod is very reliable. Even replacing basic disks is automated. FlexPod seems to be very quick and reliable. It's been running well.

FlexPod also simplifies our support experience. It's mostly internal in our own company. We know exactly what we're looking for. We know what to monitor. We have alerts set up for that. FlexPod helps.

The most valuable feature is that it's flexible and best of breed. We can add and subtract as we want. It takes care of all our needs. FlexPod is exactly what we're looking for. 

We don't have any plans for AI right now, but I'm sure when we do, it'll probably be more than helpful.

We have found it to be resilient because of the flexibility and redundancy built into it. 

I would like to see more cloud-centric modules that are specific to applications and more software-based solutions. That's all that is missing.

Our impressions are very good. It's the best upgrade hardware. We have had no issues so far. 

We had a couple of outages with FlexPod, but they were mostly software based. They weren't hardware based. So far, so good.

In terms of scalability, that's exactly what we have with FlexPod. We're trying to expand into the cloud. Anytime we need to add some servers or take some down, it's very scalable. FlexPod is very fast.

We have a support contract with Cisco. It is very quick. We are on the phone with them immediately. Out of 10, I would give them an eight.

We had a reseller for the setup. I'm fairly new at the company. I wasn't there for the setup. From what I have heard, the experience was very good. They have dedicated account managers that work with us directly. It was a good experience.

We have a single tenant application. The compute engine power and the cloud resources that we need for the application are more than sufficient with FlexPod. We don't have any issues with performance using the application. For now, it's exactly what we are looking for. Performance is one of the reasons that we went with FlexPod. 

From CSA, we have some product requirements. FlexPod has been more than enough for us to secure our sites and pass the audits. It's been very helpful.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate this product a 10. There are some good products out there. FlexPod is in the top five for sure.

Go with the best of breed product, it will make your life easier. I would highly recommend FlexPod.

We use the FlexPod solution for all of our VMware workloads.

Prior to using this solution, we had a legacy VMware environment and there were a lot of problems. Comparing to that time, we can really see the cost benefits of using FlexPod.

The most valuable feature is that it integrates with NetApp, as well as the Cisco B200 M4 and M5 Blades. It is a fully integrated system.

The Validated Designs are very good because they act as a reference to see whether we have done things properly.

It would be very helpful if the upgrades for Cisco, VMware, and NetApp could be bundled together and performed at the same time. Currently, if I need to upgrade NetApp or VMware then I have to request a service outage. If all three were bundled together then it would be very easy.

Every time Cisco introduces a new product like the M3, M4, or M5 blades, I have to build a new cluster because the CPU chipset is different. It cannot be accommodated within the existing cluster, necessitating having to build a new one, which causes me to invest more money.

The stability of this solution is very good.

The two partners, Cisco and NetApp, have both been in the market for a long time. Stability-wise we don't have any issues, but if we do then we will call technical support.

It is very resilient. The resiliency is obvious.

There are no issues in terms of scalability with this solution. If I want to grow the compute resources or Azure separately then I can do it. Or, if I want to add a fabric internet switch then I will just buy it.

Technical support is very good. I would rate it ten out of ten.

The setup of FlexPod is straightforward because all of the components are there.

We use a qualified reseller for all our Cisco procurements.

I can say that we are getting a good return on investment at this point.

We have saved approximately twenty to thirty percent by using this solution.

We pay approximately $1,400 USD in total for between five-thousand and ten-thousand ports. 

Apart from FlexPod fees, I have the VMware annual license cost.

We evaluated solutions from HP, Cisco, and IBM before choosing this solution.

This solution runs all of our mission-critical applications, and the cost benefits to using this solution are very good. It integrates well with other products, and in fact, the biggest lesson that I have learned from this solution is that integration is a good thing. Cisco and NetApp have done a good job.

I have been hearing that NetApp will be taken over by Cisco. If this happens, and NetApp is integrated with all of the Cisco solutions, then it would be very good. Currently one of the weak points with Cisco is that they are not a storage company. It was similar in the case of Dell, who took over EMC.

Overall, this is definitely a good product.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case for FlexPod is providing cloud services.

FlexPod impacted us by making things easier to deploy. The solution is a private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environment. That's very important to us. We're doing a lot of hybrid cloud. 

The solution's infrastructure enables us to run mission-critical workloads. I do work for the Department of Homeland Security. We have a lot of critical applications. 

The validated designs and overall versatility in terms of integrating our technology and capabilities are pretty good.

The solution brings us a scale of broad application support that helps us meet the needs of diverse workloads.

The most valuable feature is the automation.

FlexPod's ability to manage from edge to core to cloud for supporting modern data and compute requirements is very good.

We have found the solution to be innovative when it comes to computing scores and networking because of the ease of deployment.

It has increased staff productivity and has simplified our support experience. It streamlines our IT admin. 

FlexPod is very stable and resilient. 

FlexPod is very scalable.

The solution's technical support is knowledgeable.

We came in and the solution had already been installed.

The initial setup of FlexPod was straightforward.

We haven't seen ROI yet. 

We have found the solution to be resilient in the way that everything is regarded. The solution reduces the time required to deploy a new application. 

There's a lot of different ways to deploy. Look into FlexPod because it makes things easier, especially for operations, i.e. to fix things and get things back up and running.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate this product a nine out of ten.

We use this solution in our on-premise production environment.

It does optimize operations. There is a huge improvement, between fifteen and twenty percent, in application performance.

This solution allows us to have a highly diverse environment. It is scalable and has been helpful with our DB deployment and DB management.

The solution infrastructure enables us to run mission-control workloads.

This gives us a good opportunity because it allows us to connect different Cisco devices, giving us a highly diverse environment. It is diverse and allows connections between two different vendor’s systems.

The most valuable features of this solution are the scalability, the speed of deployment, and physical server management.

Cisco should work closely with other vendors to ensure that their specialized hardware can be integrated.

This solution is really stable.

This is a very scalable solution.

I would rate technical support a nine out of ten.

It does simplify our support experience. We used to have a SAN environment that was managed by a dedicated team. Now, management is handled by separate teams.

FlexPod was recommended by our architect and vendor, WWT.

The initial setup of FlexPod is straightforward. This solution reduces our application deployment time by approximately five percent.

We had assistance with our deployment from WWT, and our experience was good.

The solution has not reduced our data center costs. From the finance perspective, it doesn't save us money. But performance-wise, we benefit.

Our licensing fees are on a yearly basis.

I highly recommend this solution.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use it for my private cloud. We are providing a service.

FlexPod has helped us reduce our time of deployment because we are really only missing integration with different applications.

It has also allowed us to streamline our IT administration.

The integration is something else.

The core cloud is a good feature. If we had a login that extended from the private cloud to the public cloud that would be the best, but it's up there.

The solution has granular scalability.

I would be interested to see more integration with other applications.

FlexPod is very resilient. So far, it has been stable. Keep in mind we are still deploying it, so the real use case has yet to be seen.

Scalability looks okay because it’s based on the capacity of the device, so I wouldn’t normally assume any scalability issue.

Their technical support has been okay.

The initial setup was straightforward, but the migration has taken some time.

We used a reseller for the integration. 

FlexPod saves us money. There is definitely a return on our investment.

I would rate FlexPod as seven or eight out of ten. It's too early to say anything, but for now, my only concern is the limited integration with applications.

The biggest lesson I learned was that from the automation point of view, this should be saving us time. When you’re doing it for the first time it’s not going to be very easy.

We use FlexPod for our on-premise file solution. Its infrastructure enables us to run demanding or mission-critical workloads.

This solution has given us a great deal of on-site storage that we didn't have before.

The solution’s granular scalability or broad application support helps us meet the needs of diverse workloads.

We have seen an improvement in application performance. Although I don't know what the baseline was so I cannot tell how much it has improved.

It has enabled us to reduce data center costs and to save money.

The most valuable features of this solution are that it's flexible and it's fast. The validates designs have been generally quite good and it is innovative. 

It has streamlined our IT admin.

The graphical interface could be made easier to use and more intuitive.

The solution’s ability to manage from edge to core, to cloud, to supporting modern data and compute requirements isn't very good. It manages itself, and it has components to help orchestrate itself across the entire network, which is good. However, not necessarily to the edge.

Once this solution is up and running and configured, it is very stable and resilient. s

This solution is quite scalable. You add more and they work better together.

Technical support for this solution is improving.

The initial setup of this solution is fairly complex. We have a complex environment.

This solution has reduced deployment time. 

Initially, we had somebody to provide us assistance with this solution. 

This solution was implemented before I joined the company.

My advice to anybody considering this product is to give it a close look because it's a great solution.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Our primary use case is to integrate the compute, networking and storage in our data center.

FlexPod simplifies our deployments and the automation. It enables us to handle mission-critical workloads and applications.

The best feature of the product is not exactly a feature. It is the ease of deployment and use.

As a solution, it isn't really very innovative. It could have better support for portals.

The solution is very stable. Any outage can be brought back up quickly.

The solution is easily scaled. It is possible to integrate new capabilities and technologies which we have successfully done with no issues. It's a valid, viable model.

Customer service is above average.

The product was adopted as a solution before I came to the company. 

The installation was straightforward.

We used a consultant for the implementation. That was Bedrock and they are okay at what they do.

The reduction in data center costs is the obvious return on investment.

The solution has reduced data center operating costs by about five percent.

Other options were considered. That included IBM and HP solutions.

The product is an eight out of ten. It's stable and we've had no issues. It is definitely worth considering as a solution depending on your particular needs.

The purpose of FlexPod is for a converged infrastructure that provides compute or networking storage and helps launch applications more easily and dynamically.

At the end of the day, AI is not AI without the application that we write into it. With collaboration between Microsoft — utilizing it to build in a manner that is compatible to the FlexPod architecture — we're able to provide specific intelligence that supports our objectives — whatever it is at a given time. Whether it's data aggregation, learning, pouring out the analytics, the intelligence helps specific applications respond to requirements within a business structure. That's what FlexPod enables us to do. That agility reduces the number of hours that it takes to construct a data center, whether it is physical or virtual, by enabling applications to support AI objectives. It just needs to be built correctly.

We have experienced about 28 to 30% improvement in application performance and in our industry that's actually a very significant improvement.

The purpose of using FlexPod, for us, is to simplify and streamline application deployment. 
Compared to utilizing a rack and stack model and using a virtualization technology like VMware, the time savings is about 40% in getting the application into production.

Certification from both manufacturers states that this is a tried and true converged product. That's what we are most happy about. One of the biggest things that my engineers have the pains with is to vet out core networking, vet out stretch routing, vet out applications and then vet out the compute, the front end and the stores, then layer it. After all that deal with the application and quality assure it before we put into production. FlexPod cut out all that complexity and helped get us to the point where it in a data center, launch our application, build the application, test it, QA, and then put in production. So it does reduce the time with regards to how we dynamically provision and provide applications to our end users and developers. 

If we look at data center solutions, any of those solutions are only as good as the people that put it together. If there's a way for us to take a hyperconverged technology or converged technology — like FlexPod — and use it with artificial intelligence, that allows the engineer who is building it to infuse the deployment with intelligence. Turning it on, the necessary steps — done correctly — eliminate human error. If something is in error or not within compliance to confines of what that particular architecture should be like, intelligence lets that engineer know that an object is out of policy. For example, if you implement SAP and Oracle, the Oracle database goes through this way; if you partition it out to this number of lines or a particular number of virtual machines, the recommendation may be different to achieve the maximum efficiency.

If the solution does that, it helps enable and accelerate deployment. Every organization out there has its own challenges. Whether you're an automobile manufacturer, or a cloud solution provider, or a managed service provider, or even application software provider working for social networking where the only thing they need to do is support people, all that is important is when they login to that particular application. They need to have that effort fit the user experience. The collaboration between Cisco and NetApp can learn to provide that.

Millennials today are very intelligent people when it comes to social media, but they're not hands-on with applications or as CLI (command-line interface) as some of the older engineers. The millennial comes in and they look at something and they get it. Okay, as long as that's valid, it is okay. The smarter thing is that something is put into FlexPod to be sure potential errors are covered. 

The client will tell you what they want to do. Well, whatever that is — they can be selling hamburgers, make pizzas, or fly an airplane. If we make a machine dynamic, it allows professionals to go to market and set their strategy a lot better.

As far as stability, the product is a tank. It doesn't break. It's very reliable. It is also resilient in terms of workloads, but it has to involve the necessary security staff to oversee it and the proper security application and layers to support it. But structurally and architecturally, the solution itself, from a workload or a workforce perspective, is very resilient.

It does have its limitation if the architecture is weak and constructed incorrectly. If you do it right, it scales infinitely.

When you build it, and you build it to scale, you'll be able to serve out any application dynamically to end users. It could be an organization of 3,000, it could be an organization of 50,000. As long as you build your FlexPod architecture correctly within your data center, whether it's a co-location or a physical data center, it's proven itself to be extremely scalable.

It becomes an Achilles tendon when an organization leveraging FlexPod does not build enough scalable resources. That's when layering applications does cause issues. I've seen that both from a security perspective, as well as an application performance perspective.

We use technical support all the time. The collaboration between Cisco and NetApp is actually very good. We use both platforms. Even though we work with Cisco directly to utilize HyperFlex architecture, which competes with FlexPod, the customer service isn't competitive and remains collaborative. There is no finger-pointing, which is very surprising. More often than not, we're able to satisfy an anomaly or technical issue easily. The technical support is very, very good.

We hated taking racks down or putting them up just to deploy a simple solution. If we need an application and had to put another rack up, it means using a lot of resources. Instead, we could launch a virtual machine. The network, the compute and the storage is in a single solution.

If you have to spend more time during a day fixing computers, servers and the network than you do focusing on what you make money from, you don't need to be in the business you are in. That's why they provide hyperconverged technologies that are data-center-centric out of the box. You buy it, you bracket, turn it on, load an application onto it, and then you build it. 

It all started many years ago when IBM created the most intelligent compute system in the world. Everybody logged into a VT100 terminal. They didn't care about what was going on in the machine. They logged in and it worked. Then some guy decided to break it apart and create a disparate network. When they figured out they realized it was too sophisticated. As the company grew they needed a server for every single application. That's why you see the evolution of VMware and Citrix and the evolution of converge.

The future of things moved away from just hardware. The future of things now is going to be like hyperconverged but in a very virtual form. That's the reason why Cisco is buying organizations like BroadSoft. They want to get into organizations that provide virtual services.

The product is actually easy to set up. It's self-learning. It's methodical. At the same time, you have to go through all the minutia of the networking layer, the storage layer, the compute layer to focus on the foundation. Then prepare it for application download and then application build on either databases or the application itself based on the OS that it resides on. The model is quite simple.

We do the implementations.

People go to the cloud today and think that it's going to save them money. Actually, if you're going to go to the cloud, you're going to spend more money. The difference between going to a cloud infrastructure and having your own private cloud like say FlexPod, the cost structure is the same. You're going to need humans to continue to manage, maintain and run it. You're going to continue to do a refresh on it because technology will get old. Cisco and NetApp will never sit on their laurels. They won't just create FlexPod and have only one model. Over time, switches, routers, storage, interfaces and things like that will change.

That's why I think it's important that we don't focus too much on ROI. ROI is not the amount of money you spend on FlexPod or cloud that equates to revenue. ROI is whether you have a good product that allows your company to leverage technology. FlexPod enhances the way you go to market. That is an ROI. 

If a CFO wants to do a 10-year map to see how long is it going to make up the investment, you don't need to buy FlexPod. You need to talk to how you to go to the market efficiently. You needed to ask yourself whether your company will be viable and competitive to stay in the market landscape with respect to what you sell. 

You have to understand why you're spending that money. If not then this investment will not make sense.

We considered VMware, Citrix, going full cloud, sharing with a cloud, handing it off to a managed service provider, building it ourselves, rack and stack — pretty much everything was on the table. FlexPod is a good product. I think they just need to continue to keep up the pace with organization like Nutanix and those types of organizations to be able to compete.

You can't get in trouble going with Cisco and NetApp. If you get stuck or have an issue, support is there. The inner partnership, inner engineering, and cross-pollination is there. I'm still leery of some of the up-and-coming hyperconverged organizations out there trying to compete. They may be good, dynamic, fast, growing, everybody's getting on on it, but they're not backed by two large publicly-traded organizations that have a legacy foundation that's been tried and proven for what they do and do best. 

I would probably give this solution a seven-and-a-half or an eight out of ten. It isn't higher because I know that if I were to look at a very dynamic data-center solution, there are organizations who can do it a lot more agile, more quickly, or in a more user-friendly way. It takes a very sophisticated group of people to run and maintain NetApp and Cisco. It's not just a box you put in a server. You scale it out and you log onto a graphical user interface and you manage it. When it is running, it's a very, very powerful foundation that no other hyperconverged solution out there can compete with. You cannot break it. And like I said, as long as you have the right people who know the foundations, FlexPod is a very powerful data center foundation.

I think one of the greatest things that we like about NetApp is the fabric OS and leverage that proprietary app to be able to make it self-aware of legacy storage, legacy compute, current compute and future compute.

One of the cumbersome parts that we discovered is that there are claims that say something can be done, but it takes a lot of testing and trial and error and working with our ISP to ensure that these multi-cloud, multi tendencies and applications living in it all talk to each other. In other words, it's not going to run by itself. It will continue to take a group of highly sophisticated engineers and application folks to be able to make things work.

FlexPod was built in collaboration with Cisco when they didn't have their own hyperconverged technology and when NetApp didn't have their own networking technology. The idea behind FlexPod was to build that converged and hyperconverged foundation to support it. The direction Cisco is moving in today leaves the partnership intact on that app for now, but with some of their hyperconverged solutions out there it may not stay that way. Competing HyperFlex technologies are extremely agile today, and if they continue to develop, possible partnerships with the likes of Oracle or Linux or Microsoft may be something to be reckoned with.

There are no walls to technology. As long as you code out a certified solution to dynamically support your market strategy, that's all you needed. That's what I really learned from blind spots, and that's the reason why we moved in the direction that we did.

Don't look at the price. It is more important to understand where your company is competitively in the market. If you're going FlexPod, it's going to be a journey and that FlexPod isn't going to make you money. But it's going to help you really find your company, or the next level, or the future of where you're going to be in terms of going into a market. You should not buy FlexPod because you want to be cool like other companies. It won't save you money. It is more important that it enables your organization to be more visionary and more technically dynamic.

Our primary use case for FlexPod is for better storage.

The FlexPod solution increased back-end productivity and streamlined our IT admin.

The most valuable features of FlexPod are high availability and scalability.

In the digital future, I would like to see included more code compatibility. The storage should be more mobile. We should be able to move it from place to place.

FlexPod needs more support on ML/AI networks.

FlexPod is very stable.

We're still working on scalability. We have to keep low price versions of the high-end equipment. I would like to see a little more data compression on the solution.

The FlexPod technical support has been fairly good. I cannot complain.

We knew that we needed to invest by talking with consultants.

The initial setup of FlexPod was complex in the way that we had to manage the data.

We did not use a consultant. We do it all by ourselves.

On a scale from 1 to 10, I would rate this product an 8. Consolidation is possible. 

FlexPod doesn't compare to other products. Do many tryouts first. Try to just mimic different environments to get a different view of the platform.

Our primary use case for this solution is for educational content.

This solution has improved our organization in the way that we now require fewer employees. It has reduced the complexity of our network monitoring. 

It has reduced the workload on our network admins and our network availability has been reduced. 

The most valuable features of this solution are instant scalability and reliability. The solution has good granularity in terms of network visibility.

The main area that this solution has room for improvement is in Cisco support.

The stability of the solution is very good. 

The scalability is good.

FlexPod's technical support is bad, as with everything regarding Cisco support.

The initial setup for FlexPod is complex.

We used a consultancy company for the implementation. 

The solution forces us to ACI to make quotas and we will do that.

FlexPod supports both traditional and SCN reduced costs.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate this product a seven. It's not perfect.

I believe that FlexPod is the best solution. 

We use this solution for our servers. We are getting ready to move to the cloud.

We have a network team and assistance team in our organization, and this solution has helped them to combine and work together a lot better.

The solution's granular scalability and broad application support help us to meet the needs of diverse workloads.

The performance has improved with a couple of applications that we have. I’m not sure of the percentage, but I would say about twenty percent. It also optimizes operations.

It has increased staff productivity because we can work on other stuff. 

The most valuable feature is that it is all-in-one, and it is easy to get support on it.

There are times where we have had issues with technical support.

In terms of stability, it is very stable.

This solution is scalable.

Technical support is pretty good. I would rate it seven out of ten.

Sometimes we still have issues with support. We have had instances where we’ve called in and not gotten the right people on the phone.

We began to look for a new solution when the stuff we had was at end-of-life.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward. You simply follow the documentation.

We performed the implementation in-house.

We looked at Cisco and HP when we were researching this solution.

This is a very stable product and we have had really good luck with it, so I would recommend it to a colleague at another company.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use this solution in our data center. We use a hybrid environment. It connects our on-premise system with the cloud.

We are a partner with Cisco, and we assist our customers based on their business requirements. 

We have definitely seen an improvement in application performance. They have high availability, and this is what we are looking for. I would say that it is a ninety percent improvement.

Staff productivity has increased because they have more time. The solution provides centralized management, and less time is required for troubleshooting and research. The documentation is in the GUI, embedded within the software. I would say that there is a thirty percent improvement.

Datacenter costs are reduced by means of less power, cooling, and space. I would say it is a fifty percent reduction.

This solution helps our IT administrator to troubleshoot and understand problems.

The most valuable features are the Fabric Interconnect Manager and the UCS Manager. It connects the virtualization, the network, and the storage all in one cage.

Our data center costs have been reduced by means of less power, cooling, and space.

It is very helpful for our customers to have everything centralized. Most of our customers are moving to the cloud, and they need help to migrate their data. The majority of cases that I see are hybrid cloud and on-premise solutions.

There are too many drivers and software combined all together, and we need to have compatibility between all of them.

At this beginning, the FlexPod solution had too many bugs. Today, however, it is more resilient. It has high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery.

This solution is very scalable. You can increase the number of parts horizontally without affecting the production environment.

Cisco's support is very good, all the time. I love them. You have one number to call, and this call will cover the compute, storage, and networking.

This solution is easy to deploy. This solution reduces application deployment time because we have integrated automation with it. The simple integration makes it easy. We have an eighty percent reduction in time.

Using this product makes our life easy.

I have learned a lot from this solution. When you touch a new technology, there is another new technology coming in.

This resiliency of this solution helps. There is high availability, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, and it is easy to deploy.

One of the solutions that we implemented was the joining of two data centers together. We used EVPN-VXLAN, and this was a great solution for them.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is VMware hosting. We use it primarily in the core data center, and that’s where it has worked best for us.

Our applications for payroll, HR, and anything that is mission-critical runs on some form of Flex device. We run a lot of different workloads and a lot of different VMs on this platform.

This solution has helped to make more things consistent within our organization.

In terms of staff productivity, we manage more and more with less and less people.

The most valuable feature is that it works and is compatible with all of the existing platforms that we use.

The validated designs are good in that they provide a kind of known quantity.

I’m not sure that it’s overly innovative. It’s a little more traditional than the hyper converge-type option and things like that, but it works.

On the NetApp side, there are definitely things to improve in terms of software updates.

There are a lot of complex, moving parts, and as each revision comes along they get easier to manage it all, but there are a lot of moving parts. Things are not as simple as they market them. Until you learn how to use them all, it is a bit of a challenge. The more than they can consolidate and drive that administration down, the easier it will come. That is the biggest thing for me.

I would like to see more SaaS-based management tools. I think that this is where they are headed with Active IQ and Intersight. A lot of the traditional tools have been on-premise hosted, and that's another thing for us to manage. Essentially, to manage things that we are already managing. So, I'd rather see the SaaS-based tools become the standard.

The stability of this solution is very good. This is a resilient solution. It’s very redundant in terms of capability between the plain infrastructure and the storage. We really haven’t had any issues with that.

Scalability is very good. It allows us to grow most computing and storage resources independently. It allows us to add what's needed.

We have had really good technical support across the board. This solution has simplified our support experience. 

The initial setup of this solution was straightforward. Granted, the reseller did most of the work.

We used a reseller to assist with our implementation. They made it easy.

I don’t know that it has reduced costs, but it hasn’t incurred any higher costs. It’s probably reduced costs in the fact that as things improve they get smaller.

My advice for anybody implementing this solution is to be prepared to learn about the solution. The converge solutions promise a lot of easier management, but there's still a lot of things that they need to know about. There are compromises, so they need to make sure they understand completely what they are getting into.

There are definitely some areas where, as a whole, this solution could be better, but it's pretty good.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

This solution is used mostly for isolated pods for SAP, for instance, or for EPIC.

Private, hybrid and multi-cloud environments are heavily in use by various customers. I would say that hybrid is probably the most common today.

We have integrated with cloud services such as NetApp’s ONTAP, AWS, and Azure.

Its ability to manage from edge, to core, to cloud, to supporting modern data and compute requirements has been scoped heavily before we actually spec out the FlexPods, but as far as all the interoperability and the core site, that's all been validated by the OEMs. It's kind of a guarantee. These are all validated technology standards. 

From the perspective of the business picking the right solution, it's all being guaranteed to work and it's supposedly scalable. Those are two of the reasons why it's probably been working for a lot of organizations.

They're always validating new designs on FlexPod to adapt to current versions of software and WMware, for instance. They're all good, validated designs.

Overall it is innovative when it comes to compute, storage and networking. There is a lot of flexibility and the hardware specs are based on what application or applications you're trying to run. There's flexibility in the sense that you're tailoring the stack toward whatever application you're trying to run.

The biggest thing that I would like to see is more cost-effective FlexPod solutions. I would also like to see more available configurations of FlexPods.

This solution is very, very stable. 

Any single point of failure has been removed from the FlexPods, so they all have multiple redundancies built-in.

It's supposedly scalable. The FlexPod examples that I've seen in production are usually built and run from that configuration. I don't see people changing them that much.

Technical support for this solution is very good.

One of the benefits for vendors, being in a FlexPod, is that you don’t have to call support for each of the OEMs to help figure out what the problem is. It’s kind of a one-stop-shop as far as support goes.

There are, basically, validated guidelines on how to deploy all of the FlexPods, so they have all been pretty straightforward.

This solution does reduce deployment time, although I don’t know the exact percentage in terms of time savings. I can say that as far as “go to market”, it’s generally faster

I've seen all three examples; resellers, consultants, and integrators.

Theoretically, we have seen ROI, but I don't know what the number is.

FlexPod is multi-vendor, and it is mostly driven by customer demand.

This is a solution that I see mostly for large enterprises, on the side of cost. Smaller and medium-sized enterprises are usually not interested. Cost is the primary factor behind why I would not give this product a perfect rating.

For anybody who is implementing this solution for a customer, my advice is to get what the requirements are in writing. That way, you have yourself covered once you actually buy the product. That's the requirements they gave you and it hasn't expanded beyond that.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We provide this solution to customers for their data centers, and we also use it internally, for our data center, to host customer data.

This solution is right there in terms of leading-edge digital equipment.

It is definitely easier for us to maintain and do build-outs, so it takes a lot less time to set things up for the customer.

We have seen approximately a twenty-five percent increase in application performance.

The most valuable feature is the ease of setup. When we're bringing out the new solution, it's easy to get everything in the rack. When we need to add to it, later on, it's easier to have all of that stuff there and add as we need it. It's easier to bolt-on, and the integration between the pieces is a lot easier on the setup side, too.

The management is easy. Some of the stuff we have is an older generation that can’t do connectivity into the inner site. But, for everything that we can put in there, we can see all of the customers from that one pane of glass. It makes it simple.

It enables us to run mission-critical workloads. We are running one hundred to one hundred and fifty SQL and high-demand database servers.

I’ve gotten a lot of use out of the validated designs because that is what I go by, whenever we’re building out systems for the customers. It seems like they stay pretty up to date on the newly released products.

As we do much of the Tier-I support ourselves, and thus don't normally need it, there is time wasted in moving up to the next level.

This is a solid solution, and I don't have any issues with stability.

This is a resilient solution. We have a lot of clusters set up, and we haven’t had to worry about server failures because when we do have a server fail, the other ones pick up the workload pretty seamlessly.

Scalability is easy, and we can pretty much have anybody do it.

We can scale that really easily, and we’ve been doing that. We were probably one of the first Cisco customers that came on when the UCS line came out, so we have a lot invested in the architecture.

We have used technical support from time to time.

Most of the time, we end up having to get a tier above. We're able to do a lot of the Tier-I troubleshooting on our own. We have a lot of engineers that can handle that, so we do spend some time trying to get past Tier-I in order to get the support we really need.

We were already a big Cisco partner when they came out with this line, and it was something that we just moved right into. Once we saw that it worked, and saw how easy it was to scale it out, we just decided to go that way to save a little extra money.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward and very easy.

There is a thirty-five to forty percent reduction in the time required for deployment.

We handled the implementation in-house.

My advice for anybody considering this solution is to get in touch with an account manager at Cisco, then visit and see a demo. I know that when we were first looking at it, an account manager came out and brought a senior engineer with him. They saw the solution and went over it in great detail. It was easy for us to see the gain that we were getting from the product.

I think that people still need to do their own due diligence and look at other solutions. Once you get those two or three solution sets and compare them, I think you'll see that this one is probably the best one out there. This solution is right there with leading-edge digital equipment.

Overall, this is a good solution. It has saved us time on the setup, as well as maintaining the system, and we haven't had to do a whole lot of troubleshooting with it.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use this solution for the VMware virtualization of all of our servers. We use the Cisco UCS for the blade servers.

From a server storage side, we were previously using the HP BladeSystem c7000 chassis for our blade servers. It was much harder to update the firmware when compared to the Cisco UCS.

From a UCS side, it is very simple to go from an ESXi host that is on an M4 blade and switch it out to an M5 blade by changing the service profiles on the blades. It is very easy and quick. 

The procedure for contacting technical support could be simplified.

UCS has been around for, I'm assuming, about ten years, and it has only gotten better with time. I like it.

Scalability is very easy. You just scale up or scale down, whenever you want.

When dealing with technical support, which was not often, it was tied to our account. That was difficult because I had to go through a partner to find out what our accounts were before I could get support. I wish that part was a little easier.

Our previous solution was an HP c7000 BladeSystem with 1-gigabit passthrough modules, and we were going to a 10-gigabit solution. We wanted something that was easier, better, and would support 10-gigabit. We actually ended up going to a 40-gigabit solution.

The HP solution, HP Virtual Connect Flex-10, only supported 10-gigabit modules.

The initial setup was pretty much straightforward.

We have deployed two different systems. The first one was by CDW, which went perfectly well. The second one was by Precidia, which also went perfectly well. Both of these resellers knew what they were doing and everything went smoothly.

We only looked at Cisco at the time.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution depends on what they're going with. If it is the converged infrastructure then the UCS is probably the way to go. If instead, they are going with the hyperconverged infrastructure, then I would suggest going with the HyperFlex solution.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from this solution is the ease of actually setting it up and learning it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use this solution for our development workloads.

The private hybrid multi-cloud environment works for us. We're using it as a private cloud.

There's a lot less overhead management. It's a lot easier for developers, in particular, to get the compute and storage they need. They don't have to go through a bunch of change requests. They just do it on demand.

The solution's infrastructure enables us to run demanding, mission-critical workloads. Our entire development organization runs on FlexPod. Their full development environment is on it. So, application development is pretty mission critical to us.

I like FlexPod's granular scalability and broad application support. Our workload isn't that diverse, but I could see other use cases for it.

Flexpod helped us reduce the time required to deploy new applications by about 60%. It's a very dramatic change.

It has also reduced data centered costs. It's hard to quantify, but there's a lot less bare metal that we need. It's all in FlexPod, so maybe a 40% saving. That's a guess, but it's significant.

The solution has also increased static productivity, mainly in that the developers are able to self-serve. They're less dependent on infrastructure resources to stage an environment for them to then start developing on. They can stage their own environments now.

Support is probably the same. It's one area that we didn't see a lot of improvement in and it's actually supporting FlexPod. It's new technology to a lot of our staff, so they're a little uneasy when they're in there messing with UCS's. It's not something a lot of them do all the time. When we do have to, we kind of fumble around the UCS a little bit to figure our way around.

FlexPod does help streamline our IT admin.

Agility is probably the most valuable feature for us. It's very easy to send out resources.

I would assess it as very easy to manage from edge to core cloud. It's a central point of management. We've automated the majority of it and service delivery is fine.

I find FlexPod to be innovative in how automated it is and how it provides a unified ecosystem. I don't have to worry about compatibility or things not working well with each other. It all just works. That's the easiest thing. It's kind of a turnkey solution: we just start spinning up the resources as needed.

I'd like to see some more Ansible integration for automation purposes. We automate everything else with Ansible, so it would be great if we could automate our FlexPod with Ansible as well.

We could probably see a little bit more training as well.

The solution is very resilient. We haven't lost our FlexPod once, it's been up to, even power outages and things that happened at the data center. It's remained very stable.

I think it can scale highly.

We really like the technical support. We were able to get up and running in day one of the FlexPod. Like I said, supporting it is a little more challenging only because of the familiarity with the GUIs. A lot of people aren't in there very often though, and when we have to troubleshoot it's a little challenging for us.

We used VMware Private Cloud primarily, but we wanted to get into a more tangible private cloud experience as opposed to building our own with individual components that didn't fit together very well. We like that this is designed for network compute storage all in one rack. That's mainly what drilled us to invest in the FlexPod.

The initial setup was straightforward. We followed the validated design and we had external partners come in and help us build it, and then we were up and running. I wouldn't say it was complex.

We've seen return on investment for sure. The solution saves us money overall.

We only evaluated Cisco. I don't believe that we even looked at Dell or HCI. It's pure Cisco for us.

Know what you're getting into upfront, and make sure to train your staff appropriately before diving in and setting something up and then backfilling on your training. Go in with your eyes open and really understand the solution before you start turning the keys over to users and access.

The CBD was very easy to follow. The validated design we followed to the letter, and we haven't had any problems with further integration. It's all gone well.

I would give this solution an eight or nine out of ten: a very high score. It's been very stable. We've been running our dev environment off of it for three years now without any real hiccups or outages. The developers are certainly much more empowered and there's a lot less overhead on the networking people. It just works.

The biggest lesson for me is probably that there is value in some of the larger marketing items. Not just marketing bullet points, but there are actual truth and experience that can back up what the marketing slides have sold us. It delivered to our expectations, I would say.

We use FlexPod primarily for automation and growing capacity.

Delivery speed and integration speeds have increased. The solution has enabled us to run mission-critical workloads. Our SQL cluster is on there, which is high IOPS.

All-in-one solution is great for when you don't have a lot of staff, with multiple disciplines. It has increased productivity because we only have a staff of four people, so we are able to focus on other items like innovation. It also has simplified our support experience.

FlexPod has also improved applications for us. It handles IOS better.

It is easy to set up, maintain and has great stability.

One touch upgrades would be nice.

FlexPod is very stable and resilient. You just stand it up, and you don't ever have issues with it, so it's been the best storage array in platform we've seen. We've never had a problem.

We've been told from our sales team that it's going to scale really well, but we've never actually tested this. We only have one.

We have a very high opinion of the technical support team.

We've always been roll your own, setting up the UCS, and the external storage arrays, and then plugging them in and zoning it in, so the fact that it's an all-in-one solution is great.

We use Infinidat and EMC. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

It would be nice to have had this years ago when we first started out, instead of a hodgepodge of different storage and compute technologies within our data center. It'd be nice to just have the one and scale it out.

I like the validated designs because they're fully baked, but they do take a while when there are upgrades that need to happen, for all the vendors to come together and certify their solutions in a matrix.

I would rate FlexPod as a ten out of ten. It's innovative, easy, and reliable.

Our primary use case for this solution is infrastructure.

All of our main applications run on this solution, and it has done a stellar job.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the data services that are available.

This solution is very hard to maintain and keep up.

It would like the system to have better usability, where somebody who is less of an expert can still perform the basic functions. In general, simplify the system.

The stability of this solution is very good.

The scalability is extremely good. It scales really, really well.

In terms of performance, our old architecture was far behind and couldn't keep up. That was our tipping point when deciding to move to a new solution.

The initial setup of this solution is complex. There are too many levels of architecture design, with lots of different layers of pointing connections. It takes a really well-trained skill set to get it up and running.

We used an integrator for our implementation, and we found their service to be extremely good.

We have seen a return on investment.

We evaluated other solutions like HP and EMC, but we already had a lot of Cisco equipment and our engineers were trained on Cisco, so this solution made more sense.

My advice for anybody considering this solution is to do their homework. There are a lot of other solutions that do the same thing, but it depends on your use case. This is not the best fit for every situation.

Overall, I think that this is a great product, but it is very hard to maintain.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We use this primarily for robosites, which means remote offices.

Honestly, we've standardized on it, so FlexPod has improved our company as far as ease of management, stability, and redundancy.

The solution's infrastructure enables us to run demanding and mission-critical workloads. With manufacturing, for example, we need to be up pretty much 24/7.

We've also seen an improvement in application performance with FlexPod, as well as increased staff productivity. Just the fact everything is up when we need it to be, and we're not waiting on downtime.

FlexPod also simplifies our support experience. With every site being on the same standard, we support it the same way everywhere, so it's easy to train new folks or offshore staff. In addition, it streamlines our IT administration.

Redundancy and stability are the most valuable attributes for us.

The validated designs are good to have. We do use them.

I have found the solution to be innovative when it comes to compute storage and networking. It really gives me the ability to scale to the site's requirements and size.

FlexPod also reduces the time required to deploy our application.

It would be nice to have a simpler setup, and we could achieve that with UCS Central, but just the licensing for that is out of our scope from a cost perspective.

The initial learning curve is pretty steep.

Stability has been solid. Using Cisco-validated design, everything has been rock solid and redundant, and when there is an issue, obviously that redundancy comes into play.

It's been reliable, and it's nice that we can perform upgrades without downtime.

I like the fact that we can add compute as needed, without downtime. From the storage side, I guess that's easy to expand as well, by just throwing down another shelf to the FlexPod.

Their technical support is good.

Our older solutions were not as reliable.

The initial setup was somewhat complex, but once you do it thirty, forty, or fifty times, you kind of know your standards.

We used a vendor and had a very good experience with them.

Overall, the solution saves us money. We have seen an ROI, although I don't know the exact amount.

Dell, Vertex, Lenovo, and Nutanix were all under consideration. We chose FlexPod because that's what we kind of based our standard on. The redundancy and ease of upgrades not taking any downtime were also major factors.

I would say that it is a rock solid platform, the redundancy is awesome, and ease of management and the upgrade process is smooth and non-disruptive.

Data center costs are a little bit more expensive with FlexPod, but you're paying for the redundancy and flexibility.

I would rate this as a ten out of ten. It's been a solid solution for us.

We sell FlexPod. We have different versions of the software people like. Because we are the main seller of the product, we have quite a few customers.

In the old days, when VMware was not so acceptable in large enterprises, the company offered customers pre-use coupons to replace their machines. 

For many large customers, they may or may not trust FlexPod in a sophisticated ecosystem. They still rely on the hardware to provide stability for large enterprises.

The best feature of FlexPod is the set scope array. It is produced by set options on the DHCP server using the Cisco UCS Manager with VMware.

FlexPod is a very mature product. It's a CI product with converged Netapp FAS storage and Stateless UCS compute for modern-day infrastructure. In terms of stability, FlexPod is the best in the industry. Installation with FlexPod is a bit complex, but it can be upgraded easily. I think Flexpod is phasing out, but it is still the right solution.

Installation with FlexPod is a bit complex, but it can be upgraded easily. I think Flexpod is phasing out, but it is still the right solution.

The stability of FlexPod is best in the industry (at least in Hong Kong).

Scalability is quite good. You can simply use APT at the surface. There are no required dependencies. 

Usually, FlexPod is good enough in terms of Cisco's product line support.

We have been using FlexPod here for about 10 years.

For the initial setup, you have to follow the guide, step-by-step and version-specific for the installation. If you follow the guide step-by-step it is fairly simple, not that complex. 

We deploy for customers firsthand, usually within one week. Our last deployment of FlexPod took one to two months. It depends on the requirements.

For FlexPod, it is always trustworthy. I had previously never seen flex machines from other brands or associated with other products.

FlexPod is a large investment and they are good enough to support it. That is where we fully recognize long-term gains in ROI.

The FlexPod licensing can adjust to your purse, i.e. there are different levels available for businesses of all sizes.

If you want to have stability, then FlexPod is the easy way to go. Newer products may not be rated highly enough for large enterprise corporations to procure, i.e. it depends largely on the internal regulations in use for data center management.

I would rate FlexPod with a 9/10 because this software successfully carried out its mission.

We would probably use FlexPod in an Edge type of scenario for our COs to get closer to the customers, because our data center is already Cisco UCS with NetApp. This scenario with FlexPod would probably work well for our Edge deployments to get closer to customers.

We are NetApp/Cisco customers. We do have a similar implementation to FlexPod. Our main use case for its use is the virtual data center

The speed of scalability within the product and ease of integration are two factors which will play well with our environment.

We have seen a ten to 15 percent improvement in application performance.

The scale out allows us, in a small form factor, to scale out and get more compute and storage, as needed. This would be appreciated in our business.

It is innovative because it's bare metal and you can customize it easily. This brings a lot of benefits to the solution.

They could improve the Cisco technical support.

Stability is rock solid. With all the built in redundancy within the product, I find it very resilient.

It is very scalable. Since it's based off of Cisco UCS and all NetApp products, it has huge scalability.

I haven't called technical support for FlexPod. 

NetApp support is fantastic. The times that I've had to contact them, it was awesome. I was able to get to an engineer right away and the service was excellent. I even received more than what we asked for, additional information. So, it was very good. 

Cisco support is much slower. Opening cases with Cisco tech is sometimes a bit tedious. The return time for less important calls can be slower. Even Priority 1 calls can sometimes be a bit long and they will have to call me back.

We aren't investing in a new solution because we're currently using Cisco and NetApp products. We're most investing in a new configuration, which is FlexPod, since it aligns well with our current product lineup. 

The initial setup is straightforward. It is all interface-based, so point and click. 

At the moment, we used it to expand, so we're actually spending money to get it.

We see the most ROI on ease of deployment and time spent. Since the addition of nodes, it is all automated now. What would normally take us around three to five hours in the past, has come down to 15 minutes to half an hour, creating a significant gain in time.

We didn't have a lot of vendors on the short list. We work with Nutanix in the past, which was a complete and utter failure. 

Seeing as we're a Cisco and NetApp shop, it was natural to go with FlexPod.

Go for it. Just buy it. It's simple and out-of-the-box. Set it and forget it.

I haven't had time to look over the validated designs, but I have seen some in the past. I think that they are very helpful in getting a general idea and configuration guide to different products.

Bundled with the right products, multi-cloud environments could be a good asset. With its flexibility, it would allow for movement of workloads into multiple environments, which would be a great benefit.

Our primary use case was for unified support, so our customers could ask us a question or receive support for any type of products. It could be for UCS, network, or storage.

Our customers use it for virtual machines and with VMware with tool sites, e.g., VMware solutions for DR.

FlexPod provides one solution for who to call when there is an issue.

ONTAP is the core of FlexPod, so its most valuable features are: FlexClone, Snapshot, and SnapCenter.

FlexPod is innovative when it comes to its product's validate design and functionalities. Plus, you have NetApp and Cisco, the best brands together in one product.

I would like them to scale more to rack unit servers instead of blade servers.

Since we implemented Flexpod, we have had two issues with it, and they were with VMware: 

1. We lost connectivity between VMware and the storage. 
2. We lost vCenter once. 

Neither has anything to do with Flexpod at all.

The solution is resilient because its intrinsic. For every product on the solution, we have Fabric Interconnects for the Cisco UCS, where you can move the profiles on the blades. It holds up well.

FlexPod is better than HCI because you can scale wherever you want. You can scale the compute. You can also scale network and storage apart.

FlexPod's tech support is very good.

We were previously using Dell EMC servers and storage. We were also using HPE networking. We switched due to the support and the products were getting old, needing better performance.