When investing in FlexPod, we compare it to the existing system, like a right-now system, where cost savings come from negotiation, not necessarily FlexPod itself. As developers, we have to consider various factors.

At least, we have standardized operations to follow. While we don't focus on price now, it hasn't shown to be more expensive compared to traditional non-CI systems. We analyze costs before investing in CI and FlexPod.

We haven't actually encountered situations where it directly freed up budgets for other projects. When we invest in a system like FlexPod, it's mainly to provide internal services.

Normally, when we decide to invest, say in FlexPod, we need to present evidence and justifications to the procurement team. We usually have annual financial plans for technology investments, so it's not like sudden budget shifts. However, at least we have that yearly plan in place.

We have another management index where we have another measurement. For example, that's just how we checklist-discuss the investment based on the revenue. Those from revenues, as an example, five percent or six percent, if you make the investment under those percentages, it's acceptable. 

We don't have a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for those. As long as it's below the investment budget the organization set at the beginning of the year, it's okay. And it doesn't affect the business's growth.

But if it affects your business role, then it's a problem.

For ROI, I would have to account for all the time savings and streamlined operations. I haven't done an official ROI yet with the customers. However, when we compare cloud-spend, we are seeing for three years in cloud, we could have purchase FlexPod on-premises for less. Many customers on-premises are achieving the hybrid solution, they are adding cloud to it when and where it makes sense. As a whole, customers are still liking and buying FlexPod as it is today. On-premises spend has increased on the server and storage front with increased cloud spend.

The templates, visibility, and ease of management in my opinion reduce deployment and troubleshooting from a couple of hours or more down to a fraction of that, thinking of an incident, you will also have fewer people on the calls. You are not getting everybody from every aspect of the business, networking, storage, compute, managers, and PMs onto a conference call just to figure out what is going on. You are getting onto a call with specific people knowing what is going on from a single pane of management and alerting perspective.

Other ROI, the FlexPod solution greatly reduces the cabling in the datacenter returning back some savings by way of physical gear purchase and physical IT management time. We are seeing reduced time to troubleshoot, reduced time to inventory the infrastructure, and reduced time to deploy systems with templates. In my experience, the solution is saving easily 10 hours a week in an enterprise environment.

When customers are standardized on this technology it becomes consistent infrastructure and easier to expand when needed. The customers will also have consistent pricing and know what to budget for expansion and or builds in other datacenters. It means that the customer does not have to go out and re-architect for new solutions to fit a workload with new pricing, infrastructure, components, and then slap it all together, again. There has definitely been savings in standardization of this solution by not having to go through the whole process involving more people and adding infrastructure sprawl that needs to be managed differently with more tools, more vendors, managing many service and support contracts.

We have seen an ROI.

FlexPod has helped reduce troubleshooting time by 10% on architecture configs. 

The solution's ROI is good. I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

We have seen a reduction in support needs.

FlexPod has reduced our overall TCO and simplified our operations. 

We have seen ROI through IOPS and network latency. 

We definitely saw a lot of operational cost savings using FlexPod. As far as capital outlay goes, that was a little bit too much for us to swallow and we weren't able to recognize enough savings in that area to afford it.

If the flexible consumption had really minimized our upfront spending, we definitely would have gone into it, but we found that the "cost containers" were not enough to make the operational life cycle of the FlexPod equipment worthwhile for us.

Our customers definitely see ROI. We generally model the TCO for them over time and we're generally pretty accurate. They usually get their payback on the product-based converged solution in two years or less. They usually avoid having to add headcount.

The solution's flexible consumption has definitely reduced our customers' TCO. It allows them to do more without their having to add staff to support it. The flexible consumption is a good option for some customers and not for others. We have some who love it and some that don't.

They're going to spend the money on the solution one way or the other, and flexible consumption lets them spread it out over time and pay as they grow. That's great for some, while others just want to do the CapEx because of tax reasons or the like. Neither one is better. They're just different and they're both fine.

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.

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.

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 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 have seen ROI.

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

We don't have a TCO model right now.

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.

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.

Theoretically, we have seen ROI, but I don't know what the number is.

The return on investment is very high for FlexPod implementations.

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.

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.

We haven't seen ROI yet. 

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.

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 have not seen ROI yet. 

We have seen ROI. 

It actually initially increased our CapEx.

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.

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

The application performance improved by 50 to 70 percent.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 haven't seen ROI yet. 

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

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

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

We've seen return on investment for sure. The solution saves us money overall.

We have seen a return on investment.

Overall, the solution saves us money. We have seen an ROI, although I don't know the exact amount.

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.

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 have save time because the implementation is easier and money because we have minimized support issues.

It saves a lot of time because it is a single product. We also save time with the installation.

I have saved time on new service deployments. I've done deployments in under a week, and if it's a cloud-based deployment, it's even faster.

We have seen a five to ten percent savings on new service deployments.

Our first couple of years, our ROI was good. It helped us to lower the cost on the management of setup operations. It also helped to maintain the minimal outage window, when there is an outage that happens.

We have saved 50 percent on new service deployments and a 20 percent improvement in application performance.

We have seen ROI. We have saved time, money, space, and power consumption on new service deployments. We have a data center in Toronto which had ten racks on one of the new servers. This was all reduced to two racks with six chassis, which is amazing.

While initially the application performance was slower, we now have seen 100 percent improvement in application performance after all the required connectors were added.

We have saved money using FlexPod. We have saved time and money for new service deployments. 

We have seen ROI and saved time and money for new service deployments.

We have absolutely been able to save space. I am comparing it to my previous experience because we did not have a FlexPod solution so we had everything working piecemeal. That's very hard to manage and, if anything would go wrong, I'd always feel like it's me to blame. Here, I feel like I have an insurance policy. 

We have seen an improvement in application performance. We are pushing a lot more I/O and flexibility. We came from systems which did not have thin provisioning. Therefore, we are more flexible in being able to give out space or have I/O, especially with the AFF being all-flash. 

We can just swap in new equipment or hardware as we need, which has probably saved us several weeks.

The investment has been great. We put our money into it and it has given us something that we have been able to rely on for years.

We have been able to save time on new service deployments. When it was originally setup, it probably saved us several hours.

It has saved us hundreds of man-hours by using this converged infrastructure.

From our customer's perspective, they're not spending much time on troubleshooting, resolutions, etc. They have a solid platform which allows them to run applications, workloads, and have their business running at a top level.

Batch jobs which used to take two or three hours in the evening are now running in ten to fifteen minutes. This is a significant improvement.

We have seen ROI.

We saved a few weeks of time for new service deployments.

Coming from a rack and stack server model to FlexPod, it has saved us a lot of time (approximately hundreds to thousands of hours).

We have saved time and money for new service deployments. Without FlexPod, it probably takes about ten hours. With FlexPod, within two hours, we are up and running. So, we have seen about an 80 percent time decrease.

We have seen our data center rack space collapse about 90 percent. We have a data center which only has two racks now out of the 20 that were there previously.

We have also reduced our manpower with the solution.

We have seen ROI.

I don't have any data about ROI, but I know we were able to collapse some of our compute workload for virtualization and reduce our licensing count for SQL Server. That saves a lot of money every year, just with denser blades that were available in the UCS platform.

We have seen ROI.

I haven't had to put in a request for new rack space. Our footprint is down to two racks that run our entire core. We run multimillion-dollar exercises through it. But it's hard to quantify ROI because we had nothing previously. We weren't keeping track. And then we went to this system. I just know that in the last four years, other than buying some minor upgrades, we haven't spent any money.

I'm not the one who would capture ROI figures, but I'm sure we have seen ROI.

We are in the process of finalizing our ROI. 

We looked at VxRail, FlexPod, and going to different managed service providers, including going to AWS directly. The FlexPod gave us a quicker time to get up and running. The actual cost and negotiation was on par, if not better, than the other things that we were looking at. The labor to operate it is about 30 percent less than we anticipated.

There are a lot of different ways to measure it, but the ROI is compared to the old way. The old way was quite frankly trying to figure out plumbing:

• What do I do with networking?
• What do I do with storage?
• What do I do with compute?
• How do I make it work together?
• How do I test it?

There are a lot of papers on ROI (8:1, 10:1, and so on). It is pretty easy to understand that I am not doing all this busy work, plumbing, etc. It is coming to me pretty much as an integrated system, and I am delivering an application. There are a lot of different ways to measure it, from business outcomes to what it costs me to do it.

I have seen what I would consider ROI by my clients' value stream. When we first started out, we were using a lot of disparate systems. We went ahead and departmentalized on this particular product, which enabled us to start to see value in our clients, who said, "I am operational now. I am running. I have the system up with little downtime." 

We had our system running for 18 months, and we had other systems which were crashing on a regular basis. We started having customers transfer from those systems to ours. So, at first, the customers were running their own systems, then they jumped on ours.

We manage more than 20 large clients. Those may include groups of several hundred people for each one of those clients. So, it is 20 clients, but our development group is around 300 people, our voice group is over 100 people, etc.

We are pushing big towards the ACI infrastructure within our data center. Rack space is another, then integrate the storage solutions into that. As a company, we have seen return on investment. Therefore, I think the product is going to work out.

We have absolutely seen ROI. We have saved between two to four million dollars on travel alone over the past 24 months. We have deployed this to 75 percent of the sites where we will be deploying it. We have a little over 200 units installed. The travel savings alone has been huge for the organization.

Large and small companies do not have time to design the compute, the amount of storage, and how it works together. They are buying pre-proven, pretested solutions with reference architectures already in place. So, a lot of FlexPods you can buy with reference architectures and how to install them on top of it solutions.

None that we have measured. We do not measure any of our equipment or our data center, as far as ROI.

As far as ease of management, we do not have to hire more people to administer it or cross-train someone who is not necessarily an expert in one thing or another. If they do not know it and the primary person is out, then we can just call, someone will answer and help us out.

ROI is not a question or concern.

Storage is very expensive. To buy MIC cards and additional storage either on-prem or in the cloud, the IT department does not have money for it, so you need a more niche product or a more flexible way to store your data. That is the benefit that you get from this product.

I have seen value from FlexPod. The connectivity is simple. There is less to break. There is less tinkering or lost time that you do not really notice. Also, we run our capital for three to five years, so we size it for that type of environment.

It is a little more difficult in government because we do not track that much on the soft dollar side. They look at it more as a capital investment. However, I can tell you from when I started there, when I started with the organization and we put our first FlexPod in our downtime has significantly been reduced.

From that prospective, if we look at our return on investment, we had have more productivity uptime. Our end users are obviously happier and IT is not constantly getting a black mark from the business because tech has not been worked.

No downtime, which is a good thing.

I have not paid attention to ROI. 

As far as the real value, it is a simplistic consolidation where I can actually talk to somebody on the phone, and say, "You should not have to leave the room or go to another floor. This should be laid out like this." 

It is very convenient, and that is a good value right there.

It's provided a good return on investment. It's allowed us to do more with the few people that we actually have.

It’s pricey, but provides a high return on investment.

ROI is difficult to gauge because things have changed so much in the time since we started. We have moved from a virtual environment of roughly 30, 40, 50 percent to 70, 90 percent now. I want to cut it.

ROI is very difficult to truly quantify, but as far as pricing goes, it totally depends on the size of the system and what components you desire. Because the FlexPod is really just an architecture based on standards, pricing can range all over the place. For small businesses, you might want a FlexPod mini. For larger corporations, you might want multiple FlexPod installations.