FlexPod XCS Reviews

Flexibility and speed.

I like that we can do anything we want to with the networking part of it, without having to add cables and cards, and we can add extra networks, extra VLANs, and extend the environment without having to buy new stuff.

We oftentimes will get a new product, a new server solution that requires a separate network, or even a proof of concept, sometimes development servers that need separated networks. We can spin those up without having to do new cables, new network ports. Any cost or any change requests, we can just do them on the fly.

We like it because everything is 10 Gig all the way through, from the storage to the switches to everything else, which is more than we need, and that's great.

It seems very cost effective once it's in place, and it's easy to expand and easy to add capacity without a lot of extra money.

It honestly does everything I need it to do at this point. So for me, for my organization, what we do, I don't need anything else other than for them to keep making it so I can keep buying the newer blades and the newer parts as they come out.

The management interface of the UCS part of it is a little bit clunky. It uses Java, so when we're managing it, if I have a computer that doesn't have Java on it or has the wrong version of Java on it, there's some iterations that have to happen to get into the manager of it.

That is annoying, albeit really not impactful to the service, it's just my annoyance getting into managing it. But once I'm there it's OK. So if anything, maybe the management is a little bit clunky.

Five and a half years.

It's good. We've had it for about five or six years now and we've had no outages. It's been great, it's easy to work on, it's easy to upgrade.

No crashes. The only time we've had to turn it off is when we had a building power outage, we had to shut everything in the building off.

Very good so far. We haven't taken it to any extreme level, but anything we've needed to do, we've been able to scale out easily, and we've been able to extend it out to our disaster recovery sites and include that in the same architectures. We have a little mini FlexPod down there too.

When we first had it installed, we did have a Cisco partner and a NetApp partner come out and help us deploy it, initially. Going forward, we haven't really had to rely on any support outside of our organization, which is good.

We brought it in as a proof of concept. We were trying to bring virtual desktops to our organization and it was pitched as an all-in-one package deal we could deploy easily.

I thought it was very straightforward, we accomplished it in about a day and a half. We were up and running and everything was on it.

Our field is federal government. I don't think this product is uniquely valuable for our industry, but I think it's a very good value to the government. We pushed it a lot, but there are lots of ways to accomplish this. We, in our part of the government, think it's the best way to do it, but I don't know that it's uniquely suited to government.

I'm a happy customer of FlexPod.

• The ease of deployment: You don't have to worry about dealing with all three components from three different vendors.
• The support structure: Now when you can open cases, you call either vendor and tell them it's a FlexPod case, they'll hook up with all the rest of the resources from different domains, if needed. That's the best part.

It's less resource-intensive, given that it comes in a package. You don't have to deal with all the companies yourself.

• The whole packaging
• Deployment
• Support structure

The above all help to increase the productivity by reducing the deployment and configuration time, and also adhere to best practices as well.

Compared with other converged solutions, there are better support systems, but you pay for the premium. But outside the support systems, they know what they're doing, and the resolution time is much better, because I've dealt with the other systems as well.

Maybe in the future, they could include the HCI solution into the mix. Maybe the newer solutions, like the ONTAP Fabric Pool or ONTAP Select, as well down the line could be added. That would be nice.

It's straightforward. It has gotten better. I'm not in touch with the newer deployment methods, but I haven't seen issues, so I think we are good on this.

It would be nice if we can allow config management tools like maybe SaltStack or Puppet. We are comfortable with SaltStack. It would be nice to not only use it for deployment as well as to manage the configs, top to bottom, because that is something we need to have a better handle on, to make sure we are consistent across the board.

It's good. We know that all the different companies, Cisco, NetApp and VMware, they all are pretty stable in their own markets. Therefore, as long as we adhere to the best practices, and make sure we don't oversize or undersize, we should be good.

Scalability is sometimes a challenge for us. The way we are growing, sometimes we don't know what the demand is going to look like. It's hard to expect what demand is going to come by forecasting through purchase, going through the cycle. I feel that there is a scope for improvement here.

Make it more like On Demand. Make FlexPod On Demand, maybe the compute piece or storage piece. Also it would be nice if they could know our datacenter footprint, so they know how much we can grow. That would help minimize the time for scaling, because those were some of the challenges we faced frequency around datacenter space and to figure out where things to plugin.

It's good. Sometimes, we find ourself waiting for the right engineer to be available. It takes time to escalate to the right person. We had these meetings with the support organization a couple of times, and we told them that we'd rather wait for the right engineer than to spend time going over the same stuff and going nowhere.

It was there before I came.

In some aspects, they are pretty good, and in other aspects, they need improvement.

For someone looking at FlexPod and similar solutions: I tell them to go with whatever works for them, as it's organization-specific and resource-specific, because the in-house knowledge-base also weighs in, and it's a big deal because you don't want to spend time working on your learning curve.

If it was just a suggestion, you can make any product work as well, as long as you design it properly, you don't over utilize it, and you make sure you follow up with the vendors and do the recommendations. At the same time, the vendors follow up with us and keep us up-to-date and know our pain points and work towards them. Therefore, I would recommend FlexPod.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Response.
• Make sure the product delivers what they advertise. That's primary, because we don't have enough time to PoC all the different aspects.
• Give more flexibility in terms of purchasing, the roadmap, and involve us when they come out with new products and/or get our feedback.

The ease of use. I like that with all the NetApp products, it's very easy to use. I'm on the storage side of it, but we're still working with the servers and we're using the Cis UCS servers. So there are some tweaks that they're still working on on that side of it.

But the original PoC we did came back with very good numbers and looked like it was going to help a lot of our users locally. And we have remote users that will attach to the FlexPod and do their work from say, Houston, logging into Calgary or other places from outside of Calgary. It centralizes everything into our datacenter and it helps us manage it more easily.

The general manageability of it really is easy and it's taking advantage of all the deduplication, compression. We've got 9.1 P3 in there now so we haven't taken the next step to do compaction or anything like that but I'm sure we're going to go down that road too.

The benefit is the speed, it's the performance. That's what it comes down to is the performance of the solution.

It's the first step of it right now for us. They're still proving some of the server side out from it but we've already pushed out the storage side of it. They're using that storage in their existing, and they are getting better performance, better benefits.

I'm not really sure, to be honest. A lot of what it's doing today is exactly what we need, so I'm focusing on some other things at this point around our database environment and things like that. Everything that I've seen right now from a FlexPod perspective is very good.

I think they can always improve, whether it's dedupe or compression, those algorithms; and flash through better SSDs. I guess faster is not really there with an SSD now, but I think anything that makes it smaller, better cooling, less power, those kinds of things. Help in the datacenter.

We've had FlexPod in our environment for, I would say about six to nine months. We brought it in to help one of our applications called Petrel. It's IO intensive. It's an application that petrophysicists use to look for oil. That's what they're using it for, so they need performance for projects.

In general, just because I've been working with NetApp products for a lot of years, from that perspective, I don't have outages that I worry about. It's very stable in that sense. I have more problems if my network goes down than anything else, and it's not my problem anymore.

Very scalable. We're already planning how we're going to expand and grow it. They're doing a lot of exploration work so we know it's going to expand so we're already planning for it, and it's going to be easy to do.

We've used lots of technical support. I've used it. We've talked to people on the phone, we've done the chats online. All kinds of different things. NetApp's support's always been great for us. They're knowledgeable, absolutely.

I was not involved directly in the initial setup. The other guy that I work with was part of the PoC that we did, and then I got a little bit involved later on. He's actually part of the finishing off of it. But the ongoing support and operational part of it, I'm part of that.

They had to jump through a lot of hoops to get things but I think part of it was our own... What we needed to do was listen to the experts a little more to say, "Okay, we have to do it this way versus trying to push our own infrastructure on it." So that's what hurt us. But in the end, really good.

FlexPod is absolutely uniquely valuable for oil and gas, for some of the more higher-intensive products, the software that engineers will use to look for oil They're always looking to be able to do that faster, better and more efficiently.

I gave it a nine out of 10 because nothing's ever perfect. We did run into some hiccups around some different things. Part of that is us, the other part of that is working with the vendors. We weren't utilizing things with the switch properly. When we were having jobs come in from outside to access the storage, because it wasn't going through the Cisco switch and everything else, it was actually a slower grab for them. Once we changed those things and really implemented more of what you should be doing with the FlexPod, that's when we started seeing the performance gains.

There's one number to call if you have a problem, they can get it fixed.

Also, it's good to have everything set up the right where you know; all this works together if you do the config right. There's no performance issues.

The simplicity means I don't have to spend all day troubleshooting gremlins.

It helped make things easier so we don't have the tracking down gremlins. Before we used this it was, "Oh, this server's not working right. Why?" And then we have to dig through; and we haven't had any of those since we started with FlexPod.

I know there are other versions of FlexPods beyond what we use. I've only dealt with basically the Cisco NetApp VMware version. I can't think of any other features that I would need.

It's always nice if it's cheaper. We've been locked into all this. We could save money and go with HyperV but then you have other issues. There are always things you can do to save money but you have to ask yourself if it's worth it.

About three years.

No issues. Very stable.

We haven't had any issues with that either. If we have to add, we add, and it all works together.

Honestly, FlexPod-related, we haven't had any. Very rarely do you have problems that are related to the FlexPod. If anything, we'll have issues with VMware that are not related to anything else, then we have to go to them. They are responsive and knowledgeable.

No. We've used bits and pieces of it; the three different pieces, we have always used VMware. We're always using that app but then kind of brought UCS into it and then built the FlexPod.

We switched for the simplicity of having one number to call.

I came in after it was already setup. I do firmware upgrades and some things like that. It is not complex.

I think it's valuable to anyone. I don't think it's related to industry, rather it's for anyone who runs a datacenter.

I think the most valuable features include it being scalable. We got the product and we have a small environment, but it was able to be scalable to when we started to grow. So I think that was one of the bigger features.

Also, that everything is seamless. And what I mean by that is that you have the components of a Cisco, and you have the components of NetApp; and we have a networking team that is all Cisco certified, and we have a team of NetApp administrators that are also certified. So by not having to reach out and do a whole lot of different training, most of the training had already been done with previous experience. It saved the company a lot more man hours and time to actually get the FlexPod up and running.

That's pretty tricky, because for what we have and for what we use it for, it's actually pretty perfect, to be quite honest. Even when we brought the finished product to our customer, there were really no complaints. They were happy with just having HA, "Hey, if something goes down, we don't lose services." That was their biggest concern. Outside of that they really don't have any complaints at all.

It wouldn't be more FlexPod as a whole, I think for me it would be more NetApp. What I mean by that is, we are a company that likes to do SnapMirrors all over the place, and the customer is always asking when we set up a SnapMirror, "How long does it take or how long do you have left?" And when you've been dealing with NetApp you have to manually do some calculations, make an educated guess. So if there was something like a progress bar for a SnapMirror, so a customer could say, "Hey, what's the percentage?" and I answer, "It's 57%," versus saying, "I think, well, by the size of this volume and the speed of the link..." and that kind of stuff. A progress bar would probably solve all that because they'd like to know, how much more time do we have when we're doing this SnapMirror. I think that would be pretty cool.

For the company it's going on two and a half years. And we're still deploying new ones out.

I think the stability is great. I love the Multipathing for the FlexPlot. You have HA all over the place. You have HA with your storage, you have HA with the blades, you have HA with the Nexus switches as well. You can't ask for more HA than that. So you have time to replace a part, you have time to troubleshoot something without having any downtime. So I think it's excellent.

I have not used tech support yet. All our guys are pretty well versed, especially the knowledge of Cisco and the knowledge of NetApp. And then I forgot to even toss in the knowledge of VMware, because we run VMware on top of four of the blades. Having that group already there at work and having the experience, we all just put our minds together trying to figure it out and it works out pretty well.

It was a little complex but it was because before I started deploying FlexPods I was just in a systems-type realm. But once I completed my initial configuration of one and understood the importance of having HA - once I understood that - I figured out, "Well, cabling, it makes sense." Whatever happens on the A side happens on the B side, and it just started kind of flowing together.

So not too terribly bad. Plus NetApp has real great resources. You can go to their page, you can pull up FlexPod, you can find all the cabling in there for whatever model you have, supported and unsupported, they were really good about that; that was awesome.

The most important criteria when looking at vendors, to me, is honesty about a product. We talked to NetApp folks and they were really good as far as getting us all the information.

It wasn't just that I said I need a solution and they gave me a quote for the biggest solution that I needed to get. They asked, how many people do you have, what kind of expansion do you see yourself going into five years from now, how many services do you want, how is it going to grow. And I thought that was just awesome. Usually they try to sell you the most expensive, like a car salesman. But no, they really looked at our needs, looked at where we were going, picked out a solution.

Even with NetApp, they could've picked a solution that was just NetApp. They looked at it as a whole and said, "For the size of your datacenter, for the users that you're going to have, and to be able to take everybody's unique skill set and put it together, FlexPod will work out for you."

In terms of advice to a colleague, I would definitely tell them to take a look into it. I know most people have their ways with all-in-one systems. In a sense it is that, but in a sense it's not. There are separate components to this system.

If you have a passion for trying to create a better datacenter or if you have a passion for learning new things, FlexPod is the way to go. You're learning about three different technologies, depending on what you use for your hosting, regardless if it's VMware, HyperV, you're learning the stack so you're learning how everything connects.

And, depending on what you do, if you're at a layer-three relationship, you'll be learning about that as well, depending upon how much access you have. But it's definitely an opportunity to satisfy your customer and also increase your knowledge base.

• Resiliency
• Performance

Resiliency: It's extremely fault tolerant so it's highly available. If one component fails, it's got a backup that will take over.

Performance: FlexPod rocks. It's pretty powerful. And it helps when you have a FlexPod, all the workload's inside. There's no external things that can hurt it, except for itself.

Also, it's easy to manage, because you basically have two interfaces that you can use to manage all of the three tiers, storage, computer, networking. So, it's easy to manage.

Once we started using it, people that didn't understand it were skeptical. Once we proved how resilient, and how well it performed, we got more internal customers who wanted to use it.

I'm excited to see the SolidFire FlexPod. I think that's going to bring a lot more business opportunities. I think you're going to be able to scale your workloads inside of it. Just integrated, at a lower cost, I think will be great.

The FlexPod, with the UC chassis and the NetApp storage is perfect for us, we had no trouble. The FlexPod SF, the SolidFire, it's just a newer generation. I'm not sure what they could improve on.

The SolidFire, I don't think it is going to natively support SnapMirror. It uses its own replication, I think, but I know it's in the roadmap. They're talking by the end of this year, that it will come out.

You can have AMP servers, in the FlexPods, you can have it join an ESX cluster. So you have that GUI. I think someday you'll see a single pane of glass for management, that would be the best thing for it.

We've been using FlexPods onsite for four to five years.

Stability is great, never had it go down in the entire four years. Never crashed, never lost anything that was not fault tolerant. So, if we lost a piece of hardware, its HA or failover component took over.

We actually did several upgrades. We've had to upgrade the compute, the UC, chassis. We've added storage, all non-disruptive. So, yeah it's very scalable.

Technical support is great. So the way NetApp set it up is, they're right next door to Cisco in NTP, and they actually have a dedicated team of VMware, Cisco, and NetApp to troubleshoot problems. The beauty is that if any component in it, even if it's a Cisco switch, or the UC chassis, which is Cisco, you call NetApp, and the ticket gets routed to the appropriate group, immediately.

We had specific workloads that needed a converged infrastructure, and it was just the one we picked.

It was new to me. I'm more of a traditional storage guy, replication, backup, recovery guy. But, it was very easy to understand, as we were installing it.

All was upgradable. If you needed to reboot any component, either one of the switchblades or a VM in the chassis, you could just move it over, without any disruption, unless it was CIFS, and then do the upgrade.

We're in the Financial industry but I don't think it's uniquely valuable for just that industry. I think it's valuable for any workload that it's appropriate for. There are many use cases for it.

It's just a great product, it really is.

That it works. That it does exactly what it says on the tin. That once it's set up, it does exactly what's its supposed to do. There are no "gotchas," there are no "oopsies." Not in this particular use case. There is no hidden BS that has to be satisfied, this, that, or the other. It just does exactly what it's supposed to do.

Up time, cost, predictability.

With the old Dell EqualLogic, EMC, up-time was always an issue. There was always something that created a problem here and there. We have, in four years, not had a single system-down issue. That's hard to beat.

The predictability of our system utilization: I can predict fairly easily when I need to go out and buy new shelves because I can trend it all. I can fairly easily predict where I need to open more aisles. I can fairly easily predict where I need more space. It just works.

The CLI part of it is still evolving enough that commands that you expect to do something become deprecated and you want to take their place and you have to keep up with the code base. In this code base you do this, and in this code base you do this, and in this code base you do that. But for the most part its good and, let's be honest, everything changes.

Automatic tiering would be good to have.

My biggest thing is I would love to see a native SMB or NFS front end to an optic store on the AFF and FAS platforms. Right now you want me to go out and buy a front end for it that creates an optic store on it and gives me the SMB interface. I would love to see that as a native part of the SBM. It doesn't have to be the end all be all; it doesn't have to be this hyper-scale thing but just the fact that I have it, so I can dip my toe in it, and I can get something that kind of works, that would be epic; that is my main thing.

The other big annoyance I have with Net App is the fragmentation of all the software. I have SnapManager, I have this, I have that, and they're all slightly different. They all look slightly different. They all come in different VMs. Some are OBAs, some are installed on Windows, some have weird requirements like, "No, no, no, it has to run on this version of Windows." It would be nice to just have all of that in one giant application and then just turn on and off different features based on license keys. That would make things easier.

About four years.

Great. It's been perfect for four years. You can't beat that.

So far I have not had any issues at all. The only couple of things I would like to see would be something, as I said, like internal tiering where you could automatically set up an aggregate spread across a 10K disc and have the controller automatically tier it. But now we're going all flash anyway so who cares? We've kind of brute forced our way out of the problems.

They're good. They're knowledgeable, absolutely. I have no complaints with the tech support that we have had to deal with.

We switched because EMC and Dell, and EqualLogic sucked and it was driving me nuts and it never worked.

It was a paradigm shift because every stack has its own set of unique ways of doing things and getting used to that and getting into that mindset took a little bit of effort but once you get it, it's clear sailing.

Upgrades are not complex.

We're a law firm. I think this product is valuable for pretty much anybody who has a large amount of data that they need to manage. I don't think that this product is uniquely valuable for a law firm.

I am a very happy customer.

I like the management interface in UCS and then UCS Director. I like how I can still automate, the API that you can do with FlexPod - you can work with it through API - which is what we have to have for our environment. We have to produce more with less people. We have to have workflows that can do it a lot faster.

There are a lot of features that the storage and the environment has. I, personally, like the feature with the profiles on the UCS side. You can just take out blades and replace them, and you're back up and running in no time.

Faster provisioning, meeting SLAs, deadlines. We are able to produce more with less resources.

I would think more cloud integration, a lot more flexibility with adapting to different things. Not saying that it does not already. I'm just trying to see if I could do a lot more things with it, in regards to AWS and Azure. A lot more flow.

The mission that NetApp has with the whole fabric, if they can do a lot more with it within the FlexPod, that would be good. They're working on it. Nothing bad to say about it. That's where they're going with it.

Not necessarily with, say, with cloud sync, with cloud ONTAP, with the fabric pools and all that. I guess I want to see other customers do a lot more cool stuff with it, so that I can do it. That's pretty much how I do it. We look at other people, see what they've done, proven, and then we say, "Okay. Let's do it. Let them jump off the cliff first before we go."

I'm thinking vendor agnostic, right? Where instead of having to build your FlexPod, here's your Cisco, here's your Nexus, here's your storage and all that, maybe Cisco can buy out NetApp and then they just have this one big box. Or the other way around. NetApp buys Cisco and then there's just this one box and everything's right on it. You have this big chassis with blades and you just swap everything out. Technically, you could do that with UCS already.

About a year.

It's very stable. As far as being tested and proven by the different vendors, Cisco, NetApp. But it's also stable in the code, UCS on the NetApp side, on the storage side, on the switch side. It's all proven code. It's been around for a long time. I see it as something that's reliable, stable and the fact that everything's redundant, so you don't have to worry about it.

Currently, I think it's great because they support, for example, cluster. You can scale that beyond belief. Then, there's also the UCS domains, you can have multiples in there and expand it, so I think it has no problems scaling.

Unless you're talking a really, really large environment with, say, beyond the petabytes. And even then... Maybe you could run into issues with management, but still I think UCS Director provides value with that.

It's a one-stop shop. It's good. I like it. They were knowledgeable, and if they weren't, they knew where to find the information.

We switched because we needed a converged infrastructure.We didn't have it. We had bunch of siloed environments across the board.

We chose NetApp because it helped us unify what we already had. All our training experiences with UCS - we have an environment of UCS, we have VBlock. We decided, "All right. Let's use the training that we already have and let's take UCS and let's take all the virtualization that we have and let's just continue to use it." We had NetApp already, so might as well just take NetApp with it.

FlexPod has been around for a long time. We said, "All right. Let's PoC this," so we PoC'd it. We got a lot out of it, lot of the requirements were met. It worked well for what we had.

Not complex.

Upgrades, the same, not complex. With ONTAP, you just have to pick your order, find out how you can upgrade them and do your UCS, do your Nexus switches, do your storage. Not difficult.

There was Nutanix. We do have a few Nutanix in there. It's just not as well known.

It's easy to manage if you start out correctly. If you don't, if you just spaghetti everything out and do all kinds of weird things within it, and don't keep standards, you always, like anything, create chaos.

We're in the financial industry but I think FlexPod is valuable for a lot of industries, not just this one. I don't see it as a one niche for just financial, could be for everything.

Right now, I think it's a great product. I don't give anybody a 10 unless they're outstanding, perfect in every way.

I'd say the ease of how we can manage it. That is something I personally like. It means I have to do less work. I manage storage, so with the ease with which we can understand, and then share it to the VMware. We create datastores and we share and all that is easy. Not very difficult.

Sharing over internet. We don't need too many FC connections for that. We just need ethernet connections and we can export it to the virtual machines and to the ESX actually.

We have both the solutions actually. The part where we are right now, yes, it is better. And we are looking forward to going for the hyper-converged one as well.

We're not exactly with FlexPod, but we have NFS shares and all. Somehow, if we can dig into the end user who is using that share, and who is populating how much data into that. I don't know, maybe it's already there, but to all the people I've talked with, I haven't heard about it.

So if that can be included, that would be good. We have some tools like OCI's and all. So if we can find from there, who is the end person who's using the share - and sometimes they over utilize it - and if you can find out who, to that level, if we can dig down, that'll be good for the administration point of view.

The performance could be improved. Because it's over network, I don't know if they have to improve something on the NetApp end, because over the network it slows down when it's compared to the fiber channel network. If they can, that would be wonderful.

In our environment FlexPod has been used for, I think, more than three years now.

It's stable. We don't face a lot of issues often, but sometimes we do face them, performance wise. If the load is increased, sometimes that way. We do get issues, but we are able to resolve them and they are manageable.

Yes, we can scale. We are actually now scaling our environment, including FlexPod on our roadmap, and it does scalability.

For the cases we have, sometimes the issues which we get, we do raise NetApp cases with the team. We use it.

They're good. They're helpful. They're spot on time, that's one good thing. We like it. NetApp is way, way better than some others that we've had really bad times with.

I'm new to my new project, so probably yes, there would have been something, which they have replaced with FlexPod. But I don't know what was replaced, to be honest.

They switched because they wanted better performance and we are especially using FlexPod for datastores over the network. It's more feasible, I'd say. Performance wouldn't be as good as SAN. But still, it is a better solution.

I wasn't involved. I just joined, like a year back. So I wasn't involved when this was procured and all.

I am involved in an upgrade right now. The process is not very complex. Actually, NetApp is helping us, so I wouldn't say they're very complex. They're non-disruptive. That's something which matters to our customer. No down-time so that's what we like about it.

I think I could, maybe, do the upgrade without NetApp's help.

Our industry is management services, Tarragon Consultancy, one of the biggest groups for management services. I think across the industry, FlexPod is a good one, to get convergence of everything in one place; we can get the computer storage and then we can export everything. It's good.

• Pretty much a single phone number to call when there is a problem.
• Ease of use
• Manageability for the storage system

It is valuable, because it is easy. Easy to use, so we don't spend a whole lot of time learning new products out there. That is a major plus.

It definitely made an impact to how we manage our data. We recently have a new data center, and we migrated our data from one of the older storage solutions out there to an all NetApp environment.

Tighter integration with CISCO.

Since 2013.

It's very stable. We haven't really had any major issues with the FlexPod solution in all four years.

I find it very easy to scale upwards and horizontally, as well. It's very easy for us to scale up by adding either additional controllers or additional storage shelves.

We have used tech support. They are very knowledgeable and very prompt in getting back to us.

We have engaged technical support to assist us on a lot of different things. Whenever we have a case open, and if we think it requires some escalation, we have a SAM and they make sure we get the resources that we need and get back to normal operations within a short period of time.

Before Flexpod, we had other Meta app systems going back to 2008.

We're a health system company, so we have a number of different storage solutions. However FlexPod, it has everything.

We still have a few solutions because some applications have their specific storage systems, and being in the health industry, those applications are usually approved by FDA, and it's not something which can be changed at will.

I was involved in the initial setup. It's pretty straightforward.