FlexPod XCS Reviews

Our primary use case is for VMs in our virtual environment.

It has reduced costs because we are not buying a lot of infrastructure or physical servers. Also, deployment and confirmation times have reduced significantly with our use of this solution. We can speed up by VMs at the rate of ten to 15 minutes, then give it to our customers.

• Deduplication
• Compression

Validate designs are a good. They work in the background to combine all the infrastructure and storage. They create automation which can create volumes and attach VMs directly to massive CIFS. This is now easily done.

With the next solution, if there is a virtual Flex part where we can deploy it to private clouds or in public clouds rather tying up the hardware, it would reduce costs and complexity. Then, we could do a lot more automation.

It is pretty stable. We haven't had any issues, so it's pretty resilient.

We can easily scale up or down, and add more storage instead of VMs.

We haven't done lot of scaling at this time because we have around 2000 to 3000 VMs. Initially, we bought the whole storage of compute needed for our VMs, so we haven't scaled up. Currently, we are looking at scaling up a little more. It seem pretty easy to add more nodes.

NetApp technical support is very good. We have our own dedicated TAMs and SAMs assigned, and support has a nice dashboard where log into support and see all our systems. We can see the performance, data, etc. 

The previous solution required us to buy a server or node for the cabling, deployment, configuration, which meant a lot of time and resources every time we had to buy more nodes or servers and add them. We don't have this with FlexPod.

Take a look at FlexPod and do a PoC. Compare it to other products and you will see the huge savings.

It provides all the network information needed, such as how to create pools and set up servers. It is pretty easy.

When we install, it is an innovative, because we have all of the products in one box and one frame. This reduces all the cabling and all IPs needed as they are already there.

NetApp helped us with the setup.

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

Private cloud is good as long as it justifies the cost of putting your data in public clouds. If you're a financial client, you can't put all your financial data in a public cloud, as per government policies. However, if it's not critical data nor personal data of the customer, then it should be okay to put it on a public cloud as long as it justifies the price.

It has been enabling as a data for our service platform. 

FlexPods have been able to grow, build, and change how they looks at data analytics by setting up the system and enabling them to grow as they need. We can add them to additional NetApp domains allowing them to scale quite large and collect as much information on their data plane as they need.

FlexPod means I will have reliability, flexibility, and scalability. The three main variables that I rely upon to deliver whatever I need to my clients.

I would like to see more interoperability within FlexPods. This comes into more of how we grow from multiple domains to a massive domain. That would be fun to see in the future.

It is extremely stable. That is the reason that I love the platform. The platform allows us to leave during the day, and at night the system continues to run. We come back the next day and it gives us the flexibility of adding more users. We have about more than 20 high-end clients and almost 5000 virtual machines on ten domains which means ten FlexPods. Because of that, we are able to provide our clients with a completely stable, versatile platform.

We use it both in the field and in the lab. In the lab, scalability means that my clients (which are all internal users) are building software, writing code, and building up new applications that we provide for them. We have around 26 million subscribers for Charter. Within the platform, we are able to leverage and give those individuals tenants the necessary tools to grow and build what they need to build to provide services to our external clients.

Support is supreme, everything from documentation to having people who will jump in and support our systems. When we were tied to the automatic provisioning system on command, it allowed us to tell when a device had gone bad. We get drives sent to us automatically, then we replace those drives, and we continue to service our client. Zero downtime, that is what we love: a lights out type operations.

At first, it seems a little complex. As you get going, you realize it is quite straightforward. The documentation alone that NetApp provides can guide anybody through the process. You can hire external vendors to assist you with it, but if you have some knowledgeable people, and they read the documentation, in a few short days, you will be up and operational.

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.

I rate it as a 10 out of 10. I always have. I feel it is something special and unique. Not only do you get the best with the Cisco platform compute, but then I get NetApp for my storage, and it just works. It is reliable, and it has given me every aspect of what I am looking for to provide to my clients. My team of experts, as they come in and work on it, know that at the end of the day, they get to leave and go home to be with their families. It does not give them problems, and it is consistent beyond compare.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• We look for who the client is or who the vendor is.
• What kind of reputation they have.
• How they are perceived in the market.
• How they treat us, and if they treat us like a partner. 

NetApp's a partner to us. There are a lot of vendors out there who come in and want to sell you something and leave. NetApp is here for the long haul. They are here to provide service,  engage, and make sure that we are part of their community. I find when I have an issue that I can call on my sales rep and my technical rep, and also just reach out directly to NetApp for the support. They are going to be there for me, no matter what time of day or night, whatever is going on. Very rarely do I need it because they are so proactive in everything they do for us.

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.

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 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.

We are using it in two cases. 

1. We are using it for a database solution, so we're moving all of our 12G database systems onto Oracle UCS with flash as the hot store. We are still using spinning disk as the cold store. Initial tests are going really well. We're actually moving our first big load on in a couple of weeks. 
2. We are using Oracle VM Citrix-based hypervisor, full solution, with FlexPod as the repo on the back-end. All the guest nodes are running on UCS B200 M4s. We have A700, A300, and A200 on the back-end for various slavers and pulls, and they are all working great.
   

We just put our first full workloads on it about a month ago. Since then, everyone has been saying after booting it, this was their fastest startup ever in that environment. Thus, it is working well so far.

For the management side of our UCS, it is a single pane of glass for multiple people, whether it is data center, sysadmin, or server deployment. 

On the UCS side for server profile, there is a type of layer of abstraction from the actual hardware. It is a lot easier to do hardware replacement, as long as you are Fibre Channel booting, you can just replace hardware which breaks and have things come right back online.

Flash obviously just adds speed and bandwidth to everything.

The most valuable features in a data center, or parts of it, are footprint and power consumption. The flash side is the first time that Moore's Law breaks. It gets smaller, and also takes less power.

We have had a bit of struggle on the support side. 

I am not looking into the next iterations of it yet, because we are still standing up some parts of what we have now. 

I would like to see the partnership with NetApp and Cisco continue. We have been a NetApp shop for a long time. We have seen partner agreements between NetApp and tech companies fall apart over time. They were with Hitachi for a while, then 3Par for a while, and so on. However, we have a lot vested in Cisco and NetApp now. We would like to see the Flexpod service agreement strengthen as we continue to benefit on the customer side.

We like NetApp and Cisco. I do not want to have to figure out how to make either of them work once they have decided to part ways. Therefore, it is important to us that they hold together.

We are pretty new, but so far, we have not had issues on the flash side. We just moved our first production workloads onto it about six to eight weeks ago. We did not find MTBF early.

We purchased what we needed, so there is some room for scalability. We went big with the A700, thus we are using the 15TB SSDs. So far, so good.

From a customer perspective, it has been up to us to make sure that we get both NetApp and Cisco involved when we have had an issue. Unfortunately, we cannot just contact one side and they contact the other vendor to sort of work it out in the background, leaving you in the loop. We are interested in what is going on, but we have felt that we have had to pull the two sides together to make the FlexPod service side of it work to our benefit.

They have worked with us to sort things out. Admittedly, we are running the bleeding edge of things. We are using Oracle UEK, which was not necessarily on either side's support matrix right upfront. Therefore, we have had some issues getting both sides' corporate to play nice. Eventually, it did get sorted out, and we are getting these things resolved.

We previously worked with physical servers. We had a lot of HPE c7000 class. We started with RLX, which was pre-HPE. HPE bought them. 

We have played with the P class and C class, doing a couple different proven concepts along the way. We had Dell and Cisco, and some other people all come in, and they taught their stuff.

This time around, from the managed solution side of it, Cisco is what sold us. Hardware is hardware, but how you put the solution together was the selling point for us. To be able to get something saying, "You build it like this." Not, you have a bunch of parts, what do you want to do with it? This is what a lot of the other vendors are still doing. They are tailoring hardware to your workload after you have bought hardware. 

As opposed to finding the solution you need, helping you build it upfront, presenting the hardware and dock, then showing you how to build it. This is what is nice for us. While a little rough, once you have built it, the support matrix says, "Here is newest version of firmware. Here is newest version of something else." Then, off you go. They do not necessarily take all iterations of change back to the lab to recertify them. 

You work with the vendor partnership to keep you in compliance going forward. This is one of the reasons that I want to see the NetApp and Cisco partnership hold together. Otherwise, we are right back where we were before. NetApp has an update and Cisco has an update, and neither one of them have tested it with each other. 

Setup was pretty easy. This was our first venture into UCS at all. It was a steep learning curve figuring it out. We are using Central to manage six different domains, so getting that hierarchy put together upfront so we could do global templating across all those domains was a little rough, mostly from a conceptual standpoint. It deploys easily now that we have got it out.

We have been a NetApp shop forever, so that part was a piece of cake.

Make sure that you engage as much with whom you are buying from as a partnership, not just as a purchase. 

We did a PoC with four different vendors to test out combinations of a hardware build. Storage was kind of a given as we have been a NetApp shop forever. We have gone through a couple other ones. We really like 3PAR, but that's a different story.

The hardware has been rock solid so far. It has gone up easy. It runs well. We have not had issues with it.

Pay attention to what you need upfront as you are building it. Know the workload that you are trying to solve with it. Make sure you are buying for performance, not just capacity. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It is important that they care about the business that we do after sale. It is one thing to get a quote, obtain the parts, and make sure you have all the right things upfront. Your business is going to change the next day, especially for a business like us. We are in a multi-customer type of environment where somebody will have a new bright idea tomorrow. Therefore, we need to be adaptable. It is important to have a partnership with the people that we purchase from. Thus, ongoing modifications can continue to be part of the conversation, not just, "I sold you something. Let me know when it is time to renew your contract."

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.

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).