FlexPod XCS Reviews

Our primary use case is virtualization. Most of our virtualized environment runs on FlexPod.

Once you set up the underlying infrastructure, it's very quick to add more capacity or add more compute or networking.

We have also definitely saved time for new service deployments, on the order of many weeks - two months, three months.

Ease of deployment. Once I deploy the chassis and I have the back-end storage, configuring more UCS servers is very quick. I can deploy a new UCS server within minutes.

I would like to see them reduce the complexity, that would be my number one request. Right now, doing simple things is pretty complex. You have so many options. It might be better if it was more wizard-driven, as opposed to going through five hundred dials. It's not very easy or intuitive.

It's stable. We haven't had any issues. We have it deployed for multiple customers and they have all been very stable.

We have found the solution to be resilient. We test it. Before we turned over the product to the customer we did a lot of testing. No single point of failure. VMware, UCS, NetApp, we pulled cables, we did failovers, everything was seamless. Very good.

We have a customer that has five chassis and it scales very well. It is very easy to scale up and wide.

I haven't had any issues, I've called Cisco, NetApp, VMware. It's been pretty good.

We switched to FlexPod because of cost. The cost of our previous solution was too high. I couldn't scale out as easily as I wanted to.

Setup is complex. They don't follow the norms. You expect certain things to be a certain way but once you start deploying you go, "Ah-ha." I found three or four "ah-ha" moments or "gotchas." It wasn't very straightforward. I had to do some digging to find out the right way to deploy it.

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

Nutanix, SimpliVity, and Vblock. We went with FlexPod because I think NetApp is a better product for the back-end storage. The other two are the same.

I would suggest doing a mini FlexPod PoC. That is probably the best way to kick the tires and find out what the product is all about.

I have seen an improvement in application performance but I can't attribute that to the UCS or the FlexPod environment because I'm running on an SSD. It doesn't matter if it's FlexPod or not, it'll still run fast.

I haven't really dealt with validated designs. I go to Cisco and grab the product line from there and just deploy according to that. I don't really deviate too much from the already-architected solutions.

In terms of private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, right now we're only doing private. Private is pretty much doing business as usual, nothing different about it. I haven't really looked into how we can take it to the cloud yet. We don't use FlexPod to manage private cloud.

As for the solution being innovative when it comes to compute, storage, and networking, when UCS came on first, that technology was innovative. I haven't seen much innovation from them recently.

I rate FlexPod at eight out of ten. They still have some room for improvement. As I said, the complexity is still pretty high. If they can get a handle on the complexity part I would give it a nine or ten.

We had a lot of disparate technologies which were spread around to different sites. It was the ability to converge a lot of different data and platforms into a single common platform that we could then scale horizontally and vertically.

I do not have a lot to comment on here.

The next evolution of what we are doing is going to be disaster recovery and business continuity between the US and Canada. In six months, I could give you a different answer.

It is stable. With the partnership that we have with NetApp, and also to a certain extent with VMware, whenever we have a problem, they have been super responsive. From the SnapMirror technology to the NSX platform that sits on top of FlexPod, they have been almost as good, if not better, than the integrator that we originally worked with.

Scale for us was really important. We were taking multiple data centers across the US and Canada and consolidating them into two regional data centers. We did not want all of the out-of-pocket expenses upfront. We knew with the FlexPod that we could scale out as we consumed more of those smaller data centers.

The time to be able to answer our call to the time to get to a technician who understands what we are telling them, and even though they may not be able to help us resolve the problem, they are knowledgeable enough to tell us what to do to prepare to talk with a Tier 2 or 3 type person. Then, from there, there is the ownership to the resolution, then the followup by our account executive.

We were early adopters, and there was some complexity involved. That is why a good integrator partner is important. We are a little bit ahead of the curve, and the market has matured since then. 

After the first FlexPod, the second and third got easier and easier for us to deploy. We are now self-sustaining in the configuration portion of managing it, and also in the ongoing operations.

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.

I would have to rate it a nine, because 10 would be nirvana, where I would just press Next> Next> Next, then it is done. I know life is not that easy, but maybe someday it will be. As far as the technology that I am looking for, it is still at least two or three points above the next competitor.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: My relationship with NetApp goes back about six or seven years, maybe longer. My account executive was on point to make sure that what we were buying would not just sit on the shelf, and what we were buying was actually being used relevant to best practices. He came in on a quarterly basis with a scorecard and report card that would say, "Are we on point? Are we doing the right things that we should be doing? Are we paying attention to the right things?" That brought up a different sense and perception of what I think an account executive should be. The technical engineer who is supporting them as well facilitated a very successful relationship between NetApp and us. It became a very strategic relationship, almost like a partnership. I value that, and I never relied much on technical support because they were always on point before I needed to make a call outside to them.

It has not improved my organization, because the products work so well on their own. We have not had any issues with it. Knock on wood.

It just works fine.

The assurance and the peace of mind that we get from knowing if we had an issue with either the NetApp equipment, Cisco equipment, or our VMware enviroment, we can call one number for support, then everyone works together and nobody is pointing fingers all over the place.

It is very consistent. We have had other systems that we have had to replace. Other vendors who we are migrating away from, or have already done so.

However, we are fully onboard with NetApp at this point. We love the company and their products with their ease of use and support.

We have several NetApp systems and we know that if we run low on space that we can add a shelf. We just recently did a head swap on some older systems, and it went fine. There were not any big issues.

NetApp's tech support is top-notch. We have a good relationship with our local guy. If he does not know the answer right away, he reaches out to somebody in the larger office and we receive answer very quickly. We are very happy with support.

Depends on who you are talking to whether the initial setup is straightforward or complex. Setting up a NetApp is one thing, setting up a Cisco UCS environment is another thing. We did not buy it as a FlexPod. We bought all the ingredients individually, then registered it as a FlexPod because it is licensed as such. 

We had subject-matter experts doing their roles. In the end, they realized it was a FlexPod and it should be registered as one. 

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.

I would give it an eight or nine out of 10. I am not going to give anybody a 10, because you cannot achieve it. We are very happy with NetApp and Cisco, and our FlexPod solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Cisco and NetApp are best of breed. We just fell into this from years of using other products and vendors. 

At some point, you learn along the way that this company over here does a good job and I have heard good things, and this other company also does a good job. Then, these two companies find each other and you get a great solution.

The ease at which it scales and its redundancy factors. It's extremely redundant and easy-to-scale.

The software integration, the APIs, are really good. Because everything is going to such a hybrid world, it's better to push things through software than it is to do it manually. The more that they're making the commands the same in your cloud solution versus your private solution is great. It's making our lives a lot easier.

It's very quick. It's very fast. Because it's so highly-scalable and redundant, it's easy to buy new products and scale up quickly onto business demands and needs.

As far as data center technologies or blueprints, it's pretty high up there. But FlexPod has the ability to grow with your company and it has the ability to provide many solutions, and we have yet to find a problem that we haven't been able to solve with our infrastructure. It's been great.

There are certain things that are just hard to do on a physical infrastructure, like for instance you need to make petabytes of data available at high speed. That's really hard to do in private data centers. I'm not really sure how they could do that without making direct links between them, or something.

They can try, but I think really the hardware just needs to get better. I don't know there's a lot they can do about that, other than just let time pass. They already do a great job. There's just certain things that are made better for the cloud as opposed to a private data center, and I'm not sure they can really fix those until the hardware gets better.

They're already doing things that I would like, especially on the Cisco side. They needed to do a better job of allowing API access, and they've done that. So has NetApp, actually. There's a lot of services we would like to put through a software manager, and that was a problem like five to six years ago. Nowadays, it's getting a lot better and as they add more to it, it's just getting better every year.

It is stable. Everything is built with redundancy in mind. Everything is built with doubles and has double paths, so it's highly redundant, constantly. It's one of the main reasons we picked it, to be honest.

We have used Cisco and NetApp's support.

NetApp has been great. They're always quick to respond. The best thing about NetApp, is they are willing to work with other companies quite quickly. Some other companies have a difficult time. They're like, "Oh, it's this person's fault," but NetApp is willing to work together often.

Cisco is a bit tougher. They have more products and more features to troubleshoot, so sometimes the tech support doesn't work quite as well as NetApp's, but it's not bad. It's better than Microsoft's.

I was involved in the initial setup. As with most pieces of technology, you can make it as complex as you want. However, they give you the tools and the resources to be able to make it complex without it taking a ton of man hours.

"Don't undersell some of the features that FlexPod provides to you." A lot of people will see the price tag on like, Dell's chassis systems or the EMC and they're like, "Oh, this is great," but they don't realize the things that they're giving up in the manageability of using a FlexPod, and the redundancy built into FlexPod. If your company really needs to be up 100% of the time, and you need to do a private data center, I don't know if I could realistically actually recommend another blueprint.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

Reliability is a big one; being able to be depend on it. Also, giving you features without getting too complex about it. The best example I can give is NetApp versus EMC. NetApp, you buy ONTAP. When you buy ONTAP, you have everything that ONTAP gives you. It gives you the tons of features that come in the box. For EMC, each single one of those things is another thing I have to buy. It's 29 or 30 packets or software updates I have to buy from EMC. I really appreciate that NetApp just bundles it together and says, "Here's what we do. Here's what it is. Here's the tools."

I appreciate that they do that. They also do a great job of updating it, unlike with EMC, you have to buy and piecemeal things together. You're like, "Oh, I needed this feature." They're like, "Well, you've got to buy that new thing." I don't need to do that with ONTAP. I just buy it and it's all there.

This sounds dumb, but it just works. I don't want to have to deal with support, and I don't need to because, again, it has just worked.

It allows me to focus on other things. Backing up databases. More efficient.

Everybody's short staffed. We're short staffed and so it's allowed me to take on other stuff, and it just sits there and runs. It's not sexy but it does the job.

Upgrades are always scary because you just don't know. Nobody has six or seven different systems sitting around that you can test on before you go into production data.

My complaints are all ticky-tacky, not from a "vision" perspective. If VSC worked properly. It's for disaster recovery. If you have storage networks that are identical across datacenters then it doesn't work for picking off SnapMirrors. That's not a FlexPod thing so much as just a NetApp product thing and they're aware of my issue with that.

Some of the things have not been incredibly intuitive, but once I figured them out they work. That's a matter of their engineers think differently than my mind works. For some, that's a Mac versus Windows thing right there. Windows makes perfect sense for some people and Macs make perfect sense for other people and it doesn't mean one's better than the other. It's just some people like different things.

One of the things that has been less than intuitive is how UCS views storage when you're implementing something new. Some of the 9X ONTAP stuff is just different. It's not less intuitive, it's just different now, and I think I've actually kind of adapted to that. When it's complex there's no easy way to do it, that's why it's complex. But for the most part, they made pretty complex things rather intuitive, so I'm okay with that. It's just different than my mind would think out of the box.

At least ten years, at this and another company.

So far so good. (I don't want to jinx myself).

I have no complaints. You have a DIMM go bad or you have a disk drive die or something like that, but for the most part it just sits there and runs, like I said, which is what I want.

There have been some things. Whether it's an upgrade, whether it's, "Oh, we've got to move this storage from here to here to support this," or whatever. Yes, there's downtime, but the majority of it has been planned. It's once a month, once every two months, something like that. It's not that bad.

I haven't had to cross that bridge yet, but I'm sure it's there if I need it. Don't get me wrong. Scalability's been a big thing because we suddenly needed to maintain backups for a lot longer and I needed more storage space. We went from a half a petabyte to a petabyte within months because we needed to and it worked fine, so I guess that's good, considering it wasn't part of the plan initially.

Well, the one time it was really a problem, it was good and they fixed the problem eventually. The other time they didn't make me feel stupid because it was my fault, so that was good, too.

I was hired to migrate a datacenter from an infrastructure that sucked to a new location on a better infrastructure, and so I put out the RFP for that and was involved in the purchasing decision, although not exclusively.

And unsurprisingly, FlexPod won. Partially, it had a leg up because that was what I knew backwards and forwards and trusted. I had an impact on that, and yes, it was intentional, but frankly it was the best solution for us.

Uneventful. It is more complex than setting up a laptop, so it took more time, but at the same time we did implement it in what most of our partners felt was record time, so that was good.

We did look at Vblock for about ten seconds til we got the price, and frankly we knew they weren't going to work anyway. Not just the price, but it didn't fit us. But that was the only other integrated one

We did sort of look a little at the one that HPE just bought, Nimble. We looked into 3PAR; and I didn't even know what EMC "product of the week" we looked at, but we looked at those as well.

The way the model is now, where, at least with NetApp, effectively you have a partner actually doing the implementation, not an actual NetApp employee - which is fine - I'm looking for good partner knowledge of it. Whoever's setting it up, I want them to know the product, whether it's UCS or whether it's NetApp or whatever. That's critical because I've actually had people that didn't really know what they were doing show up on our doorstep to set stuff up, and that's never good for anybody.

You can't just say you'd want it to be a simple "one button," push this button and everything works sort of a thing either. Not just for job security reasons but because I don't think it's possible, at least at this point in technological terms, to have things be much simpler and still give you the flexibility that you're getting. You get what you put into it. I probably could have made our setup a lot less complex, and I probably wouldn't have nearly the flexibility that I have.

A 10 out of 10 would be a "one button" mind-reading setup; and again, there goes my job. It would be things that just aren't available at this point, such as I'd like to pay very little for this and yet have zero down time, even for upgrades and things like that. It's just not there yet. Someday maybe it will be, but...

I would say it's more important to plan it out and do it right than it is to get it implemented quickly. I would say, no matter how static things are for you, there's going to be change and you probably should know how to make those changes or adapt to those changes as time goes by. That is part of the FlexPod, which comes down to the UCS side of the things. I did not envision needing to change networking as much as I have changed networking for a lot of the machines, so that ability has been really nice. So sometimes you don't know what you will need, what features. Sometimes it's just nice to have the features even though you're never going to use them, because you might.

The most valuable features are the service profiles and the temporary profiles that are available if you lose one of your servers. You can move the service template from one server to another. That's an advantage, as you can set it and there's not a lot you have to do. It minimizes the time you spend on administration. It is easy to use and to get support. There's a 1-800 number to get support from Cisco and they are helpful. 

My admin team doesn't have to spend a lot of time trying to provision servers. Provisioning servers used to take hours, and now it takes up to five minutes. 

In addition to that, it helps us with the automation. We use other tools that comply with FlexPod, such as Cisco UCS Director, to help us with workflow automation. That saves us a lot of time and money. My engineers can focus on running new stuff or trying to work on what matters most. They can work on applications more, rather than troubleshooting.

I would to see a little bit more in the FlexPod interface.

This solution is very stable. We haven't had any issues with it so far. It’s been running in our environment for the last three years without a single problem. The upgrade is easy, and there are a lot of tools available when you're planning to do an upgrade. Tools are available by the vendors to tell you which version you need to use for the different FlexPod components.

From the name "FlexPod", you know that it's very flexible. You can scale up or scale out if you need more computes, if you have blade servers, or if you need more storage. You just add additional shelves and then you have extra storage. If you need more virtualization, you just add more licenses, and you can accommodate more VMware ESX.

Before I got to this company, I worked at another company where we had one FlexPod device. We decided to deploy another FlexPod device. After I left that company, I went to another company and adopted the VCE solution. I got exposed to both of them and I was able to judge which solution was going to be best and meet the company’s needs. 

That company had an aged infrastructure that was obsolete. We had to do an infrastructure face lift. It was easy for me, as I was exposed to both VCE and FlexPod.

It made more sense to go with FlexPod. I already had expertise on how to use it, NetApp storage, and VMware. I didn't have to spend a lot of time training my team how to deploy a solution when we already had prior experience on how to use it.

In addition to that, the cost was good compared to other products.

Like VCE, OpenStack was a determining factor because it was going to take us a lot of time to deploy it. Rather than spending three months to deploy OpenStack, it was going to take us a year to get the solution up and running. 

The other solution we looked was Hitachi VSP. At the time, VSP was new on the market and didn't have a validated design by Cisco, EMC, or any of the other vendors. It wasn't adopted widely in the market. I did not feel comfortable going with that. FlexPod was more adopted and in use.

If you are looking into a new storage solution, look at the return on investment, what your requirements are, what types of workloads you need to use, and pick the best storage solution for you.

I have been working with FlexPod for a while now. I recently shifted my job and have been working with a solution included in FlexPod. Most customer use cases that I have seen are either using it as a database management system or for a VDI solution.

There are a lot of points for configuration.

We are using a private cloud with Azure, but the newer versions integrate with Cisco Intersight.

You get data privacy with it. 

The solution helps to optimize our operations with insight gained from Intersight Active IQ or CSA.

The integration part of things is the most valuable feature. You are getting a whole set of things under one roof and rack. There is support for everything, which is one of the cool things.

The designs are pretty good. Cisco, NetApp, or the OS vendor keep on updating them, which is one of the good points. They will send out a new document about a design refreshment. Everything integrates perfectly with Cisco's new chassis and NetApp version 9.9.

The different modules perfectly integrate with each other because of the Cisco UCS part. For a single chassis, you might have eight plates powering up. Then, there is Nexus, which integrates with your FIS pretty smoothly. For the storage part of it, some solutions have MDSS, and some don't. However, getting them configured is pretty much a few clicks.

I like the continuous CI/CD upgrade cycle with this solution.

They just announced that they are going to move it along with Intersight from Cisco. That can be a private or public cloud, which is one of the areas where it can grow more and has a lot of potential.

I have been using it for somewhere around three to four years.

The solution is resilient.

It has become easier to monitor and automate processes using the solution.

We get everything under one roof instead of just modulating parts.

It is scalable. I have seen the solution used on multi-site environments. I have also seen somewhere around 2,000 to 2,500 people using it on a single site. In other use cases, I have seen it being used in smaller environments, where the data capacity is assigned. Something that I discovered myself, the data relevancy needs to be really good.

If the network or site is down, you just need to go to a single vendor. You don't have to open up multiple cases with each vendor to get things done. That is one of the financial benefits of this solution.

The technical support is pretty good. Rather than running to different vendors, you can open up a case with any of the vendors, who will then communicate with each other to get things resolved. So, customers can go to different vendors for a single issue. From my perspective, if a case is being opened with Cisco, I have seen their people working with VMware to get things resolved. 

I would rate the customer support somewhere between 7.5 and 8 out of 10.

Positive

I have not previously used another solution.

If you use the design document, everything is pretty straightforward. The racking and stacking are pretty easy, in regards to the physical stuff. Cisco and ONTAP are pretty simple to configure if you follow the proper design.

You just need to do a couple of clicks for your UCS. The same goes for Nexus. It depends upon the configuration, but it is pretty easy to deploy. Once that is done, it is just how you want to use your storage, which is the only contribution that you need to do because everything else is taken care of. 

It takes a maximum of two or three people to deploy the solution, e.g., someone to do the physical work and another person to configure everything. 

Once the physical work is done, the configuration part comes in. That is when your switches and UCS integrate with each other. I have done the configuration on Nexus and UCS parts, where I definitely needed help.

We have seen ROI through IOPS and network latency. 

I did not really evaluate other options before choosing Flexpod because it is a leading product in the market for converged use cases.

The private cloud environment is one of the major selling points for it.

Usually, people move to a different solution when it comes to getting a hybrid cloud solution, e.g., a CA solution or HyperFlex. This is where I have seen it get a bit distorted.

I would highly recommend it for core and multi-cloud solutions.

The way that they are making the progress, it will still be a relevant solution going forward. Where there is a need for big data, this solution can be considered.

I would rate this solution around 7.6 out of 10.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are very strong NetApp partners.

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

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

I haven't seen ROI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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