FlexPod XCS Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

We do not use their storage into public cloud.

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

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

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

It hasn't saved us CapEx.

It's been stable. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FlexPod reduced our data center costs by around 20%.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The stability of this solution is very good.

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

It is very resilient. The resiliency is obvious.

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

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

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

We use a qualified reseller for all our Cisco procurements.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall, this is definitely a good product.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you have to spend more time during a day fixing computers, servers and the network than you do focusing on what you make money from, you don't need to be in the business you are in. That's why they provide hyperconverged technologies that are data-center-centric out of the box. You buy it, you bracket, turn it on, load an application onto it, and then you build it. 

It all started many years ago when IBM created the most intelligent compute system in the world. Everybody logged into a VT100 terminal. They didn't care about what was going on in the machine. They logged in and it worked. Then some guy decided to break it apart and create a disparate network. When they figured out they realized it was too sophisticated. As the company grew they needed a server for every single application. That's why you see the evolution of VMware and Citrix and the evolution of converge.

The future of things moved away from just hardware. The future of things now is going to be like hyperconverged but in a very virtual form. That's the reason why Cisco is buying organizations like BroadSoft. They want to get into organizations that provide virtual services.

The product is actually easy to set up. It's self-learning. It's methodical. At the same time, you have to go through all the minutia of the networking layer, the storage layer, the compute layer to focus on the foundation. Then prepare it for application download and then application build on either databases or the application itself based on the OS that it resides on. The model is quite simple.

We do the implementations.

People go to the cloud today and think that it's going to save them money. Actually, if you're going to go to the cloud, you're going to spend more money. The difference between going to a cloud infrastructure and having your own private cloud like say FlexPod, the cost structure is the same. You're going to need humans to continue to manage, maintain and run it. You're going to continue to do a refresh on it because technology will get old. Cisco and NetApp will never sit on their laurels. They won't just create FlexPod and have only one model. Over time, switches, routers, storage, interfaces and things like that will change.

That's why I think it's important that we don't focus too much on ROI. ROI is not the amount of money you spend on FlexPod or cloud that equates to revenue. ROI is whether you have a good product that allows your company to leverage technology. FlexPod enhances the way you go to market. That is an ROI. 

If a CFO wants to do a 10-year map to see how long is it going to make up the investment, you don't need to buy FlexPod. You need to talk to how you to go to the market efficiently. You needed to ask yourself whether your company will be viable and competitive to stay in the market landscape with respect to what you sell. 

You have to understand why you're spending that money. If not then this investment will not make sense.

We considered VMware, Citrix, going full cloud, sharing with a cloud, handing it off to a managed service provider, building it ourselves, rack and stack — pretty much everything was on the table. FlexPod is a good product. I think they just need to continue to keep up the pace with organization like Nutanix and those types of organizations to be able to compete.

You can't get in trouble going with Cisco and NetApp. If you get stuck or have an issue, support is there. The inner partnership, inner engineering, and cross-pollination is there. I'm still leery of some of the up-and-coming hyperconverged organizations out there trying to compete. They may be good, dynamic, fast, growing, everybody's getting on on it, but they're not backed by two large publicly-traded organizations that have a legacy foundation that's been tried and proven for what they do and do best. 

I would probably give this solution a seven-and-a-half or an eight out of ten. It isn't higher because I know that if I were to look at a very dynamic data-center solution, there are organizations who can do it a lot more agile, more quickly, or in a more user-friendly way. It takes a very sophisticated group of people to run and maintain NetApp and Cisco. It's not just a box you put in a server. You scale it out and you log onto a graphical user interface and you manage it. When it is running, it's a very, very powerful foundation that no other hyperconverged solution out there can compete with. You cannot break it. And like I said, as long as you have the right people who know the foundations, FlexPod is a very powerful data center foundation.

I think one of the greatest things that we like about NetApp is the fabric OS and leverage that proprietary app to be able to make it self-aware of legacy storage, legacy compute, current compute and future compute.

One of the cumbersome parts that we discovered is that there are claims that say something can be done, but it takes a lot of testing and trial and error and working with our ISP to ensure that these multi-cloud, multi tendencies and applications living in it all talk to each other. In other words, it's not going to run by itself. It will continue to take a group of highly sophisticated engineers and application folks to be able to make things work.

FlexPod was built in collaboration with Cisco when they didn't have their own hyperconverged technology and when NetApp didn't have their own networking technology. The idea behind FlexPod was to build that converged and hyperconverged foundation to support it. The direction Cisco is moving in today leaves the partnership intact on that app for now, but with some of their hyperconverged solutions out there it may not stay that way. Competing HyperFlex technologies are extremely agile today, and if they continue to develop, possible partnerships with the likes of Oracle or Linux or Microsoft may be something to be reckoned with.

There are no walls to technology. As long as you code out a certified solution to dynamically support your market strategy, that's all you needed. That's what I really learned from blind spots, and that's the reason why we moved in the direction that we did.

Don't look at the price. It is more important to understand where your company is competitively in the market. If you're going FlexPod, it's going to be a journey and that FlexPod isn't going to make you money. But it's going to help you really find your company, or the next level, or the future of where you're going to be in terms of going into a market. You should not buy FlexPod because you want to be cool like other companies. It won't save you money. It is more important that it enables your organization to be more visionary and more technically dynamic.

FlexPod is a design with everything in one bag. This helped us initially when we consolidated everything into one box.

It was innovative in the beginning. So, it was a very effective proposal. We were dealing with multiple vendors and support. This initially solved our problems, so we could focus on some other areas. However, we had to come back to it and address other challenges.

The most valuable is the one support. I have a 1-800 number. I call one number rather than figuring out whether it's a network, compute, or storage issue. It is beautiful and works out nicely.

We have experienced issues with patching. When there are Cisco releases, there are some vulnerabilities, i.e., security vulnerabilities. We are as a financial company and need to be on top patching. As a company, we cannot have continuous downtime to do patching, which is a challenge that we have faced.

Another issues is that Cisco lists some patching, but NetApp is not certified for it, or vice versa. It's very difficult to keep up-to-date all our levels. Then, we slowly started spinning up our own versions of Cisco separately from NetApp and NetApp separate from Cisco. This has worked well for us.

Stability has been good.

Initially, when we started downsizing our data center, we consolidated a lot of equipment into FlexPod. The fewer racks and companies to deal with: one vendor and one support. This sounded good when we were small. Initially, everything was certified, and read and worked beautifully. However, when we scaled up, because the business grew, we had real scalability challenges, as FlexPod is designed for a small to mid-size customers.

With FlexPod, there is a vertical limit for everything.

It is somewhat resilient. If your company has equally scaled growth in all area, then maybe FlexPod is good. However, if your network is growing 200 percent, but the storage is only 100 percent, or maybe the company is only 50 percent, then the apps didn't scale up right. This will create bigger challenges.

Tech support has been good. There are no issues with NetApp or Cisco. 

We would like to see the tech support timing match better with our business needs. This is definitely becoming more challenging.

It was straightforward. There is a lot certification on the workload, so we don't have to worry about it.

We used ACS, who was good and knowledgeable.

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

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

Everything was NetApp initially, but we were independently buying the equipment from Cisco through NetApp. This worked for us beautifully because it was the same vendor who we were dealing with and everything was certified in a box.

There are a lot option based on your workload. Think about the next five years: How will your business grow? Then, is FlexPod is the right way to go?

In addition, what happens when there is a bug identified in one of the layer? Will you need to shut down the whole thing because just you encountered that one thing?

Everything is perfect with the validate designs. However, they are not designed for large customers. They are designed for SMBs and small data centers.

Multi-cloud environments can work well for some use cases, like expanding data centers.

We do not use FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud.

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.

We have been using FlexPod for five years. We use it for our Epic environment.

We get a unified, collaborative support model. It conforms with the CVD and it helps us with maintaining supportability. All of our vendors give us the support that we need in a timely and effective manner.

It has also been very versatile. We have others that do not exactly conform with it and yet we still benefit from the collaborative support model. And we're not required to go to a certain thing if it doesn't work well or isn't the best case for our situation. That's been wonderful.

We're using the Epic environment on-demand workflow, and that has saved us quite literally thousands of man-hours by helping us refresh, back up, and create new instances. We wouldn't have been able to do so if it wasn't for all of that time-saving. Being able to have SUP, REL, and REL VAL DR instances, we would need to double our staff, at least, to be able to do that.

• The design has already been validated.
• The support element, the lack of finger-pointing, where all of the different vendors are working together collaboratively, sharing data, opening tickets with one another.
• We already use UCS and it goes well with the vendors that we have picked.

At the beginning, there was a little bit of confusion among the support folks on how to open up tickets with the others. There needs to be a little more helping of the partners to make sure that they are able to handle opening tickets with the other vendors.

For our Epic environment, aside from an environmental data center problem, a heating issue, we have not had any issues whatsoever with the infrastructure. From a resilience perspective, we've set it and we've been able to forget it for the most part.

We planned a five-year model for our Epic environment, so that we haven't really needed to scale. For other areas of our environment, it has scaled fairly well. The data mobility helps a lot with that, if we have to do a refresh. It's just simply vol moves, etc.

One thing to note would be that we're now looking to go into a MetroCluster IP with our FlexPod. Going from Fabric to IP, we're not able to do that with vol move. Still, we can do SnapMirror relationships and get all that data moved over.

The one other thing would be that in the transition from 7-Mode to CDOT there was no unplanned downtime, and it went very well with all the tools that NetApp has provided us.

Just fantastic tech support. The chat functionality gets us in touch with top-level engineers when we need it. As a hospital, that level of support is priceless.

We had been using Dell EMC storage before, VPLEX, etc. We had a good bit of experience with that. 

Because our VAR helped us with a lot of it, from our perspective it was very simple.

Initially, for our Epic environment, we used OST. Our VAR, PEAK Resources, also specializes in converged infrastructure. It went fairly well. It was a little bit rocky at the start, but that's why we picked our VAR. Their experience and the level of investment that they make in NetApp are fantastic. They helped us a lot.

We looked at Dell EMC VCE very seriously, as it's a converged product. NetApp was a lot more flexible, it didn't require a forklift approach. We had a really great experience with NetApp specifically. We were already using Cisco, for both network as well as compute, and it just seemed like just a great play, to have that flexibility and to have the support model to help us. And it has proven to be great.

If a colleague was looking at this or similar solutions, I would help them to understand what we've done with it for Epic and the success that we've had. I would share with them the examples of converged support as well as the stability that we've had. They are what has really made this a success story.

Regarding private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, I love it. The idea of the state of Fabric. We haven't been able to leverage the public cloud portion of it yet, but the whole vision of the data movement is where we want to stay, so that we're ready for the cloud where we can do that. As for private, we're looking to bring up StorageGRID to be able to offload cold blocks on our AFF. That kind of a feature set is wonderful. We don't use FlexPod for managed private cloud.

In terms of FlexPod being innovative when it comes to compute, storage and networking, it stays current. We're not five versions back because we're having to be conformed with other solutions. It seems like NetApp is doing a great job of making sure all their vendors are keeping things up to date. There have been some other than Day One-types of events that it's impossible to really get to. We're not waiting long for things to come up.

As for improvement in application performance, we started with an All Flash Epic so we've had really wonderful sub-millisecond latencies from the get-go. We haven't experienced degraded performance.

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.