Again, FlexPod can be thought of as a platform with easier management and granularity to carve it up for almost any use case, a mega block of modern modular infrastructure and would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I rate FlexPod nine out of 10. FlexPod allows you to build what you need when you need it. "Flex" is in the name. If you need more compute, you add it and don't need to worry about it. If you don't want to use it in the FlexPod at some point, the compute can be repurposed for something else. The same is true for the network switches. When you need more network capacity, you replace the switch and interfaces or maybe increase the speeds on your network interfaces. Replace the network components with what you want, the capacity you need, etc. The same goes for the storage on the NetApp side.

My advice is to start with what you think you need. As your needs change, put new hardware and performance capabilities in place. You add it as required in the same environment space, so you don't have to change your product line. Your disaster recovery or secondary sites all stay the same. The Cisco and VMware stuff inter-operates. VMware is all over the place, and NetApp ONTAP is ONTAP. It's all the same platform, no matter where you put it in the cloud. 

In Nutanix's environment, they've got two or three. You can have external storage because maybe their internal storage isn't good enough. That external storage platform is something outside of the converged environment. You've got to manage it separately. You've got two hypervisor capabilities here. You could put VMware on it, or you could put Nutanix on it. They're not interchangeable. Once you pick one, you are stuck with that one forever. And if it's not good enough, you have to tear down the whole thing to start over. You're not tied into anything.

We have not used the solution to integrate advanced cloud services. I’m working on a VCF project currently. I have not used Intersight, Active IQ, or CSA yet. That's actually on my to-do list for my current project.

At this point in time, we do not use this solution to power any AI machine learning applications.

UCS is more network-driven than it is server-driven, which is what Dell and HP, drive on. Once we set up the basic server parts, the rest of it is network base. It is a mind changer. When I handed it off to server admins, they were worried about a lot of issues that they used to deal with on a Dell, HP, or even IBM. They don't have to worry about that with the UCS.

I'd advise new users to understand where they’re putting their ports and know which ones are going to be fiber channel ports, FIs, and make sure they have a distributed switch and are not connected directly to the core switches, the 7Ks or 9Ks. I've seen people take down their whole environment when somebody added a VLAN or added a network for the UCS network that was already on the core. It took the whole thing down.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. If the DIMM problems were removed, by far the solution deserves a perfect ten.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. If FlexPod can improve support, maybe it can be a nine, but at least the spare parts and local support team are not perfect.  

It depends on the scale of the system. If your system requires a very high standard and you have thousands of VMs, like 5,000 to 6,000, you should consider FlexPod. Because at that scale, you would use less time for physical management. System stability is very important, so FlexPod is one of the best solutions.

We always prefer the converged solutions because of scalability and flexibility. These are key factors.

I would rate the product overall as nine out of 10.

We still require the proper skills and the proper people in place to manage it. It's still a network. It's still storage. It's still virtualization. I wouldn't consider it a small-office type of solution. It's definitely a data center or enterprise-level solution. But it is a little bit simpler than if we were to piece together the solution ourselves with other vendors. If we were to get an HP and build ourselves a NAS, for example, or even if we would get something that's not supported the way that our FlexPod solution is, it could be more complicated.

I don't think the solution has saved our organization in terms of capital expenditures because we do upgrades, either because we need space or because we need compute, every year. But I wouldn't say that's a bad thing either. It's not like we have drastic spending. It's a matter of trending. If the business is doing well and the application and the platform are doing well because we're onboarding more clients, we need more compute and storage.

I would rate FlexPod XCS a nine out of ten. Our experience with the solution is good and we use it well. 

We use Cisco validated designs but we don't do our own designs.

Our decision to implement this solution was not influenced by the fact that it integrates with all of the major public clouds.

FlexPod gives you the ability to manage the system in a simplified way. It gives you automation capability, which means a lot less manpower to manage it. Power and cooling requirements are lower. The total cost of ownership is lower. Finally, it just gives staff more freedom to do some of the other mundane day-to-day operations.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We have found the solution to be resilient in the way that everything is regarded. The solution reduces the time required to deploy a new application. 

There's a lot of different ways to deploy. Look into FlexPod because it makes things easier, especially for operations, i.e. to fix things and get things back up and running.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate this product a nine out of ten.

Expanding the choices in switches could enhance the cost-effectiveness of FlexPod implementations. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

We did the research. We went through different vendors when choosing a FlexPod solution. For us at that time, and today, it is the best solution on the market when it comes to converged infrastructure. It has a really easy implementation, which gives you a lot of flexibility with the server profiles, which gives you easy disaster recovery with snapshot technology. If you are looking into such technology, have a look at FlexPod and you'll see that it will suit your needs.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. It gives us all the capabilities that we need. It gives us good performance. It gives us easy disaster recovery. It gives us easy modular upgrades and extensions. Basically, everything we need.

I would give it an eight (out of 10). I always think there is room for improvement, especially with technology changing as much as it is. 

I would rate the solution a solid nine (out of 10). The solution has been good for us. Nothing is perfect. That is why I wouldn't give it a ten. However, everything that we have done with it has been spot on. We've had very little problems with it. We're able to integrate it really well.

I would recommend going for this solution.

My advice for anybody who is researching this type of solution is to consider their requirements. If they're looking for an on-premises solution, with everything integrated, then I would recommend FlexPod.

This solution is good, but it is not perfect.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I would say that it is a rock solid platform, the redundancy is awesome, and ease of management and the upgrade process is smooth and non-disruptive.

Data center costs are a little bit more expensive with FlexPod, but you're paying for the redundancy and flexibility.

I would rate this as a ten out of ten. It's been a solid solution for us.

I would rate the solution as an eight out of 10. I would suggest or recommend FlexPod for deployment if you are moving from a predefined converged infrastructure or validated design architecture. Though, you have to customize it based on your requirements. Right now, do not just jump in. Work with a partner to build out your requirements, then deploy it properly.

Our data center is huge, so it has let us reduce some cost, but nothing significant.

FlexPod is worth consideration. It's not necessarily something that you have to buy as a pod. You can buy the pieces individually, then get it classified. Anybody who is looking to consolidate physical into a virtual environment, it's great for that or any type of private hosting environment. It works really well.

The validate designs and overall versatility are some of the reasons that we decided to go with FlexPod. It's all been prevalidated, and we know it will work, which is valuable for us.

This solution is innovative when it comes to compute storage and networking. It comes back to the compatibility. Everything working from top to bottom has been great. Also, knowing the technology has been validated makes everything more streamlined.

I'm part of the managed services team, and our current FlexPod is a private cloud. However, FlexPod gives you the opportunity to keep it private, but at the same time, you have the ability to go hybrid, making it public. So, it's very versatile.

Despite our FlexPod being six to seven years old, it still works to this day. We do face some vulnerability issues that can only be fixed with a hardware refresh. Unfortunately, we went a different direction away from FlexPod. Everything had been great up until we had to do the tech refresh.

Try it. Nowadays, they will give you access online to check it out and see how it works.

It is innovative because it integrates with different platforms.

We have seen an 80 percent increase in application performance.

FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud gives us what we need. We don't have any issues with it.

We are planning to eventually go to the cloud. So, the multi-cloud capability being there in the future is exciting.

Definitely ensure you size the environment correctly.

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.

I would rate the solution as an eight (out of 10). There is always room for improvement, but it's the best technology that I have used so far.

Genuinely have an understanding of where you want to go. We've had issues before at other companies where people like a hardware. Don't look at the hardware. Instead, look at what you want to do, then work backwards.

Right now, all of our needs are currently being met. I know we're going to move towards NVMe with the one data center once we update. However, that is pretty much the newest thing on the radar for me.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution depends on what they're going with. If it is the converged infrastructure then the UCS is probably the way to go. If instead, they are going with the hyperconverged infrastructure, then I would suggest going with the HyperFlex solution.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from this solution is the ease of actually setting it up and learning it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.

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."

My advice to someone considering this solution is to go for it. 

I would rate FlexPod a nine out of ten because this is definitely a huge improvement based on what we saw. 

Look at the end-to-end solution. Examine what the needs are. The solution is so flexible, and there are so many options. If you plan it well, you can plan a very cost effective cost-effective solution throughout the whole gamut of storage arrays available through NetApp.

I would rate it a nine (out of 10) because there is always room for improvement. I can't be perfect.

We don't use tiering to public cloud.

My advice to anybody considering this product is to give it a close look because it's a great solution.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

My advice for anybody implementing this solution is to be prepared to learn about the solution. The converge solutions promise a lot of easier management, but there's still a lot of things that they need to know about. There are compromises, so they need to make sure they understand completely what they are getting into.

There are definitely some areas where, as a whole, this solution could be better, but it's pretty good.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

It is innovative when it comes to compute storage and networking because they are continuously updating the UCS infrastructure and continuously adding new FAS and AFF units into it. They're continuously updating the Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs), so there's definitely innovation which goes into it, almost on a daily basis. They continue to update the number of CVDs available, so it makes our life a lot easier on the sales delivery side. 

For on-premise solutions, it allows our customers to be able to move workloads in and out of the cloud. This allows for the hybrid model. It gives on-premise security, but if they have workloads that require cloud-based applications or containerized applications, then they can the capability of moving their workloads into the cloud. So, it's all about application overloading.

There is a lot of information on www.flexpod.com. I recommend using that as a starting point. There are CVD links there too.

It’s not perfect, nothing is, but it’s very good. I would say that it’s definitely worth the investment just for the ease of implementation and the pre-qualified support packages that are included. You know that the architecture and the implementation/environment will be supported by all vendors involved.

I'm using the Cisco product, FlexPod.

I can recommend FlexPod to others if it's used correctly or for the right purpose. You get into trouble if you use a tool for the wrong purpose.

For what I was using FlexPod for, which was for a client that didn't have a lot of volume and stress in terms of the applications, I'm rating the solution as eight out of ten. However, if FlexPod will be used for highly transactional, high-volume applications, it's a four out of ten.

It is quite important to have a converged solution. Then, you can have all the components responsible for stability and performance together in one place.

In general, the solution is quite good. I expect improvements in every area over time.

I would rate the product as eight out of 10.

If anyone is just going from a conventional SAN to VMware Hypervisor, it is the most reliable option moving forward. Following technology trends, if you're moving from a conventional server to SAN and you would like to integrate from encryption to SAN-to-SAN replication to any features—ranging from security, ransomware protection, and DR—this solution covers it.

It simplifies infrastructure from edge to core, but I don't know if it also simplifies from core to cloud. 

We are not yet using FlexPod's storage tiering to a public cloud. We also haven't fully adopted most of the innovations, such as all-flash CI, private and hybrid cloud deployment, secure-multi-tenancy, end-to-end NVMe, cloud storage tiering, but we are getting there in terms of whatever trends are there in the market within cloud integration, flash, and NVMe. It is improving our infrastructure, and we will be there. We are currently in the process of adopting some of these.

It has only theoretically decreased our company's data center costs in terms of floor space, power, or cooling. That's because when we went into FlexPod in a data center, we were migrating from one data center to another. At the moment, they still coexist. We are still in transition. So, in terms of cooling and power, we are still cooling and consuming power in both locations. Until we completely go off one of the data centers and move some of the workloads to the cloud, practically, there won't be any reduction in the data center costs. 

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

We have found that the solution simplifies infrastructure from edge to core to cloud — although we have not really implemented the cloud yet.

The solution has made our staff more efficient and enables them to spend more time driving the business forward. It's primarily what we do. We don't really have other tasks. But as far as not having to worry about daily maintenance on the network very much — it just works. I'm not messing with it every day and trying to get something to work right. It is set up, it is configured, We have got our policies in place and you pretty much roll. We can focus on doing other things like analyzing the data, mixture throughput, things like that when you don't have to worry about the hardware tripping you up.

I think the integration improved application performance in our organization. The back end on the FlexPod with the 40 gig connections on the NetApp makes the DB admins life a whole lot easier with a lot less latency for them. And not only that, with the components, we can monitor it and see where they are being affected and then we can fix those issues for them without a lot of back-and-forths.

I'm sure the solution has saved the organization money. Because it creates a smaller footprint you do not need as many servers. I don't know offhand how much power and storage and residual costs we saved. But the solution has decreased organization data center costs.

The solutions have affected our operations with the opportunity to use things like All-flash, CI, Private and HyperCloud. I'd say that one of the biggest improvements was All-flash. Before we were still using mechanical drives and actually we did on the first generation of FlexPod. We are on our third generation. They did have mechanical drives in the first iteration. So for us to move to all-flash, which we have now, was a really good step up.

On a scale of one to ten where ten is the best, I would rank the product against the competition as a ten.

My advice to anyone considering this solution is that they really start out looking at their needs depending on the size of the company. The product is kind of expensive even from an entry-level standpoint. I know they have the edge systems for branches, but if you have a small to medium-size business you probably have to have a lot of data to make it worthwhile. I would say FlexPod would be the way to go if you are a larger business or one with large data volume.

I would rate it a solid eight out of ten. It's not perfect. Everything's already plugged in when you get it out of the box. Obviously there is a bit more configuration involved than a VCE where everything comes in and you're buying a box, essentially. But that's a pretty minor knock on it.

It is a really solid solution. The pod flexibility along with the containerization of each pod is very nice.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've recommended Flexpod a few times. Every one of them has been extremely happy with it. It's a solid workhorse, especially in shops like mine where we're in the small to mid-range and I don't have the people to sit there and just babysit something. I have too many things for them to do. This product is really good. I don't want to say it's a set-it-and-forget-it, but the daily, hands-on is so light. The visibility - even though I pick on the analytics - is decent. I can get my guys to manage it, but it also frees them up so I can get them working on other things, which is critical in this day and age.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Ease of use.
• Support: Getting support from a gigantic organization that is ancient, like IBM, was a real challenge. We had some weird bugs that cropped up with IBM and their software which is developed for array replication, in conjunction with VMware. We do not have these issues with NetApp. It just works. Support and supportability are very high.

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

I'm a happy customer of FlexPod.

From a network perspective, it is very stable. We don't have any issues with this. I would recommend it, just because of its uptime and the fact that you can sleep through the night, and not get called at 3 AM. I have peace of mind from the stability. Peace of mind and stability are by far the biggest factors.

Go for it. Just buy it. It's simple and out-of-the-box. Set it and forget it.

I haven't had time to look over the validated designs, but I have seen some in the past. I think that they are very helpful in getting a general idea and configuration guide to different products.

Bundled with the right products, multi-cloud environments could be a good asset. With its flexibility, it would allow for movement of workloads into multiple environments, which would be a great benefit.

It's reliable and scalable. I can sleep well at night and not have to get woken up at three in the morning because something went bump. The solution works. You can't go wrong with the platform.

The validate designs and overall versatility are excellent. The people who did them, they did a good job. They were very thorough. The whole entire environment was well thought out, so it could scale up or out. Every component was selected properly. All the configurations for the environment are detailed, so you don't have to do any homework. You just plug it in and run it.

We use FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud, and it is excellent. I haven't had any problems with it at all since I've deployed it, and I have continued to scale it out. I don't see it going anywhere.

Hybrid cloud is where it is at, and I don't believe everybody can go into public cloud or multi-cloud entirely. I am looking forward to connecting hybrid cloud to my FlexPod environment.

We purchased through CDW. They were knowledgeable about the solution. They won the bid. It was very simple with us. We sent it out for a bid and they came back with the lowest cost on the response.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Cost is always important, but it is not our base. We look at performance, availability, overall usability, and simplicity.

We started with ONTAP, version 7.0. We have NetApp’s 3200 storage series and that is what we use now. It's still version 7.0, with the live firmware.

We are a government company. When we design a new solution, we cannot point to the technology that we want to use. It's against the government's rules. We need to design a general solution with the main points that we want to cover, and the main points that we want to remain. We will sometimes have to choose between several technologies and several offers that we find on the market. That's why most of the time it's difficult to keep the same technology for long.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. It is a very flexible solution. Its support, usability, and even the scalability of it has been great.

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.

Using this product makes our life easy.

I have learned a lot from this solution. When you touch a new technology, there is another new technology coming in.

This resiliency of this solution helps. There is high availability, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, and it is easy to deploy.

One of the solutions that we implemented was the joining of two data centers together. We used EVPN-VXLAN, and this was a great solution for them.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Know what you're getting into upfront, and make sure to train your staff appropriately before diving in and setting something up and then backfilling on your training. Go in with your eyes open and really understand the solution before you start turning the keys over to users and access.

The CBD was very easy to follow. The validated design we followed to the letter, and we haven't had any problems with further integration. It's all gone well.

I would give this solution an eight or nine out of ten: a very high score. It's been very stable. We've been running our dev environment off of it for three years now without any real hiccups or outages. The developers are certainly much more empowered and there's a lot less overhead on the networking people. It just works.

The biggest lesson for me is probably that there is value in some of the larger marketing items. Not just marketing bullet points, but there are actual truth and experience that can back up what the marketing slides have sold us. It delivered to our expectations, I would say.

Go for it as a solution.

I like the validated designs because we don't have to do more research on it. Research has already been done by trustworthy companies, like Cisco, NetApp, and VMware. They have provided us with the properly designed ones, which is less headache for us.

We do not use FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud, but maybe in the future.

Our experience using this tool is that we have been very happy with it for over six year. The solution has given us whatever our company has wanted. It has delivered in a very short time and has quick turn-around for different projects.

I also suggest looking around. NetApp is a good case for us. It really solves our issues. Although there are other solutions available on the market, this tool is definitely worth looking at it.

FlexPod is not cheap and the way things are going, you could probably get the same thing at half the price from another vendor. NetApp has to be very competitive on the prices in order to really compete in this market.

The idea of the FlexPod: We've all probably experienced the difficulties of working without that type of reference architecture and that acknowledgement of the support. You waste a lot of time because there are going to be problems. There are going to be troubles that you have to go through and the vendors working together on the support has been a value to us. I think almost everybody in this industry has probably gone through that at some point, where you know that a problem lies with one of these three manufacturers, but you spend way too much time finger-pointing and you don't get to the heart of the issue. That was one of the definite advantages of the FlexPod.

Overall, it's really suited our needs. At a time when the storage is kind of a moving target, I think that we did get what we paid for; we have a valued product. We have not had any type of bad experiences that, to me, that would steer us away from NetApp in the future.

Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

Go with FlexPod as a solution. You shouldn't have any concerns.

For our implementation, our customers are just private cloud. They are not going to public or hybrid now, but customers know that they able to do it.

We use FlexPod with VMware vCloud. It is great. We use the plugins in VMware and all the validate solutions, which is awesome.

Consider all your business needs. Go through the process and data mine before deciding on a solution.

I like the validate designs. The versatility may seem restricting, but you need to be creative of it. You need to find ways to create and get it in. The flexibility is there, but you may have to think a little out of the box for it.

Everyone has done private cloud. I see a lot of customers moving towards the hybrid model. Where you could do it in different ways. I've seen people have an infrastructure and service provider, then they realize quickly that it is not the solution for them and want to move back. However, it is not that easy. You have to pay going in and going out, as there is time and effort involved, as well as additional work. However, with FlexPod, it doesn't matter which cloud solution that you pick. You can move any which way. I am just starting a multi-cloud project that does this now. The flexibility of it is amazing.

We don't use FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud as we are very small.

When I get involved in FlexPod project delivery, my life has been easy.

It is definitely worth looking into, especially if you have lower-end components that do the exact same thing.

It is innovative when it comes to compute, storage, and networking, because there are a lot of the storage efficiencies which allow us to keep a smaller footprint.

We are not using FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud. While we don't do cloud yet, we might consider it in the future.

Cisco NetApp products are a pretty die-hard.

Do not be afraid of it. Roll your sleeves up, and get into it, as it is not that hard. Speak the language, and if you don't, call somebody.

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.

There have been some improvements on the Cisco UCS side since we began using this solution. In the earlier days, it was more difficult to upgrade, and there was pain involved during the process. That has gotten a lot better over time.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of product is to consider their requirements. If their need is for a dense data center that is scalable, then this would be the choice because it scales easier than any other product I'm aware of.

This is a good solution, but our experience hasn't been perfect.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I am looking forward to using the cloud enablement that they have been working on.

In the last three years, I lost money that was budgeted for capital expenditures, meaning that I have had to give it back because I literally have nothing to buy. We do have operating expenses and we have the capability, but everything that we are doing is moving into Azure, using managed services and software as a service. This means that we've been reducing our hardware footprint significantly. Especially with the efficiencies that NetApp brings, we don't need as much storage space.

My advice for anybody researching this solution is to evaluate your workloads.

NetApp is definitely the way to go.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

I highly recommend this solution.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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 flexibility, operational efficiency, and scalability of FlexPod are amazing. This product would have been the solution that we went with outside the price. The functionality and features that it provides are, bar none, the best in the industry.

The product itself is great. It is just that the cost and licensing are prohibitive.

But for someone looking for the most cost-effective solution, I would definitely tell them to consider this as one of the products to evaluate.

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.

We are a very lean organization, so this solution has not necessarily made our staff more efficient. If we were not already that way then we wouldn't get anything done.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is to make sure that you include FlexPod and be sure to consider the costs in the evaluation. I cannot imagine a situation where the total cost of ownership is not comparable. 

This is a solution that makes my life easier and I can always count on it being up. For me, that is the most important thing.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The fact that FlexPod integrates with all major public clouds did not specifically influence our decision to go with it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate this product as an eight. That is mostly because the cost is comparatively high for what it does.

Storage I/O is pretty important for enhancing user experience and utility.

This is a solution that I see mostly for large enterprises, on the side of cost. Smaller and medium-sized enterprises are usually not interested. Cost is the primary factor behind why I would not give this product a perfect rating.

For anybody who is implementing this solution for a customer, my advice is to get what the requirements are in writing. That way, you have yourself covered once you actually buy the product. That's the requirements they gave you and it hasn't expanded beyond that.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Take your time. It's no small undertaking to implement a converged platform or to shift to a different one. Typically, when you make the decision on a converged platform, you're making that decision for the next five to seven years. So take your time.

Regarding the Validated Designs, I've set up VersaStacks as well as FlexPods and it's just like a recipe book or a cookbook. You follow the steps and it's pretty difficult to mess it up. The Validated Designs are great. They're a great reference guide to go back to if you're troubleshooting an issue later on as well. 

In terms of private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, it's great to see because we have a large presence in Azure already. But it's native Azure. There was no tooling to tie it to our data center. Until now. So shifting things to the cloud volumes from Azure Blob Storage inserts a common framework, we can replicate data between the data centers and the cloud. It's great. 

As for managing private cloud, we use FlexPod for own internal hosting of our customers' data, so we ourselves operator our own private cloud.

It's also innovative when it comes to compute, storage, and networking. You can use any number of Nexus lines, MDS. I've done setups with MDS 5000s. I've worked on systems from version 1 all the way to current, so I've seen quite a few iterations of it.

I would rate FlexPod at eight out of ten overall. It's definitely a very complex system. We're definitely not making changes in it daily. There is a little bit of a learning curve for a junior admin.

I would rate it in the upper echelon of an eight or nine. I like the FlexPod product. Primarily going back to the NetApp resiliency, there is no workload that I would not put on the NetApp platform, whether it is the All Flash FAS, the spinning hybrid disk, etc. NetApp is paramount when it comes to high availability and resiliency. Then, on the UCS side, you are taking the leader in networking, bandwidth, and throughput, and basically building that backbone for compute infrastructure. 

The bandwidth and throughout that you get from it and the changes which we saw in my customer days going from the HPC 7000 series chassis, where we were constantly constrained for throughput and bandwidth. We were seeing 60 to 70 megabit throughput on huge ISO files, and you dump it over into UCS (same NetApp storage on the back-end), and you are seeing 200 to 400 megabits of throughput. 

It is just unparalleled. So, it is definitely the leader out there.

It has a lot of big partner resources, which are consistently behind it, such as thousands of engineering hours and new CBDs coming out every year. It has both proven infrastructure which has been running for the eight-plus years, as well as being innovative. Every time Cisco comes out with a new Blade, Fabric Interconnects, or new switches, or NetApp comes out with new arrays, they are being integrated into the product that year as well as being integrated into the rest of the data conference suite. From that perspective, you are not really inventing anything; you are taking proven things and implementing them in a particularly efficient manner.

This is the best hyperconverged infrastructure. No need to be worried (or scared) on how these three solutions will sit in a box. Everything is prepackaged and rebuilt. It is seamless when you want to install or ship it. No complaints.

Most important criteria when working with a vendor: We were concerned how these three partners, NetApp, Cisco, and VMware, would come together for network, storage, and compute. At the beginning, we were a little concerned. It has been four years now with no issues, and it is going well.

In terms of maintaining the same level of guidance, had we been working with one vendor as opposed to two vendors at the same time, they both have their own individual best practices and there are a lot of best practices out there. There isn't necessarily one that's really the best. I think that there is enough crossover between them that I don't know that it really makes a big difference.

I rate FlexPod at eight out of 10 because there is always room for improvement, although there is nothing off the top of my head that I can specifically call out. Going back to the simplification of IT, everybody can always do more to really simplify things because we live at a time where so much of what we do is "a little bit of everything."  As we go through the continued evolution there, that is really the biggest area that both NetApp and Cisco could really improve: to simplify management, to simplify the monitoring, and the maintenance. 

Also, bringing down that cost of entry as well and keeping the costs lower would help to us get it into more small to midsize businesses. FlexPod Express is a great product, but continue to bring down that cost of entry.

My advice is "do it." It meets the needs of small to midsize business all the way up to the large enterprise that needs to scale in a massive fashion. It's a great product, it's a great solution, and we're really happy with it.

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.

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.

Another large hospital, certainly, should focus on the longevity and the simplicity of the solution. I'm really all about the simplicity of it. I have to keep things simple. In IT, we have a habit of making things very complicated, and it's really difficult to change your thinking to keep things smoothly.

Give it a look. See if it fits your environment. That's kind of it, for anything you purchase, because it's got to fit your environment; it works for us. It works for what we're trying to do.

I look for a vendor with an established history of innovation of stability. That's one of the things with NetApp and Cisco. They're leaders in innovation in their fields. I'm entirely confident in the solutions I have with them today and the solutions they're going to provide tomorrow.

Recommendation to peers: I would recommend that they would really regret it if they didn't at the very least invest in and consider a FlexPod solution.

I'd give it firm 9.5, simply because I don't believe in giving tens out. Literally, it's been in our situation pretty flawless.

The tool is recommended for companies with an employee count between 50-500. Bigger companies look for individualized solutions. You must look for a different solution if you have a complicated or bigger infrastructure. I rate the product a seven out of ten. 

I would rate FlexPod as a 10 (out of 10).

Overall, as an entire package, it has everything that we need and support is very helpful when needed. It is still installed and working today problem free.

Look at your needs and what you are looking to do. See what fits your needs better. There is not one solution or company that will be a fit all.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We look at everything as a whole package. As far as support, how long its been out on the market and what they offer. Support is probably the biggest, but for whatever product that we buy from a vendor, it needs to be solidified for a while and tested out on the market, aka tried-and-true.

Using FlexPod as one product, understand that you are putting yourself in the hands of three of the major technology leaders. You are not only getting a product, an appliance, but you are gaining experience. All these things work together to help you decide for today and tomorrow.

If you want something really fast to deploy, you are going to use a Validated Design; everybody's compliance and all that is taken care of. But you can make a FlexPod-like build and you can later go certify it as a FlexPod design.

Regarding private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, every solution is here to answer a problem. So the question is: What are the challenges? Based on those you can then use the proper solution. NetApp people usually tell us that the hybrid vision is the best, and I tend to agree with them.

In terms of the solution being innovative for compute, it's very useful for the storage engineer. If there is a problem with the host, he can replace the base hardware and put the intelligence right back in the same box. In that way, every type has been kitted out, without anyone having to rebuild anything from scratch.

Go with the FlexPod. It's a very easy solution. There are dedicated minds behind it. You will notice an improvement.

We save time and money with the solution but I don't know how to quantify them because we only have a few physical servers. Everything has been built into it so we haven't had to buy things. So we're not aware of what it would have cost us, by not going with it, because we went all-in on the FlexPod design. Similarly, regarding application performance improvements, I can't say because we went straight into the system.

Regarding thoughts on the solution vis-a-vis private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, unfortunately, we can't move into a cloud other than private. We're starting to investigate how to do it. I don't know how much of a player it's going to be for us, due to our environment. If we deploy it out, it will be used for private cloud, but we don't do so currently.

Realistically, I would rate it a nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement. 

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.

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 is a 10 out of 10 for us. We will go in and talk to a client about all things that they are trying to do, from cloud on. A significant percentage come to the conclusion that they want to run their most important stuff on FlexPod architecture.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: At first, businesses did not select a vendor. They thought, "Why wouldn't I just buy all this stuff myself and figure it out." 

Initially, five to six years ago, a lot of companies were organized differently. They had a networking team, a server team, and a storage team, which didn't even agree. We had to help them understand the value of coming together. As people start going in and start thinking, "Okay, I need service-like delivery. I need to compete with cloud, if I'm going to deliver an application in my company. How are other people are doing it?"

So, they had to start figuring out how to consolidate. FlexPod is a converged infrastructure, and they had to use it. There are a few companies that are still a little disorganized, but most of them, even large companies, have come back and said, "I get it, this is why I need to do this."

Our most important criteria when working with or selecting a vendor include their maturity in the market, their customer satisfaction, their NPS score, and their ability to be flexible as a partner to us

I rate FlexPod highly because it was the first converged solution that was supported by all of the vendors at the same time, which is as flexible as it is, from a scalability and supportability perspective.

My advice is to make sure you understand the business requirements and size it appropriately.

It is always best to test it, whether in a DevOps environment or do a demo, before actually going fully live. You need to make sure it behaves right in a new environment, because there is no environment that is exactly same as another. It might work on my environment, then you try it on yours and it does not work, then you will blame the product. However, the issue might not be with the product, it might be something else. So, it is very important to make sure that you test it, you do a POC on your environment, and watch its behavior.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

It is a partnership, more than a transactional relationship. You often find if you work for a massive, FMCG company, like AB InBev, that you will not find all the feature sets that you require as off the table products. 

What I want to see:

1. When you engage your customer and say, "This is what you are trying to go through. This is the direction we are trying to go through."
2. Often our customers want required feature sets, which will help our business going forward as well as keeping the vendor fulling aligned.

I would rate FlexPod as a seven out of 10 because it has gone through a long journey in our organization and we have had pretty good support. The FlexPod environment still exists and, according to the roadmap, it will go to 2020.

In terms of advice, this is all about converged and hyper-converged. If you are looking to convert your environment, then I would definitely suggest going with the FlexPod.

Engage the partner and see what their suggestions would be as to tailor-make or tailor-fit the application and the solution. This app was a good fit for us because we're already the data customer.

Plan for the worst. Hope for the best. Now that there is a clustered ONTAP, I can't see many other solutions being better. I know that everyone's going towards this hyperconvergence, but I think you still need to keep compute and storage separate. You never know where your growth is going to be.

Maybe I'm old school, but depending on your business model. We tend to grow storage more than compute at times; and other times more compute than storage, but it just depends on your particular needs. I like the separation.

FlexPod is definitely easy to deploy and go with. If I had to recommend it, I would definitely recommend the NetApp FlexPod solution.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is that their product works. That's the most important thing. Then second is customer service and getting to solution. I hate a lot of side talk, empty promises – nothing becomes of it – just to get the sale. Really, make sure the product works and then you get the support that you need and not chatter.

The tool helps to save TCO by consolidating our workloads into smaller footprints. 

FlexPod XCS helps us save money. 

I rate it an eight out of ten. 

In terms of comparing converged infrastructure solutions and picking the most cost-effective one, you have to pick what works for you. Think about who's going to support it. If you're hiring a vendor, like me, you want to make sure that you trust me and that I'm going to be around. If you're doing it in-house, make sure that you're picking the one that your people can run.

Even though this is a fairly new product, it is very appropriate for business solutions, and not just your mom-and-pop shops. It scales rather well, and to me, the big thing is the rolling upgrade scenario as far as when it comes time to lifecycle your equipment. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I would probably rate the product as a seven out of ten. The amount of time it saved us on the setup, maintaining the system and the fact that we haven't had to do a whole lot of troubleshooting with it makes it valuable. 

As far as people entertaining the solution, they should go look at their equipment, know what their pain points are and then get in touch with somebody at Cisco. Reach out to an account manager or see a demo. I know when we were first looking at it, an account manager came out to us and brought a systems engineer with him. We had the opportunity to see the solution and they went over the potential benefits in great detail. It was easy for us to see the gain that we would be getting by implementing the product. 

People need to do their own due diligence in researching new solutions. Exploring other solutions is important to determine which particular solution is the best fit. Once you get the possibilities down to two or three solution sets that may work for you, compare them rigorously before committing. One will probably stand out as the best be it because of budget, features, capabilities or application.

It would be nice to have had this years ago when we first started out, instead of a hodgepodge of different storage and compute technologies within our data center. It'd be nice to just have the one and scale it out.

I like the validated designs because they're fully baked, but they do take a while when there are upgrades that need to happen, for all the vendors to come together and certify their solutions in a matrix.

I would rate FlexPod as a ten out of ten. It's innovative, easy, and reliable.

This flexible is very good for private cloud solutions.

The solution is trustworthy, and it has proven itself too. You get what you pay for. It's the oldest hyperconverged platform in our industry. There's something to be said for that.

The solution works great for multi-cloud environments because you can segment the platform.

FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud makes it easier to manage a large number of environments for a company. This makes it a bit more streamlined on management, deployment, and orchestration.

We have saved time with Snapshots, SnapMirrors, and backup and DR capabilities versus other platforms that we have looked at in the past. However, for new deployments, we have not saved, because we don't have any automation on top for deploying VMs or shares. It doesn't really seem to be part of the FlexPod platform.

We don't use it for hybrid cloud, multi-cloud environments, or Managed Private Cloud.

Everything that we are looking for feature-wise seems to be coming out in ONTAP or VMware releases.

If you need to scale, storage and commute independently, then you want to go FlexPod. If you don't have that sort of need and want something simple and easy to throw up and use, despite some of its shortcomings, hyper-converged is probably the way to go. It really depends on how big you are and what you need.

Versatility is great. However, in this day and age, it is probably more complex than it needs to be, especially on the Cisco side. I am not a huge Cisco lover. UCS is getting long in the tooth. It's great for what it is, but it is now overly complex compared to other solutions on the market.

FlexPod was at one point on the bleeding edge. Now, I think the bleeding edge is hyperconverged, and I know Cisco and NetApp are looking into that independently.

We use FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud, which is great.

I don't love the Cloud. It is a good space for second copy backups and maybe bursting into the cloud depending on what your application workload is like. However, I'm not a lover of the hybrid cloud model, or even going fully into the cloud, unless you are willing to undertake the paradigm of creating your applications and workload for it. Moving your legacy info into the cloud is expensive and a bad move.

I would give it a nine out of 10, simply because it has helped us change the way we do business: From being a receive, integrate, box up, ship out, unbox, and rerack. It has been fantastic and changed our business model.   

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It is all of it. 

• Support
• Reliability
• Flexibility to adapt on the fly when we need to modify and install, then support certain circumstances.
• Meet the needs which were not outlined in the original project.

FlexPod has been fantastic.

I would rate it as a nine out of 10, because I rarely rate anything as a perfect. It does have issues. We have had bugs which have been released, even though they have been minor. As far as the configuration (going back to configuration issues), on the UCS side, sometimes it is difficult to set up. However, once you get it set up, it is easy to add additional compute to it.

Definitely go with FlexPod. It's a great solution, especially with - I keep bringing up NetApp - but NetApp is a great company to work with. They really take the lead. I think it's worthwhile. You'll take your server farm from 200, or however many you have, condense it into one virtual environment, with the backing of Cisco, with the backing of NetApp. I think it's a perfect solution.

I would rate FlexPod a 10 out of 10, absolutely. The best.

I recommend buying FlexPod technology.

I think other vendors have more scalability because they use higher-density disks and they can use clusters for storage. When we use a NetApp cluster, we only have a processing cluster. If one controller fails or a pair of controllers fails, all the disks that are connected to those controllers also fail.

We built FlexPod. We didn’t buy it. We bought the Cisco servers, the switches and the NetApp storage. When we built the first FlexPod, we bought infrastructure for the Guatemala and Dominican Republic data centers. We have the same infrastructure for all of the sites.

Because it's a scalable appliance, most IT people tend to aim to get the biggest thing because you might as well. You want to cover your back as well, and all of that. But scalability; you've got to have in mind scalability. When looking at FlexPod, buying the basic thing could cost you a little bit, but you have that flexibility of adding and scaling up in FlexPod. You don't have to go all-in like we used to with a lot of different appliances.

It's non-disruptive. That's a huge thing. You want to build something that you can say, “OK, the business is going to grow. We are anticipating the business is going to grow three times the size.” You don't want to buy an appliance now and then, when you want to add an extension to it, you have to take the business down. That doesn't look good for you as an IT department. It also doesn't look good for your appliance, saying, "Why do we have to go down for eight hours or 12 hours? We've already invested so much money and now you're saying we're going to be disrupted for 12 hours." So, FlexPod eliminates that for you.

Start small, have in mind that you can scale out, and scale up, too.

A few of the reasons why I gave it a perfect rating are support; scalability, of course, for the appliance; and scalability for the company itself. NetApp is growing; now they're adding SolidFire to their portfolio. I've taken a brief look at SolidFire. I've noticed that they're dealing with it as a separate entity – not separate technology, but definitely a separate entity – that you can add to a portfolio of NetApp, whether it is EF or FAS; now, they've also got SolidFire.

I'm hoping to see NetApp integrate SolidFire into the OnCommand GUI itself. That way, we wouldn’t have to deal with two separate appliances in the back. That would add more headache to the administrator – having to know two different appliances, adding command capacity and administering two different technologies – rather than integrating them into one and having one admin side. It is new technology so I would give them an almost-perfect rating, but SolidFire is a great technology to add to your portfolio.

I'm a pro-FlexPod guy, which is where this comes from. We haven't faced any usability issues with it before. We've faced a couple of performance issues that turned out to be outside the FlexPod, not within the FlexPod. It turned to be a Microsoft database issue that some on the DB team were able to resolve. Performance-wise, the performance tools give you a great insight on what's going on in your appliance or in your FlexPod; knowing where you could do some enhancements, or where you can help troubleshoot some problems for developers or for the database teams; saying, “This is where we need to enhance or this is how our appliance is performing.” It's pretty cool.

Evaluate multiple products. It all depends on how the product would actually fit into your use case. NetApp FlexPod fits well into our use case, so I definitely encourage you to evaluate NetApp and SolidFire.

It has been part of our success so far. I would give it a perfect rating if it fit into all the virtualization platforms that I’ve mentioned.

Definitely take advantage of all the training you can, particularly the UCS portion of the setup. It's very much a one time setup if you do it right the first time. I use the reference install guide for the VMware on FlexPod, even for installs that aren't using NetApp storage because it's so well-written. It's 175 pages but it gives you not only what to do, but why to do it and even full configurations you can copy-and-paste in to make sure that everything really is "set it and forget it". You can just continue to operate your business, serve your clients as well as possible, and not have to go back and try and fix things.

We’ve never had an incident where we set it up and it hasn't worked; there have just been little things, such as when I didn't think and was setting up the first of the two fabric interconnects and put dash-A at the end of the name. I forgot that it adds A and B anyway, so that client is UCS-CompanyName-A-A or -A-B. As long as I followed the guides, I've never had an issue.

I really like good support when I’m looking at a vendor; that’s one of the most important criteria for me. I'm big on vendors that have good training. I want a vendor that wants to support their clients, wants their clients to be better educated. I don't want a vendor that wants you to always call them and maybe bill up a support call. I want the vendor that gives you the training so you can operate the equipment best yourself; still have good support when you do have to call, but give you the information you need so you can do it yourself and operate it as well as possible.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

I would rate it an eight (out of 10).

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.

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.

Know what your use case will be for and figure out whether you are going on-premise or want a hybrid solution. This will change what you need. If you are going to do some hybrid stuff, you may need to decide to create your own software to make the hybrid connection or you can use HCI. This may change the things you want to buy.

We are trying to decide if we want to go to a private, hybrid or multi-cloud environment. We don't have any services to deploy VMs yet on the cloud.

I really can't fault them. I can't give them a 10 out of 10, because that seems over-the-top. It is not a revolutionary product, but it is a very good product. I would give it an eight out of 10, because it is easy to deploy, works well, the reps are good, and the support is great.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The product works. Our vendor team is great. I love our account manager and our tech guy is great. It is a confident feeling.

We invested in FlexPod because we were setting up a VDI environment. 

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

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

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

Customer references are important and peer reviews are very important. Sometimes we do a test or POC, but that’s hard to do.

Definitely consider NetApp. I would rate the product as a 10 out of 10 because it is fantastic. 

The biggest lesson that I have learned, working with this solution, is that it's better to go with something that has been vetted, tested, and designed by people with knowledge, as opposed to trying to go on your own. This is why we chose a certified, validated design.

This product has all of the big players behind it. Overall it works, and the reliability is top-shelf. I don't know what's better.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The idea of validate designs is excellent.

Trial it. See if you can get a demo to a trial system, then put some big workloads through it and see what performance you get.

I like the validate designs. I like the way they are put together and give you an easy building block to configure and set the system up. The one negative is the interoperability matrix. This could cover a more wide range of partners. For example, we have upgraded the whole firmware across the stack, and looking at the matrix, everything looked green. However, something in Oracle would cause us an issue during the upgrade, then we would have to either rollback or sit with support. While support has been good with getting to the bottom of things, it would be nice to have more confidence when we are going into an upgrade that it will work.

Today, it looks like the software design solutions will be able to support our move into the cloud much easier than I initially thought. We are only just starting that transformation now, but I see with Data ONTAP and Cloud Volumes ONTAP, it looks like we will be easily moving our data into the cloud and making better use of the compute that is up there rather than having to expand out in our data center. 

We have four or five weather events every year which cause a huge strain on our systems with customers logging in and working out whether they have power or not, or how long the power outages will last, and whilst that happens, our databases are getting absolutely hammered. Now, historically we've had to build our data center to be able to cope with those big workloads. It's only four or five days a year, so we are effectively wasting money when we don't need to. If we can burst out to the cloud, it would really help.

I think it is innovative with this move to the cloud using ONTAP. With the whole NetApp product range being very similar in its look and feel in the cloud as it is on-prem, I feel comfortable that our engineers will be able to spin up and utilize it quite quickly.

We don't use FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud.

I rate it as a nine and a half out of 10, because of all the additional visibility and the integration with our equipment, and how well it plays. DR has been tremendously easier.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It is a little of everything. Support is key because no network is the same. No protocols running across it are the same. You are going to run into weird issues, and talking to our virtualization guys, they are really happy with support. I see NetApp all the time on our campus.

It's not all about cost. Overwhelmingly, the issue is that you shouldn't be as concerned with cost as much as you should with the scalability and the ability of a system. Even though you may be looking at a product that's more expensive than other equivalents out there, you're probably getting one of the best customer experiences out there, bar none.

I've had to use HPE support, and I've had to use NetApp support, and 100% of the time, I would wind up referring NetApp support overwhelmingly.

When you're looking at everything, it's not all about cost. It's also about usability, scalability, and performance. With all those applications, I've never once had issues with any type of performance, or had scalability problems with NetApp.

The only times we had downtime with our server/storage environment was because of SAN switching issues. One issue was related to a software upgrade on our SAN switches, the other was misconfigured zoning on the SAN switching environment. In both cases, it was human error and not system-intrinsic error that caused our downtime.

I would definitely recommend NetApp. Based on our results with NetApp, the stability, and what I know from my datacenter colleagues, it's a really reliable company.

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.

The advice that I would give to anybody considering FlexPod would be to just do it. It depends whether you know NetApp or not. If you don't know NetApp, when you get into NetApp it's a bit confusing based on storage, virtual machines and stuff that other storage vendors don't necessarily use. Do a lot of reading and researching.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. Not a ten because it's not like it hasn't broken. There have been issues, but it's not major issues. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. An eight because it's very reliable but there are some flaws which you need time to tackle them. There are some things that can be better. Better integration would make it a ten. 

I would recommend this solution to someone considering it because of the support it comes with and the high-performance. We can scale it up to a level which we will never reach.

Develop a relationship with a partner. Those resources for us have been invaluable.

I would probably rate it about an eight (out of 10). That's just because it does meet the needs, but It's not perfect. Nothing is. There are some features or advertisements about what its capabilities are, but when dig into it or you get down the road, it's not exactly what it was advertised as.

We are experimenting with the solution’s storage tiering to public cloud right now. We haven't really gotten too far into it, but that's something that we're actually looking to do.

My advice for anybody considering this solution is to get in touch with an account manager at Cisco, then visit and see a demo. I know that when we were first looking at it, an account manager came out and brought a senior engineer with him. They saw the solution and went over it in great detail. It was easy for us to see the gain that we were getting from the product.

I think that people still need to do their own due diligence and look at other solutions. Once you get those two or three solution sets and compare them, I think you'll see that this one is probably the best one out there. This solution is right there with leading-edge digital equipment.

Overall, this is a good solution. It has saved us time on the setup, as well as maintaining the system, and we haven't had to do a whole lot of troubleshooting with it.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I would say, "Definitely consult FlexPod."

I am saving time in my work and so are my colleagues.

I would like to go with the hybrid environment. My tech is built to accommodate any application, independent of the stack where you are, whether it is on on-premise, AWS, Google, or Azure. This way you have ease of moving the application in and back, providing flexibility. However, I would stick with the hybrid as the best way to start with public clouds because of security.

My advice is to reach out to people who have used it. It's a good solution and the proof is from the users who use it.

I would rate it a nine, close to a 10 out of 10. The support is great. It's a validated solution. It's the best-of-breed of all the products that are in the FlexPod as well. It's just a great solution for us.

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

Buy it. It's a good product.

Make sure that it meets the requirements that you're looking for as well as being scalable in the future, because data's constantly growing. You have to be able to forecast a little bit forward. NetApp is configurable, and the ease of use will make configuring it a lot easier. That’s probably why I would recommend it: NetApp itself doesn't have a steep learning curve.

As long as it's within your budget, it's a great one-shot deal that allows you to really have an integrated platform that you can just build off of.

It's definitely an expensive solution, but it has been a really robust solution. We know what we get with it. We definitely like the vendors teaming up and having a more integrated solution.

Do your reviews. Put some thought into what you want and what you need. Try to plan out 3-5 years. Give yourself an idea of your growth. Things like that. How you want to be able to manage that. Make sure that you have all those ideas down and discuss them before you start implementing anything; especially with the FlexPod, because there are so many options. You want to make sure that it's going to sustain you, not just now, but 3-5 years out.

Work closely with your vendor. From the storage side – I always start with storage – you need to build a team that includes VMware, the storage people, the Citrix guys and someone who knows UCS. Once you have that team in place, your things are going to go very, very smoothly.

We haven't really had to look at expanding it but, I can see that it'll be an interesting experience doing expansion on the storage side, so I think four stars would be accurate for usability and implementation.

Peer reviews are very important in our research.

Must have a sense of how everything operationally will be going into FlexPod. Must plan scaling up and out. The problem I run into the most is unanticipated growth, so keep track of growth factors and do not overextend FlexPod. It is usually a performance vs. capacity issue.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

It is more complex than just basic storage systems. That's intimidating to some people but it works well for me because I've learned it, I know it, I've been using it for ten years and it's not a big deal to me. But it is intimidating to some people and if you push past that, and just learn it, it is worth it. Especially for the additional tools and the environment it allows you to utilize.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. Not a ten because it could always be cheaper, it could always be faster.

I would rate it a nine (out of 10). It is the better way for the customer to has less troubles and problems.

You have one configuration and one compliance with two companies, Cisco and NetApp. I think this is the best way to make solutions.

We do not use the solution’s storage tiering to the public cloud. We are not using the cloud at all for the moment.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to engage some type of professional services just to set it up if they are unfamiliar with the technology.

This is a solution that I recommend, and if you're already familiar with other similar technologies then it is pretty simple to put it together.

We do not have the license for NDME yet, and we would like to see how much improvement it is over our current setup.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

My advice for anybody considering this solution is to do their homework. There are a lot of other solutions that do the same thing, but it depends on your use case. This is not the best fit for every situation.

Overall, I think that this is a great product, but it is very hard to maintain.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

I would recommend NetApp.

Organizations are going towards cloud environments. However, as we are doing customers' projects, we do not go for external cloud, we do it on our internal private cloud. Our priority is to respect the customer's data in the internal private cloud. We are using FlexPod with Managed Private Cloud. 

We are looking towards more advanced HCI deployments now, and we're looking forward to the AI, which will be in concert with Insight. Analytics with AI will be much more beneficial and we are already trying to adopt HCI.

We are targeting now towards HCI because it is more converged towards compute, network and storage. We hope to gain more benefit using HCI, as well as AFF.

Go for it.

It simplifies everything. It gives you a single place to go if you need support or if you need to expand.

We don't have a true FlexPod.

I would rate it as a nine out of 10, because every product has room for advancement.

• It is a mature solution.
• It has been pretested.
• There is reference architectures for it.
• It is easy to use.
• It uses the best compute.
• It uses the best storage.
• It uses the best networking, which all works together in a proven solution. 

It's a pretty smooth solution. For anybody wanting to get a small system to actually teach on as well as learn and use, you can't beat FlexPod.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

Trust relationship, either knowing somebody that actually knows them and has had a good experience, and if I find that then I'm not too worried. However, it's also about the personal relationship. It's about getting to know the people you're dealing with at the vendor. All three of them, Fujitsu, Cisco, and NetApp have just been amazing, particularly NetApp for me. They've done some amazing stuff with me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I guess it depends what your roles are. We are a one-stop shop, so we have to do all these different things. So for us it was important to accomplish a lot of different goals with one system. So, I would just ask someone: "How easy do you want things to be? Is support important to you? Is it important to work with different vendors who all know how the whole system works? How much time do you need to save when you're doing support?"

I would tell them my story, about six years ago buying the FlexPod and how we purchased banks and scaled through it seamlessly. I have never had any downtime, and I feel like the support has been what has been advertised. I would certainly suggest buying that environment.

I know that it is really a good product. In the end, it is doing the job.

Peer reviews are not as important as user conferences but market research is there for a reason.

You have the functionality that UCS brings, and that NetApp bring, in terms of their replication and backup products. It's got great potential. Don’t set it up by yourself, pay the professionals, as if it's deployed incorrectly, it can create giant headaches.

When the operations matter, you definitely have to look at FlexPod. I see Flexpod as a singular competitor for two reasons, once you scale the solution as you need and the operations and administrator's effort keep the same. The flexibility allows you to scale just the necessity you need with no waste of investments. I would rate this solution as ten out of ten.

The validated designs for major enterprise apps in our company are very important. It helps us in using a lot of Microsoft applications.

FlexPod simplifies infrastructure from edge to core to cloud, and that is one of the main reasons we chose FlexPod. We want our environment to provide for users, power users, and service providers in several ways. That is why we developed this FlexPod solution.

The solutions unified support for the entire stack is also very important. We analyze the way the support for our products is utilized. So we need to be with a solution that integrates with support for software along with the storage.

Our team is more efficient since we started using the product as it has enabling them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward. We don't have to spend time matching each resource to its use.

The advice I would give to someone at another company who is researching FlexPod is that I would recommend that they go straight with FlexPod and not worry about it.

On a scale from one to ten where ten is the best, I would rate FlexPod as a nine-out-of-ten.

If configuration, unification, and standardization are the concern and if they are using it with Cisco as a network edge then I think it will be a good solution to go with FlexPod.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. Not a ten because a seven means for me that it is more than a five. A 10 would mean that I don't have to do anything else to improve. Improvements could be ESXi installations at vCenter installation and all of that. I have this to do it. It is a solution, but it has stops at a certain point. It is not a complete solution. 

The product is an eight out of ten. It's stable and we've had no issues. It is definitely worth considering as a solution depending on your particular needs.

If you want to have stability, then FlexPod is the easy way to go. Newer products may not be rated highly enough for large enterprise corporations to procure, i.e. it depends largely on the internal regulations in use for data center management.

I would rate FlexPod with a 9/10 because this software successfully carried out its mission.

It would be so wonderful to incorporate private hybrid and multi-cloud environments. And even rope in some of these cloud providers.

I would rate it about an eight out of 10. We have been very happy with the product. It has been very successful for us. We have a lot of customers who are thrilled with what we have done. As a VAR, it is easy for us to go through, manage, and maintain. That sort of middle of the road management piece would be a big part of it, and I would like to see more CVDs and more published designs around a multi-hypervisor approach within a single pod. This would be an improvement.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We work as a VAR and MSP. The most important thing for us is the trust relationship with a vendor. Support and reliability are important, and not to be a stick-in-the-mud, but for the most part, every major vendor has support and reliability now. However, the relationship, being able to go through and build with a vendor, then the trust that you establish with a vendor for us is the most critical thing.

I would rate it close to a nine or 10, because of what the product looks like, the validated designs which are out there, and the support behind it. It's a great product. That is why we sell it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

A combination of everything from best of breed, support, and if other customers who have used it have had good experiences with it.

It's good, it's a very nice product. Very scalable.

Do your research. It's good for our business case but maybe it doesn't fit your particular business needs, or maybe there's a better solution out there. In our circumstance, it fit our needs and has performed as advertised.

Do a little research, find out if the business case applies to them, how they could leverage it, and if it's something they could leverage in their environment. Get a PoC, that's another thing. Definitely get a POC for the product to determine if it's good for them.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Stability, after the product is implemented into an environment.
• Scalability
• Responsiveness to certain type of issues.

Identify your requirements, make sure you know what they are, and don't fall short in doing so. If you do, that may drive you to a different solution. It's not all about cost. Rather, it is the value that it brings to you.

If they were going to upgrade their storage, I would tell them NetApp has been really solid for us. I can't think of any reason not to use it. That's a good thing with IT people, because usually if something's bad, we're ready to tell you.

Don't design it yourself. Use the certified designs, especially for FlexPod. The one time we went with our own design, we ended up going back and reengineering it so we could put in a certified design later on.

For us, the big incentive would be the support that you get out of NetApp and the partners that we have in our town. There are a lot of strong NetApp FlexPod people. Thereare a lot of FlexPods out where we are. If you're looking for a solution that you know is going to work and that you're going to get some solid support and backing from the vendor throughout your process from start to finish, it's going to be the NetApp guys.

I’ve given it a perfect rating based on our experiences. We've rolled out multiple racks of FlexPod and we've never had an issue. We've got two data centers full of it and we've not actually had to call NetApp support. We've never contacted support even when we had a couple of drive failures. They're proactive on that, so the drive shows up and gets swapped out. We never actually opened a ticket for anything other than those two automated ones.

You need a partner that you can trust and a partner you can actually move forward with. You need to understand what the full lifecycle of the product will be. You need to understand where you're going to go next. That was the big thing for us. When we changed, it was a major change. It was a lot of downtime, a lot of frustration for a lot of people. That's why something like NetApp, where I know that I have the ability to take out the controller, grab a new controller with cluster data ONTAP; you've got the scale out ability as well. That's been really great for us as well. As I’ve mentioned, we've tripled the amount of storage, we've tripled the amount of compute, added additional controllers, with little interruption to users. That's huge.

Follow the best practice guides and you can't go wrong.

If you've already got a storage compute environment, a good analysis of what your existing environment is like, what your workload's like, will assist where you place data, where you place your volumes on the FAS system. You generally have a good understanding of what your existing workload is, so you can obviously scale and design your storage layout with FlexPod correctly or most efficiently.

I guess I'm a bit biased in my opinion but I've worked with it for probably seven, eight years. I’ve never had an issue with it and everything that I need to do with it, I've been able to do pretty much.

I’d advise them to get one that’s bigger than you need obviously, the nature of the sheer growth that the industry is seeing is logarithmic not linear.

I think it depends on how you are organized. If you have hardware and storage in the same leadership chain its great. I think one of the reasons that we have pain, is that it doesn’t fit our business organization very well because we have two separate managers and therefore, there is stepping on toes.

I would say that it’s a great solution for customers who want to guarantee out-of-the-box compatibility and performance.

It all depends on your specific needs and what you're looking for, which depends on your environment.

• Read the white paper solution online about the product. 
• Engage with the engineers.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Relationship is the key, so they respond better. We may need an onsite engineer to come and do an evaluation for us. 

In terms of advice, I can only tell you about FlexPod, I don't have any other solution. I would say definitely go for it.

I have run four FlexPod environments, and they have all been phenomenal. They have all worked until you had to turn them off. That is why I like them.

I can't imagine anybody not doing this today. But if nobody was doing this today, I would definitely push them to do it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Reputability. They have to have a good name. That is the big.
• Speed to deploy and getting the purchasing paperwork correct the first time: These are important things in our environment, because they just add to delays.

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

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

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

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

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

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

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

I am a very happy customer.

I'd say, go for the NetApp with the Cisco UCS. It definitely will cut your management time down and it's a very reliable solution.

Take a look at the product. If you go through your requirements and have to redo either your virtual environment or some of your SAN storage, look at putting your compute storage and network together.

I would definitely recommend FlexPod. The first thing I would say is just the simplicity and the standardization that you can put in place. You can do more with less. This packaged solution already works, so you don't have to figure it out and be your own integrator. This is the way to go.

Go for the solution with the Cisco UCS. It definitely will cut your management time down, and it's a very reliable solution.

Spend the time up front to architect it, get the details, and make sure your plan is solid.

If you’re limited to the number of admins you have, like we are, FlexPod is a good solution to look into, especially if the distant end lacks the skill level that you might have in house. FlexPod is good if you have limited management capacity.

The infrastructure should be de-coupled from the workload, there should not be any dependency. It should be abstracted, do not look to FlexPod as the solution, but as one of many solutions. You need to understand your environment and what you need.

FlexPod is is not really a product, but more of an architecture based on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), Cisco Nexus Switches, and NetApp Storage. It is one of the best unified computing architectures out there, and is highly scalable.

FlexPods are perfect for nearly any environment, can be scaled out to fit the needs of the company, have longevity, and can be managed globally. Get a vendor who knows what they are doing and they can help you be successful.

I used the Gen4 FlexPod at a previous company and we are reselling Gen5 to a couple of other companies. All using 40 gigs. It would be tough to quantify how much is actually saved, but I know it is a significant reduction in the number of cables, number of switches, and number of servers that they have to use. On $1 million billing for materials, I'm guessing they're probably saving at least $25,000 to $30,000. Overall they see a bit of return on investment.

We have talked about getting a hundred gig infrastructure so we can incorporate AI or machine learning, but they are not there yet.

The efficiency of data protection and data management goes back to leveraging UCS director and UCSM. Just the ability to provision the environments quickly is significant. I would say that FlexPod simplifies IT operations for unifying data management. Our customer is not currently using any cloud right now. I personally have not used any cloud, but I know there are opportunities for some integrations. 

They are leveraging SnapMirror to replicate all their source data and their production data center over to DR, as well as test development. It is easier than a host-based copy. Keeping all the switching within the FlexPod environment instead of having to go up to the core all the time probably helps out.

In terms of switches, cabling, the chassis — being able to fit eight servers in 6U obviously, helps out in terms of data center savings.

The advice I would give to people considering this solution is to certainly leverage all the tools and applications that Cisco and NetApp have developed around the FlexPod solution. You could certainly buy things separately and piecemeal it together, but things like the CSA and the solutions support becomes a nightmare. When you get a nice certified FlexPod solution, all the tools come with it. It makes a big difference in the environment and usability.

On a scale of one to ten where ten is the best, I would rate FlexPod as a nine or a ten. I love it. Again, there are obviously a lot of new HCI products that are coming out. But in terms of being able to manage it, I think that FlexPod is pretty solid as is.

This is a very stable product and we have had really good luck with it, so I would recommend it to a colleague at another company.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our primary criteria when selecting a vendor are to get support, a good solution, one that our customers are happy with.

My advice would be, try it, buy it, see what you can do with it and get some experience with it. With that experience, you can better sell it to the customer.

It doesn't really get simpler than the setup that we had, and the maintenance that we have had. I would tell colleagues that NetApp is the way to go.

Go through all the training, and make sure you understand all the systems. It is very different than a lot of the other systems. There are intricacies which are important to understand, especially with the duplication providers. Therefore, understanding all the challenges around it is important for long-term support.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: A vendor who cares about us as a customer. A vendor who is able to work through every issue, regardless of who is at fault, and solve the problem.

When considering a solution, look at it in total from purchase. Then, look at what is going on five years down the road. Do a comparison of expansion, ease of expansion, and everything else.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: reliability. We receive this now from the FlexPod solution.

We're a data analyst company, looking after property data. I'm not sure this product is uniquely valuable for our industry. It certainly has some value, especially in the mergers and acquisitions space where we need to stand up some infrastructure that matches ours in a newer environment, and be able to have that standard.

We bought the Cisco and the NetApp separately and integrated them ourselves, so that probably made it a little more difficult. But we followed all the guidelines that were published from both Cisco and NetApp regarding how to put them together. Now, it is sold as an already built together package, which probably would make it easier.

We invested in this solution because we were trying to lower our costs and improve the time to implement and upgrade.

They should definitely look into NetApp, especially now with the SolidFire acquisition. They have almost everything you would need for storage. I've used HPE SANs before and EMC, and NetApp just blows them out of the water with manageability and the price point.

Give it a shot. Call your vendors and just get it. They'll demo it for you, so use that. It is important to demo everything first, because there is a lot of money on the line just for a "I guess this might work out for us.”

Make sure you get all your requirements up front. Make sure that the protocols that you want to use are supported by your vendor. There are a lot of niche players out there that will say they will do something. When you get them onsite, they don't or they don't perform as well. We were looking at a couple of other flash providers, including Nutanix and Tintri.

Bringing them onsite for a demo works great, but when you start talking to people who actually use the solution... We found that in the demos, they couldn't live up to the promises they were making, or it didn't make sense to add more infrastructure in. I can't get rid of my core NetApp infrastructure, so it didn’t really make any sense to add another storage vendor in, and increase the complexity. Using FlexPod has been simpler than adding in another vendor.

NetApp might be a little more expensive but in the long run, it pays off for itself.
I’ve been very happy with their technical ability, their technical delivery, and the usability; it’s very easy.

Perform due diligence. Understand your business requirement.

It loses points because they’re a little behind the competition in the hyper-converged infrastructure pace. When you get to see what the other environment sees, you know they need to catch up to others.

It’s a good solution to implement, and easy to get to work, it’ll provide flexibility and agility you need for a datacenter, but it’s a start of the journey. You need to be on top of it.

I would rate FlexPod as seven or eight out of ten. It's too early to say anything, but for now, my only concern is the limited integration with applications.

The biggest lesson I learned was that from the automation point of view, this should be saving us time. When you’re doing it for the first time it’s not going to be very easy.

The solution forces us to ACI to make quotas and we will do that.

FlexPod supports both traditional and SCN reduced costs.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate this product a seven. It's not perfect.

I believe that FlexPod is the best solution. 

The FlexPod solution is one of the easiest solutions to implement, maintain, and scale.

It is a complete solution.

My advice is to read the design guides, that is the most important thing. Also, work with an integrator wherever possible.

I rate FlexPod an eight out of 10. If there was a simpler management pane, maybe a little bit more flexibility in terms of multiple hypervisors in a single deployment, I would rate it higher. But aside from those issues, we're very happy.

The solution is really good but with 7-Mode I would rate it at seven out of 10. With NetApp  Cluster Mode the rating is higher.

Do your research. They all have their own niches. Don't go cheap. That's one thing we've learned: Just because you might see another vendor who offers something a little cheaper, it is not necessarily the best. It might not have the White Papers or the proven technology that works together. That's what is nice about FlexPod, that you do have those elements. This has been working together for many years. They had this relationship with these other companies and you know you'll have the support behind it.

Go with it. Seriously. There are a lot of solutions out there. Converged infrastructure's trying to push its way in. We've looked at it. Maybe for a small company starting out, it might be okay but it won't scale to the level that the FlexPod can scale to, have the same performance, and guarantee that you're going to have it all work together.

It does what it says it's going to do. It makes life much easier all around. It's not a solution where you have to sit there and say, "Is this switch going to work with this system?" The systems are more complicated, they’re more complex, the bandwidth is faster. Anytime you have an issue or a mismatch in config, hardware, drivers, and so on, you're going to have a big issue down the line. Being able to be in a FlexPod, where they're sitting there saying, "No, if you buy this piece, you buy this piece and you buy this piece, we guarantee it's going to work," that's a huge, huge plus.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are responsiveness and ease of use; those two are the biggest. The technology's pretty similar across the board. They all do what they say they're going to do. I haven't worked with EMC. I hear that, for each level, you need to know different commands, different stuff. With NetApp, being able to go from a 2200 series to an 8040 series with the same commands is fantastic. I like that, and they are very responsive. Ease of use, responsiveness and performance, of course, but, as I’ve mentioned, they all do what they say they're going to do, pretty much.

I would advise doing a proof of concept, see it first.

Overall, I would rate FlexPod an eight out of 10. It's fast, solid, and it keeps improving, adding new features. The support is very good. There have even been times we didn't realize there was an issue and we have automatically received a replacement; all through "call home."

Don't just buy the solution that your sales guy is trying to sell you. Understand what your needs are, understand what your I/O requirements and capacity requirements are, and leverage the sales team's engineers to truly devise the solution that you're going to actually take advantage of. 

Don't get caught up in price, initially. The sales teams can always work on price. Focus on what the solution is going to do for you, and is it actually going to meet your needs. Then deal with price after that.

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

So the first thing is you have to know your workload. A lot of customers go in, and what they do is they push on infrastructure without understanding the applications. So to any customer, I always tell them, you have to do an assessment of the application, understand the characteristics of the application. That will drive the solution, whether it's all-flash, whether it's a hybrid model, or whether it's just spinning disc. So until we know the application stack, I don't even talk infrastructure.

We've already had businesses come to us and say, "What do you use?" We just tell them about the whole FlexPod idea and what kind of benefits it brings: the scalability, the one-throat-to-choke kind of support. We've had a couple of companies take our advice and they were happy with it too.

In terms of homework to do before implementation, you have to look at your workloads and see how you're going to use it. In our experience, we have thrown everything but the kitchen sink at it and it actually performs really well. We've had very little problems, very little problems.

When I look at working with a vendor, I like one that takes an approach of making decisions in your interest. You can usually sort out pretty quickly whether they're there to just push gear or raw services, or if they're actually there to be a partner to help you succeed in the landscape. You can shake that out usually within a few meetings to see how they're really going to be. I’ve found that in NetApp.

I would say that you should seriously consider it. It’s very worthwhile.

I rate FlexPod eight out of 10. 

On a scale from 1 to 10, I would rate this product an 8. Consolidation is possible. 

FlexPod doesn't compare to other products. Do many tryouts first. Try to just mimic different environments to get a different view of the platform.

You won't regret it in the end, if you invest in FlexPod.

My thoughts on the solution regarding private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environment are that I definitely think hybrid is the future, having a flexible infrastructure. That's where I like the FlexPod, it's more like hyperconverged. It has more layers of flexibility for moving workloads up to and back from the cloud. We currently don't use FlexPod for managed private cloud.

My top criteria when selecting a vendor are that they are easy to work with and have knowledgeable engineers on the other side. When I have questions, I want to be able to get them answered easily.

Make sure to have FlexPod on the list. If you're looking at HPE or Dell EMC, put NetApp in there and take a look at them.

My industry is IT consulting, so my company has a lot of clients that are in various verticals. It can be healthcare, it can be education, so depending on what vertical they're in, they'll have a requirement to have a certain converged solution that they know that will work.

It's solid compared to everything else I see out there. All these other server manufacturers don't quite have the same level of integration that the Cisco has with this product. I really do like how Cisco has pulled it all together compared to, say, Dell or any of the other manufacturers. It's just much more simple for me to work with, and eventually to customers, it's a great hand-off when it's time to leave.

Selecting this solution really depends on the architects. The first thing I ask is why they think they need to upgrade and what it is that is driving it.

A lot of times, unfortunately, a lot of upgrades aren't really upgrades. They are just product refreshes. They are just making sure that customers understand that just doing a product refresh may, or may not, meet their future growth needs.

On my side, I try to help people understanding what they want to do, and why they are going about it.

We want to help them understand if there are any other future things coming into play that may, or may not, determine whether they are better off sticking with what they have. That could be a hybrid array, going with all-flash, or sticking with the spinning disc array with some flash cache for their environment. We want to make sure they're not getting too little or too much for what they really need.

If you don't have a reseller that you can talk to, talk to some industry experts. Get a demo. Basically, get an idea of what the FlexPod can do for you and which deployment model fits best for your company.

As I’ve mentioned, given what we were dealing with before, integrating with Cisco and NetApp storage, the marriage between those two companies, they came up with a perfect solution that is pretty modular and flexible. We can scale it however we like it, to whatever site we're going to deploy it at.

I'm not too concerned about more integration between the Cisco and NetApp systems. Obviously, you're going to have some separation there, because they are two different companies. Obviously, the interoperability of the different components, being able to work together, is great enough as it is. Being able to have one user interface that controls everything, I don't think you ever get that but, who knows? Cisco could buy out NetApp; who knows? They might just absorb into one interface. For me, that’s not so important, but I can see where some customers, some users, might look at that as a benefit.

When I look at a vendor, the most important criteria for us is what type of premier support they have. If something breaks, do we have 24-hour support? Obviously, pricing comes along with those but I think support is most important to us.

If you are really trying to find a solution to your problems, FlexPod will do it for you and fix it them.

There so many options now. It solely depends on your requirements. Some tools have good features, but I don't see any specifics of this tool that I could recommend to someone else.

Definitely leverage NFS datastores if you are going to be running VMware. Don't just treat it as any old storage. Think about the fact that NetApp is invested heavily into the WAFL file system and the whole bit.

There is a ton of preparations that you would need to do before implementation. That could be a months-long process. Make sure that you have the right equipment that is going to connect into it; your top-of-rack switches and the whole bit.

Go for it. One thing to be aware of is the support, but the rest is good.

When I’m selecting a vendor such as NetApp, in the business that we are in, I look for stability. When it comes to stability, reputation will matter; how long have they been in business and for how long they have proved themselves. The reputation is one of the things. Stability is the key thing.

Do it. Once you get it set up and configured, it's rock solid. It scales with your business easily. It will make your life so much easier once it's in place.

It's so reliable; I have had no problems with it. It's delivered everything that we've asked of it and we haven't even moved to flash yet. I'm pretty happy with it.

As far as anything that you need to prepare beforehand, I'm not entirely sure. We got to do a full greenfield upgrade. We weren’t trying to do a rip-and-replace of our current environment.

The most important criteria when I’m looking for a vendor is reliability, both with the product and the vendor relationship; not a lot of turnover in account managers. Things like that.

I would say, what are you waiting for?

It's worth evaluating. Having the certified architecture certainly helps when it comes to design and testing.

Give it a shot. If you are experienced with other types of technologies already, it's pretty simple to put it together.

I would rate the solution as an eight (out of 10).

It is a good solution compared to other products. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It depends on the device - How much it carries, what the security is, etc.

Don't buy magnetic media, but rather buy all-flash storage, solid state drives, or other types of flash media. I can't imagine that magnetic media is going to be around for much longer. Eventually, the old stuff is going to go away. Spinning platters are going to go away. I suggest investing in all-flash. Don't buy magnetic media, but rather put them in your garage.

Check the interop matrix and check it carefully. Make sure that everything's going to work across the line.

Another thing: Once I've got my FlexPod in place and NetApp knows I've got a NetApp 8040 – they know I have these models – have it pull the interop matrix for me. You know all my parts. Why do I have to hunt it down?

For other customers: Just make sure you do your homework on it. Make sure it's actually going to give you what you need and have fun with it.

It's well worth looking into.

I would highly recommend NetApp as a storage solution. I am impressed with all types of storage. In terms of choosing NetApp, FlexPod has a very good hyper-converged infrastructure and flash storage. It is a very good way of being cost effective. There are a lot of vendors, but not that many of them are as cost effective as NetApp.

I would say do it, do it now. Spend the money and buy it, it makes it easy.

I would say that it seems to be the way to go in our environment. We're looking into it for new aspects as well but well see.

I work with the support side. Having the support structure, having the availability of one line and, having two vendors for that one call is a huge advantage over other solutions.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: flexibility and licensing costs.

It's a great solution. I would recommend FlexPod, except for the licensing fee. I can speak about the implementation part. I don't know what the system admins would say. I'm not able to speak from their perspective.

NetApp’s FAS system is an excellent line of product. In today’s world the need for virtualization is continuingly increasing. Therefore having a storage platform that can be flexible in terms of configuration and scalability it’s important to the successful deployment of virtualization in the datacenter.

When we are positioning against a cheaper solution it's really difficult to sell NetApp to our small customers, so it's really difficult to position. The customer has to see a lot of value. Once we have medium and bigger customers, it's really easy to position and it's perfect.

I’d say its worth looking into – the community using it is a great resource.

Peer reviews are very important, as you're not getting a sales pitch, but real information.

If you’re looking for a mixture of companies and you’ve played the point-the-finger blame-game – it removes all that. FlexPod helps to minimize that kind of blame-the-other-vendors. When you have an issue, it gets resolved faster.

We’ve looked at everything and did footwork, so just go with Flexpod to save yourself time and effort.

It’s a good product, and I wouldn’t say not to go with it. If you are heavily invested with another vendor, for example HP, don’t change.

I rate FlexPod a seven out of 10. The reason behind that is, there is a lot of value in FlexPod, and FlexPod is incorporating a lot of the newer technologies, like ACI, into the design, rather than just keeping it an xOS, as an example.

It is a good proof of concept.

Peer reviews are very important because you want to know what experiences other people are having.

I would say that you should at least consider it. Although it does require some cross-team collaboration, how you work together and combine things depends on your political and cultural relationships within your team. It can be a cross-domain kind of experience.

Make sure you have expertise in Cisco and NetApp components so you can operationally ace it over, because even though it’s a reference architecture, you have to know about each component. Have in-house expertise, otherwise, it’s the best of the products out there.

Make sure you have your NetApp support up-to-date.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: reliability, support, and value for money.

Go look for somebody who is doing it and has been doing it for a while. The FlexPods have been shown to be reliable. They work with two of the best vendors. Cicso: For the compute and for the networking, you can't get better. VMware: For the virtualization. They just work great together. There are other converge solutions out there like EMC, but I think that these are the three agnostic ones. EMC obviously owns a piece of VMware, so it's hard to know what parts they want to play. Maybe Pure Storage is the other agnostic, but I believe that NetApp, right now, is doing the best converged FlexPod design in the FlexPod space.

There was a lot of documentation around it, in terms of what works with what. Customers know that if they upgrade their NetApp to version 9, they know what versions of UCS they need to upgrade to and what versions of VMware will work with that.

I would say that flexibility is the most important factor we look at, and also, for us, the worldwide availability is very important.

Make sure you have infrastructure, as it needs to have a good datacenter infrastructure otherwise you won’t use 100% of solution.

Give it a try and work with your partner or reseller to see if there is a demo available to try out the product. A lot of partners have that capability. Let people log in and try it. You should try out a solution before you buy.

We're in finance. I don't know if this solution is uniquely valuable in our industry but it works for us. It's not perfect but it does what we expected. We haven't had any problems at all.

Again, only had it several months, so I'm rating it a seven because I'm pessimistic. But that way, it also has room to grow.

Pick your partner wisely, as they have a lot in your success. Go with someone with a history in FlexPod.

I consider this solution a 10 out of 10. It is a very complete solution and easy to administer.