FlexPod XCS Primary Use Case

Chris Haight - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Solutions Architect at CDW Canada Inc.

Most of my customers have separate server, network and storage teams. Therefore, bringing UCS together with NetApp storage, which makes a FlexPod, speaks to my customers' use cases. We are able to carve it up for almost everything, whether it is for HyperVisor's such as VMware ESXi or bare-metal Linux / Windows servers. My customers love the option to carve it up as they like and use their existing storage investments treating the marriage of compute and storage as a "FlexPod", more a platform. Again, it covers off almost every use case my customers have.

The deployment really depends on what the customer is trying to achieve, in-house IT skillsets, budget and other variables will need to be considered. I have customers who are proponents of everything SaaS with a bit of cloud and customers with SaaS, Cloud and on-premises taking a balanced approach to realize an Hybrid "Multi-Cloud" environment. Others that are pairing SaaS with on-premises, and some, only SaaS with remote workers. I also have customers that remain all on-preemies because of the nature of their data. So, my stance is hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure in the end but I look at all the solutions out there, bring the right pieces together trying to achieve, with my customers a hybrid environment. Lots of stuff in-between and many pause at various places on this journey, whether it is to pivot to new technology previously unavailable, re-assess and or build budget for their "the next steps". Hybrid is where to land, where I think all companies are going to land. There will be many variations like a 70/30 or 80/20 split. We just don't know. It all depends on the customer, use case and workloads!

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Bob Greenwald - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

We use FlexPod for onsite virtualized and leveraged hardware, so we work with many VMs and generic workloads. There is no specific single-purpose workload. It would be like the VMware solution.

We have three primary production environments and a legacy environment. Right now, the entire workload of the organization is roughly split into thirds across those various generations: Gen one, Gen two, Gen three, and legacy. Legacy can't move off of old hardware, or it's in the process of being moved to modern platforms. 

Gen one was FlexPod, Gen two was a different Dell solution, and Gen three was yet another Dell solution because somebody up the chain loves Dell these days. They're building a fourth generation of primarily containerized stuff based on Red Hat Kubernetes for new workloads or Red Hat OpenShift. The compute workloads in FlexPod are slowly being moved out. There's no plan to replace that or to continue using that as a FlexPod. However, the storage driving the current compute and network shares will be transitioned into the strategic platform for file-sharing platforms across the enterprise. 

It highlights the flexibility that comes with the product set. They're still using VMware everywhere. They're not going to be using the compute environment. They're still using Cisco network switches everywhere and will continue to use NetApp storage everywhere. Interestingly, this new containerized OpenShift environment they have in place today gets its storage back from the NetApp through NetApp automation and integration tools in their cloud set. It highlights the flexibility of what you can do with the entire platform when you need to do something.

In terms of administration, we have five or six people on the storage side that are primarily doing storage. There's a rather large team in charge of server administration, but they're doing server administration across the entire enterprise as a team. There are around 25 or 30 Windows and Linux system administrators. The house's Windows side also manages the necessary VMware work, but they're not dedicated to FlexPod. They're across the entire enterprise, but any of them could come in and do most of the work.

In addition, there are about 10 people on the engineering side. They're the ones who are primarily responsible for designing and driving operational standards. The same people are in charge of infrastructure across the entire enterprise and aren't limited to FlexPod. There's also a good smattering of network folk. 

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John Kevin - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy IT Manager at MBBank

We primarily use FlexPod for tier-one applications. We leverage it for ONTAP systems, and sometimes for general-purpose systems as well. XMPPROL speaks around it for ECM, PPM, and CIM, and sequential notifications.

Normally, we use FlexPod internally. XCS comes from Cisco and NetApp, meaning they come together to build a system that satisfies the better-designed CVD.

We are in the finance and banking industry. 

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Buyer's Guide
FlexPod XCS
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about FlexPod XCS. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Christian Schuster - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Designer at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use it for different use cases. We have projects that are specialized for the healthcare sector. This is because of the certifications that NetApp has in this sector, both for VDI and standard VMware.

Most of our customers and projects are about hybrid cloud integration. So, having something still on-premises that integrates with hyperscalers is why we are often using NetApp, who has a versatile data platform.

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Neil Bembridge - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Infrastructure Manager at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

We have high-IO SQL workloads. We have over 200 SQL Servers for our flagship platform so we definitely need compute, storage, network, all of that in one, that's going to perform under pressure.

We're using AFF A700s, which at the time we got them, were the latest and greatest of all-flash storage. The Cisco UCS portion that we're using are M5s and M4s. They were top of the line when they were released, as well. 

We're looking for low-latency and high-compute, and that's what FlexPod gives us.

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CF
Director of Product and Customer Management Services at CEDSIF - Ministry of Finance

We use FlexPod XCS in our data center to provide IT services like hosting. We also use it to store in-house applications. 

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MJ
Infrastructure Engineer at Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center

We use this system for the performance, cost of ownership, agility, expandability of it, and the automation.

I manage this solution, but I don't think of the FlexPod solution on a whole. I manage all of the individual components including Cisco UCS Manager, UCS Director, and UCS Central. I work with all of the storage devices including the flash arrays and the filers. I work with the switches via Flex channel or on the ethernet side.

We use the solution's tiering to a public cloud for archival purposes. We have everything in-house for the most part, but there is some data that is not that critical but needs to be archived because of government regulations. We have to keep it for quite some time.

With respect to the history of innovation, it has affected our ease of use, cost of ownership, we use less manpower to manage it, and we have better uptime. As far as disaster recovery, that's been a really big plus because we have the two fabrics. 

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SS
Network Engineer at Department of Homeland Security

Our primary use case for FlexPod is providing cloud services.

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SL
Infrastructure Lead at a non-profit with 51-200 employees

The primary use case is within our commercial infrastructure, where it integrates with FSCs and factories. This integration allows us to manage and utilize a mix of storage resources efficiently. It's especially valuable for handling heavy SAN workloads, as our site doesn't have a significant amount of NAS storage.

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ZS
IT Manager at Capgemini

We are using it internally for one of our departments to provide the platform in which our employees are working to support our customers.

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JL
Senior Client Executive at Sirius

In our case, we were building out a brand new data center. They were rolling out Epic, which is a big healthcare application. So, we bought 200 UCS servers. This was five years ago when we first implemented this, and the FAS 8060 has been serving this customer very well. It has allowed them to start with what was 26 hospitals and grow up to 45 hospitals, all with the same set of infrastructure over the last five years. 

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SP
Senior IT Analyst at a construction company with 10,001+ employees

It is mostly for small remote sites. The WAN link isn't good enough for them to come to the enterprise site at this time. So, we do a lot of file shares, VMs, etc. It's to run the local business.

Our FlexPods are NetApp FASs, Cisco UCS, and Cisco switches. That's our version of a FlexPod. We call them ROBOs (remote office/branch office). We have about a hundred throughout the world that we deploy in different regions. For us personally, I do the NetApp side of it. We're running NetApp version 9.5P6. That is the lowest version that we run in our ROBO environment. 

While the deployment model is on-prem, we are moving to a backup model in the cloud for them for DR. In the next month or two, we are going to start that.

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Ameet Bakshi - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant VP at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our solution includes 7K switches, an 8060 as our filer, and Cisco 1610 as our interconnect switches.

We are not on the cloud yet, but we are currently exploring all of our options.

We use our FlexPod for all of our work, including our company applications.

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KK
Senior Systems Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use this primarily for robosites, which means remote offices.

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HS
Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our primary use case is healthcare for billing applications. With FlexPod, we use it mostly on some databases and billing applications. We are also using it now for containers, mostly with VMware.

We have the Cisco UCS M4 Blade Server, 6300 Series Fabric Interconnect, and NetApp AFF A800.

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DS
Senior Systems Engineer at Booz Allen Hamilton

Our FlexPod solution is designed to isolate a sensitive data environment. We're able to use the technology to silo it away from the rest of our hosting environment.

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SM
Storage Administrator at HDR

We use it for its resilience and redundancy. Storage-wise, we use it for its deduplication. The primary use is to keep storage for 24-hours and have no issues.

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VK
Senior Storage Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use on-prem for our unified network communications solution, which is basically a Call Center. We have a Cisco call center running Cisco software on FlexPod. That is our primary and only use case right now for it. We use HP as a computer hardware solution for the enterprise. We'll probably expand our use of FlexPod and we use it for everything else including the entire production environment.

The components we are currently using are Cisco Blade Server Chassis. The blades are M4, Fabric Interconnect 6248, I believe. The very first version. They are very old. We'll probably be upgrading in a few years, or maybe next year. We have MDS switches, 9148 — they are pretty old too. We will have to upgrade them. And then we have NetApp FAS8040 disks.

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KK
Systems Engineer at First Ontario Credit Union

For both data centers, everything that we use IT-wise is run on both of them.

We currently use versions 4.1 and 3.2.

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DM
Infrastructure Engineer at TechnipFMC

We use this solution for the VMware virtualization of all of our servers. We use the Cisco UCS for the blade servers.

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JB
Senior Data Storage Administrator at Denver Health

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

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EG
Data Center Manager at a consultancy with 5,001-10,000 employees

We are using it in two cases. 

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

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

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RM
Senior Systems Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Our primary use case for this solution is for VDI.

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EK
Senior System Administrator at Bell Canada

The primary use case that we have is we like the support model of the FlexPod. We like it being converged with NetApp storage, Cisco, UCS, and VMware. We like having a single point of contact phone number for all support inquiries. These are some of the main selling features that we enjoy about FlexPod.

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TL
Network Engineer at DHS USCIS

We use FlexPod for our on-premise file solution. Its infrastructure enables us to run demanding or mission-critical workloads.

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BG
Sr Platform Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our primary use case for this solution is VMware hosting. We use it primarily in the core data center, and that’s where it has worked best for us.

Our applications for payroll, HR, and anything that is mission-critical runs on some form of Flex device. We run a lot of different workloads and a lot of different VMs on this platform.

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AK
Solutions Architect at GDT - General Datatech

We have a customer who is looking for a converged infrastructure to deploy multi-cloud solutions for on-premise solutions.

Our customers use FlexPod today. Our impressions of it are great. It fits our customer's demands. We like the way that it integrates into their environments. Being that Netapp and Cisco have partnered together on it, along with VMware, and Microsoft, there is a good relationship with all of those companies working together.

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YY
Director of Board at a training & coaching company with 51-200 employees

FlexPod is a converged infrastructure consolidating the data center and server forms and providing a new contract. It's used primarily for reducing virtual machines, so FlexPod is used for consolidation, optimization, and rationalization purposes.

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SA
Sysadmin at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

In general, we use it for our storage and computing work loads.

We had challenges finding the right partner regarding performance, flexibility, and support from the vendor. FlexPod is an all-inclusive solution, so we found the right one.

We have about 1,000 end users and 2,500 endpoints.

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BK
Senior Infrastructure Analyst at a legal firm with 201-500 employees

We have FlexPod Mini for the primary data center.

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CK
Data Center Engineer at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

We use this solution for backing up and storing banking and financial data. It is especially important for protecting data mirroring between multiple data centers using a hybrid cloud type approach. We have our own cases for what we use but we do like the input we get from the manufacturers and their suggestions on how we should deploy things.

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PK
Senior Storage Engineer at U.S. Bancorp

Our primary use case for this solution is for custom applications. 

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AA
Sr Storage Engineer at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees

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

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AJ
Infrastructure Engineer at Suntrust Bank

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

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LM
Architect at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

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

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TT
Works at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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

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RP
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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MR
Network/Telecom/IT Security Manager at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use it for some 90 servers and systems. It runs our primary student information system, we have our phone systems through it, our email. Everything is running on it, all critical functions, all critical servers.

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DB
System Analyst at ONEOK, Inc.

We use it for VMware. Most of what we do runs on it. Our business runs on it. Probably 60 percent of our environment runs on UCS and 100 percent on NetApp storage, with Cisco switching everywhere.

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EK
Senior System Administrator at Bell Canada

We would probably use FlexPod in an Edge type of scenario for our COs to get closer to the customers, because our data center is already Cisco UCS with NetApp. This scenario with FlexPod would probably work well for our Edge deployments to get closer to customers.

We are NetApp/Cisco customers. We do have a similar implementation to FlexPod. Our main use case for its use is the virtual data center

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AC
Senior IT Manager at Vocera

We use it for our internal cloud infrastructure.

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AH
Senior Systems Engineer at a transportation company with 501-1,000 employees

We have four different use cases that we bought it for:

  1. Our production VM or infrastructure is on a FlexPod with a metro cluster.
  2. We have a CCTV system, which is a FlexPod using E-Series as a back end.
  3. We have another E-Series FlexPod for backup infrastructure, with our combo products.
  4. We have a test end environment, which is a mini replica of our production, VMware assistance.
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AS
Chief Technology Officer at Triana Business Solutions Lda

We started to move from rack-mounted servers and we needed to make a virtualized environment. One of the requirements for virtualizing all our bare metal infrastructure was to move to a solution with components such as VMware and central storage. We started to look for the environments and were seeking out which was the best version with the possible solution that was in the market and we found NetApp FlexPod, one of the most flexible and easy to use, ready-to-market solutions. We chose NetApp FlexPod due to its flexibility and ease.

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JJ
Principal Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Over the last year, we've implemented several solutions with FlexPod. We implemented whatever the latest version is. I know we just put one in that was the latest version in a New Jersey school.

Our customers are using on-premise. It's all on premise, but we have implemented solutions that are more hybrid where they are deploying a model where they want their app dev groups to be able to deploy resources much easier to an on-premise infrastructure, as compared to an AWS subscription.

Generally, it's a mix between Azure and AWS. That's what we're seeing from customers overall. 

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AS
Sr Network Solution Engineer at InterVision Systems Technologies

We use this solution in our data center. We use a hybrid environment. It connects our on-premise system with the cloud.

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JC
Senior IT Planner Integrator at a government with 501-1,000 employees

We use this solution for our development workloads.

The private hybrid multi-cloud environment works for us. We're using it as a private cloud.

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RM
Senior Systems Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

We are using it to have production workloads running on it.

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NN
System Consultant at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees

Our organization relies on it as the backbone of our infrastructure, which we use to provide services to multiple clients in a multi-client environment.

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RM
Storage Engineer Manager at Servix

Our primary use case was for unified support, so our customers could ask us a question or receive support for any type of products. It could be for UCS, network, or storage.

Our customers use it for virtual machines and with VMware with tool sites, e.g., VMware solutions for DR.

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OV
Senior Project Consultant at DynTek

We have a FlexPod in our lab. I have implemented or deployed FlexPod for many customers.

Most of the use case that I have seen is to either adjust on size or if the customer is modernizing their current infrastructure and does not want to go the traditional route, wanting to have some type of convergence. The customer is usually be more comfortable with a flexible solution because there's a lot of choice and scale.

Depending on the customer needs, I've delivered extremely large and complex to very simple solutions. The most attractive thing for customers is how good the consolidation is. Sometimes, if they had a previous infrastructure of five or six racks, we can then bring them down to a rack or even half a rack. This is mind-blowing to them as their performance is increased tenfold and their infrastructure has shrunk. The power consumption shrinks and the management is simple.

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TD
Operations Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

It's pretty much our infrastructure.

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CJ
Technical Operations Manager at Dyncorp

The vendor delivers a fully-configured prebuilt system with a certain baseline on it. We can ship it to five continents. They can roll them into place, plug in two power cords and six network cables, and we are off to the races.

Remotely, we have installed 230 systems globally (no domestic) in the past 22 months.

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it_user886947 - PeerSpot reviewer
TSE at Insight Enterprises, Inc.

Customers use it to consolidate their resources, rather than having a more extravagant and very high-cost center. FlexPod seems to be a simpler, more economical solution and, obviously, it is a lot easier to work on.

Our clients will use it for anything from healthcare (a lot of surgical) to major consumer distribution, universities or higher learning institutions. Large customers, like Digital Realty, who do business with smaller companies, all try to get the same type of solution.

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DB
Senior Systems Engineer at a government with 201-500 employees

Our primary use case for this solution is virtualization with Hyper-V.

We are using Cisco UCS and NetApp together in our FlexPod solution.

The validated designs for major enterprise applications are very important for our organization because we are part of the local government, and this solution is a critical platform for a broad array of applications and services that we provide to the public.

The history of innovations, in particular, the inclusion of all-flash, has had a positive effect on our database performance.

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JM
Director of Data Center Operations at Barry University

Everything with NetApp right now is our DR and restore strategy. We have all of our VMs installed in an on-premises FlexPod.

We have another filter down in our DR site and everything is replicated using SnapProtect and SnapSuite.

The validated designs for major enterprise applications are very important to our organization. We have to make sure that everything is fully supported, end to end, and that we're not going to have any problems. When people have trouble they resort to finger-pointing and complain about the network, servers, or storage. With the one validated design, we contact NetApp and get support for everything we need.

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AA
Network Administrator at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

We use this solution in our on-premise production environment.

It does optimize operations. There is a huge improvement, between fifteen and twenty percent, in application performance.

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GS
Network Architect at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We were trying to come up with a unified vendor for a hyper-converged solution. Our deployment model was SASE.

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SK
Sr Systems Engineer at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our primary use case is for all of our data storage and so primarily VMware virtualization. We run over 95% of all of our computers running on VMware.

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RB
Cloud Engineer at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Our primary use case for this solution is virtualization. We run both VMware and Hyper-V.

We currently have an AFF8040 that is running with Cisco UCS in our FlexPod solution. We have a four-node cluster, where we have the AFF but we also have a second cluster with spinning disks. It's nice to have them clustered because I can move my high-performance workloads over onto the SSD, easily. If we have things that we determine aren't taking advantage of the SSD, I can volume migrate it back to the spinning disk and not waste high-performance capacity on workloads that aren't utilizing the speed of the SSD.

The solution's validated designed for major enterprise apps are very important to us because we would prefer not to open support calls, and with the validated configuration, it just works.

We are not yet using this solution for tiering to a public cloud, but it is something that we're looking into.

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MA
Senior Systems Engineer at First Ontario Credit Union

We're in a financial institute and we have two data centers. We use this solution for all of our applications.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps are very useful for us from an engineering standpoint.

In terms of simplifying our infrastructure, we do not use the cloud right now.

FlexPod has saved our organization in terms of capital expenditures, although I cannot say by how much at this time.

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TB
Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at CANADIAN PAYMENTS ASSOCIATION

Our primary use for this product is for virtual desktop infrastructure and for virtual server storage.

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FS
Corp Solutions Engineer - Network at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

This solution is used mostly for isolated pods for SAP, for instance, or for EPIC.

Private, hybrid and multi-cloud environments are heavily in use by various customers. I would say that hybrid is probably the most common today.

We have integrated with cloud services such as NetApp’s ONTAP, AWS, and Azure.

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CR
Lead of the Server and Storage Team at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

We use it for our entire virtualization stack, and one of the big driving factors for us was the support between Cisco and NetApp.

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SH
IT Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

My primary use case for FlexPod is for usage at our remote and small branch offices.

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DZ
Service Delivery Architect at Premiercomm

The primary use case that we have for most of our customers is where they're in a converged environment and they also have file system storage. It's primarily where they're looking for a solid NAS-based appliance that also runs business-critical workloads well, with a highly available architecture.

The focus is data center workload as well as VDI workload. And once they've already got it, why not use it for file storage as well as other things to replace Windows file servers. It's easier to deal with a NetApp - which is typically more secure - than a Windows Server that you're going to have to patch constantly.

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David Rechsteiner - PeerSpot reviewer
Account Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The solution suits converged infrastructures, where the customer gets a complete system with Cisco servers, NetApp Storage, and Cisco switches.

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RL
CTO at ForceOne

We have been using FlexPod for a virtualized environment, mainly for virtual machines running on VMware or Hyper-V with database solutions, application servers, and web servers. In general, it is for all data center infrastructure. 

It is our integrated system between NetApp and Cisco.

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WB
Manager of IT Services at a comms service provider

Primary use case is for a telecommunications company. We have used it for housing virtual servers for an internal corporate network, as well as for a service provider network.

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IM
IT Engineer at CenturyLink, Inc.

FlexPod can be used for all types of workloads. At my company we are using FlexPod for the SAP HANA product.

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BF
System Engineer at Missile Defense Agency

We use it to implement our core data center and server environment.

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TE
Systems Manager at Marcum

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

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CB
Lead Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We sell FlexPod and enable our customers to leverage it to run their data centers.

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SL
Enterprise Architecture at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

It is used as a data storage infrastructure. We also use it for ERP applications, a combination of SYSPRO and SAP. 

Performance-wise, it is actually doing quite well. The end users are very happy with it.

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it_user870267 - PeerSpot reviewer
It Managed Services Provider at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

The use case is that it is running with multiple applications with VMware, and this a two data-center model, Flexpod, along with NetApp storage. It's quite useful.

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SW
Storage Administrator at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees

We use FlexPod XCS to provide primary storage for production data. 

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JW
Engagement Architect at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

We're using it for general purpose virtualization or converged, as well as in specific cases like electronic medical records. That is the big one.

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VT
Solution Architect at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

We use FlexPod for all of our tier two and tier three storage, in all of our business units.

The ability to scale on demand allows us to get the capacity for the customer in a much more efficient manner in a better timeframe.

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KS
Network Engineering Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use FlexPod for customer data center solutions — as well as internal solutions in our data center — to host customer data.

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JH
System Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use FlexPod primarily for automation and growing capacity.

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JC
Storage Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

FlexPod is a single product that you can manage. It has very good scalability. We can scale our UCS Servers. We can carry 12 storage nodes in the FlexPod. The main benefit is its single, all in one solution from server switch to storage.

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JG
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

We use it mainly for consolidation in the data center.

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NF
Manager of Network Services at a legal firm with 501-1,000 employees

We use FlexPod in our data centers. We serve all of our infrastructure off of it, which includes Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, and Citrix. It is all virtualized. We are also using the file share from FlexPod with Snapshotting and SnapMirroring for disaster recovery (DR) between data centers.

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GP
Systems Engineer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use FlexPod for everything: Running our virtual stack, all our research data, etc.

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DA
Executive Director Of IT at a university

What we wanted to do with the FlexPod solution was get VMware, our NetApp, and Cisco solutions, all in one. Also, to be able to take all of our physical servers and move them into a virtual environment, which we were able to accomplish.

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PD
Pre-Sales Specialist at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Our customers use this solution. It's a validated design and there's one solution for compute and storage. The validated design is an advantage when you take all of the separate parts.

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AT
Senior IT Infrastructure Specialist at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

Two hour production products are fully running in AWS. For the FlexPod, we just run everything on it.

We bought all the parts separately. So, we are running a certified FlexPod design with the AFF A700, UCS chassis, and Cisco Nexus FIs.

We are using both AWS and Azure.

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SC
Cloud Service Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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

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

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

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HB
Network Engineer at a legal firm with 501-1,000 employees

We use this solution in our data center. It runs all of our ESX environment with SQL and Exchange servers on it.

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IO
Subject Matter Expert at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

We use it for generalized workloads in a hypervisor situation, either VMM or Hyper-V. It is used for any particular workloads that the government has for this purpose. It is sometimes used for dedicated hardware as well, so it provides the flexibility as we need it. We can also grow because we can easily expand it from its initial chassis.

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JP
Systems Administrator at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The primary use case is storage for medical imagery.

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CF
Network Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our primary use case for FlexPod is Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). We sell multi-tenancy services to our customers.

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JF
Systems Administrator at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use it for running our VM environment. We have three different data centers that use FlexPod: two in North America and one in Europe. Our daily job is important.

We use it FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud, which is fast, reliable, and trustworthy.

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MP
Capacity Manager at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our primary use case is a mixture of workloads. We have VMware, Citrix, Oracle and SAP, which are all running within the FlexPod stack.

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SB
Site Reliability Engineer 2 at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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

There are a lot of points for configuration.

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

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JD
Platforms Engineer at Logicalis

We have multiple use cases for it. Most of it is just based on the fact of its reliability and its performance. We have customers in the insurance industry, financial industry, retail and they mostly use it for compute and storage. 

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OS
Team Lead at Grenke Digital gmbh

We're using a FlexPod cluster with Cisco UCS and NetApp AFF. It's a four-node cluster. We use FlexPod for everything in our company. We're a financial company.

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AS
Systems Engineer at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We are using for the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for our hospital.

We are using a primary and secondary data center model. We have two locations where one is the primary and the other is the DR.

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JW
Director of Datacenter at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

We provide this solution to customers for their data centers, and we also use it internally, for our data center, to host customer data.

This solution is right there in terms of leading-edge digital equipment.

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BP
Senior Storage Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our environment is completely virtualized. Therefore, we are using Cisco UCS and NetApp as back-end storage.

We're using FlexPod on Managed Private Cloud only today, and it's good. It's doing its job and we are happy so far.

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EW
Solution Architect at Charter

We primarily deploy FlexPod with customers that have defined business requirements. For customers that have used it in the past, we basically rinse and repeat because they do like the product and reuse it continually.

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FA
Virtualization/Storage Specialist at a energy/utilities company with 201-500 employees

Our primary use case for the solution is running critical infrastructure, and we deploy it on-premises

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VD
Sales Analyst at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

We have a bank customer in Brazil who sells a lot of credit cards.

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JT
Technical Consultant at Venn IT solutions

We have a custom-built FlexPod with a Cisco 6332-16FI and an AH-700.

It is being used as our primary network infrastructure.

The solution’s validated designs are pretty important for major enterprise apps in our organization. We follow them to make sure that we're compliant.

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CG
IT Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Our primary use case for this solution is infrastructure.

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AS
Associate VP at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

We use it for our customer's work that we do because we are an IT service provider. We do application development and testing. For this purpose, the data is with us and we work with FlexPod for their data.

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BM
Network Engineer III at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

It's used for managing our virtual workload exclusively. It manages our virtual servers and our internal business systems are run on it.

We use FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud. It functions.

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it_user865494 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The key features and functionalities of NetApp FlexPod that the company uses run:

  1. VMware Horizon View
  2. standalone workloads.

The environment is NetApp Controller FAS8040, Cisco Nexus switches (5000/7000/9000) and Cisco UCS Server with fabric interconnect.

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RP
Service Delivery Director at VORTEX TI

My primary use case is for private cloud, database servers, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

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JC
IT at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

We have a VMware solution that we use with our servers and we also use it to see if it might be a solution for us as an exchange server.

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AR
IT Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Our primary use case is for virtualization, the VMs.

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MB
Practice Lead at Bedroc

Our primary use case is to integrate the compute, networking and storage in our data center.

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it_user979815 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Solution Engineer at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

We sell FlexPod. We have different versions of the software people like. Because we are the main seller of the product, we have quite a few customers.

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SI
Systems Engineer at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees

One place to go for support. 

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JV
Consultant Technical at Vosko

We are a NetApp partner. I, myself, am doing ACI and data center stuff. We have been active for a year and have several customers running on FlexPod SF functionality. We don't do native NetApp stuff, only FlexPod SF.

We are mostly looking at healthcare, and we also in the banking world. We have one customer to whom we sold this as a storage product.

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JP
Information Systems Manager at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use FlexPod to simplify support, to accelerate troubleshooting by using the FlexPod in integrating. Whether it's a VMware or a UCS Cisco problem, or a Nexus problem, it makes support a lot simpler.

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OS
Enterprise Solution Architect at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

It is for video solutions. It saves us a lot of money in our environment. My job is to make sure that the government saves money. 

The use case for us is that many users are able to use this when they travel out of the country. With computers right now, all you need to do is log into the website to access the resources, then you can use them in your flexible solution.

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AP
Network Systems Specialist at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We have had two FlexPods for five years now. We're currently purchasing a third one. We have never had any problems with them in that time. We are using it for hosting COREmanager and Unity Connection. So far, so good. Its performance is great.

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BD
Infrastructure Manager at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

Our primary use case is company back-end servers and services. The performance is great. 

We deployed this for our server environment in our company. Therefore, all the typical systems you would see in a commercial company are what we are running it on. It was not built for a specific use case. It was built instead for using hard servers or network-attached storage. Just putting it all together makes it simple to use.

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MD
Solutions Architect at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Our primary use is mostly for footprint consolidation — reducing the number of cables and easing the management model compared to just working with monolithic servers. Having access to the UCSM (Unified Computing System Manager) and managing that way seems to be a lot easier.

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SK
Network Engineer at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use this solution for our servers. We are getting ready to move to the cloud.

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EO
Technical Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Our primary use for it is in the healthcare market. We have a lot of customers using it because they want to have some flexibility with storage and compute. That is the reason we are selling it in the healthcare market.

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KH
Information Security Engineer at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees

Our primary use case for NetApp has been as part of a Cisco UCS chassis. We have seven or eight different instances of it now, spread around the world. So far, it has been very reliable, other than a few hard drive failures here and there, but those are expected.

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RK
Manager Of Network Administrator at a educational organization with 201-500 employees

We have our primary and backup data centers as our primary storage, not only for Windows Servers on NFS, but also as part of our users' data stores.

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JB
Senior systems manager at a transportation company with 201-500 employees

Primary use case is for virtualization of our phone systems and our domain.

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MM
AGM at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

We use it for my private cloud. We are providing a service.

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RS
Director at HCL Technologies

Our primary use case for this solution is for educational content.

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TT
Virtualization Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

It in our primary data centers and almost on all of our sites. Therefore, we use both FlexPod and FlexPod Express.

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DC
Solutions Architect at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

We primarily use it to provide compute resources for customers. It is basically a data center in a box, and it performs very well for us.

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it_user865491 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Storage Analyst at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I am working on a FlexPod environment, though it is not the exact FlexPod box from NetApp. Our environment is custom made, resembling FlexPod with UCS chassis, NetApp storage, and Cisco MDS. We have five HA pairs and a MetroCluster, along with Cisco MDS in front and Brocade as back-end switches (for MetroCluster).

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EZ
Director Of Engineering

We use it for virtualizing infrastructure and also for the virtual cloud system.

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AS
Systems Engineer at Symbol Technologies PLC

We've deployed a couple of projects for universities. They have been using FlexPod for a VDI solution as well as their file systems and servers. We usually use cheaper firewalls to secure the solution. We mostly use Cisco, which is higher power as well. 

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JQ
Network Engineer at a government with 10,001+ employees

Our primary use case for FlexPod is for better storage.

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MM
Enterprise Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

We use it more to deploy a supportive solution so that a customer can go to one business support number and then have FlexPod for the whole infrastructure.

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CW
Systems Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

We use it for our inner data center and with our UCS to handle all our server data, and it's doing pretty well.

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MC
Principal Infrastructure Engineer at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

It is our primary on-premise infrastructure.

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KR
Network Engineer at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

It is performing well. It is the data center of devices, e.g., when we are using the call locations in San Francisco and Sacramento.

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it_user252573 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Architect and Business Consultant

My use case was a small FlexPod architecture (seven Cisco B-Series Blades, a FAS8200 in CDOT, two Cisco Nexus switches). One rack. We used Cisco 3xxx switches. Six profiles were defined so six blades were running and one was a spare.

On top of the infrastructure we used Oracle Hypervisor (OVM); the VMs were based on Oracle Linux. On top the virtual machines we hosted Oracle Database (pinned, to reduce license costs) or applications.

So two levels of flexibility per DR were activated: one based on profiles and one based on the hypervisor.

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FD
Senior Network Engineer at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our use case is for a life sciences cloud offering.

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TD
Technical Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The primary use case is for customers that want to replicate infrastructure over and over again and have a consistent architecture for their workloads. It's appropriate for larger enterprises that want the pod design in their data centers.

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JS
Systems Administrator at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

We have everything on our FlexPod.

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it_user862512 - PeerSpot reviewer
Private Cloud Infrastructure Manager at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Company-wide production and development of private cloud infrastructure.

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RH
Technical Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

It is where we keep our production network: all our main controllers, accounting applications, and our file servers. They are running on FlexPod.

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it_user319338 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Innovation at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

In our facilities we use FlexPod to host business applications: bpm'online (our tool for the help desk), SugarCRM, Microsoft Exchange Server, Cisco CallManager, some applications related to telephony and collaboration, and for demonstrations of our solution.

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it_user798375 - PeerSpot reviewer
PMO Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

I used the solution as disaster recovery (DR) for backing up the IBM Power series infrastructure. The primary site is running our core application, which is based on Java and Oracle databases installed on a SUSE Linux environment.

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Buyer's Guide
FlexPod XCS
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about FlexPod XCS. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.