Voice of a FlexPod Customer: Cooperative Support You Can Count On
Bruno Messina
One of the most consequential IT projects you can undertake today is to digitally transform your approach to data center management. But a digital transformation can be tricky to pull off. Not only do you need to know where your current approach falls short, you also have to understand what it takes to adopt a better one.
So how do you do it? By starting out with a bit of unbiased feedback from your peers. That’s why we launched this new blog series highlighting reviews by verified customers of ours on IT Central Station.
To learn what makes customer support for the FlexPod® data center solution from NetApp and Cisco so special, keep reading.
About the Reviewer
A FlexPod customer of several years, this reviewer is the server and storage team lead at a tech services company with hundreds of employees. They use FlexPod across their entire virtualization stack.What They Gained with FlexPod
Before switching to FlexPod, the reviewer had become frustrated with the level of support offered by their previous provider. In the search for alternative solutions, they were drawn to FlexPod for its innovative engineering. But the clincher? The FlexPod Cooperative Support model between NetApp, Cisco, and partners such as Microsoft and VMware. After bringing FlexPod on board, they found it did not disappoint.If you open a ticket, you get a response from NetApp and Cisco on the same page, on the same team. Their support has been great. You actually get a follow-up a day later: ‘Is everything still good?’Perhaps unsurprisingly, they’ve only had to engage customer support once. Because with FlexPod, they now enjoy rock-solid stability and seamless, affordable scalability. They also report that their performance levels have risen to new heights.
We have easily seen a 100% improvement in application performance over our previous platform.Finally, they’ve been able to collapse some of their compute workload for virtualization and reduce the licensing count for their SQL server, enabling them to cut costs considerably.
What the Initial Setup Looked Like
They decided to leverage the data centre with the Microsoft Hyper-V server, so their initial setup was more complex than most. But by referencing a few Cisco Validated Designs and working with Cisco-certified experts, they sailed through the setup without any issues. Afterwards, they continued to reference validated designs for easy troubleshooting.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.
Parting Thoughts
With FlexPod, this reviewer has helped to transform IT operations at their business by gaining access to:- Fast, reliable customer support
- Helpful validated designs for easy reference
- Reliable stability and simple scalability
Want to read the complete review? Head over to IT Central Station.
To discover how other customers have benefited from FlexPod, read the blog.
Bruno Messina
Next Steps
.png?width=5760&format=avif&disable=upscale)