Cisco FlexPod Reviews & Insights

FlexPod is the backbone of the city. We use it for all departments and services within the city. It gave us a single point of management for our servers and the ability to move or migrate physical server profiles from one server to another. [It gives] us a very consistent and reliable experience.

We utilize FlexPod with VMware for both virtual and physical hosts in our data center. Our primary usage is a private cloud offering via the VMware hosts. My team sells back hosting services to other departments within the company, allowing them to get 24/7 support and hosting without having to pay for IT staff out of their own budgets, while ensuring that the support team, being members of the same company, have a vested interest in providing up time and service that an external provider might not have.

FlexPod is great for mid to large size companies, where the flexibility and depth of a traditional SAN and high performance servers is required. For smaller companies, it might make more sense to go with a hyper converged solution such as Hyperflex or Nutanix (both of which can still run on Cisco UCS servers, but would not be making use of Netapp storage), to meet the requirements in a smaller footprint.