Voice of a FlexPod Customer: Stable Storage and Robust Hardware for Remote Sites
Natalia Eichinger
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 blog series highlighting reviews by verified customers of ours on IT Central Station.
Keep reading to discover how one customer brought stable storage, easy scalability, and more to their remote branch offices by switching to the FlexPod® data center solution from NetApp and Cisco.
About the Reviewer
This reviewer is a senior IT analyst at a large construction company with more than 10,000 employees. They currently leverage about 100 FlexPod solutions on-premises at their remote branch offices in different regions worldwide.What They Gained with FlexPod
Thanks to FlexPod, this company gained the stability needed to optimize their remote branch office support.With a solution onsite at each of their smaller offices, they now have the stable storage required to run all their businesses locally—a critical upgrade for the many locations that don’t have a strong enough WAN link to reliably connect to the corporate servers. How stable is the storage at their remote sites today? The reviewer shares that operations at one site in Fargo, North Dakota, proceeded uninterrupted even after the roof fell in!
“They were sitting there able to keep continuously running even though they had a roof collapse.”
And with FlexPod, they don’t have to worry about replacing failing hardware—a huge concern with their previous solution. Gone are the days when the server staff had to rush to fix storage and server emergencies at their remote branch offices.
FlexPod’s scalability and flexibility are two other significant gains, say the reviewer. Even though each remote branch office is different, they’ve been able to easily tailor each solution to the specific storage requirements at hand and scale up or down when things change.
Overall, the reviewer has seen reliability rise to new heights with FlexPod.
“The solution has decreased the unplanned downtime incidents in our organization by 25 to 30 percent.”
What the Initial Setup Looked Like
The reviewer has found the installation process simple, aside from a minor setback during their first FlexPod setup. What happened? Instead of working with a trusted technology partner such as WWT for their initial deployment, they turned to an internal expert—someone who ended up leaving the company while the installation was still in progress. But the reviewer is happy to report they’ve now “gotten it down to a science to install.”Parting Thoughts
FlexPod has helped this reviewer strengthen the business with:- Stable application performance across all remote branch offices
- More dependable hardware
- A more flexible and scalable future
To read the complete review, visit IT Central Station.
Want to check out more feedback from FlexPod customers? Head over to the blog.
Natalia Eichinger
Natalia Eichinger is a senior product marketing manager for the NetApp StorageGRID object storage solution. Before joining NetApp in 2018, Natalia worked at Microsoft, performing various roles in marketing, working with technical audiences, and looking after the Enterprise Mobility and Security product portfolio.
