The customer's primary requirement is a "single point of contact" for support on their entire FlexPod solution. Both NetApp Solution Support for FlexPod and Cisco Solution Support are specifically designed for this purpose. These services provide a centralized support experience where the chosen vendor (either NetApp or Cisco) takes ownership of the entire case, regardless of whether the root cause lies with compute, networking, or storage. The vendor's support team will triage the issue and coordinate with the other partner vendor's engineering teams on the customer's behalf, thus providing the requested single point of contact and accountability.

A. Cisco SmartNet Total Care: This is a standard, component-level support service for Cisco products only. It does not cover the NetApp storage components of the FlexPod solution.

B. NetApp SupportEdge Expert: This is a standard, component-level support service for NetApp products only. It does not cover the Cisco compute or networking components.

1. NetApp Solution Support for FlexPod Datasheet (DS-3820-0218): "With Solution Support for FlexPod, you have a single point of contact for any issue. NetApp takes the lead to manage your case from start to finish, even if the issue is with a non-NetApp component. We act as a central resource for your multivendor data center technologies, collaborating with our partners to resolve your issue." This document directly supports option C as a single-point-of-contact solution.

2. Cisco Solution Support At-a-Glance (C45-735336-05): "Cisco Solution Support provides centralized support for your multivendor solution... Our team is your primary point of contact and will own your case from first call to resolution, with no handoffs." This document confirms that Cisco Solution Support (option D) provides the single point of contact required for a multi-vendor solution like FlexPod.

3. FlexPod Datacenter with VMware vSphere 7.0 and NetApp ONTAP 9.8 Design Guide (NVA-1149-DESIGN): Section: "Support". This guide states, "For a single point of contact support experience, customers can purchase either Cisco Solution Support for FlexPod or NetApp Solution Support for FlexPod... With component support, the customer is responsible for problem isolation and for opening support cases with the appropriate vendor." This reference explicitly contrasts solution-level support (C and D) with component-level support (A and B) and confirms that only the former provides a single point of contact.