FlexPod XCS Reviews

We have sold to more than 500 clients on FlexPod. It becomes an architecture, so in some cases, they understand the architecture. Then, they say, "Okay, I have another data center, and they can go and recreate it." We have had clients who have bought dozens. Others, we give them the assurance that the application is going to run. Therefore, there are a tremendous amount of attributes to it.

FlexPod is an architecture that a lot of our major customers are running with their most mission critical stuff. The big value proposition is it has been well thought out and well put together. So, it is getting them to get their applications to market more quickly, and it has taken the risk out of their business, because there is less for them to try to figure out.

It is always improving. We went from the first FlexPods, then to All Flash. We are actually sitting here with Cisco at Cisco Live talking about some of the new features in UCS that are coming out and be integrated. So, there is exciting stuff that we probably can't even talk about. Better ways to make it simpler to operate. If it is easy for you to set up, it doesn't matter if the customer doesn't have to do it, and they are enabling us to provide those seamless services, cloud-like services and cloud-like experiences. A lot of stuff is still happening, even though it is an eight year-old product.

It has been in the market for probably eight years now. This might seem old for technology, but it is continually improving in simplicity, performance, and reliability. It is absolutely stable. It is very well tested. There are probably 100 CVDs, so this shows you how much testing they do. We do additional testing, management, and monitoring. Because it is an integrated system, it is a lot easier to monitor, manage, and operate.

FlexPod is primarily built to scale up with your most important applications, but you can scale it out to some degree. There are a lot of different architectures: cloud, hyperconverged, etc., which have different attributes to them. However, when you have your most mission critical stuff and you need it to scale up providing consistent performance, that is really what it was built for.

We put a layer over support. We support the entire FlexPod environment plus applications,  cloud, etc., which is something that you will see with us in delivery. 

NetApp and Cisco have been working together very closely. If we run into a problem where we need support from NetApp or Cisco to support our client, it goes very quickly because they are working together in labs: designing, managing, and supporting these environments.

The FlexPod initial setup is straightforward if you know what you are doing in the data centers. There are simpler things. For FlexPod, you still need IT staff to set it up (that is what we do). We help build it out for the client. It is not a one button thing, and there are some things like that. It is more of an enterprise architecture. It is absolutely straightforward for us to set it up, certify it, and validate it, but there is a lot more to getting applications on it and tying them into the operations.

There are a lot of different ways to measure it, but the ROI is compared to the old way. The old way was quite frankly trying to figure out plumbing:

• What do I do with networking?
• What do I do with storage?
• What do I do with compute?
• How do I make it work together?
• How do I test it?

There are a lot of papers on ROI (8:1, 10:1, and so on). It is pretty easy to understand that I am not doing all this busy work, plumbing, etc. It is coming to me pretty much as an integrated system, and I am delivering an application. There are a lot of different ways to measure it, from business outcomes to what it costs me to do it.

It is a 10 out of 10 for us. We will go in and talk to a client about all things that they are trying to do, from cloud on. A significant percentage come to the conclusion that they want to run their most important stuff on FlexPod architecture.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: At first, businesses did not select a vendor. They thought, "Why wouldn't I just buy all this stuff myself and figure it out." 

Initially, five to six years ago, a lot of companies were organized differently. They had a networking team, a server team, and a storage team, which didn't even agree. We had to help them understand the value of coming together. As people start going in and start thinking, "Okay, I need service-like delivery. I need to compete with cloud, if I'm going to deliver an application in my company. How are other people are doing it?"

So, they had to start figuring out how to consolidate. FlexPod is a converged infrastructure, and they had to use it. There are a few companies that are still a little disorganized, but most of them, even large companies, have come back and said, "I get it, this is why I need to do this."

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.

Prior to FlexPod, we only had a physical environment. At that time we decided that we had to go to a 100 percent virtualized environment. From a physical environment, we were able to work into the FlexPod where we leverage all the virtualizations.

It provides us with a lot of agility, on-demand or through orchestrations. We deliver hundreds of servers. It has created a lot of agility in this environment.

First of all, it's a converter. It's not dependent on, it's not coming with specific storage. I can leverage its multiple storage abilities. We have various kinds of storage in our environment, like IBM or NetApp. We can mix those types of storage with the FlexPod environment.

The biggest problem we have seen is, we were using the vStorage which comes with the NetApp environment, a kind of fiber connect. We were missing fibre channel connectivity and we got lots of I/O errors. This is the one big problem we have faced with FlexPod.

I would like to see more orchestration tools in FlexPod because we virtually end up with integrating the v-orchestration tool within FlexPod. I would like to see something like that included within FlexPod.

We don't see the much DR capability within the FlexPod so for that, we have to maintain our own DR capability with DSRM.

FlexPod is pretty stable. It has worked in this environment for more than five, six years and still, for the next four to five years, there will be some piece of the FlexPod here. It's pretty stable.

There is a scalability issue with the FlexPod in terms of scale out. We always have to go and procure this piece in the data center. We always have to order a new piece of equipment for the FlexPod. That increases the cost.

We have professional support. They are pretty responsive and they support us.

We switched because of the virtualization. We were a completely physical environment and we wanted to go to a virtual environment. That is the reason we went with FlexPod.

Regarding our most important criteria when selecting a vendor, this is a very big organization and there are multiple vendors. So it's all about the partnership. In this organization, we choose the vendor at the very beginning for three years or five years and go with the long term.

Although I was not involved in the initial setup, I saw when we were moving from physical to virtual that it was pretty smooth. The initial challenge was the configuration within the data center. But I don't think it was a technical challenge.

Right now the Cisco is there. This is a Cisco shop and an IBM shop too.

I would rate FlexPod as a seven out of 10 because it has gone through a long journey in our organization and we have had pretty good support. The FlexPod environment still exists and, according to the roadmap, it will go to 2020.

In terms of advice, this is all about converged and hyper-converged. If you are looking to convert your environment, then I would definitely suggest going with the FlexPod.

Flexibility and performance are the most valuable features. We are a financial company. Performance is very important for us, when it comes to processing data on SQL databases. Scalability is another example of us installing a new 8080 and migrating data from 8040 to All Flash on the 8080.

It's flexible; it's adaptable; it's pretty fast; and it's non-disruptive. That's a huge part of what gives it an edge over other technologies these days – the disruption to the business – because our kind of business is an online business. It has to be 24/7 and zero disruption for the users. It is just great for business.

There is room for improvement in the GUI for the NetApp side. There's a lot that they could do on the CLI side. However, for a lot of novice admin users for NetApp, where you want to delegate certain work to the rest of your team, if you have a new person who joins the team or doesn't have enough experience with the CLI part, the GUI is an easier way for a novice user to use the appliance.

It exists today, but not enough. I've seen some improvements in ONTAP 9 from 8. Some features were added that were not available before, like zeroing spare disks; other features that are there as well. The world is moving more towards GUI rather than CLI. That's because it's less time-consuming. The graphical interface is better. Also, IT administrators are becoming lazier to learn the commands and memorize all the commands that have to do with simple operations; move a volume, create a LUN or something like that. Moving towards GUI would help a lot in administering the appliance, for sure.

I’ve never had any stability issues. What's nice about it is, if we approach NetApp for support, they support us on all the stack. If we approach Cisco for support, they support us throughout the stack. It's a pretty integrated solution. Also, nobody points fingers at anybody else. From the experience I've had with them, if we call Cisco, they support us on everything that has to do with the FlexPod. If we call NetApp, they support us on all FlexPod components.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. It's just great. We increased our space. We moved to flash disks from SATA and SAS. Again, no disruption; better performance; and it's all transparent to the business.

IT has a major problem when it comes to explaining where we stand to the business. All the business understands is, “I want to be always online. I want to have better performance” – whatever that means to them – “and I want it to cost me less.” It's an expensive solution, but when you compare that to what FlexPod actually does, and the performance it provides, it's pretty good.

Technical support is excellent and they support you on the Cisco equipment, too; on the Nexus. We have a Nexus 5K and a Nexus 7K. They've got pointers: where to go, what to do, what you have to look at. It removes the headache from our side, going back and forth between two different companies; one is the storage; the other is the network; and everyone is pointing performance issues on the other. But this solution tells me, “You know what, we work together. It’s our product and we'll help support you on any component,” which is a great thing.

I think the team that I joined had a different vendor. They migrated from that vendor to FlexPod because we're scaling out our business. The business is doing well, so we have a plan to scale out 10 times the business size over the next three years. That's why we addressed all other different solutions and we found the FlexPod would help us out when it comes to scalability.

If we buy the appliance right now, we don't have to buy the full size, but if we want to scale out, it gives us that option to scale out as big as we want it. Our business tripled over the last two years and we're starting to create performance labs to see how much it's going to handle when we go 10 times our size. FlexPod is helping us out with that a lot.

In general, for the backend IT people and the infrastructure team, support is one of the most important criteria when choosing a vendor. When you call, I don't want to be waiting on the line. This is the smallest example I can give: waiting on the line for a callback and support that just keeps pointing fingers at other appliances. We look for the quality of support; getting to solve and follow-up on our issues; RMAing items, if need be; and proactivity.

With NetApp, we have the online support where, if one of the disks goes down, NetApp automatically knows about it and they approach us saying, “Hey, you've got a disk that's going down. If your alerting is not working, our alerting is working. We need to send you an RMA for this disk.” Those things make an IT department feel more secure because it is not only us having to watch our back to show that we're doing a good job for our business; we've got somebody else on our side doing that for us, as well. That's another good thing.

Because it's a scalable appliance, most IT people tend to aim to get the biggest thing because you might as well. You want to cover your back as well, and all of that. But scalability; you've got to have in mind scalability. When looking at FlexPod, buying the basic thing could cost you a little bit, but you have that flexibility of adding and scaling up in FlexPod. You don't have to go all-in like we used to with a lot of different appliances.

It's non-disruptive. That's a huge thing. You want to build something that you can say, “OK, the business is going to grow. We are anticipating the business is going to grow three times the size.” You don't want to buy an appliance now and then, when you want to add an extension to it, you have to take the business down. That doesn't look good for you as an IT department. It also doesn't look good for your appliance, saying, "Why do we have to go down for eight hours or 12 hours? We've already invested so much money and now you're saying we're going to be disrupted for 12 hours." So, FlexPod eliminates that for you.

Start small, have in mind that you can scale out, and scale up, too.

A few of the reasons why I gave it a perfect rating are support; scalability, of course, for the appliance; and scalability for the company itself. NetApp is growing; now they're adding SolidFire to their portfolio. I've taken a brief look at SolidFire. I've noticed that they're dealing with it as a separate entity – not separate technology, but definitely a separate entity – that you can add to a portfolio of NetApp, whether it is EF or FAS; now, they've also got SolidFire.

I'm hoping to see NetApp integrate SolidFire into the OnCommand GUI itself. That way, we wouldn’t have to deal with two separate appliances in the back. That would add more headache to the administrator – having to know two different appliances, adding command capacity and administering two different technologies – rather than integrating them into one and having one admin side. It is new technology so I would give them an almost-perfect rating, but SolidFire is a great technology to add to your portfolio.

I'm a pro-FlexPod guy, which is where this comes from. We haven't faced any usability issues with it before. We've faced a couple of performance issues that turned out to be outside the FlexPod, not within the FlexPod. It turned to be a Microsoft database issue that some on the DB team were able to resolve. Performance-wise, the performance tools give you a great insight on what's going on in your appliance or in your FlexPod; knowing where you could do some enhancements, or where you can help troubleshoot some problems for developers or for the database teams; saying, “This is where we need to enhance or this is how our appliance is performing.” It's pretty cool.

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.

The improvement of our company is in terms of viability. The solution helped us implement capabilities we did not have previously. We do not have any issues right now. However, we are starting to outgrow the current setup. It is not as robust as we might need in the near future. We are coming up to a time where we can renew the solution and have more nodes for storage and we are considering expanding our use of the product.

Availability is the most valuable part of this solution. It is not the only solution out there that we could use, but it is a very good solution. We have not had any trouble since we installed it.

In the next releases of FlexPod, I would like it more integrated with some other HCI solutions. We are currently struggling with what to do for a solution moving forward. We can either continue with FlexPod or go directly to a different HCI solution. We have attended this conference to ask questions and to understand the differences between available products. We have found that FlexPod is already planning to move closer to having more features like NetApp HCI features than we thought, and that would be awesome.

We do not have any trouble with the product since we installed it. It is always available and it is always stable.

The scalability of FlexPod is very good. We are now on a mission to get this product renewed. Also, we are exploring how to use it with other HCI. In terms of scalability, over the last three or four years, we have scaled up and added storage and scaled hardware. So it has improved and it works very well.

When we were deciding whether to bring on FlexPod as our solution, we did look into other vendors and other solutions. FlexPod was far more advanced than other solutions that we were introduced to at the time.

The primary reason we selected FlexPod is that we understood that the solution was secure and could upgrade and manage day-to-day work. This is why we decided to go with them. 

The initial setup was very straightforward.

During the initial deployment, the head of the department worked with a partner and the support of the reseller that provides us with the solution. They are very good. The partner's name was SouthGate.

Over time, FlexPod saved our company money because the old storage and network solutions were more expensive to maintain, so we save on that front. I don't have exact numbers, but I am sure of the savings.

We are a team of five members and we also work on our storage solutions. We are all here to learn about and understand new products and see what we can do to progress either with the same product or with different solutions. We are evaluating everything as long as it is appropriate.

The validated designs for major enterprise apps in our company are very important. It helps us in using a lot of Microsoft applications.

FlexPod simplifies infrastructure from edge to core to cloud, and that is one of the main reasons we chose FlexPod. We want our environment to provide for users, power users, and service providers in several ways. That is why we developed this FlexPod solution.

The solutions unified support for the entire stack is also very important. We analyze the way the support for our products is utilized. So we need to be with a solution that integrates with support for software along with the storage.

Our team is more efficient since we started using the product as it has enabling them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward. We don't have to spend time matching each resource to its use.

The advice I would give to someone at another company who is researching FlexPod is that I would recommend that they go straight with FlexPod and not worry about it.

On a scale from one to ten where ten is the best, I would rate FlexPod as a nine-out-of-ten.

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. 

FlexPod simplifies infrastructure from edge to core to cloud. Everything becomes easier. Everything is more collapsed. Everything is easier to manage and migration into the cloud becomes seamless.

With respect to FlexPod's unified support for the entire stack, it's always good to have a single pane of glass to work from. 

It has improved application performance. Anything that runs on instance nowadays is good. I suppose if you're going from spinning media to SSD you're guaranteed to see an improvement.

FlexPod has enabled our staff to be more efficient. Once it's working, it's working. There's not a lot of break-fix. It gives you time to be proactive and not necessarily reactive. I haven't come across a time when it's not working. We have the normal disk failures and hardware issues but everything is so redundant that it doesn't affect it. 

I see the most value in the UCS portion. I love Cisco UCS.

Its ability to scale seamlessly makes adding anything so much easier than having to run by separate new hardware from the get-go.

The validated design in the architecture is an ongoing debate. You don't need to buy FlexPod itself. You can borrow FlexPod based on the reference architecture. I wouldn't say that the validated design plays such a big role because you can just reference the architecture and technically have FlexPod as well.

At the moment, our customers don't use storage tiering to public cloud but there are plans for future use. 

Possibly the UCS could get a bit better. Other than that, overall I don't necessarily have any sorts of constraints or issues with it. It's done the job that it's been bought to do.

It's never given me an issue. Stability is perfect. 

I haven't yet used their technical support. 

The initial setup was quite straightforward. As with anything nowadays, the workflows are just so good that it's easy to configure one thing and just move on to the other.

Initially, it might cost an arm and a leg but the return on investment is going to be worth it. It's going to be worth in the long run. So taking money upfront now to make make money over the long run just seems to make sense.

It has reduced our data center costs. Having everything in a single cabinet versus multiple cabinets can reduce your cost.

Our customers also evaluated Dell ECM VxBlock. They chose NetApp because it's cheaper and during a POC it always performs and gives them what they want.

I have experience with Dell EMC, HP, and NetApp. NetApp is a bit more complicated to set up than everything else. Once it gets going, it's so much easier to manage than all the others. The others on the flip side are very easy to set up but then troubleshooting can be a bit tedious and complex at times.

The advice that I would give to anybody considering FlexPod would be to just do it. It depends whether you know NetApp or not. If you don't know NetApp, when you get into NetApp it's a bit confusing based on storage, virtual machines and stuff that other storage vendors don't necessarily use. Do a lot of reading and researching.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. Not a ten because it's not like it hasn't broken. There have been issues, but it's not major issues. 

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.

This solution makes it easier for us, as engineers, to do a lot of design and a lot of the pre-work that goes into things. It is good in that respect.

This solution's history of innovations affected our operations because by using all-flash, we've sped up applications that couldn't do what they do because they were inefficient. These inefficiently-built applications needed more resources, so we used all-flash to compensate.

Generally speaking, application performance has been improved through the use of all-flash storage.

Using this solution has made our staff more efficient because they are spending less time fiddling with the backend stuff. It is more intuitive.

This solution has not had much effect on our unplanned downtime, but we did not have much before.

The most valuable features are the integration and ease of use. The integration is intuitive.

This solution is easy to learn. There is nothing hidden, and it's all available for you.

This is an expensive solution.

We have run into any issues yet, so as far as I can see, stability is good.

This solution is easily scalable, and we have scaled quite a bit.

We haven't had many cases where we have needed NetApp technical support. When we have, it has been quick and efficient.

I was not involved with the initial setup, but I can say that the work we have done with revamping the solution has been straightforward and simple.

We used a reseller to assist us with our original implementation.

Since that time, we have done half of the work ourselves.

FlexPod is expensive but from my perspective, it is worth the cost. I say this because of the ease of use and performance benefits.

The fact that FlexPod integrates with all major public clouds did not specifically influence our decision to go with it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.

We were a small company when we started, like a startup. We have been using this FlexPod since then, and now, we have grown to about mid-scale. However, FlexPod is still able to scale out the way we want, and we are happy with it.

It comes as a package. Since we are dependent on our virtualized environment, and FlexPod provides a small to mid-class environment, FlexPod is the better solution than going with a different product for each individual infrastructure stack.

The solution is innovative when it comes to compute storage and networking. Each environment has knowledge of another in a FlexPod environment. This would be difficult to operate separately. 

We are at the level where we want it to be on serving our applications, our storage, and whatever traffic we want.

The validate designs and overall versatility can be very complex. Because when you try to do automation, there are many bits and pieces tied together. Sometimes, automation gets a little tricky for provisioning. We would like simplicity in the automation.

We would also like better management of cases. For example, if you open a FlexPod case, it's not always straightforward. It would be nice to have centralized resource to open FlexPod cases and ease up management of our cases.

I would like more support on the next level transition to hybrid cloud.

The stability has been strong.

We have had some occasions where we had issues with the performance. We sometimes have had issues with the coordination between vendors, whether its Cisco and NetApp, and bringing them all together. Opening a FlexPod case is not straightforward. Other than that, the stability is good.

It is scaling to our needs. We don't have any issues.

Even though the automation is complex and it is stubborn, it scales to whatever the level that we want to performance-wise and availability-wise. 

We did not use a previous solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. We got all the requirements, then gave them to the consultants who came back telling us what is a requirement and what is a design. We discussed it, and this made the rollout pretty simple. Other than finding out what bits and pieces we needed, the instillation and execution administration was pretty straightforward.

We used a consultant who was good. They helped us initially with all the FlexPod deployments.

As a startup, for the amount of budget we have and the amount we spend, we are getting what we expected.

FlexPod was the only vendor on our shortlist. We went with FlexPod based on our requirements. Also, we have a file-based, virtualized environment, so we thought NetApp would be the right choice for our file-based environment.

I would say, "Definitely consult FlexPod."

I am saving time in my work and so are my colleagues.

I would like to go with the hybrid environment. My tech is built to accommodate any application, independent of the stack where you are, whether it is on on-premise, AWS, Google, or Azure. This way you have ease of moving the application in and back, providing flexibility. However, I would stick with the hybrid as the best way to start with public clouds because of security.

It is the overall collaboration between NetApp and Cisco to come up with a product that is best in class and best in breed. You are bringing together the best things about UCS and NetApp, as well as you are tying it together with the Nexus fabric. It makes a complete, holistic solution which is easily scalable. It can scale up to the largest size that you could possibly need, as well as scale down to smaller sizes for small business customers.

The evolution and the simplicity of IT seem to be this culture shift that we have had in IT over the last few years: the simplification. Many people are out there carrying multiple things on their shoulders. They are basically an engineer wearing a bunch of hats. The continued simplification will be a continued battle and evolution for both Cisco and NetApp, especially on the FlexPod product.

I worked for many years on the customer side. We ran NetApp for as long as I can remember. 

NetApp is incredibly highly available, very redundant, and very resilient. If I am going to put any workload on any storage platform out there, I am putting it on NetApp. Then, with the bandwidth and throughput that you get with Cisco UCS and the Nexus switching platform, it is really unparalleled and cannot be matched.

It scales out and up, so you can go both directions depending on what the needs are on the NetApp side. On the UCS side, it scales out beautifully. Everything ties back to the fabric interconnects, and you can scale up to 20 chassis, so a ridiculous amount of compute power for any sized workload.

The collaborative tech support model that NetApp and Cisco have together is what sets them apart when you look at other solutions out there. There are so many times where customers and partners who are trying to support their customers have to call around, then you are in a back and forth battle between vendors. This does not happen in the FlexPod solution because of the collaborative support model between Cisco and NetApp, as well as VMware and some of the other partners. They can pass information back and forth to ensure the customer is getting the best experience possible, and that is what makes it shine.

From a setup perspective, I come at it from two different angles. 

1. As a customer, I was involved very early on in some of those stages. At that point in time, it looked complex to me, especially earlier on in my career. 
2. Now, I have quite a few years of industry experience under my belt and working with both of these products. I would not say it is overly complex. Both NetApp and Cisco have gone to great lengths to simplify the process and IT, as a whole. There is a continued evolution of it, and you are going to continue to see the product get better.

I would rate it in the upper echelon of an eight or nine. I like the FlexPod product. Primarily going back to the NetApp resiliency, there is no workload that I would not put on the NetApp platform, whether it is the All Flash FAS, the spinning hybrid disk, etc. NetApp is paramount when it comes to high availability and resiliency. Then, on the UCS side, you are taking the leader in networking, bandwidth, and throughput, and basically building that backbone for compute infrastructure. 

The bandwidth and throughout that you get from it and the changes which we saw in my customer days going from the HPC 7000 series chassis, where we were constantly constrained for throughput and bandwidth. We were seeing 60 to 70 megabit throughput on huge ISO files, and you dump it over into UCS (same NetApp storage on the back-end), and you are seeing 200 to 400 megabits of throughput. 

It is just unparalleled. So, it is definitely the leader out there.