FlexPod XCS Reviews

We use it for VMware. Most of what we do runs on it. Our business runs on it. Probably 60 percent of our environment runs on UCS and 100 percent on NetApp storage, with Cisco switching everywhere.

The nice thing about NetApp is the ease of administration. We have a new storage admin who did not do storage at all, and he has fallen right in with it. There are no real issues. 

From a Cisco standpoint, we moved away from HPE Blade hardware into Cisco UCS hardware, and it is awesome. We like it a lot. They work well together. 

Both products are easy to use. Together, they are harmonious.

It is easy to set up and maintain. It has not had any problems. We like support from Cisco and NetApp, though not so much from VMware.

There is support for configurations and ways to do things. We just follow them. Knock on wood, we do not have any issues with it.

They should cram more space in there and find a way to compress things more; dedupe better.

No stability issues.

It should meet our needs. It is easy to add on to the tool. If we need to add a new switch, a new server, or a new chassis for Blades, it is easy. It is not disruptive. You just do it.

When we have to call for support, NetApp's people are great and their support is great - I like them as a company. Cisco support is fantastic. 

Although we have never really called in for a ticket under the FlexPod umbrella, it is nice to know that we have that option. If we have a VMware issue, a Cisco issue, or a NetApp issue, this is just a nice thing to have.

We had issues with our old storage provider: quirky stuff, weird outages, almost-outages, and performance issues. We had some IBM hardware and NetApp. Our good luck with NetApp made the decision for us when it was time for a refresh. We got rid of IBM and went all-in on NetApp.

We did a head swap upgrade about a week ago, which mostly went well for VMware systems. Everything inside the FlexPlod upgraded fine. We had an AIX system with an issue during the upgrade, but that is not my area.

Relax, as it will not be that hard to implement.

No downtime, which is a good thing.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Ease of use.
• Support: Getting support from a gigantic organization that is ancient, like IBM, was a real challenge. We had some weird bugs that cropped up with IBM and their software which is developed for array replication, in conjunction with VMware. We do not have these issues with NetApp. It just works. Support and supportability are very high.

We really like the flexibility. I love that – it doesn't happen a whole lot, but – anytime we have a blade die or even just bad RAM, I grab that service profile, throw it on another blade, and we're up and running without any issues.

We're also a pretty siloed environment. I love that we're not having to add new ports and stuff every time we add a new server; we already have everything connected. Worst case, if we're adding a new VLAN, networking adds that VLAN to the trunks to the fabric interconnects, and we're up and running without a long process. It used to be, we would have new builds run up to weeks, whereas now I roll out a new VM in 15 minutes; if I have to add new network connectivity, it might be an hour or two but that's it.

I like the user interface a whole lot. The new 3.1 release has the HTML5 interface. I finally don't have to mess with Java. I still have jump servers with specific versions of Java for FlexPod we've deployed at different times that are running different codebases. I don't have to mess with that anymore. I'm looking forward to that new equipment.

We actually run one of several private clouds within our company and it is all on FlexPod. We run it as a profit center. We're able to give all our internal clients the fastest response time of any of our server teams and the flexibility to, if you need a VM with one CPU and a couple gigs of RAM, or if you need 20 VMs with eight CPUs and 32 gigs each, it's all the same to us. We have the blades to support it all.

I haven't really come across a whole lot of areas for improvement. There are features I'd like to see in our deployment that are already available; all-flash trays, and items like that. It's there; I need to find a project that justifies getting it rolled out in our data center.

Everything works pretty well. I think they should just continue to add more features and capabilities for hybrid cloud, especially items such as cloud bursting to one of the public clouds. Specifically, they need to make sure that, for our client site, it integrates with the FedRAMP clouds; it's got to be Azure Federal or AWS Federal. It can't just be to the regular public cloud.

I haven’t yet come across any features in other solutions that I’d like to see in FlexPod. Some of the newer storage vendors have slightly easier-to-use GUI interfaces, but I weigh that compared to the control and other features I have, such as SSHing into my NetApps. It'd be nice sometimes for quick stuff, but it's not worth giving up the control I have with the NetApp filers there.

There's always something new down the road, something new that can be done, but I think it's doing as well as possible. It seems like they keep getting new features, new ideas out there. We have flash on all four of the different lines now, continuing to evolve more cloud control with the UCS Director; it keeps growing. I love it.

We've been running it six years now.

We've been running it six years now and I just ordered my gen-4 gear; it should be here at the end of the month. I've had no issues.

I do some consulting, too, and have deployed it for a bunch of clients at smaller scales. I've not had a complaint yet.

I’ve occasionally needed to use technical support; generally, just with drives. Half the time, our rep will contact us to schedule the drive shipment before we even notice the email from the alerting. We love it.

We’re absolutely happy with the technical support. NetApp has the best tech support, which I've heard is part of the interview process to get the job there. I've heard rumors that it takes multiple days and is brutal, but they're the best guys we've got. We deal with lots of large vendors, and NetApp definitely has the best support teams.

With our particular case, our previous company had spun us off without any IT staff, so we were using third-party IT and we were trying to bring IT in house. Because we were having to build our IT staff from the ground up, the flexibility and all of the things that FlexPod made easier means it is a whole lot easier to bring IT in-house. We didn't need multiple storage people, server people. We had it more integrated, and had the single company to call for any issues we had bringing that all up.

I was not involved in the initial setup. Another couple of guys on the team did it. We did the initial setup with Firefly, who was our vendor, and provided week-long training. We each got to set up several of the blades, but Firefly did the initial UCS setup. I've done other UCS implementations since then from scratch, though.

I love the setup. I think it's very simple. I'm biased; I'm a CCIE Data Center. I like it enough that I have put a lot of time into it. I took a client from all physical to all virtual in a four-day weekend, with all-new switches, new SAN, new UCS, and in four days I already had, I think, their first 10 or 15 servers moved from physical to virtual on UCS setups.

We ran through all the primary vendors, but it was all one-off; there weren’t any converged solutions at the time, six years ago, when FlexPod first came out. It was either work with HP, Dell, Hitachi, EMC, etc., or have only one place; it’s better to have everything in one place.

Definitely take advantage of all the training you can, particularly the UCS portion of the setup. It's very much a one time setup if you do it right the first time. I use the reference install guide for the VMware on FlexPod, even for installs that aren't using NetApp storage because it's so well-written. It's 175 pages but it gives you not only what to do, but why to do it and even full configurations you can copy-and-paste in to make sure that everything really is "set it and forget it". You can just continue to operate your business, serve your clients as well as possible, and not have to go back and try and fix things.

We’ve never had an incident where we set it up and it hasn't worked; there have just been little things, such as when I didn't think and was setting up the first of the two fabric interconnects and put dash-A at the end of the name. I forgot that it adds A and B anyway, so that client is UCS-CompanyName-A-A or -A-B. As long as I followed the guides, I've never had an issue.

I really like good support when I’m looking at a vendor; that’s one of the most important criteria for me. I'm big on vendors that have good training. I want a vendor that wants to support their clients, wants their clients to be better educated. I don't want a vendor that wants you to always call them and maybe bill up a support call. I want the vendor that gives you the training so you can operate the equipment best yourself; still have good support when you do have to call, but give you the information you need so you can do it yourself and operate it as well as possible.

We have a bank customer in Brazil who sells a lot of credit cards.

The solution simplifies infrastructure from edge to core to cloud.

The solution has made our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks that drives our business forward.

The most valuable feature is the one support. Anytime that a customer buys a solution for a server, storage, or network, once they have trouble in their environment, everyone wants to find out who was wrong. With FlexPod, everyone is wrong and there is unified support. The best way to solve the problem is have it be everyone's problem, not just one person's problem. For FlexPod, you can call NetApp or Cisco, and I think it's the best way to solve the problem that the customer has.

The best improvement is the validated designs. Everything has compliance. Sometimes when you have a trouble with a machine, or in your switch or storage, you can just call one place to solve the problem. 

The all-flash with the fabric interconnect, along with the connections between the solution, that is the most important aspect.

It is not easy to implement. 

The networking configurations with UCS need improvement.

The application performance has improved in our organization. The configurations of the networks are very substantive. If the customer has trouble, we just have to make the configuration one time, then everything is okay.

The scalability is good because if you want to grow your environment, then you can do it. It has compliance, stacks, and nodes.

I would rate the technical support as a 10 out of 10.

The solution has decreased the unplanned downtime incidents in our organization because of the high availability of the solution. Sometimes, customers have talked about how good the support is. When they call to open a case, we can solve it in two days. To solve a problem, it use to longer: two weeks. Now, it can be solved in two to three days.

The initial setup is a little complex.

We are the integrator. We have five or six people to implement it. In our company, we are segmented, like networking, server, storage, etc.

Before this solution, the customer had around 15 people managing the environment. After purchasing the solution, they had just one. Their OPEX was better after this solution, and the ROI was very fast. ROI happens in about two years.

I think it has reduced data center cost but we don't have this feedback from the customer.

We would like everything in one piece of hardware. This way we can just sell the product like a silo by putting everything in a stack together.

I would rate it a nine (out of 10). It is the better way for the customer to has less troubles and problems.

You have one configuration and one compliance with two companies, Cisco and NetApp. I think this is the best way to make solutions.

Our primary use case for FlexPod is Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). We sell multi-tenancy services to our customers.

We appreciate having the validated designs because it takes the guesswork out of piecing it together. The solution can be innovative when it comes to cloud computing storage and networking.

The most valuable features of the solution are reliability, scalability, and support. 

Having the validated designs helps because it takes the guesswork out of piecing it together.

It works well in private and hybrid environments. Multi-cloud, I have yet to see.

The solution saves us engineering time, which translates to savings in money and it streamlines our IT admin.

The FlexPod service and support could be improved. The integration of the different storage equipment could be improved because NetApp is the biggest piece and it seems to be well covered, but not so much on the Cisco side.

FlexPod has been very stable for us. It is resilient. 

The scalability is one of the key features in this solution.

Technical support is reasonably good. It simplifies our support experience.

I don't have as much insight into the NetApp side of it, as compared to the Cisco side.

We were looking to build a fully-certified data center to provide our IaaS solution to customers.

I wasn't part of the initial setup. However, I have been part of the expansion and it's very simple.

The deployment time has been reduced, although I cannot say by how much.

We are a system integrator, so we use our in-house team.

At the time we deployed FlexPod, there wasn't a whole lot else available other than Vblock.

It just came down to a strong relationship with the key vendors that make up the product, NetApp and Cisco.

The biggest lesson that I have learned, working with this solution, is that it's better to go with something that has been vetted, tested, and designed by people with knowledge, as opposed to trying to go on your own. This is why we chose a certified, validated design.

This product has all of the big players behind it. Overall it works, and the reliability is top-shelf. I don't know what's better.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use it to implement our core data center and server environment.

Due to the way the equipment is all together, with its resiliency, typically we have zero downtime. We run simulations for the military, and the lack of downtime is highly important, given the amount of money we run into it. We don't have to worry about downtime.

Having the capability to seamlessly move from different equipment, that's the way to go.

We have found FlexPod to be innovative, when it comes to compute, storage and networking because of the fact that NetApp and Cisco work so closely in streamlining, specifically with Validated Designs. The networking is there. I don't have a problem with transferring from physical to the virtual environment. It allows us to have that seamless storage. We lose hard drives and we don't even know about it because it's so good. The tools provided with the FlexPod allow us to be more efficient with the smaller team that we run.

The most valuable feature of FlexPod is all the vendors' synyergy together. I just have to log in and start working with it. Everything is there, and with the failover I don't even have to worry about the systems too much.

In addition, I live by the Validated Designs. I do exactly what those designs say and I haven't had a problem as a result. For example, they used to do the FCoE. They figured out there was a problem and they went over to the NFS. I moved over and I agreed with them. It worked better.

I would like them to integrate the NVIDIA GRID into the system, so we could easily deploy certain solutions with the FlexPod.

The solution is very resilient, to the point that sometimes we didn't even know it went down, because we don't actually look at our log at times. We find components that were down but it just moves and takes care of itself.

The solution is very stable. Typically, if something goes down, it's a fan or a hard drive. We haven't had any major issues and we've been running FlexPods now for about four years.

The only thing we have scaled are the blades within the UCS. The fact that they allow us to use the same chassis and just swap out the blades, that part was interesting for us. Same idea with the NetApp equipment in the FlexPod. We don't have to worry about the shelves. We can replace just the drives and go higher up on that side. It allows us to scale without doing a full-bore rack replacement.

Because of my environment, we have dedicated teams. We get instantaneous support. So it's not fair for me to answer this question.

We had a mixture of workstations, some rack servers, some floor servers. We knew that wasn't working. We were being pushed to try to virtualize what we could. That's what drove us to it. The fact that we were able to clean up all that, got rid of racks of equipment, it was just the way to go.

The initial setup was straightforward. We sat down with Cisco and NetApp, as well as World Wide, and said, "This is what we want to see." And they built the FlexPod based upon our requirements. After that initial work, everything came in quite easily.

We used a reseller, World Wide Technology. I love them.

I haven't had to put in a request for new rack space. Our footprint is down to two racks that run our entire core. We run multimillion-dollar exercises through it. But it's hard to quantify ROI because we had nothing previously. We weren't keeping track. And then we went to this system. I just know that in the last four years, other than buying some minor upgrades, we haven't spent any money.

There were no other options. I've been with Cisco since 1995.

Go with the FlexPod. It's a very easy solution. There are dedicated minds behind it. You will notice an improvement.

We save time and money with the solution but I don't know how to quantify them because we only have a few physical servers. Everything has been built into it so we haven't had to buy things. So we're not aware of what it would have cost us, by not going with it, because we went all-in on the FlexPod design. Similarly, regarding application performance improvements, I can't say because we went straight into the system.

Regarding thoughts on the solution vis-a-vis private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, unfortunately, we can't move into a cloud other than private. We're starting to investigate how to do it. I don't know how much of a player it's going to be for us, due to our environment. If we deploy it out, it will be used for private cloud, but we don't do so currently.

Realistically, I would rate it a nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement. 

Flexibility and speed.

I like that we can do anything we want to with the networking part of it, without having to add cables and cards, and we can add extra networks, extra VLANs, and extend the environment without having to buy new stuff.

We oftentimes will get a new product, a new server solution that requires a separate network, or even a proof of concept, sometimes development servers that need separated networks. We can spin those up without having to do new cables, new network ports. Any cost or any change requests, we can just do them on the fly.

We like it because everything is 10 Gig all the way through, from the storage to the switches to everything else, which is more than we need, and that's great.

It seems very cost effective once it's in place, and it's easy to expand and easy to add capacity without a lot of extra money.

It honestly does everything I need it to do at this point. So for me, for my organization, what we do, I don't need anything else other than for them to keep making it so I can keep buying the newer blades and the newer parts as they come out.

The management interface of the UCS part of it is a little bit clunky. It uses Java, so when we're managing it, if I have a computer that doesn't have Java on it or has the wrong version of Java on it, there's some iterations that have to happen to get into the manager of it.

That is annoying, albeit really not impactful to the service, it's just my annoyance getting into managing it. But once I'm there it's OK. So if anything, maybe the management is a little bit clunky.

Five and a half years.

It's good. We've had it for about five or six years now and we've had no outages. It's been great, it's easy to work on, it's easy to upgrade.

No crashes. The only time we've had to turn it off is when we had a building power outage, we had to shut everything in the building off.

Very good so far. We haven't taken it to any extreme level, but anything we've needed to do, we've been able to scale out easily, and we've been able to extend it out to our disaster recovery sites and include that in the same architectures. We have a little mini FlexPod down there too.

When we first had it installed, we did have a Cisco partner and a NetApp partner come out and help us deploy it, initially. Going forward, we haven't really had to rely on any support outside of our organization, which is good.

We brought it in as a proof of concept. We were trying to bring virtual desktops to our organization and it was pitched as an all-in-one package deal we could deploy easily.

I thought it was very straightforward, we accomplished it in about a day and a half. We were up and running and everything was on it.

Our field is federal government. I don't think this product is uniquely valuable for our industry, but I think it's a very good value to the government. We pushed it a lot, but there are lots of ways to accomplish this. We, in our part of the government, think it's the best way to do it, but I don't know that it's uniquely suited to government.

I'm a happy customer of FlexPod.

In our case, we were building out a brand new data center. They were rolling out Epic, which is a big healthcare application. So, we bought 200 UCS servers. This was five years ago when we first implemented this, and the FAS 8060 has been serving this customer very well. It has allowed them to start with what was 26 hospitals and grow up to 45 hospitals, all with the same set of infrastructure over the last five years. 

With FlexPod, it is about the synergy of the server, the storage, and the whole management layer. Together, it is really about minimizing staff. You don't have to hire more people. You can work with the minimum level of resources and the availability is really good. We have had very little downtime.

1. Scalability. We knew that we needed to grow, but we allowed them to start with a footprint. Then, we were able to add shells and drives. With the way that ONTAP works, it was seamless migrations throughout. 
2. Ease of use. They were familiar with NetApp and some standalone environments, which made it a lot easier for them.
3. It is cost-effective.

There is always room for improvement. I believe we can do hot swaps on the fly. On the release upgrades, if there was a way to do a release on the fly, that would really be cool because it does take some downtime. It takes restarting. It is more of a software thing. Customers hate doing releases. 

An area for improvement would be on Level 2 and 3 support when there is a release issue.

On the whole, this Flexspot environment is very stable. We have had hiccups. Over a five to six year period, one could look at any environment, and say, "There have there been hiccups." However, for the approximately 90 percent availability that we are looking for. we are very happy with the results.

The technical support is very good. There are times when we get stellar support, then there are times when you get an individual who may not have had the right sense of urgency when we had a sense of urgency. But when we escalate, the response is very good. So, we are happy, and that is why we continue to invest in NetApp.

We have a different storage platform running cache database, which is its main application or database for their healthcare environment. Due to a number of future proofing. scalability options, and simplicity, the customer chose to go to with NetApp from a competitive platform. So, we have just finished the migration off the competitive platform that went very smoothly. They are in GenIO testing right now. Within a few weeks, we were able to migrate them off, and it's going well.

The way that we do the initial setup, there are a lot of volumes. There are multiple copies of the same database. 

Let me speak specifically about our recent migration, where the customer actually has four copies of their production workload. In this specific environment, it is complex. Could my customer do it by themselves? No. We helped with that implementation. Their scripts are written in just to help automate the process. This enabled the migration to go very smoothly.

We were able to optimize utilization. We had NetApp over two data centers and in the secondary data center we noticed that the utilization of storage was not optimal. So, we broke up the clusters, which was really easy to do. We were able to repurpose a lot of the drive sets that were in the secondary data center and move them to the production data center. That was a huge cost avoidance at the two and a half year mark which saved the company money and still met the production requirements without having to buy anyone else's storage.

The NetApp portion was a $5 million investment five years ago. That has served the customer well over five and a half years. They are having to do another upgrade. But, if one could forecast as well as we did five years ago, that is pretty good.

I came from IBM and my customer had IBM in place before. So, we can't do FlexPod with an IBM. We can't do FlexPod with a Pure. Dell EMC is a probably the closest one that can do the whole converged environment. But, in this case, my customer would not choose to do this with Dell EMC. 

The synergy that Cisco and NetApp put together initially for FlexPod worked very well together from an availability standpoint, minimizing staff to manage the environment, keeping costs down overall, and just enabling the whole environment to work smoothly.

I would give it an eight (out of 10). I always think there is room for improvement, especially with technology changing as much as it is. 

We have been using FlexPod for a virtualized environment, mainly for virtual machines running on VMware or Hyper-V with database solutions, application servers, and web servers. In general, it is for all data center infrastructure. 

It is our integrated system between NetApp and Cisco.

FlexPod gets very strong performance and efficiency from NetApp storage as well as it is very simple to install and implement. We can be up and running in two or three day after we get the rack.

CVDs reduce risks for implementations. We always make sure that all installations are based on best practices.

FlexPod has so many versions and capabilities. So, we can simplify the data flowing between edge, port, and cloud.

FlexPod can improve with a single control management interface to manage all aspects and components of the solution.

FlexPod is very stable. It has redundant components and the uptime is 100 percent.

FlexPod has a long history of innovations in each release. They introduce each new functionality into FlexPod, like cloud integration and All Flash FAS. We are seeing all the time NetApp and ONTAP working together to create new features. 

FlexPod allows you to scale as your business grows because they support a lot of expansions from the network sites.

In Brazil, there is a special chain to support FlexPod technical support issues. It is a special chain that is integrated between NetApp and the software layer.

The unified support is very important because we have a single point of contact. Whether it is Cisco, NetApp, or VMware, they work together in order to solve any problem that the FlexPod has.

The setup is very straightforward since all our installations are based on CVDs. So, it is very easy to install.

FlexPod can decrease data cost costs because it is an integrated solution. 

We fear high availability so we can't buy from different providers.

I would rate FlexPod as a 10 (out of 10).