FlexPod XCS Reviews

Our use case is for a life sciences cloud offering.

It makes us more lateral and faster to production.

Quick deployment.

I have not really heard any complaints from our storage engineers.

It is pretty flexible. We are able to deploy faster.

I have not personally used support. 

We were using a different solution between Hitachi and other NetApp solutions. 

We switched to FlexPod for its flexibility and quicker deployment. Also, we use other NetApp products.

I was involved in the networking side of the initial setup. It was pretty straightforward.

We did the installation with a core internal team. We had some NetApp help for the storage guys, but for the network portion, it was more self-explanatory.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: flexibility and licensing costs.

We use FlexPod to simplify support, to accelerate troubleshooting by using the FlexPod in integrating. Whether it's a VMware or a UCS Cisco problem, or a Nexus problem, it makes support a lot simpler.

It keeps us on track. You have to stay FlexPod-certified, you have to really stay on track with your updates, but the troubleshooting and support aspects are really where it's the biggest bang for the buck.

Unified support. Being able to get a vendor from one company or another company on the line without having to go back through the call queue.

It's been very stable. I have no issues with it.

It scales fine, all three components are able to scale. If I need to throw on another chassis, I throw on another chassis. If I need more storage, I expand my NetApp portion of it. It's been easy.

Although it's really hard to automatically get the correct person the first time, what you can do is get someone from one stack, say VMware, and if they say, "Hey, it's not a VMware problem, it's a networking problem," they can loop in the Cisco person, give them all the information, and we can troubleshoot the Cisco or the networking portion of it. They might say, "Hey, you know what, it's storage latency. Let's loop in the NetApp partner." They can all talk in the backend and compare logs, versus me having to open three tickets and wait.

It allows me to loop in support from three different companies and not have to open a ticket with each company, and then have them say, "Send me the logs." Then have them say a couple hours later, "Well, we looked at the logs. It's not us. Go to the next guy." And then you go to the next guy and the next guy says, "Well, send me the logs, describe the problem." He takes a couple of hours, looks at the logs and says, "Hey, it's not us, it's the other guy."

We used physical servers, different storage, older legacy equipment.

The most important criteria when selecting with a vendor are 

• reliability
• technical expertise
• speed in response time.

The setup was pretty straightforward. We obviously engaged a reseller to help us with it. But putting the different components together is pretty straightforward.

We didn't evaluate others. We decided to go with NetApp and that drove the decision every place else. We went with the Cisco UCS chassis because that fit our solution.

Do your research. It's good for our business case but maybe it doesn't fit your particular business needs, or maybe there's a better solution out there. In our circumstance, it fit our needs and has performed as advertised.

We are using it in two cases. 

1. We are using it for a database solution, so we're moving all of our 12G database systems onto Oracle UCS with flash as the hot store. We are still using spinning disk as the cold store. Initial tests are going really well. We're actually moving our first big load on in a couple of weeks. 
2. We are using Oracle VM Citrix-based hypervisor, full solution, with FlexPod as the repo on the back-end. All the guest nodes are running on UCS B200 M4s. We have A700, A300, and A200 on the back-end for various slavers and pulls, and they are all working great.
   

We just put our first full workloads on it about a month ago. Since then, everyone has been saying after booting it, this was their fastest startup ever in that environment. Thus, it is working well so far.

For the management side of our UCS, it is a single pane of glass for multiple people, whether it is data center, sysadmin, or server deployment. 

On the UCS side for server profile, there is a type of layer of abstraction from the actual hardware. It is a lot easier to do hardware replacement, as long as you are Fibre Channel booting, you can just replace hardware which breaks and have things come right back online.

Flash obviously just adds speed and bandwidth to everything.

The most valuable features in a data center, or parts of it, are footprint and power consumption. The flash side is the first time that Moore's Law breaks. It gets smaller, and also takes less power.

We have had a bit of struggle on the support side. 

I am not looking into the next iterations of it yet, because we are still standing up some parts of what we have now. 

I would like to see the partnership with NetApp and Cisco continue. We have been a NetApp shop for a long time. We have seen partner agreements between NetApp and tech companies fall apart over time. They were with Hitachi for a while, then 3Par for a while, and so on. However, we have a lot vested in Cisco and NetApp now. We would like to see the Flexpod service agreement strengthen as we continue to benefit on the customer side.

We like NetApp and Cisco. I do not want to have to figure out how to make either of them work once they have decided to part ways. Therefore, it is important to us that they hold together.

We are pretty new, but so far, we have not had issues on the flash side. We just moved our first production workloads onto it about six to eight weeks ago. We did not find MTBF early.

We purchased what we needed, so there is some room for scalability. We went big with the A700, thus we are using the 15TB SSDs. So far, so good.

From a customer perspective, it has been up to us to make sure that we get both NetApp and Cisco involved when we have had an issue. Unfortunately, we cannot just contact one side and they contact the other vendor to sort of work it out in the background, leaving you in the loop. We are interested in what is going on, but we have felt that we have had to pull the two sides together to make the FlexPod service side of it work to our benefit.

They have worked with us to sort things out. Admittedly, we are running the bleeding edge of things. We are using Oracle UEK, which was not necessarily on either side's support matrix right upfront. Therefore, we have had some issues getting both sides' corporate to play nice. Eventually, it did get sorted out, and we are getting these things resolved.

We previously worked with physical servers. We had a lot of HPE c7000 class. We started with RLX, which was pre-HPE. HPE bought them. 

We have played with the P class and C class, doing a couple different proven concepts along the way. We had Dell and Cisco, and some other people all come in, and they taught their stuff.

This time around, from the managed solution side of it, Cisco is what sold us. Hardware is hardware, but how you put the solution together was the selling point for us. To be able to get something saying, "You build it like this." Not, you have a bunch of parts, what do you want to do with it? This is what a lot of the other vendors are still doing. They are tailoring hardware to your workload after you have bought hardware. 

As opposed to finding the solution you need, helping you build it upfront, presenting the hardware and dock, then showing you how to build it. This is what is nice for us. While a little rough, once you have built it, the support matrix says, "Here is newest version of firmware. Here is newest version of something else." Then, off you go. They do not necessarily take all iterations of change back to the lab to recertify them. 

You work with the vendor partnership to keep you in compliance going forward. This is one of the reasons that I want to see the NetApp and Cisco partnership hold together. Otherwise, we are right back where we were before. NetApp has an update and Cisco has an update, and neither one of them have tested it with each other. 

Setup was pretty easy. This was our first venture into UCS at all. It was a steep learning curve figuring it out. We are using Central to manage six different domains, so getting that hierarchy put together upfront so we could do global templating across all those domains was a little rough, mostly from a conceptual standpoint. It deploys easily now that we have got it out.

We have been a NetApp shop forever, so that part was a piece of cake.

Make sure that you engage as much with whom you are buying from as a partnership, not just as a purchase. 

We did a PoC with four different vendors to test out combinations of a hardware build. Storage was kind of a given as we have been a NetApp shop forever. We have gone through a couple other ones. We really like 3PAR, but that's a different story.

The hardware has been rock solid so far. It has gone up easy. It runs well. We have not had issues with it.

Pay attention to what you need upfront as you are building it. Know the workload that you are trying to solve with it. Make sure you are buying for performance, not just capacity. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It is important that they care about the business that we do after sale. It is one thing to get a quote, obtain the parts, and make sure you have all the right things upfront. Your business is going to change the next day, especially for a business like us. We are in a multi-customer type of environment where somebody will have a new bright idea tomorrow. Therefore, we need to be adaptable. It is important to have a partnership with the people that we purchase from. Thus, ongoing modifications can continue to be part of the conversation, not just, "I sold you something. Let me know when it is time to renew your contract."

We have had two FlexPods for five years now. We're currently purchasing a third one. We have never had any problems with them in that time. We are using it for hosting COREmanager and Unity Connection. So far, so good. Its performance is great.

We purchased them when we changed from physical to virtual. We really didn't have a choice but to go virtual. So, I would not be able to tell you how it improved things because it was a different environment entirely. But it definitely streamlines things.

For me, the most valuable feature is the stability. It's one less worry.

The new one that we are purchasing is going to have solid state drives. So, obviously, more speed is always a good thing.

We have had no stability issues at all. We had a power failure in our data center. They went down. As soon as we restored the power they came up and everything was good.

For us, we were looking strictly at three different data centers. So as far as scalability is concerned, we didn't build one on top of another one. We went for stability more than scalability.

It has never gone down. I think we had one drive go down once, and we opened a tech case. They sent us a new drive.

We were using physical servers, Cisco physical servers. We switched because it was mandatory for updating COREmanager to 8.x, it was mandatory to go VMware.

For us, the most important criteria in a vendor is that they need to pick up when we call.

I coordinated the initial setup, but I wasn't necessarily hands-on. But it was pretty straightforward.

We had other vendors, but we had NetApp in the house as part of our storage, we also had Cisco in the house. It made sense to combine those two and go with FlexPod.

In terms of advice, I can only tell you about FlexPod, I don't have any other solution. I would say definitely go for it.

Our primary use for it is in the healthcare market. We have a lot of customers using it because they want to have some flexibility with storage and compute. That is the reason we are selling it in the healthcare market.

It's much cheaper than the old legacy stuff, especially the storage. It means that our customers don't have to take care of separate storage, separate compute, but can combine them. It streamlines things, especially for development.

The flexibility of using it for compute as well as the flexibility of the storage itself.

When it's running, it's running. It's fine. We are impressed with the product. At the beginning, because it was new for us, there were some issues, but now, after some implementations, it has been okay.

It's scalable.

Technical support has been very helpful, and also very polite. They guided us through the process, followed up with us. I've had a good experience with them.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We also looked at HyperFlex. HyperFlex is also compatible but I think NetApp SolidFire is more robust.

Our primary criteria when selecting a vendor are to get support, a good solution, one that our customers are happy with.

My advice would be, try it, buy it, see what you can do with it and get some experience with it. With that experience, you can better sell it to the customer.

We use it for virtualizing infrastructure and also for the virtual cloud system.

It gives us pretty solid support from either Cisco or NetApp as well as an all-in-one infrastructure. We don't need a storage expert to manage everything for us.

• Easy management
• High performance 
• A single point of support

It's pretty stable. There is a small issue with the NetApp and another small issue with Cisco UCS plates, there is a failed disk, but we got a replacement right away so it's pretty solid.

It's very easy to extend it, add more chassis, more storage capacity.

We use both NetApp and Cisco for support. I would rate the support at eight out of 10.

Before FlexPod we were using IBM. We switched because it's all about unifying the systems, converging the systems. We felt we should have a solution from network to storage to the server, and computing power, from the same vendor, all in one solution; not take pieces from different vendors and put them together.

When choosing a vendor the most important criteria are the vendor's reputation and tech support.

We bought a few chassis because we have different locations, different data centers. For the first location, we got help from NetApp and Cisco. For the next few locations, we mostly did it by ourselves.

We initially spoke with Cisco and they recommended this solution.

I would advise doing a proof of concept, see it first.

Overall, I would rate FlexPod an eight out of 10. It's fast, solid, and it keeps improving, adding new features. The support is very good. There have even been times we didn't realize there was an issue and we have automatically received a replacement; all through "call home."

Our primary use case for NetApp has been as part of a Cisco UCS chassis. We have seven or eight different instances of it now, spread around the world. So far, it has been very reliable, other than a few hard drive failures here and there, but those are expected.

We run a lot of the same OS's so it really saves us a lot on infrastructure cost.

It helped us really jump into the private cloud infrastructure instead of just trying to jump straight into public, which is way more expensive in the long run. That is what most businesses will be looking for in the end. It really is a cost saving when you can keep it in-house.

The flexibility and data deduplication have been the biggest practical applications.

More flash is going to be the biggest thing for us. We use a lot of SaaS currently, but flash is the way to go.

It has been very stable. We've had UCS with NetApp for about six years now and I would venture to say it's "five nines" so far.

We typically add a new chassis about every six months, so it's very scalable.

I haven't personally used the technical support, but we do have a few people who worked for NetApp who have come to work for us. Their interactions with NetApp have been great.

FlexPod was really our first major endeavor in large converged hardware.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are the availability of support, to get it when we need it, and to upgrade as fast as possible when we need to.

I was involved in the Initial design and configuration. It was as straightforward as it gets.

We were looking at EMC as well. At the time, Cisco was partnered with both, but we went for the data deduplication from NetApp. EMC wasn't quite the same.

It doesn't really get simpler than the setup that we had, and the maintenance that we have had. I would tell colleagues that NetApp is the way to go.

My primary use case for FlexPod is for usage at our remote and small branch offices.

It has had a big, positive impact, because now everything is centralized. I do not have to have a storage or network admin, nor a hypervisor. Everything is preconfigured. Therefore, we can ship it and manage it remotely from any server. It is all in a box. 

We have been very impressed with it.

The biggest challenge that FlexPod helped me with: Now, I am not replying everyone at all my remote locations. I have approximately 38 small offices. Previously, I provided a lot of physical service, and replied to people. 

How I fixed the issue: I configure a FlexPod. I will ship it. I will install it. Then, everything I can, I will manage from my main office. Thus, I reply to fewer people at all my locations.

We would like something like a FlexPod Express; we want a smaller version for small offices. At the moment, we have medium and larger offices, plus data centers, but we are also looking for something for smaller offices. A smaller, customizable, express solution, which would fulfill our local, small office needs.

I want to use the expansion to its fullest extent, scaling by deploying 10 to 15 virtual missions in a given FlexPod. Right now, all my virtual missions are approximately five or less, which does not appear to be utilizing the product fully. I want to have scalability in any situation, even during major outages. 

We have been using it for the last four years. It has not had any outages yet, and I have had about eight deployments so far.

I use FlexPod for small remote offices. I do not come across scalability often because I have a three node minimum, which is working out well. If we want to scale, we would need a lot of technical assessment. However, from what I have read and heard, it is easy to scale, so it should not be a problem.

Once in a while, we do call Cisco. Sometimes Cisco will transfer call to NetApp. Sometimes my admins, by default, will call NetApp. Either way, it works fine. No one pushes back and says, "Why did you call Cisco or NetApp?" Both companies partner behind the scenes getting us the support that we need and help guide us through the process.

We did not have a previous solution. We used to use Dell, IBM, and HPE machines, which were all old. We used to always have a lot of problems with other domain controllers, file servers, DNS, and DNCP. 

Everything is now in FlexPod and virtual. It is always up and running.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. We do leverage a reseller to size it. Our partners are RoundTower and WWT. They configure the sizing, then they install the basic hardware. Afterwards, they will ship it to us. 

We configure the hypervisor and storage network, then we ship it to branch office.

We are looking at the Dell solution, and also we are looking at Cisco Flex. 

Right now, there is no immediate need to switch over.

This is the best hyperconverged infrastructure. No need to be worried (or scared) on how these three solutions will sit in a box. Everything is prepackaged and rebuilt. It is seamless when you want to install or ship it. No complaints.

Most important criteria when working with a vendor: We were concerned how these three partners, NetApp, Cisco, and VMware, would come together for network, storage, and compute. At the beginning, we were a little concerned. It has been four years now with no issues, and it is going well.

We primarily deploy FlexPod with customers that have defined business requirements. For customers that have used it in the past, we basically rinse and repeat because they do like the product and reuse it continually.

For our support side, our service desk, it's very helpful. They've got a single point of contact. They know what the solution looks like. It's a consistent experience for them as well.

The most valuable features are that the solution is vetted and validated and it's supported end-to-end.

I was speaking to some product managers at NetApp yesterday, which is good. There are apparently some new products coming around the whole FlexPod side of things with regards to auditing, to ensure everything is configured correctly. It's basically a "delta" if there have been any changes. It's important to us, from a support perspective, to know if there have been changes and what impact they have actually had.

It's stable. I haven't had any issues at all.

Scalability is not something we have really hit. We generally deploy on the smaller side of things, but we haven't had any issues with size or anything like that.

We haven't called NetApp directly but we get tech support through Cisco and we get absolutely great support from them. They guide us from A to Z.

We didn't work with a previous solution. Our background was all Cisco networking. Then, when Cisco came into the compute market we moved into it.

When selecting a vendor my most important criteria are support and validated designs.

There are a lot of components to it, but setting up FlexPod is what we do every day, so it is easy enough for us to go through and do. We've got some intellectual property that we have built around it, but it becomes second nature.

My advice is to reach out to people who have used it. It's a good solution and the proof is from the users who use it.

I would rate it a nine, close to a 10 out of 10. The support is great. It's a validated solution. It's the best-of-breed of all the products that are in the FlexPod as well. It's just a great solution for us.

We primarily use it to provide compute resources for customers. It is basically a data center in a box, and it performs very well for us.

The biggest benefit for us, as a partner, is the ease of implementing it. Because the configuration tends to be relatively consistent, we have a series of configuration templates that we can just pretty much stamp out on demand. I can do an entire data to center deployment in under a day now.

It scales well. It allows us to have very flexible architecture but to have the same level of simplicity that we'd normally expect in hyper-converged environments.

I'd like to see a little bit simpler management pane. Using UCS Director to front everything is good and UCS Director is a good product and it's priced well for what it does, but for a lot of that upper mid-market, it's probably a little bit of overkill for what they need. They just want a nice, simply portal to go through and see what's going on. So if there was something that was middle of the road, it would be well received.

The stability has been awesome.

Technical support is very good. We've been very happy with the response we've received. I feel they guide us through the entire process. I don't necessarily get the right person the first time when calling, but I don't think you ever get that with a Support Desk.

We were just building stacks by hand. We were strongly encouraged by Cisco - we partner with them - and when the platform began to get some traction, we looked into it and got on board.

For me, the most important thing when working with a vendor is the flexibility. We have great partner relationships with Cisco and NetApp, but it's the flexibility of the platform and the product, the way we can sell and implement it, that makes it really easy for us.

The setup is not complex but there are a lot of moving pieces. There are a lot of components to go through and touch and configure the very first time, but once you get a couple under your belt it's very easy to go through and stamp it out from there. If you follow the standardized templates and the design guides, it takes a lot of the work out of it.

My advice is to read the design guides, that is the most important thing. Also, work with an integrator wherever possible.

I rate FlexPod an eight out of 10. If there was a simpler management pane, maybe a little bit more flexibility in terms of multiple hypervisors in a single deployment, I would rate it higher. But aside from those issues, we're very happy.