FlexPod XCS Reviews

What we wanted to do with the FlexPod solution was get VMware, our NetApp, and Cisco solutions, all in one. Also, to be able to take all of our physical servers and move them into a virtual environment, which we were able to accomplish.

It took a server room where we had 280 servers and another with 180 and condensed them from 15 racks down to three racks. It's helping us in the data center with all our environmentals: we're talking about heat, air conditioning, our FM200s, all of that. It brought all of those down, so we're saving money there. Plus, we're saving money in support because we're condensing it all down. In addition, we're getting the ability of VMware, which is virtualization, so now we have redundancy on all of our boxes, instead of them being physical.

One of the most valuable things is the support. The reason for the FlexPod was that we didn't want solutions where everybody was pointing the finger at each other, blaming each other. With this solution, NetApp really takes control and really wraps its support around the whole solution. It gives us the ability to call one place and to get support and get the product up and running, smoothly.

In terms of features for a future release, that's more for my engineers to answer rather than me. For me, right now, no complaints. My big thing is getting the complaints - they come to me - and since we went to this system, we've had no complaints.

We have had it up now for about two years and we haven't had a problem with it yet.

We have already scaled it. In the last two years, we've already extended out with more hard drive space, with more memory, with more processing power. No problems whatsoever.

Their support is absolutely up to par. I even like their automation support. This morning, I got an email saying that one of our drives had a problem, and they were going to replace the drive. They send it to us and then they show us how to put it in.

We were using all standalone solutions. We had Dell standalones, we had HPE standalones, etc. The problem with the standalones was, if one box went down, whatever application was on it went down too.

When this whole age of virtualization came out, I made the choice that we needed to go that way, for a couple of reason. We have a slim IT department, our resources are valuable, and this allows us to put resources in other places and not have to worry about the technology.

What I like, when choosing a vendor is when they bring solutions to the table, and then they go through with those solutions.

I wasn't involved personally in the initial setup but my staff was. It was very simple. We got on with NetApp, we got the Cisco guys together, we got our VM guys together. NetApp really took the lead and just pushed us through. So it was a very simple setup.

We had all of the options, but not as a FlexPod, rather as separate solutions. We were looking at VM, we were looking at HPE, and this solution brought it all together in a nice little package for us.

Definitely go with FlexPod. It's a great solution, especially with - I keep bringing up NetApp - but NetApp is a great company to work with. They really take the lead. I think it's worthwhile. You'll take your server farm from 200, or however many you have, condense it into one virtual environment, with the backing of Cisco, with the backing of NetApp. I think it's a perfect solution.

I would rate FlexPod a 10 out of 10, absolutely. The best.

We sell FlexPod and enable our customers to leverage it to run their data centers.

Based on the fact that our clients can use code to program the system, they are able to deploy solutions that are a lot more reliable. That enables them to focus more on their business, rather than solving technology problems.

• Flexibility
• Programmability 
• Scalability
  

I think they are working on it, but I would like to be able to log into a portal and see the end-to-end solution and understand where it stands, from a supportability perspective. Something like that has been there, in one form or another over the years, but I believe that they're working to make it something that's more well-supported going forward.

It's very stable.

It scales very well, absolutely.

Technical support is knowledgeable, we reach the right person when we contact them. We, ourselves, also provide first-call support for FlexPod.

Setup is very straightforward. We understand the customer requirements. We take those and translate them into the configuration scripts. We can set it up very quickly and reliably and get them into production a lot faster than most traditional solutions.

Our most important criteria when working with or selecting a vendor include their maturity in the market, their customer satisfaction, their NPS score, and their ability to be flexible as a partner to us

I rate FlexPod highly because it was the first converged solution that was supported by all of the vendors at the same time, which is as flexible as it is, from a scalability and supportability perspective.

My advice is to make sure you understand the business requirements and size it appropriately.

We have our primary and backup data centers as our primary storage, not only for Windows Servers on NFS, but also as part of our users' data stores.

It has been a great product, primarily because of a lot of its deduplication features, and the out-of-the-box thinking on block level storage from NetApp, in particular. For the solution as a whole, it is great that all the different products work so well together.

Everyone's willingness to work together to solve problems. We have had a few minor issues where we have been able to get Cisco, NetApp, and VMware all on the phone to solve a problem together. No one points fingers and everyone understands each others' products.

We have had some technical issues around the Java UI, but nothing major.

It has been incredibly stable. As with any technology solutions, there are issues, but we were able to get those resolved very quickly. No one takes, "No," for an answer. We get it handled.

We have had to add some disk shelves to the system over the last couple years. We have never had issues here.

We get a lot of domestic support. We are in Kansas City, and the support office is in Wichita, Kansas. They are three hours away from us. They have never come, but it is great to have that local connection. They do a very good job of taking care of their stuff. They got a lot of pride in their equipment.

We had EMC storage before we got to the NetApp storage. We had a lot of supportability issues. It was an older system, so it was better just to upgrade the system or replace it.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution when we were replacing four hard drives a day.

The initial setup was very straightforward. They provided a lot of documentation. They provided a lot of drawings as to how to cable it properly, along with a lot of tools, making sure it was set up properly.

I set it up myself.

We purchased from CDW•G. They are great partners on the government side.

I have been a happy NetApp/FlexPod customer for years.

Go through all the training, and make sure you understand all the systems. It is very different than a lot of the other systems. There are intricacies which are important to understand, especially with the duplication providers. Therefore, understanding all the challenges around it is important for long-term support.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: A vendor who cares about us as a customer. A vendor who is able to work through every issue, regardless of who is at fault, and solve the problem.

It is where we keep our production network: all our main controllers, accounting applications, and our file servers. They are running on FlexPod.

The virtual environment is a lot more efficient than physical boxes. It allows us to move stuff around a lot, adding resources and removing resources with minimal disruption.

It is a simple turnkey solution.

When we purchased it, we had to configure everything. However, everything was already there. We just cabled it up and started to build the virtual machines (VMs).

It is been pretty stable. We have had it running for over five years now, and have had minimal problems.

It is pretty scalable. It has allowed us to add more stuff very easily.

The technical support is amazing. The NetApp support is really good. We had some problems with the storage, so we contacted them. They jumped right in and were able to take care of the issue quickly.

The solution was already implemented when I arrived at the company.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but sometimes I am involved with upgrades which are challenging. This is because there is a lot of documentation that has to be reviewed before you go through an upgrade. It is not as straightforward as some other solutions. However, the product is very stable and it does what it needs to do.

Make sure you have your NetApp support up-to-date.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: reliability, support, and value for money.

It is performing well. It is the data center of devices, e.g., when we are using the call locations in San Francisco and Sacramento.

If we go to different vendors, this solution looks good. Though, it is mainly manufactured to a particular size.

As per the implements, we need to bring more devices for this type of situation. It will be helpful for us to get more infrastructure export, etc.

• Its existing space
• Its design

We would like more security features.

Once it is in place, we do not touch it, so it is more stable than other solutions.

Scalability is good. 

Once our current issue is fixed, it will be good. Then, we will not have any issues on it.

Technical support has been good when we have contacted them in the past. They have been helpful. However, we have the technical experts, so we do not use their services often.

We used it for the remote setup, not the physical setup.

We upgrade it normally during downtime.

We do it ourselves when it is straightforward. When it is a complex installation, we bring their technical person onboard. 

We purchased the solution through CDW. They are a partner and knowledgeable. 

We are good and comfortable with CDW.

It is a good solution compared to other products. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It depends on the device - How much it carries, what the security is, etc.

Primary use case is for virtualization of our phone systems and our domain.

Being able to contact one place to get support, e.g., if it is the virtualization end of it, hardware, or storage. There is just one place to get support.

It has simplified our support.

• Reference design
• Ease of use
• Ease of support

They could improve their technical support team.

Unified management would be really nice, having one a single pane of glass to manage everything do with the solution.

It has been very stable. There has been no downtime.

Over the last six years, it has scaled very well.

On scale of one to 10, I would rate them about a seven. They need to have a specific phone number for you to call in for the FlexPod solution. Some of the partner support knows if it is for FlexPod, they will get you to the right department. 

Overall, I do reach the right person when I call them and they do offer the proper guidance.

We were previously using very individual systems, then our vendor suggested this. Also, because our phone systems, we were also using reference design.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We had a managed project team which did the installation.

We evaluated one other vendor.

We chose FlexPod because we were previous customers and know their support structure.

When considering a solution, look at it in total from purchase. Then, look at what is going on five years down the road. Do a comparison of expansion, ease of expansion, and everything else.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: reliability. We receive this now from the FlexPod solution.

We use it for our inner data center and with our UCS to handle all our server data, and it's doing pretty well.

It was in place when I got to this job. Since I've been here, it has just worked, it functions fine. We haven't had any issues with it.

Ease of use: Get it set up and it just works.

If there were going to be any improvements, they should probably be UI improvements, overall. It can get a little kludgy sometimes when trying to figure out what to do. But, other than that, from what I'm using right now, it seems to be okay.

There's a learning curve associated with it.

The stability is pretty good. For us, it just works. It's something we don't have to deal with every day, and that's a plus for us.

Whenever it was initially set up, they had a small goal. Now we're using a lot of the storage in it, so we're looking into some expansion, whether we need to do additional pods. We're in the initial stages, we're still trying to figure out how much data we're going to retain and how big we need to scale it. That's the question that we're trying to answer right now.

We have used technical support once or twice, to try to add some functionality into it that we didn't use, and they were pretty good.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup but I'm involved in the upgrading process. It's okay. I haven't worked with it in the past. I'm trying to get in with it, it's a little confusing and different from what I was doing before. But, so far, it's been okay, just minor bumps in the road.

My top criteria when selecting a vendor are that they are easy to work with and have knowledgeable engineers on the other side. When I have questions, I want to be able to get them answered easily.

Make sure to have FlexPod on the list. If you're looking at HPE or Dell EMC, put NetApp in there and take a look at them.

We use it for some 90 servers and systems. It runs our primary student information system, we have our phone systems through it, our email. Everything is running on it, all critical functions, all critical servers.

Because it's virtual, I don't have issues. All the hardware that's tied into it, whether it's memory, disk, etc., it's all seamless. It's not a big deal to make changes, it's not a big deal to upgrade. I've had drives that have failed. It's not a big deal, you just pop it out and pop the new one in and everything's fine.

I really like the architecture and I like the fact that on the storage side I can swap it out. Right now I'm on NetApp, I might go to Pure Storage. I have the flexibility. But as far as the equipment itself, the way it's all bundled together, from the UCS perspective, its rock solid.

I run all the critical applications for the university on my FlexPod solution. It needs to be up 24/7, 365. I don't need "five nines," I need "eight nines" - and it stays up.

I'd like to see a little more on the provisioning and the replication piece. I've defaulted to Veeam as our vehicle for backup. I'd like to see more insight and more analytics.

I'm going to pick on Cisco: Their products are great and they do a great job. But, especially in this day and age with the college dealing with the EU and GDPR and a lot of other issues, I really need the analytics; that's what really helps me to sell me the solution. It's a cost. Whatever I can do from an analytics side that helps me deal with different things, will only help. GDPR and the EU's requirements are more security based, but there are also some data components buried in there regarding how you are handling the data. How are you storing it? For some of those pieces, I really need a good solution. I don't want to say analytics is lacking, I just want more analytics.

Scalability is fine, I'm on my third or fourth iteration with it. As far as I can see, I'm probably going to stick with it.

For the most part, technical support has been on the software side with VMware. As far as going through TAC, we have not had to use it too much. I've been on FlexPod now for about seven, or eight years, and the number of times I have called TAC on issues is very very small. Most of the time, if there is something, I deal with my VAR and they have been great to deal with. I've never had any major issues.

TAC has been really good. The other thing that I do is I work very closely with my account manager, he's a great guy, Tyrone. He has been great to work with and the nice thing for me is that he has brought in the right people. From a data center standpoint, Jamie has been up to see me I don't know how many times. I say, "Here's what I'm trying to do," and they say, "Here are the different options you have," and they try to help us figure out the right way to go, from their perspective. I bring in my guys and we try to put it all together.

I really like the team approach, for me, it's an advantage. I do have other options but it's just so easy to work with them. I get what I need, I get the scalability, I get the future-proofing. I don't have issues. I have too many other things to worry about. If I can eliminate one I'll take it.

Before FlexPod it was all physical servers. Believe me, the time savings, the issue reduction, I can't say enough about the solution over physical servers, to do it justice. It's night and day.

When I'm looking at a vendor, cost is always a component but that's not number one. My number one is their professionalism in getting me through from soup to nuts: from the start of the project all the way to the end, to make sure that it's running right. And on "Day Two", support. If they cover that whole project, I'm good.

The setup is pretty straightforward. The biggest thing I would say to you if you were looking at doing one is, really look at your VAR. Find one that has done it before and that will help you to make sure you don't have any major pitfalls.

I've recommended Flexpod a few times. Every one of them has been extremely happy with it. It's a solid workhorse, especially in shops like mine where we're in the small to mid-range and I don't have the people to sit there and just babysit something. I have too many things for them to do. This product is really good. I don't want to say it's a set-it-and-forget-it, but the daily, hands-on is so light. The visibility - even though I pick on the analytics - is decent. I can get my guys to manage it, but it also frees them up so I can get them working on other things, which is critical in this day and age.

It is used as a data storage infrastructure. We also use it for ERP applications, a combination of SYSPRO and SAP. 

Performance-wise, it is actually doing quite well. The end users are very happy with it.

It has improve my organization through cost savings. I belong to a cost center. I need to try and find ways to optimize solutions by actually reducing costs as opposed to running up the bill.

• TS Series storage functionality
• Scalability
• Flexibility
• Rich features

It is fairly stable. I have not heard about any issues since it was deployed.

It is definitely scalable.

I have not used it personally.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Storage is very expensive. To buy MIC cards and additional storage either on-prem or in the cloud, the IT department does not have money for it, so you need a more niche product or a more flexible way to store your data. That is the benefit that you get from this product.

The strategy of the blueprint and the roadmap were done by the global company. They did the testing in the global company, then once they were happy with the results from the test lab, it was made the standard for the global company and each zone had to comply with it.

It is always best to test it, whether in a DevOps environment or do a demo, before actually going fully live. You need to make sure it behaves right in a new environment, because there is no environment that is exactly same as another. It might work on my environment, then you try it on yours and it does not work, then you will blame the product. However, the issue might not be with the product, it might be something else. So, it is very important to make sure that you test it, you do a POC on your environment, and watch its behavior.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

It is a partnership, more than a transactional relationship. You often find if you work for a massive, FMCG company, like AB InBev, that you will not find all the feature sets that you require as off the table products. 

What I want to see:

1. When you engage your customer and say, "This is what you are trying to go through. This is the direction we are trying to go through."
2. Often our customers want required feature sets, which will help our business going forward as well as keeping the vendor fulling aligned.

The primary use case that we have for most of our customers is where they're in a converged environment and they also have file system storage. It's primarily where they're looking for a solid NAS-based appliance that also runs business-critical workloads well, with a highly available architecture.

The focus is data center workload as well as VDI workload. And once they've already got it, why not use it for file storage as well as other things to replace Windows file servers. It's easier to deal with a NetApp - which is typically more secure - than a Windows Server that you're going to have to patch constantly.

For most of our customer base, the benefit is the cooperative support model. While we tend to offer ourselves to our clients as a first call for support - because we are familiar with the environment - when they choose to call NetApp or Cisco directly, the cooperative support model means they can get passed back and forth between the two organizations freely. It works really well.

For me, it really goes back to the protocols; the fact that it can run the entire stack in terms of protocols. The integration for most of our customers is VMware; the full-stack integration. They're into the VMware environment. Also, the ability to do rapid cloning, the whole nine yards. I don't know that there's anything I wouldn't pitch it for in most data center workloads.

In terms of a future release, I don't know that there is anything that I would specifically ask for. I'm happy with it and I like to see how they continue to evolve it.

As the industry as a whole is moving more toward the simplification of IT, that is something where both Cisco and NetApp could look to improve further. Just simplifying the day to day management, the day to day issues that arise, and building more intuitiveness into the interfaces would help. Especially from our customers' perspective, thinking about it from their shoes, a lot of them are wearing a lot of hats. Having things built into monitoring tools that actually provide suggested workarounds or suggested resolutions; continued improvement there is going to go a long way.

It is an incredibly stable solution. Back when I was a customer still, we were previously an all-HPE shop that switched to UCS. Stability with UCS was unparalleled, and it's the same thing with NetApp. I have never seen a more resilient HA product out there then NetApp's solution. If I want to know that I'm putting my workload on a solution, from a storage perspective, that is going to be up 100% of the time, I'm going to choose NetApp.

Scalability is an area where NetApp has definitely grown, once they got out of strictly 7-Mode and moved over to cluster data on tap. The scale-out architecture versus scale-up architecture was more beneficial there and actually carried more weight within the industry when you started to see what some others were doing.

On the UCS side of things, I struggle with it back and forth, tying everything back through the fabric interconnects. I see that over time they're not going to scale out as well as they scale up, and you're going to have to replace them at some point. But it's still a much more scalable architecture compared to some of the competing solutions that are out there, like HPE Synergy.

I get frustrated with TAC (Cisco's Technical Assistance Center) from time to time. Whether it's TAC or NetApp, working through level-one technical support has always been a challenge because it's usually a very scripted conversation. When you're an organization like ours, where we're troubleshooting for our customers all the time, you run through the common scenarios already, before turning to support. I like to be able to work my way up a little bit more quickly, and I've learned some tricks over the years to get to a level-two or level-three tech before burning too much time. 

Especially when you look at the fact that we also sell a lot of HPE and Nimble, solely because Nimble had great tech support - when you made that phone call, they picked up immediately - that's something that really went a long way toward improving their customer satisfaction. I'd love to see NetApp and Cisco do something similar to that. 

When I was a customer we still had NetApp, but it was all 7-Mode and then we were running HPE c7000 chassis. When we switched over we went to UCS Nexus and had upgraded to CDOT with brand new clusters at the time.

With my current organization, we sell a lot of solutions in many different categories but this is my go-to solution because of my comfort level with it, for sure.

When I'm having these conversations with customers, ultimately it's based around what the solution outcome needs to look like, what are the business requirements, what are the business needs and building it out from there. The biggest thing to take into account is the challenges that they're having, whether it's performance, or specific workloads and specific needs they have. A lot of customers use NetApp as just a NAS box, and I really try to do my best to get out there and evangelize that it's far more capable than that. I would say the same thing with UCS.

I have a lot of experience with setup. I'm somebody who loves to dive into CLI on the NetApp side. I love to build the entire thing from scratch and not really use any of the setup tools that are out there. There is definitely a little bit of a learning curve for FlexPod still, especially as you're building out from scratch. But, at the same time, they have both done a great job at working to simplify that deployment process and make it more straightforward.

In terms of maintaining the same level of guidance, had we been working with one vendor as opposed to two vendors at the same time, they both have their own individual best practices and there are a lot of best practices out there. There isn't necessarily one that's really the best. I think that there is enough crossover between them that I don't know that it really makes a big difference.

I rate FlexPod at eight out of 10 because there is always room for improvement, although there is nothing off the top of my head that I can specifically call out. Going back to the simplification of IT, everybody can always do more to really simplify things because we live at a time where so much of what we do is "a little bit of everything."  As we go through the continued evolution there, that is really the biggest area that both NetApp and Cisco could really improve: to simplify management, to simplify the monitoring, and the maintenance. 

Also, bringing down that cost of entry as well and keeping the costs lower would help to us get it into more small to midsize businesses. FlexPod Express is a great product, but continue to bring down that cost of entry.

My advice is "do it." It meets the needs of small to midsize business all the way up to the large enterprise that needs to scale in a massive fashion. It's a great product, it's a great solution, and we're really happy with it.