FlexPod XCS Reviews

A lot of companies do not want to put the time into designing, then figuring how much compute with storage and networking. With FlexPod, companies can buy solutions that have been pre-tested. They know it will work. They are companies out there backing and supporting it, like ours, with worldwide technologies who can support and make it part of their solution.

The combination of compute and storage networking is pretty complicated to accomplish. The real benefit of this solution is that it is pre-architected with the ability to scale-up and scale-out. You can buy this solution, and it is going to work, because it is a proven solution.

Anything can be improved. As ACI grows and storage grows (and changes), this is how FlexPods can evolve. They can include the new networking and new virtualization of storage and data center interconnectivity with the networking side of it. FlexPods can evolve and grow by connecting pods together.

It is stable because it has been tested. That is one of the reasons that companies use FlexPod. I can combine compute, storage, and networking, but I would have to test it to make sure it is configured and labelled correctly. They are buying a pre-proven solution, and that is one of the big plays for FlexPod quite frankly.

It can scale up and scale out, which is a big advantage.

I have dealt with them quite a few times. I would put them up there with Cisco tech. They are easy to get a hold of, easy to understand, and as partner, easy to work with.

For a lot of customers, when they are setting up data centers or adding onto their data center, it gives them a way to buy a prepackaged solution. A lot of FlexPods that I have sold, they are building a new data center, or adding on. It is an easy purchase or add-on, because they know it will work, and they know it will be scalable and reliable.

Setup is easy. They have already preconfigured things. Things are prelabeled, have colors, and they plugin. That is one of the reasons that you buy FlexPod, because of the ease, proven reliability and performance. 

Large and small companies do not have time to design the compute, the amount of storage, and how it works together. They are buying pre-proven, pretested solutions with reference architectures already in place. So, a lot of FlexPods you can buy with reference architectures and how to install them on top of it solutions.

I would rate it as a nine out of 10, because every product has room for advancement.

• It is a mature solution.
• It has been pretested.
• There is reference architectures for it.
• It is easy to use.
• It uses the best compute.
• It uses the best storage.
• It uses the best networking, which all works together in a proven solution. 

The setup was fairly simple. It was one of the first ones that I had done. I picked it up quickly. Overall, it was an easy deployment.

It does a really good job of what it is marketed to do. It is not as easy as a hyperconverged solution, but you are going to have a hard time finding that anywhere, where you can just plugin and run a deployment app. I do not know if they could make it work with a deployment app, but it was easy enough already, so no improvement is necessary. 

The only time that we have taken it down was when I have personally messed it up. That was all on me, and I can't fault NetApp at all.

We just added a new SAN onto our old one to scale it up and add new functionality.

We had an issue not too long ago, which ended up being my fault, but they figured it out pretty quick. We were able to determine before Memorial Day weekend, thankfully, that it was my fault, and not a product instability nor a problem with the new code. We called in because it was a pretty severe issue. We had a 20 minute outage because of it, and the issue did not resolve itself when I backed up my latest change. Therefore, we did not think it was my fault. However, everything just took awhile to come back up. So, we called support, who became engaged. It was pretty quick to resolve. 

When you open the box, they give you a very nice diagram. Which was my initial guide through setting up any NetApp SAN. It worked itself out pretty well. I knew a decent bit of the network side as well, so I might have had an unfair advantage. I connected everything up like in the diagram and went through the documentation online, then had most of the SAN set up by the time that we had engaged with our engineer to actually set up the SAN.

So, the initial setup was pretty straightforward.

I really can't fault them. I can't give them a 10 out of 10, because that seems over-the-top. It is not a revolutionary product, but it is a very good product. I would give it an eight out of 10, because it is easy to deploy, works well, the reps are good, and the support is great.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The product works. Our vendor team is great. I love our account manager and our tech guy is great. It is a confident feeling.

Our primary use case is company back-end servers and services. The performance is great. 

We deployed this for our server environment in our company. Therefore, all the typical systems you would see in a commercial company are what we are running it on. It was not built for a specific use case. It was built instead for using hard servers or network-attached storage. Just putting it all together makes it simple to use.

As a whole, it is inexpensive, and it uses the least amount of parts. You do not need a lot of things to make it work. It ships in a rack, so it is very easy to deploy.

• We call it one-man management; I do not have a whole team. 
• It runs very well lights out. Set it and forget it.

Performance management: NetApp has some tools that you can purchase to do performance management, or you can go with another vendor and buy a product which does the same thing. It would be nice if there was more of these features with the product, not add-ons.

The scalability is awesome. With UCS and NetApp, it is very scalable. You cannot get more scalable than that.

We have used technical support mainly for performing a function, not for repair. They have provided us guidance on how to do this.

Before we went FlexPod, we had hard physical servers with networking. Then depending on the networking and a virtual environment, we had several networking environment stacks which required us to have larger servers with more than one cable, maybe even more than one media type. Now, we have a whole rack full of media-type connectors, even media converters doing the same thing.

With this particular setup, you have one 10 gig or 140 gig cable, and that is all you need. Instead of having eight cables, you only have one. We had a physical server to NetApp storage. With the components that come in FlexPod, it has enabled us to reduce connectivity down to one wire, whereas before, we had eight, 12, or 20 wires going to one server.

For design and initial setup, it was very simple.

We had technical support help us with the implementation.

I have seen value from FlexPod. The connectivity is simple. There is less to break. There is less tinkering or lost time that you do not really notice. Also, we run our capital for three to five years, so we size it for that type of environment.

I have run four FlexPod environments, and they have all been phenomenal. They have all worked until you had to turn them off. That is why I like them.

I can't imagine anybody not doing this today. But if nobody was doing this today, I would definitely push them to do it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Reputability. They have to have a good name. That is the big.
• Speed to deploy and getting the purchasing paperwork correct the first time: These are important things in our environment, because they just add to delays.

I think the most valuable features include it being scalable. We got the product and we have a small environment, but it was able to be scalable to when we started to grow. So I think that was one of the bigger features.

Also, that everything is seamless. And what I mean by that is that you have the components of a Cisco, and you have the components of NetApp; and we have a networking team that is all Cisco certified, and we have a team of NetApp administrators that are also certified. So by not having to reach out and do a whole lot of different training, most of the training had already been done with previous experience. It saved the company a lot more man hours and time to actually get the FlexPod up and running.

That's pretty tricky, because for what we have and for what we use it for, it's actually pretty perfect, to be quite honest. Even when we brought the finished product to our customer, there were really no complaints. They were happy with just having HA, "Hey, if something goes down, we don't lose services." That was their biggest concern. Outside of that they really don't have any complaints at all.

It wouldn't be more FlexPod as a whole, I think for me it would be more NetApp. What I mean by that is, we are a company that likes to do SnapMirrors all over the place, and the customer is always asking when we set up a SnapMirror, "How long does it take or how long do you have left?" And when you've been dealing with NetApp you have to manually do some calculations, make an educated guess. So if there was something like a progress bar for a SnapMirror, so a customer could say, "Hey, what's the percentage?" and I answer, "It's 57%," versus saying, "I think, well, by the size of this volume and the speed of the link..." and that kind of stuff. A progress bar would probably solve all that because they'd like to know, how much more time do we have when we're doing this SnapMirror. I think that would be pretty cool.

For the company it's going on two and a half years. And we're still deploying new ones out.

I think the stability is great. I love the Multipathing for the FlexPlot. You have HA all over the place. You have HA with your storage, you have HA with the blades, you have HA with the Nexus switches as well. You can't ask for more HA than that. So you have time to replace a part, you have time to troubleshoot something without having any downtime. So I think it's excellent.

I have not used tech support yet. All our guys are pretty well versed, especially the knowledge of Cisco and the knowledge of NetApp. And then I forgot to even toss in the knowledge of VMware, because we run VMware on top of four of the blades. Having that group already there at work and having the experience, we all just put our minds together trying to figure it out and it works out pretty well.

It was a little complex but it was because before I started deploying FlexPods I was just in a systems-type realm. But once I completed my initial configuration of one and understood the importance of having HA - once I understood that - I figured out, "Well, cabling, it makes sense." Whatever happens on the A side happens on the B side, and it just started kind of flowing together.

So not too terribly bad. Plus NetApp has real great resources. You can go to their page, you can pull up FlexPod, you can find all the cabling in there for whatever model you have, supported and unsupported, they were really good about that; that was awesome.

The most important criteria when looking at vendors, to me, is honesty about a product. We talked to NetApp folks and they were really good as far as getting us all the information.

It wasn't just that I said I need a solution and they gave me a quote for the biggest solution that I needed to get. They asked, how many people do you have, what kind of expansion do you see yourself going into five years from now, how many services do you want, how is it going to grow. And I thought that was just awesome. Usually they try to sell you the most expensive, like a car salesman. But no, they really looked at our needs, looked at where we were going, picked out a solution.

Even with NetApp, they could've picked a solution that was just NetApp. They looked at it as a whole and said, "For the size of your datacenter, for the users that you're going to have, and to be able to take everybody's unique skill set and put it together, FlexPod will work out for you."

In terms of advice to a colleague, I would definitely tell them to take a look into it. I know most people have their ways with all-in-one systems. In a sense it is that, but in a sense it's not. There are separate components to this system.

If you have a passion for trying to create a better datacenter or if you have a passion for learning new things, FlexPod is the way to go. You're learning about three different technologies, depending on what you use for your hosting, regardless if it's VMware, HyperV, you're learning the stack so you're learning how everything connects.

And, depending on what you do, if you're at a layer-three relationship, you'll be learning about that as well, depending upon how much access you have. But it's definitely an opportunity to satisfy your customer and also increase your knowledge base.

The valuable features of the product used to be the memory footprint, but technology has come up. Now it's being able to build the profiles so you can move around your firmware, bios revs, your worldwide name, and your Mac addresses from physical planes.

For anyone who needs the flexibility of moving around profiles from physical device to physical device, it really adds an additional layer of virtualization, much like you move a guest from a VMware host to a VMware host. Now, you can move that VMware host from physical box to physical box. It gives you all that flexibility, if your company demands that. It's priceless.

It hasn't. Most of the implementations that I've seen don't take advantage of its features. Where I work now it's been more costly to implement it. That's not because it's a bad product by any means. It's a great product, but we're not using the key features that are exclusive to it. Therefore, we could just have a whole bunch of Dell servers flying around for our implementation for where I work today.

• Stability
• Backward and forward compatibility with bios and firmware

This is one of the key features because I can now associate a firmware REV to a given profile which I may need. I might have to have a particular one because the applications won't work with something different. If I can't float that from piece of hardware to piece of hardware, then it defeats the purpose of use. Thus, it is one of its key and unique features. If it defeats that, then it makes your HPE's just as valuable.

Also, the interface is a little convoluted. There are some additional features, like being able to name devices. Right now, the first one plugged in is Device 1, then Device 2. So, you have to be very particular on how you build out your environment, because with everything floating around, it's very important for you to know where that device is in a rack if you're dealing with remote hands and eyes. I need to tell someone that they need to go to rack J19, this RU, but I can't tell that by looking through the software. I can put notes, but it'd be really nice to kind of go, "This enclosure is ... " Some grid location in datacenter. So when you go to there, you can quickly understand where it is in the datacenter, therefore being able to rely on remote hands and eyes, because an LED light is just not enough when you're talking about rows and rows of these.

My current company has used this solution prior to when I started. I have been working with it for two years.

At a previous company, I used it back in the mid-2000s when Cisco first started coming out with UCS. My previous company evaluated it then and implemented it with EMC along with NetApp to backup storage.

It's pretty good. One of the challenges that we've run into is firmware issues. Which is kind of odd, because this was one of its selling features. Now, I can move my firmware to firmware, in case whatever application, or whatever OS application configuration you're running on it, requires a particular REV. However, they don't float around from physical device to physical device. It's all-in-family. So, if you get a mixed family or generation, you can't float that around. This defeats the purpose and we've run into that a lot of times.

It's great. I've done analysis and I came from a HPE centric mindset. We brought in UCS, and from a scale and price perspective there's a sweet point where UCS definitely has an advantage. Also, I'd add the additional advantage is throughput.

I don't use them, because someone else works with tech support in our organization.

I worked with Tech Support initially when we were evaluating and building out our designs

Where I previously worked, I built about three or four different pods in different configurations converting an EMC FlexPod to a NetApp FlexPod, then to an EMC FlexPod.

The initial setup was straightforward if you do your planning correct. It's pretty easy as far as plug and play goes.

The valuable features are just the simplicity of expanding the hardware when you need to and containerizing everything into a single platform.

On FlexPod, we are using Cisco collaboration. Not just Cisco, but other collaborator tools as well. Collaboration is our focus, versus general data storage. So we use it for anything from call manager to contact center, to call reporting.

The collaboration is a very niche group. They focus on voice and do not focus on storage. Their focus is on phones and application. I wanted to keep their focus there. I don't want them to worry about the data, the storage, the drives, the servers, and all that hardware. Those are the biggest benefits. For me, the benefit is insuring that they continue focusing on the work that they need to do and not worry about the hardware. The hardware is so reliable and just easy to use.

A single pane of glass to manage all of the components. As you know, FlexPod has multiple components from Cisco, to Vmware, to NetApp. I would like to have a single pane of glass from which you could monitor.a

Stability has been great so far. We had it in place 9-10 months now, but we're also a platinum partner as far as the service. That way we can receive monitoring. In case one the drive fails, a new drive is shipped, and somebody even comes in and puts it in for you.

We haven't grown yet, but that is why we purchased it. It is to easily expand when we need it.

We haven't used technical support yet.

We were coming to the end-of-life with our hardware, and we needed a platform that could easily grow. We were using the traditional stand-alone servers. We then went to the Cisco C-series, then we started virtualizing, and then we needed something bigger.

I was responsible for the initial setup and it was a breeze. Everything came shipped, plugged-in, and ready to go.

We evaluated IBM, Vblock, and Nutanix.

The factors that made us go with FlexPod were the components that were in FlexPod, NetApp being a big one of those, and Cisco being the other big name. When you think about storage, you think NetApp. There are a few others out there. When you think about routing switching, you typically think Cisco.

Cisco has done a great job coming into the server environment, and I believe in developing partnerships with companies and putting their weight behind it. These companies will continue to perform in in the future. Think about who you would invest in the stock market. Who are you going to put your money in?

Another large hospital, certainly, should focus on the longevity and the simplicity of the solution. I'm really all about the simplicity of it. I have to keep things simple. In IT, we have a habit of making things very complicated, and it's really difficult to change your thinking to keep things smoothly.

It runs extremely well. Once the initial setup’s completed, it's very steady and continues to run great. Having something that is kind of like an industry standard is extremely helpful, because there's a lot of information such as other customers’ reviews and issues that they ran into; that becomes nice to have.

For our organization, it makes it extremely consistent across the organization. All of our infrastructure guys are working off of the same things, even if they're at different sites.

We've been able to expand our capabilities with the same manpower.

At a recent NetApp conference, I was hoping to hit some of the sessions to see the ease-of-use for setup, to make that a little bit faster. That way, it's not taking a bunch of guys a lot of time to get that set up. As I’ve mentioned, it's run rock-solid for over three years, so there's not a lot of areas with room for improvement.

The reason why I haven’t rated it higher is that the initial setup was extremely difficult. We had transitioned from different technologies and so we were trying to learn, as well as set it up correctly.

We’ve had it for three years.

It's extremely stable, at least in our environment. We've had very minimal issues. Most of the time, it's a hardware failure; something along those lines; it’s outside of the control of anybody. Things run for three or four years and then, "Oh no, it broke." It's been extremely stable for us.

I know that it's extremely scalable, but when we purchased, we purchased a large amount. We haven't actually exceeded our usage at this point. We're still running at 70% of what we had originally purchased.

The technical support has been great at the customer site that I support. We have vendor support that sits on site, so I can go knock on somebody's door. It's really helpful. They've been very responsive.

We were using HP for blades – the HP C7000, C3000s – and the FlexPod. The FlexPod implementation actually was dramatically different for the setup. Once it was set up, it ran a lot more stable.

In terms of speed, we did see an improvement over the HP blades, but we also upgraded from seven-year-old equipment to three-year-old equipment. We had a massive increase. We purchased on a forecast of five years; this is what we think we will be in five years. As I’ve mentioned, we're at about 70% right now. I think that we overpurchased it. It was a dramatic shift when we first got it and it's still holding up well.

Compared to the HP solution that we were previously using, it's considerably more stable, outside of the initial setup. It’s better in almost every way, outside of the initial setup. The stability; the flexibility that it gives us. It is scalable if we ever need to add additional capacity in.

We decided to invest in a new solution when we were migrating to a new data center. We looked at a bunch of different vendors because we were going to put all brand-new gear in. We already used NetApp previously and so we went to the FlexPod architecture to become more standardized across the industry.

Initial setup was extremely difficult. It takes a lot of time to do the initial setup, at least with the version we had. It looks like there are newer tools that are out to make it a little bit better and faster for the initial setup, but when we first did it, it was extremely difficult.

It took us a few days to get it up and running. That was where the down points were. It took so long to get it set up, where some of the older technologies that we had used set up a little bit faster, but they weren't as flexible or stable with what we were trying to accomplish.

It's provided a good return on investment. It's allowed us to do more with the few people that we actually have.

We looked at HP and then we also looked at Dell. I don't remember what the servers were, but it was similar technologies.

We decided to go with NetApp because of the FlexPod. There was a lot more documentation, "Hey, this is how you set it up; this is what we're trying to do."
We already ran Cisco, and we already ran NetApp. Bringing the Cisco UCS chassis in just made sense; having a product that was supportable by all the different vendors. It was more consistent across the board.

Make sure that it meets the requirements that you're looking for as well as being scalable in the future, because data's constantly growing. You have to be able to forecast a little bit forward. NetApp is configurable, and the ease of use will make configuring it a lot easier. That’s probably why I would recommend it: NetApp itself doesn't have a steep learning curve.

Our primary use is mostly for footprint consolidation — reducing the number of cables and easing the management model compared to just working with monolithic servers. Having access to the UCSM (Unified Computing System Manager) and managing that way seems to be a lot easier.

Going from the old monolithic server and silo storage that they used to use is an improvement. With the FlexPod solution, just being able to manage and monitor the overall environment helps. It saves a lot of money on all the various tools that are required to manage a traditional solution. Most of the necessary management and monitoring tools are included with the FlexPod solution. So, that's nice.

Potentially through the use of NetApp technologies on the back end — like the FlexCloning and the Snapshots — we have changed the way we do our development workflows and actually the way we do DR (Disaster Recovery) as well. So, we are using UCS (Unified Computing System) on service profiles and leveraging all their servers for test development in normal operating conditions. In the case of DR, you just have to switch service profiles. You boot to a different line off of that and you are able to turn the development test into the DR environment. That's nice.

For me, the most valuable feature is probably just the orchestration and automation that can be done around the whole solution from top to bottom, from servers to storage, networking, and using UCS Director. With the FlexPod solution, you are able to quickly provision all your hosts and all the resources that you need for the environment.

In the next generation, I'd just like to see bigger, faster, and better. I think that's partly there. Just shove more memory in them, throw a faster proxy in them, use 100 gig infrastructure. Having more hundred gig ports and AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup/Modeling Language) workloads would be very nice.

Scalability is nice. With this product, you can just add more compute, buy another chassis, and it might be fairly inexpensive, but you plug it in and away you go. There is no more dedicating ILO (Integrated Lights-Out) ports or track ports or whatever, out-of-band management, et cetera. So, that makes the opportunities for scaling nice.

I give both Cisco and NetApp a ten for their efforts in technical support. I have used a lot of other vendors' support services, and pretty often it is an absolute joke. If there is an issue, the FlexPod support team is there to fix it.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. Once you get the understanding of how the system works, it is fairly easy to set it up. 

We do the consultations, so I set it up myself.

There are a lot of hyper-converged solutions out on the market these days, a couple of our customers have tried those and they felt a little constrained within those environments. The FlexPod is nice because it is still made up of separate components but it is centrally managed. 

I actually used to manage the FlexPod at one company I was with. It was great there because it was all Cisco UCS. We leveraged Cisco UCS director to provision and add capacity when we needed to. Another company I was at used a Blade infrastructure along with fabric switches so that was the same sort of model. It is just easier when compared to other solutions. Fewer points of entry make it more manageable.

I used the Gen4 FlexPod at a previous company and we are reselling Gen5 to a couple of other companies. All using 40 gigs. It would be tough to quantify how much is actually saved, but I know it is a significant reduction in the number of cables, number of switches, and number of servers that they have to use. On $1 million billing for materials, I'm guessing they're probably saving at least $25,000 to $30,000. Overall they see a bit of return on investment.

We have talked about getting a hundred gig infrastructure so we can incorporate AI or machine learning, but they are not there yet.

The efficiency of data protection and data management goes back to leveraging UCS director and UCSM. Just the ability to provision the environments quickly is significant. I would say that FlexPod simplifies IT operations for unifying data management. Our customer is not currently using any cloud right now. I personally have not used any cloud, but I know there are opportunities for some integrations. 

They are leveraging SnapMirror to replicate all their source data and their production data center over to DR, as well as test development. It is easier than a host-based copy. Keeping all the switching within the FlexPod environment instead of having to go up to the core all the time probably helps out.

In terms of switches, cabling, the chassis — being able to fit eight servers in 6U obviously, helps out in terms of data center savings.

The advice I would give to people considering this solution is to certainly leverage all the tools and applications that Cisco and NetApp have developed around the FlexPod solution. You could certainly buy things separately and piecemeal it together, but things like the CSA and the solutions support becomes a nightmare. When you get a nice certified FlexPod solution, all the tools come with it. It makes a big difference in the environment and usability.

On a scale of one to ten where ten is the best, I would rate FlexPod as a nine or a ten. I love it. Again, there are obviously a lot of new HCI products that are coming out. But in terms of being able to manage it, I think that FlexPod is pretty solid as is.