FlexPod XCS Reviews

Our primary use case is for virtualization, the VMs.

FlexPod has enabled us to consolidate some of our stuff. 

The validated designs for major enterprise apps are an integral part of our company. We only do validated designs in our thing and then we remove our data center consolidation and move stuff onto that.

It simplifies the infrastructure from edge to core. It simplifies the configuration metrics and saved time. FlexPod simplified and saved time overall for all of the configuration and deployment.

Backup, restore, and ease of deployment are the most valuable features.

It hasn't changed the application performance in our company but obviously the new hardware gives it the performance increase. Overall nothing more changed.

I would like to have the installation of the top virtualization on its own rather than doing it through the admin. For example, if FlexPod is configured after the configuration of the host, the ESXi is installed also, but it should be part of it rather than doing it as a separate system.

It is pretty solid.

It's scalable. 

I don't remember having needed to contact their technical support. 

We knew we needed to invest in a solution like FlexPod because we were growing and we have evaluated different solutions and after that we decided.

The initial setup was straightforward because we did not do it, Cisco did it.

I deployed through Cisco. We had a positive experience with them.

We have seen ROI. 

It actually initially increased our CapEx.

We looked at Red Hat, VMware, HP, Cisco. We chose FlexPod because of the consolidation and reduced footprint.

If configuration, unification, and standardization are the concern and if they are using it with Cisco as a network edge then I think it will be a good solution to go with FlexPod.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. Not a ten because a seven means for me that it is more than a five. A 10 would mean that I don't have to do anything else to improve. Improvements could be ESXi installations at vCenter installation and all of that. I have this to do it. It is a solution, but it has stops at a certain point. It is not a complete solution. 

It is our primary on-premise infrastructure.

It runs our VMs. Our SQL databases are all on VMs, so everything is virtualized.

Once the FlexPod is built, managers provision additional VMs. So, it's pretty simplified.

With the all-flash array, I think it did improve application performance in our organization.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization are very important. We just followed them to make sure the CVD was compliant or matched to what they designed.

The solution’s unified support for the entire stack is beneficial. It is all in one.

I would like to see more of a centralized support model because we have all the FlexPod components and we hand build them. So, if we have issues with one particular stack, we're talking to individual vendors, e.g., for UCS, I have to call Cisco, and for storage, I have to call NetApp.

So far, the stability has been good. We haven't had downtime or issues since I built it. 

The old one did have some outages. The old UCS FIs went down during the firmware upgrade.

Our stuff usually doesn't go down, so the unplanned downtime isn't worse or better than before.

Our department is pretty small.

Our models are pretty small. So, we'll be able to expand additional chassis in place, then additional disk shelves.

We have had to file tech support cases. Our experience with them is okay. We dislike going online with the robot stuff. Many times, it has delayed our reaching out to a real support engineer.

When I came onboard, they had already purchased it. I just put everything together.

The setup is pretty straightforward. 

My recommendation: If you are not familiar with the technology, you probably should engage some type of professional services to set it up.

We hand built our FlexPod environment. It is composed of a Cisco UCS 6332-16UP FI, NetApp AFF A700, and an NDS.

It was easy to build. We had an old FlexPod built by someone else and I built the new one. We're in the process of migrating all the workloads over.

It hasn't decreased our data center cost by much. It just one rack replaced by another.

I heard the NVMe stuff is coming around. We don't have that license or that feature yet. So, we probably will try it out and see how much improvement that's over our current setup.

Give it a shot. If you are experienced with other types of technologies already, it's pretty simple to put it together.

I would rate the solution as an eight (out of 10).

Our primary use case for this solution is for educational content.

This solution has improved our organization in the way that we now require fewer employees. It has reduced the complexity of our network monitoring. 

It has reduced the workload on our network admins and our network availability has been reduced. 

The most valuable features of this solution are instant scalability and reliability. The solution has good granularity in terms of network visibility.

The main area that this solution has room for improvement is in Cisco support.

The stability of the solution is very good. 

The scalability is good.

FlexPod's technical support is bad, as with everything regarding Cisco support.

The initial setup for FlexPod is complex.

We used a consultancy company for the implementation. 

The solution forces us to ACI to make quotas and we will do that.

FlexPod supports both traditional and SCN reduced costs.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate this product a seven. It's not perfect.

I believe that FlexPod is the best solution. 

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.

I like the management interface in UCS and then UCS Director. I like how I can still automate, the API that you can do with FlexPod - you can work with it through API - which is what we have to have for our environment. We have to produce more with less people. We have to have workflows that can do it a lot faster.

There are a lot of features that the storage and the environment has. I, personally, like the feature with the profiles on the UCS side. You can just take out blades and replace them, and you're back up and running in no time.

Faster provisioning, meeting SLAs, deadlines. We are able to produce more with less resources.

I would think more cloud integration, a lot more flexibility with adapting to different things. Not saying that it does not already. I'm just trying to see if I could do a lot more things with it, in regards to AWS and Azure. A lot more flow.

The mission that NetApp has with the whole fabric, if they can do a lot more with it within the FlexPod, that would be good. They're working on it. Nothing bad to say about it. That's where they're going with it.

Not necessarily with, say, with cloud sync, with cloud ONTAP, with the fabric pools and all that. I guess I want to see other customers do a lot more cool stuff with it, so that I can do it. That's pretty much how I do it. We look at other people, see what they've done, proven, and then we say, "Okay. Let's do it. Let them jump off the cliff first before we go."

I'm thinking vendor agnostic, right? Where instead of having to build your FlexPod, here's your Cisco, here's your Nexus, here's your storage and all that, maybe Cisco can buy out NetApp and then they just have this one big box. Or the other way around. NetApp buys Cisco and then there's just this one box and everything's right on it. You have this big chassis with blades and you just swap everything out. Technically, you could do that with UCS already.

About a year.

It's very stable. As far as being tested and proven by the different vendors, Cisco, NetApp. But it's also stable in the code, UCS on the NetApp side, on the storage side, on the switch side. It's all proven code. It's been around for a long time. I see it as something that's reliable, stable and the fact that everything's redundant, so you don't have to worry about it.

Currently, I think it's great because they support, for example, cluster. You can scale that beyond belief. Then, there's also the UCS domains, you can have multiples in there and expand it, so I think it has no problems scaling.

Unless you're talking a really, really large environment with, say, beyond the petabytes. And even then... Maybe you could run into issues with management, but still I think UCS Director provides value with that.

It's a one-stop shop. It's good. I like it. They were knowledgeable, and if they weren't, they knew where to find the information.

We switched because we needed a converged infrastructure.We didn't have it. We had bunch of siloed environments across the board.

We chose NetApp because it helped us unify what we already had. All our training experiences with UCS - we have an environment of UCS, we have VBlock. We decided, "All right. Let's use the training that we already have and let's take UCS and let's take all the virtualization that we have and let's just continue to use it." We had NetApp already, so might as well just take NetApp with it.

FlexPod has been around for a long time. We said, "All right. Let's PoC this," so we PoC'd it. We got a lot out of it, lot of the requirements were met. It worked well for what we had.

Not complex.

Upgrades, the same, not complex. With ONTAP, you just have to pick your order, find out how you can upgrade them and do your UCS, do your Nexus switches, do your storage. Not difficult.

There was Nutanix. We do have a few Nutanix in there. It's just not as well known.

It's easy to manage if you start out correctly. If you don't, if you just spaghetti everything out and do all kinds of weird things within it, and don't keep standards, you always, like anything, create chaos.

We're in the financial industry but I think FlexPod is valuable for a lot of industries, not just this one. I don't see it as a one niche for just financial, could be for everything.

Right now, I think it's a great product. I don't give anybody a 10 unless they're outstanding, perfect in every way.

The most valuable feature is that it's an end-to-end solution for which we have a single support structure. We can tag it in the event we have something that crosses between silos.

We like that we've got the validated design that we can use quickly to start it. We have something that we know that will work. We also like the fact that the whole end-to-end design has been tested. And we know that if we have a problem, we're in good company possibly. That's a big help for us.

The benefits to my organization are faster time for deployment, faster time to problem resolution; a stable and reliable environment.

I think it still seems that there is isn’t end-to-end automation. I can't say, "I want to build a host," and say, "Provision the blade. Provision the storage. Provision the SAN." All those things in one swipe would be nice. I think that's what everyone wants: push the button, make it work. The big thing is that we'd like to be able to have it provisioned end to end. The biggest weakness is on the SAN side and the fiber channel side is a mess. It isn't very clear at times. That part is the most complex. If we can avoid it, we don't do it.

It's been a very stable environment for us, absolutely. We've only had very few instances and each of those have been resolved very quickly. It's been a fantastic change for us.

It just works, scalability-wise. We've been able to continue to grow the environment. We've tripled in size since initial deployment. We've not really changed the overall structure of the deployment. Scaling up was very easy.

Technical support has been very good. We haven't had to use it much, which is good too. We've had once incident where we had to really get all three legs involved – the compute, the storage and the network side involved – and it worked well. It was a very good experience to see from end to end. The problem looked like it was storage, but could've been on the SAN side. We worked through that and we also had to go back through the host. We had all three parties involved. They worked well together.

Initial setup was very easy. We looked at the validated design. We tweaked it a little bit to fit our environment specifically. We deployed from there. It was a day or so at best, more because we have our own little processes we have to go through.

ROI is difficult to gauge because things have changed so much in the time since we started. We have moved from a virtual environment of roughly 30, 40, 50 percent to 70, 90 percent now. I want to cut it.

We've been using HP for a long time.

For storage, we were using EMC before. We had been using their platform for a number of years. We were in for a forklift upgrade. The next upgrade would've been a complete forklift upgrade. We evaluated Hitachi, NetApp, and EMC. We talked with Dell as well, but we really narrowed it down to Hitachi, EMC, or NetApp. With EMC, because it was a forklift upgrade, we were really upset that it wasn't something that we could just add on to what we had or change out the parts. We had a major conversion, so that put them at a disadvantage right away. In talking with NetApp, the big thing for us was getting rid of the forklift upgrade; going to a system where we could evolve from year to year to year. We're three or four years in on this now; so far that's been the case. We have done controller replacements and upgrades and everything else, without serious service interruptions, so that's been a big deal for us.

You need a partner that you can trust and a partner you can actually move forward with. You need to understand what the full lifecycle of the product will be. You need to understand where you're going to go next. That was the big thing for us. When we changed, it was a major change. It was a lot of downtime, a lot of frustration for a lot of people. That's why something like NetApp, where I know that I have the ability to take out the controller, grab a new controller with cluster data ONTAP; you've got the scale out ability as well. That's been really great for us as well. As I’ve mentioned, we've tripled the amount of storage, we've tripled the amount of compute, added additional controllers, with little interruption to users. That's huge.

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.