FlexPod XCS Reviews

It is versatile, and the profiles and things that you can create with it are good to work with and make it easy to replace the hardware.

It has made it easier to deploy new virtual machines. We use it for our virtual machine environment. Before, it was a lot just having to get the hardware ready. Now that the FlexPod solutions are built up, they make it a lot easier as far as networking.

Easier integration from the beginning, which they have put improvements in as far as setting it up. It was just a large learning curve for us at first.

Probably two to three years.

Once we got implemented, it was very stable.

It should scale out based on what I've seen.

We haven't had to scale out yet. We have fairly small environments, but many of them and they are all separated. But based on the solution, I think we could scale it more if we needed to easily.

I have used it from the storage site, from the NetApp side, and also from the Cisco side. I contacted either vendor.

At times it's difficult to get to the right person, but eventually, depending on how far you push, you can get to the right person. Once I reach the right person, they are knowledgeable. Generally, my experience working with tech support is fine.

We were on a platform, which we thought didn't have a long life from another vendor.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was pretty complex.

There is a steep learning curve on the Cisco side to set up profiles.

I had pricing from separate vendors. I got storage from NetApp and Cisco Blade Servers, so I don't know. I didn't buy it as a package, so it's hard to say.

We bought the Cisco and the NetApp separately and integrated them ourselves, so that probably made it a little more difficult. But we followed all the guidelines that were published from both Cisco and NetApp regarding how to put them together. Now, it is sold as an already built together package, which probably would make it easier.

• The central point of management
• The centralized management of the storage and the compute

• Improved functionality
• Speeds up deployment time.

The product is uniquely valuable because we were able to get everything up and running very quickly without having to consult with multiple teams across the IT infrastructure.

When we initially installed it, the automation piece really wasn't available. Maybe in a future release, if automation was built into the product that would be good.

Three years.

The stability is very good.

The scalability is very good.

We used technical support for the initial install. They were good, knowledgeable, and helped us get answers quickly. We were able to reach the right person quickly.

The original project was no longer needed, so we took it apart, and repurposed the components.

I was involved in the initial setup. I found it to be very easy.

Fully-supported end-to-end architecture using the compatibility matrices around it.

It makes our configurations more consistent and easier to troubleshoot.

The product is uniquely valuable for the industry because we've had some experience with a competing solution from another storage vending solution, and it was not nearly as stable.

Better integration with other vendors that are involved in the FlexPod solution, like Cisco.

About five years now.

It is very stable.

Five years ago, it was very scalable. Now, the technology has changed so much in the last five years, it's not the most scalable solution out there.

I have used technical support. It's very good. They were knowledgeable.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward.

We invested in this solution because we were trying to lower our costs and improve the time to implement and upgrade.

Simplicity.

It has allowed us to scale out a bit more.

It is a uniquely valuable product to our company, because it allows us to easily put a product in there as a whole solution without going out and purchasing different pieces.

We really haven't had any issues or problems out of it. We do feel with the whole FlexPod solution that we were actually sold more than we needed as far as extra parts. We just did a lift in shift of one of our FlexPods to a new datacenter, and instead of using the 5000 series switch, we went straight for the 7000. We didn't really need the 5000 series switches in the first place. 

Two years.

It's fairly stable. We have not had downtime because of the solution, but because of the software, VDI.

It seems very scalable. We have had to scale out. We have actually doubled in size.

I was involved in the initial setup. At the time, it seemed complex, because we had never done it before, but as I look back on it, it was pretty straightforward.

For installation, we used CDW's professional services. It was a learning experience for all of us. We actually helped them install it, so it was actually our first iteration FlexPod and it helped us actually get up to speed on it.

I wasn't involved in this.

We invested in FlexPod because we were setting up a VDI environment. 

The automatic revisioning via the ability to provision through a single interface and touch all the components along with it. That really helps us to spin up things like test apps, DevOps, and all that stuff in one interface.

It cuts down on the time needed to provision anything. So if a business unit says, "Hey, I need this, because I need to do analysis on this portfolio that I'm going to buy", or "Are these customers going to pay?" We can provision things very quickly and they can get to work on making money.

It's uniquely valuable because the hyper-converge (buzzword) has taken over right now, but our converged infrastructure, even though it's three or four years old, is still doing everything we need it to do.

Maybe some of the graphical interfaces could be a little more user-friendly from the Cisco side of things.

I'm interested to see how the Converged System Manager comes out. It allows you to see all the components in a single graphical interface. Right now, we have to go to a couple different ones to see everything. We can execute scripts in the background against everything, but it would be nice to see a picture. That way we can give that to the executives, and say "Here, check out this cool thing we have." They probably don't understand it all.

The company was using it before I got there. I have been there for about four years, so at least four years.

I started working on NetApp products in 2008.

We haven't had any downtime in four years. I don't have any problems at all with the stability.

There are some upper limits that we're never gonna reach. I don't have any concerns about scalability or increasing it.

We have used it that much. Of course we have used some of it, but most of it is for a failed hardware or something like. We haven't had any major bugs.

We've never had any issues with tech support. So I would say we're very well-supported and satisfied with the way they do things.

The previous solution was physical servers with a storage so everything was separate, administered separately, and they decided "Hey, let's go with this FlexPod to size everything together with unified support and unified products." So that's why they chose it, to slim things down, but at the same time, to gain some functionality that maybe they didn't have before.

The initial setup predates me.

It's an all-in-one validated design. We don't have to worry about making sure that thing A supports thing B. It's all top-down, integrated, and validated, which means for us, it's going to just work.

It let us not worry about the minutiae of the configuration, and instead worry about how we put systems and applications online and the maintenance to build a new environment.

It uniquely valuable because it's leveraging first-party products and services. Systems, which we already would use, now they are all integrated with each other, so we don't have to worry about going out into the market and finding those components separately, then making sure that they work together the way we need.

Surprise me with something I haven't thought of.

Maybe it's out-of-the-box and can configure itself. Something that's beyond the simplicity that I already think is there. Abstract away some of the technical details of setting it up, so you don't need the experience of an engineer to come in and do the work.

About four months.

The stability is fine so far. It's solid. It's a rock.

The scalability is fine.

Technical support is a non-issue. That's another advantage with FlexPod, in particular, is it's one single endpoint for support. We don't have to call around and there's no finger-pointing between organizations.

Our old solution was outdated, old, and out of support. We were at our hardware refresh point of three to five years.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was straightforward.

The integration between Cisco and NetApp was quite key for us, and the VMware as well. The whole FlexPod stack is pretty key to that.

We are using FlexClone to clone our production environments into Dev and UAT. We used to take a week per environment to do this, now we can get it done in a couple of days per environment.

It is uniquely valuable, because we haven't seen any other vendors in the market who are doing something similar to what the FlexClone technology is doing.

We've had a few technical problems, if those weren't present, then it would probably be perfect.

Two and a half years.

It is very stable. We've been running it for the last two and a half years in our production and DR sites, and we haven't had any issues whatsoever.

It is very scalable. We've had to expand the storage infrastructure a few times, and have had no problems with scaling it out.

I have used NetApp technical support. The first level is probably pretty average. As soon as you escalate above the first level and you start speaking to the second and the third levels, then the support becomes very good.

We spoke to NetApp, because one of our biggest concerns that we had was cloning our environments. We had to have identical replicas of our production environments in Dev and UAT, and the flexible solution was the best option for us at that point.

We contracted through a third party to do the initial setup.

My favorite part is the storage side, allocating the storage, it's very easy. The WWNs, you got the virtual WWNs. It's a little different from physical servers. I like that it's pretty easy to provision storage.

From a user perspective, they have no issues.

As far as my role and what I do (my duties), it's easy. They are able to see their storage immediately, they don't have any problems with connectivity issues like you'll see on a physical server compared to a blade implementation.

Usability: It's a little bit convoluted. It'd be nice if they had it pretty straightforward. If it was a straightforward out-of-the-box configuration and could operate out of the box, that would be nice.

Ease to work with.

It's been six months, since it was implemented. Currently, we provide the back-end storage to the FlexPod.

So far, very stable. So far, it is okay.

Scalability is pretty good. You can extend it out, extend out storage as well your guest systems. Yes, it is not a problem.

I have not used technical support for either FlexPod or Cisco.

I was involved in the initial setup for the storage piece and it was complex. As far as the design, FlexPod is a complex piece of equipment. You just can't read a book and be ready to get it operational. You have to go through professional services that have some experience with it.

Do a little research, find out if the business case applies to them, how they could leverage it, and if it's something they could leverage in their environment. Get a PoC, that's another thing. Definitely get a POC for the product to determine if it's good for them.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Stability, after the product is implemented into an environment.
• Scalability
• Responsiveness to certain type of issues.

The ease at which it scales and its redundancy factors. It's extremely redundant and easy-to-scale.

The software integration, the APIs, are really good. Because everything is going to such a hybrid world, it's better to push things through software than it is to do it manually. The more that they're making the commands the same in your cloud solution versus your private solution is great. It's making our lives a lot easier.

It's very quick. It's very fast. Because it's so highly-scalable and redundant, it's easy to buy new products and scale up quickly onto business demands and needs.

As far as data center technologies or blueprints, it's pretty high up there. But FlexPod has the ability to grow with your company and it has the ability to provide many solutions, and we have yet to find a problem that we haven't been able to solve with our infrastructure. It's been great.

There are certain things that are just hard to do on a physical infrastructure, like for instance you need to make petabytes of data available at high speed. That's really hard to do in private data centers. I'm not really sure how they could do that without making direct links between them, or something.

They can try, but I think really the hardware just needs to get better. I don't know there's a lot they can do about that, other than just let time pass. They already do a great job. There's just certain things that are made better for the cloud as opposed to a private data center, and I'm not sure they can really fix those until the hardware gets better.

They're already doing things that I would like, especially on the Cisco side. They needed to do a better job of allowing API access, and they've done that. So has NetApp, actually. There's a lot of services we would like to put through a software manager, and that was a problem like five to six years ago. Nowadays, it's getting a lot better and as they add more to it, it's just getting better every year.

It is stable. Everything is built with redundancy in mind. Everything is built with doubles and has double paths, so it's highly redundant, constantly. It's one of the main reasons we picked it, to be honest.

We have used Cisco and NetApp's support.

NetApp has been great. They're always quick to respond. The best thing about NetApp, is they are willing to work with other companies quite quickly. Some other companies have a difficult time. They're like, "Oh, it's this person's fault," but NetApp is willing to work together often.

Cisco is a bit tougher. They have more products and more features to troubleshoot, so sometimes the tech support doesn't work quite as well as NetApp's, but it's not bad. It's better than Microsoft's.

I was involved in the initial setup. As with most pieces of technology, you can make it as complex as you want. However, they give you the tools and the resources to be able to make it complex without it taking a ton of man hours.

"Don't undersell some of the features that FlexPod provides to you." A lot of people will see the price tag on like, Dell's chassis systems or the EMC and they're like, "Oh, this is great," but they don't realize the things that they're giving up in the manageability of using a FlexPod, and the redundancy built into FlexPod. If your company really needs to be up 100% of the time, and you need to do a private data center, I don't know if I could realistically actually recommend another blueprint.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

Reliability is a big one; being able to be depend on it. Also, giving you features without getting too complex about it. The best example I can give is NetApp versus EMC. NetApp, you buy ONTAP. When you buy ONTAP, you have everything that ONTAP gives you. It gives you the tons of features that come in the box. For EMC, each single one of those things is another thing I have to buy. It's 29 or 30 packets or software updates I have to buy from EMC. I really appreciate that NetApp just bundles it together and says, "Here's what we do. Here's what it is. Here's the tools."

I appreciate that they do that. They also do a great job of updating it, unlike with EMC, you have to buy and piecemeal things together. You're like, "Oh, I needed this feature." They're like, "Well, you've got to buy that new thing." I don't need to do that with ONTAP. I just buy it and it's all there.

• It's actually pretty easy to put together.
• It's very easy to keep up and maintain.
• Allows for quick use. I use power show on the system to actually get the infrastructure up and running.
• It runs solid, with no problems.

It's simplified the infrastructure (the backend infrastructure). I went from a 1GB infrastructure to 10GB, and it's been really good and fast.

They could improve on the small stuff, like fixing and replacing broken cables.

I am looking forward to playing around with the hyper-converged infrastructure, but that'll be on the next upgrade.

It is solid. You turn it on, you set it up, and it runs.

It's good. I brought in the older storage as well, so that's let me keep my existing storage. However, it's a small system.

I have had to used Cisco tech support for it, not NetApp. The Cisco support is amazing.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was fairly straightforward. There's enough diagrams and the validated architecture document basically had it all there for me.

I have a partnership with Fujitsu New Zealand, and their consultants there actually sat down with me and talked over what I needed, and came up with this solution.

I did look at the Hitachi Data Systems Hyperconverged Infrastructure, but it used virtualization for storage that I wasn't prepared to use simply because we already do a nested virtualized environment, so I didn't want virtualization on top of virtualization.

I run a very odd system in terms of what we teach our students. We virtualize the hypervisor, then they put virtual machines inside the hypervisor, and we use the NetApp Vsim for them to provision their own storage. We do some of the NetApp curriculum on that as well as and we do the VMware install/configure/manage course on top of it as well. So, I didn't want virtualization on top of virtualization for storage. That's what it amounts to.

It's a pretty smooth solution. For anybody wanting to get a small system to actually teach on as well as learn and use, you can't beat FlexPod.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

Trust relationship, either knowing somebody that actually knows them and has had a good experience, and if I find that then I'm not too worried. However, it's also about the personal relationship. It's about getting to know the people you're dealing with at the vendor. All three of them, Fujitsu, Cisco, and NetApp have just been amazing, particularly NetApp for me. They've done some amazing stuff with me.