FlexPod XCS Reviews

We have high-IO SQL workloads. We have over 200 SQL Servers for our flagship platform so we definitely need compute, storage, network, all of that in one, that's going to perform under pressure.

We're using AFF A700s, which at the time we got them, were the latest and greatest of all-flash storage. The Cisco UCS portion that we're using are M5s and M4s. They were top of the line when they were released, as well. 

We're looking for low-latency and high-compute, and that's what FlexPod gives us.

We have an overnight production run. We take a bunch of files from some of our clients and mash them around and throw them into the databases, and then processes them in SQL. We've been able to reduce that run-time, just by upgrading the UCS portion, by 20 percent in the past year.

We've implemented a lot of initiatives over the past five years, but bringing in SSD was the big one. Then we added more controllers and updated UCS hardware. Those are all steps that have enhanced our application performance. This year, we also adopted SnapCenter, which is a NetApp product, and that has increased the reliability and efficiency of our backups as well.

UCS has also reduced our data center costs. We had HP machines, which took up the better part of 2 racks. Bringing all that into a UCS chassis, with the FlexPod solution, has reduced power use and it has reduced physical footprint and has cleaned up our racks. We have easily saved over 50 percent physical space. 

One of the most valuable features is the interoperability between the devices, between the Cisco, NetApp, and VMware. That's always nice. 

The supportability is also good, the fact that we can call one vendor and they'll help us. We don't need to call our vendor, Softchoice. We could call NetApp and/or Cisco and/or VMware, and they would all help us. We wouldn't be pushed away to the sides. They're not going around blaming people. The solution is sold as-is and it's supported by the three parties. They have to support it, and that's nice.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps are also extremely important in our organization. We don't always have time to research products and solutions ourselves. By going with a validated design, we're assured that it's the latest and greatest. It's supported by the three major vendors that we deal with. That's not really something we could find with other vendors, although, to be fair, we haven't looked around.

I'd like them to bring back the GUI for NetApp ONTAP. They changed the interface in version 9.8, and it's not great. In 9.9 they've tried to make it better, but its still as useful as 9.7 and before. 

We've been using FlexPod for about eight years.

It's extremely stable.

The way that we have NetApp built, with HA, it provides redundant workloads. The storage failover is pretty transparent, so when there is an outage, none of our workloads is affected. It's proven and tested. They throw the term "non-disruptive" around a lot, and it actually is non-disruptive. Obviously, I was hesitant when I read that, and I wanted to test it for myself. But I've personally been involved in some of the storage work that's been done over the past two years, and I can agree that when NetApp says it's non-disruptive, it is, in fact, not-disruptive.

Over the years we've expanded our FlexPod, our NetApp nodes, from four to six.

It's scalable. If we need capacity, if we need to scale up we can purchase new blades and have more powerful CPU and RAM. If we need to scale out and have more space, it's pretty flexible. Whether we need to do storage, compute, or network, they are all components that we can just purchase and hook in.

NetApp has definitely been there for us. They're a good partner of ours. We also use our third-party vendor called Softchoice. They're our primary support guys and we go to them first, and then they will open a ticket with Cisco or NetApp or VMware, if necessary. When it comes to NetApp, when we have needed help their support has helped us. The unified support for the entire stack is extremely important. The fact that we can just call one vendor and get support on it is a huge bonus.

Positive

NetApp has been with our organization since before I started working here, although back then it wouldn't have been a FlexPod solution. It would have been a piecemeal solution of HP and NetApp.

It's expensive, but when you want entreprise services and support you pay for what you get. 

We still require the proper skills and the proper people in place to manage it. It's still a network. It's still storage. It's still virtualization. I wouldn't consider it a small-office type of solution. It's definitely a data center or enterprise-level solution. But it is a little bit simpler than if we were to piece together the solution ourselves with other vendors. If we were to get an HP and build ourselves a NAS, for example, or even if we would get something that's not supported the way that our FlexPod solution is, it could be more complicated.

I don't think the solution has saved our organization in terms of capital expenditures because we do upgrades, either because we need space or because we need compute, every year. But I wouldn't say that's a bad thing either. It's not like we have drastic spending. It's a matter of trending. If the business is doing well and the application and the platform are doing well because we're onboarding more clients, we need more compute and storage.

Our primary use case for this solution is VMware hosting. We use it primarily in the core data center, and that’s where it has worked best for us.

Our applications for payroll, HR, and anything that is mission-critical runs on some form of Flex device. We run a lot of different workloads and a lot of different VMs on this platform.

This solution has helped to make more things consistent within our organization.

In terms of staff productivity, we manage more and more with less and less people.

The most valuable feature is that it works and is compatible with all of the existing platforms that we use.

The validated designs are good in that they provide a kind of known quantity.

I’m not sure that it’s overly innovative. It’s a little more traditional than the hyper converge-type option and things like that, but it works.

On the NetApp side, there are definitely things to improve in terms of software updates.

There are a lot of complex, moving parts, and as each revision comes along they get easier to manage it all, but there are a lot of moving parts. Things are not as simple as they market them. Until you learn how to use them all, it is a bit of a challenge. The more than they can consolidate and drive that administration down, the easier it will come. That is the biggest thing for me.

I would like to see more SaaS-based management tools. I think that this is where they are headed with Active IQ and Intersight. A lot of the traditional tools have been on-premise hosted, and that's another thing for us to manage. Essentially, to manage things that we are already managing. So, I'd rather see the SaaS-based tools become the standard.

The stability of this solution is very good. This is a resilient solution. It’s very redundant in terms of capability between the plain infrastructure and the storage. We really haven’t had any issues with that.

Scalability is very good. It allows us to grow most computing and storage resources independently. It allows us to add what's needed.

We have had really good technical support across the board. This solution has simplified our support experience. 

The initial setup of this solution was straightforward. Granted, the reseller did most of the work.

We used a reseller to assist with our implementation. They made it easy.

I don’t know that it has reduced costs, but it hasn’t incurred any higher costs. It’s probably reduced costs in the fact that as things improve they get smaller.

My advice for anybody implementing this solution is to be prepared to learn about the solution. The converge solutions promise a lot of easier management, but there's still a lot of things that they need to know about. There are compromises, so they need to make sure they understand completely what they are getting into.

There are definitely some areas where, as a whole, this solution could be better, but it's pretty good.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use FlexPod for our on-premise file solution. Its infrastructure enables us to run demanding or mission-critical workloads.

This solution has given us a great deal of on-site storage that we didn't have before.

The solution’s granular scalability or broad application support helps us meet the needs of diverse workloads.

We have seen an improvement in application performance. Although I don't know what the baseline was so I cannot tell how much it has improved.

It has enabled us to reduce data center costs and to save money.

The most valuable features of this solution are that it's flexible and it's fast. The validates designs have been generally quite good and it is innovative. 

It has streamlined our IT admin.

The graphical interface could be made easier to use and more intuitive.

The solution’s ability to manage from edge to core, to cloud, to supporting modern data and compute requirements isn't very good. It manages itself, and it has components to help orchestrate itself across the entire network, which is good. However, not necessarily to the edge.

Once this solution is up and running and configured, it is very stable and resilient. s

This solution is quite scalable. You add more and they work better together.

Technical support for this solution is improving.

The initial setup of this solution is fairly complex. We have a complex environment.

This solution has reduced deployment time. 

Initially, we had somebody to provide us assistance with this solution. 

This solution was implemented before I joined the company.

My advice to anybody considering this product is to give it a close look because it's a great solution.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

FlexPod is a design with everything in one bag. This helped us initially when we consolidated everything into one box.

It was innovative in the beginning. So, it was a very effective proposal. We were dealing with multiple vendors and support. This initially solved our problems, so we could focus on some other areas. However, we had to come back to it and address other challenges.

The most valuable is the one support. I have a 1-800 number. I call one number rather than figuring out whether it's a network, compute, or storage issue. It is beautiful and works out nicely.

We have experienced issues with patching. When there are Cisco releases, there are some vulnerabilities, i.e., security vulnerabilities. We are as a financial company and need to be on top patching. As a company, we cannot have continuous downtime to do patching, which is a challenge that we have faced.

Another issues is that Cisco lists some patching, but NetApp is not certified for it, or vice versa. It's very difficult to keep up-to-date all our levels. Then, we slowly started spinning up our own versions of Cisco separately from NetApp and NetApp separate from Cisco. This has worked well for us.

Stability has been good.

Initially, when we started downsizing our data center, we consolidated a lot of equipment into FlexPod. The fewer racks and companies to deal with: one vendor and one support. This sounded good when we were small. Initially, everything was certified, and read and worked beautifully. However, when we scaled up, because the business grew, we had real scalability challenges, as FlexPod is designed for a small to mid-size customers.

With FlexPod, there is a vertical limit for everything.

It is somewhat resilient. If your company has equally scaled growth in all area, then maybe FlexPod is good. However, if your network is growing 200 percent, but the storage is only 100 percent, or maybe the company is only 50 percent, then the apps didn't scale up right. This will create bigger challenges.

Tech support has been good. There are no issues with NetApp or Cisco. 

We would like to see the tech support timing match better with our business needs. This is definitely becoming more challenging.

It was straightforward. There is a lot certification on the workload, so we don't have to worry about it.

We used ACS, who was good and knowledgeable.

Our first couple of years, our ROI was good. It helped us to lower the cost on the management of setup operations. It also helped to maintain the minimal outage window, when there is an outage that happens.

We have saved 50 percent on new service deployments and a 20 percent improvement in application performance.

Everything was NetApp initially, but we were independently buying the equipment from Cisco through NetApp. This worked for us beautifully because it was the same vendor who we were dealing with and everything was certified in a box.

There are a lot option based on your workload. Think about the next five years: How will your business grow? Then, is FlexPod is the right way to go?

In addition, what happens when there is a bug identified in one of the layer? Will you need to shut down the whole thing because just you encountered that one thing?

Everything is perfect with the validate designs. However, they are not designed for large customers. They are designed for SMBs and small data centers.

Multi-cloud environments can work well for some use cases, like expanding data centers.

We do not use FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud.

We use FlexPod for onsite virtualized and leveraged hardware, so we work with many VMs and generic workloads. There is no specific single-purpose workload. It would be like the VMware solution.

We have three primary production environments and a legacy environment. Right now, the entire workload of the organization is roughly split into thirds across those various generations: Gen one, Gen two, Gen three, and legacy. Legacy can't move off of old hardware, or it's in the process of being moved to modern platforms. 

Gen one was FlexPod, Gen two was a different Dell solution, and Gen three was yet another Dell solution because somebody up the chain loves Dell these days. They're building a fourth generation of primarily containerized stuff based on Red Hat Kubernetes for new workloads or Red Hat OpenShift. The compute workloads in FlexPod are slowly being moved out. There's no plan to replace that or to continue using that as a FlexPod. However, the storage driving the current compute and network shares will be transitioned into the strategic platform for file-sharing platforms across the enterprise. 

It highlights the flexibility that comes with the product set. They're still using VMware everywhere. They're not going to be using the compute environment. They're still using Cisco network switches everywhere and will continue to use NetApp storage everywhere. Interestingly, this new containerized OpenShift environment they have in place today gets its storage back from the NetApp through NetApp automation and integration tools in their cloud set. It highlights the flexibility of what you can do with the entire platform when you need to do something.

In terms of administration, we have five or six people on the storage side that are primarily doing storage. There's a rather large team in charge of server administration, but they're doing server administration across the entire enterprise as a team. There are around 25 or 30 Windows and Linux system administrators. The house's Windows side also manages the necessary VMware work, but they're not dedicated to FlexPod. They're across the entire enterprise, but any of them could come in and do most of the work.

In addition, there are about 10 people on the engineering side. They're the ones who are primarily responsible for designing and driving operational standards. The same people are in charge of infrastructure across the entire enterprise and aren't limited to FlexPod. There's also a good smattering of network folk. 

The pre-validated architectures are attractive. My organization is in the Fintech industry, where standards are critical, so validations and compliance are essential. There are vendor-designed and vendor-validated design starting points. You can build up for scale or if you need more compute from those starting points. If you need more storage, you put out more storage. For performance and things like that, you can put the components you need to meet your specific needs as long as you stay within those validated designs.  

Even if you start with one and diverge from it, it's still a FlexPod, and you get support from the three primary organizations: Cisco, VMware, and NetApp. Even if you don't use a Cisco-validated or NetApp-validated design, you can still qualify as a FlexPod if you're out of those standard deployments. Executives like having those models as a starting point.

FlexPod has saved us some time, but I must add a caveat. The challenge was getting the operations side of the house aligned with what FlexPod was. Even today, the operational side remains heavily siloed. There are teams for networking, storage, Windows, etc. That separation of concerns continues to be the standard model for operational support today. It took a lot to break down that model a small amount because everybody in FlexPod has to know and work together because of the integration. 

You can't just do the network piece because there's so much that the network touches. You can't just do the compute piece because there's so much the compute touches, especially with VMware. You can't just do the storage piece. You have to understand how that relates to virtualization and the compute. It took them a while to get some people in place that could cross these silos to make troubleshooting more effective. Has it become more effective? Yes. But it took a long time to get there for external reasons.

It hasn't impacted our TCO because everybody who came in still runs everything else they used to run. When they decided to do the next major expansion, and somebody wanted to go with Dell, and they went with Dell hardware, all the same people had to learn that as well. So we don't have a TCO advantage on FlexPod versus anything else.

The pre-validated architectures also haven't affected our productivity if you look at application performance. The application performance is what it is. It also hasn't increased our productivity regarding our ability to operate the system because many outside factors affect our operations, and nothing about the FlexPod design helps us overcome them.

The most significant benefit is storage flexibility. FlexPod is a reference design to build on and add the appropriate resources you need for your workloads. That's what differentiates it from something like HCI, where you have to buy certain size pieces when you want to expand.

I can do just about anything storage-related with it. In a FlexPod environment, we can provide whatever you want from a data storage perspective. Replication, backup, disaster recovery, etc., are all there right out of the box. I can set up fiber channel LAN, channel-over-ethernet LAN, etc. Storage is highly flexible in this environment. I don't have to buy two or three products and don't have to do some sort of software virtualization of the storage, which takes away your performance.

For hyperscalers, you have insights on the Cisco side that you can use to look at tons of stuff. From the storage side, you could put a range of NetApp tools in the cloud. You could put VMware in the cloud and talk back to the native on-prem Cisco compute environment. 

Their network environment extends into the cloud. There are no limits in terms of integration. NetApp is the most integrated hyper-scale for storage and moving data into the cloud for long-term backup storage. VMware is fully available, so you could run VMware or Kubernetes on VMware in the cloud and tie it to your local storage through NetApp integration.

It's an excellent match because your compute could easily DR to the cloud and be ready to go with all your storage without any modifications necessary because of the native integrations. It integrates well with the hyperscalers. 

Support could be more integrated. For example, you might call NetApp, and they'll determine that VMware is the issue. It would be helpful if they could automatically engage VMware and bring them onto the same call to transfer ticket information and work together. 

Ideally, you can call any vendor potentially causing the problem—Cisco, VMware, or NetApp. They should automatically bring in the other teams as necessary if it isn't. That doesn't happen as smoothly as it should.

I have been using FlexPod for six years. I'm in my seventh year now. 

FlexPod is highly stable at this point. However, there were some growing pains. For instance, when I came on board, they had a bad experience with an ONTAP upgrade that created some unexpected downtime. They have had some challenges with how they wanted to use the entire system.

For instance, the primary use case is virtualized workload. The secondary use case used a fiber channel over ethernet with physical servers. That presented some challenges during certain operations. You'd expect it to be automatic because it wasn't set up correctly. You don't discover the issue until you do routine patching or maintenance work and suddenly lose all your connections to a server. We had some of those growing pains early on, but it has become highly stable after six years. 

We've scaled FlexPod as much as we needed in any direction. We haven't even scratched the surface of what it could do. There are no practical limits on scalability as a design standard.

I rate FlexPod support seven out of 10. It depends on which person you get when you call. Unfortunately, I think that's true of most vendors' technical support. If you don't get the right person at the right level to start with, you're in for a potentially bad experience.

I joined the company after the initial setup. However, it seems complex from what I've seen. The team who deployed it had a reseller set it up for them, but they changed it afterward. They had a different idea of how they wanted it to operate. They tried to make it work in their model instead of adapting to what FlexPod was designed to be. I think they complicated things.

They only use one cloud provider, and FlexPod is minimally connected. Their newer environments are more connected, but backup to the cloud is the only use case they're using for primary functionality, and it's somewhat limited. There was no challenge in doing it, but the overall use case for that is still somewhat limited.

I rate FlexPod nine out of 10. FlexPod allows you to build what you need when you need it. "Flex" is in the name. If you need more compute, you add it and don't need to worry about it. If you don't want to use it in the FlexPod at some point, the compute can be repurposed for something else. The same is true for the network switches. When you need more network capacity, you replace the switch and interfaces or maybe increase the speeds on your network interfaces. Replace the network components with what you want, the capacity you need, etc. The same goes for the storage on the NetApp side.

My advice is to start with what you think you need. As your needs change, put new hardware and performance capabilities in place. You add it as required in the same environment space, so you don't have to change your product line. Your disaster recovery or secondary sites all stay the same. The Cisco and VMware stuff inter-operates. VMware is all over the place, and NetApp ONTAP is ONTAP. It's all the same platform, no matter where you put it in the cloud. 

In Nutanix's environment, they've got two or three. You can have external storage because maybe their internal storage isn't good enough. That external storage platform is something outside of the converged environment. You've got to manage it separately. You've got two hypervisor capabilities here. You could put VMware on it, or you could put Nutanix on it. They're not interchangeable. Once you pick one, you are stuck with that one forever. And if it's not good enough, you have to tear down the whole thing to start over. You're not tied into anything.

For both data centers, everything that we use IT-wise is run on both of them.

We currently use versions 4.1 and 3.2.

The solution simplifies infrastructure from edge to core to cloud. It makes supporting it, troubleshooting it, and documentation a lot easier. Time to resolving a problem goes down quite a bit as well.

The most valuable feature is the one call number for support and the fact that all the documentation comes with it. They have all of the preprepared plans for the deployment model and we can just choose which one we want for VMware, etc. The hardware is all listed. We buy that and away we go. It's called validated design.

The validated design is nice if we have issues with anything. We can call the vendor, or if anyone says anything, we can say, "Well, we're already running by the certified design to the verify design. We're not doing anything out of the ordinary." It makes support a lot easier.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization is very important because of the whole troubleshooting problem, or if we run into any supportability problems. We say, "We've done what was asked of the company. It is all verified. We shouldn't have any funny things happening." As for management, if they come down and ask questions, we can say, "We're following best practices."

Mainly, the interface needs improvement. I'm not a big fan of UCS Manager, sometimes. I believe they released the new one, and it seems like in every version something changes and something else doesn't work. When they switched to HTML5, I believe we had issues in version 3.2. They fixed it in the next version. The amount of work to upgrade a system for change control is tedious to have issues every time. I would recommend more regression testing, then testing the different browsers in that.

The solution decreased the unplanned downtime incidents in our company because it's newer, more supported. HPE had a lot of bugs in the system. Our guys would go to make a change, then all of a sudden, they would run into a bug. Next thing, we are down. There is a lot better documentation and support behind the FlexPods.

We haven't had any issues yet. Anytime that we've ever had to scale, we just add another blade chassis, and away we go. We throw in more blades. It is very easy. We reuse all of our templates for that. So, it is very quick to deploy new hardware.

The technical support is the best out of all the ones that I'm responsible for calling, e.g., compared to Dell EMC. We've had issues with Dell EMC in the past, HPE as well. 

Anytime that I have called NetApp, they have an answer right away. Before with Dell EMC and HPE, we've been bounced around in their Tier 1 and 2 before you get to talk to someone who knows what is going on. That doesn't seem to happen with NetApp, or if it happens behind the scenes, we don't see it.

The solution’s unified support for the entire stack is very important to us. When we have trouble with Fibre Channel or networking, it's just one number to call. You get someone who knows the whole stack versus having to chase down Brocade, Cisco, or NetApp.

Before, we used to run on HPE Blade Centers, so we had a networking guy, an HPE Blade Center guy, and a VMware guy. Using UCS and FlexPod, we now have two people at the company who run that whole stack, so there is no finger-pointing. It eases a lot of troubleshooting, because it's just two people versus multiple teams.

It has improved the application performance in our company. For us, it was about replacing old hardware with new hardware. The application performance was slow before, and it is better now.

It was straightforward because I have done it multiple times before. I've had to do it probably four times now. Now, I just know what I need to do versus the first time I had to it. We worked with a reseller and basically read all the documentation the first time.

The process for deployment is rack and stack, then upgrade to the latest firmware. We go through all our templates and gather what we're currently using compared to what the latest version of UCS offers. We make any updates, as necessary,  then reconfigure, redeploy, and away we go.

We did it ourselves.

We went from two racks down to one at one location. We stayed the same at another location. Power-wise, we never really paid attention to it. With cooling, there is less hardware.

The solution has saved our company time.

We decided on NetApp mainly cost because of cost and the fact that we already have the in-house knowledge and expertise. Therefore, it just made sense to stay within the ecosystem we were in.

Usually, we have a look at other vendors, like Dell EMC and HPE. However, currently, it was based on the time cycle of the hardware refresh. It made sense to just go with what we already had.

We are looking at going down the next refresh with NVMe, and NetApp is the only one who offers that end-to-end solution.

I would rate the solution as an eight (out of 10). There is always room for improvement, but it's the best technology that I have used so far.

Genuinely have an understanding of where you want to go. We've had issues before at other companies where people like a hardware. Don't look at the hardware. Instead, look at what you want to do, then work backwards.

Right now, all of our needs are currently being met. I know we're going to move towards NVMe with the one data center once we update. However, that is pretty much the newest thing on the radar for me.

It is mostly for small remote sites. The WAN link isn't good enough for them to come to the enterprise site at this time. So, we do a lot of file shares, VMs, etc. It's to run the local business.

Our FlexPods are NetApp FASs, Cisco UCS, and Cisco switches. That's our version of a FlexPod. We call them ROBOs (remote office/branch office). We have about a hundred throughout the world that we deploy in different regions. For us personally, I do the NetApp side of it. We're running NetApp version 9.5P6. That is the lowest version that we run in our ROBO environment. 

While the deployment model is on-prem, we are moving to a backup model in the cloud for them for DR. In the next month or two, we are going to start that.

It's done really good things. A lot of it for us is being able to have that storage with the whole solution onsite at a small site, which may not have the WAN capabilities to use the corporate servers for their applications. So, that does help.

A lot of what we've done with the FlexPod is to replace hardware that was failing. We had a lot of UCS solutions go into replace IBM Blade Servers which were majorly failing. We had all types of problems with those. 

We've also had challenges in the beginning where we didn't size sites right. We just totally blew it. We took their monthly closing down to a crawl, then ended up replacing it with an AFF solution, which was great. It really helped us out a lot.

It's just been a little bit here and a little bit there. The biggest thing is being able to have that remote site, and that they can keep running. If they lose the WAN, they can keep running. It's helped not having P1s and P2s at sites because they're dependent on corporate to be able to get something and they lose network connectivity. E.g., we had a site where the roof went. The site is in Fargo, North Dakota. They had a roof collapse at their site, but they kept going because, while they had other problems, they weren't reliant on going to a corporate data center to run their apps in the factory. They were sitting there able to keep continuously running even though they had a roof collapse.

We have done the all-flash at some sites. The one site where we totally blew the configuration, we came in with an All Flash FAS, and it went from them not knowing if they were going to be able to do year-end closing to year-end closing happening because they're an Oracle site. They had been on SAN previously, and all our ROBOs are NAS. We don't have any SAN in our ROBO environment, which is our FlexPod environment. So, they went from a SAN environment to a small FAS that didn't meet their needs, then with that AFF, we've had no problems since then. We installed it right before Christmas, literally two days before Christmas by pulling out the old and putting in the new.

For the entire stack, we have what we call a ROBO team in each of the regions. I'm part of the U.S. team. We have the same team work on this stack for every installation in the Americas, which includes places like North America, Mexico, and Brazil. It's really helped us because we've done documentation that we can push off to our separate teams that do the support, like server support, UCS support, and our storage support. This helps us out. Everything is the same. We've tried to keep everything the same and keep them as common as we can, so it helps with our operations team, which actually is in India. They know that if they can go to any one of those sites and there should be very similar setup.

For the longest time, with all the failures that they had with the IBM Blade Servers, our server staff was rushing to bring in storage and servers because of all the failures. Because of this solution, we now don't have very many problems. The only problems that we do have is sometimes storage gets a little out of control. They need more than they thought they needed. Other than that, it's been very smooth. We rarely have major problems at that size.

We've gotten it down to a science to install. So, it's been very easy to install. It has been very flexible for us because some sites don't need as much storage as other sites. Instead of going for a regular four terabyte, 12-drive solution, we can take it down to a two terabyte SaaS solution if the site doesn't need that much storage. Because we're trying not to have storage just sitting there, doing nothing, it's very flexible for us. We do have sites that have over a 100 terabytes. So, it's been a very flexible solution for us.

We do a little bit of Oracle at some of the sites, so the validated designs have been very good. We've had very good results. We have no complaints about latency or anything like that. Most of it is a lot of just file shares and stuff like that. But we do have Oracle and SQL at some sites.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. It does depend on what model you get. For example, we don't try to put a small model in a site that we think would be growing.

The technical support has been very good. I have had a few calls with them. I had one problem at the site where I had an aggregate that would not shrink after I had deleted some stuff. It took a few tries to get the right guy on the call. We do have a NetApp SAM with our company, and it really took getting to him to get the solution fixed. 

They were trying to replace all the older hardware with new hardware, getting some new sites as well. At some of the sites, they used the IBM Blade Servers, which were having high failure rates. That was a big wreck. We were going to a UCS solution, so they were trying to integrate into the UCS solution as well.

Three or four years ago, our management decided they were going to put in EMC VNX at a site that had a lot of Oracle in it. It was one of our bigger sites. They do big trucks there, and for the three years that VNX sat there, they had all types of Oracle problems in terms of latency issues, but could never get that latency issue fixed. We brought in a ROBO solution, and I didn't do any tweaking on it. I just put it in and put the Oracle on SAS drives, then separated them out by themselves. We've had no complaints in two years.

We did not use WWT for the initial setup, and we did have problems. A lot of it had to do with the gentleman who worked on the program left. From our perspective, it was a lot of trial and error. It took a couple deployments to get a rhythm to it. After that, since the first two to three deployments, it's been very smooth. With the same team, we know what we're doing. We have the same project leader.

We did the deployment, but we did use our WWT. With WWT, we have them set up the basic configurations on everything. For the storage solution, they set up by the IPs and made sure everything is connected correctly. They don't get into the deep dive into the software or deployment. That is something we do.

They get it so when it's at the site, it gets plugged in. The network guy gets the ports plugged in and gets support set up. Then, we can get onto the storage and UCS, provision VMs, etc. Once that's setup, we can start working.

We have seen ROI.

The solution has decreased the unplanned downtime incidents in our organization by 25 to 30 percent.

Everything is purchased, so we do not do any leasing with this product.

I would rate the solution a solid nine (out of 10). The solution has been good for us. Nothing is perfect. That is why I wouldn't give it a ten. However, everything that we have done with it has been spot on. We've had very little problems with it. We're able to integrate it really well.

I would recommend going for this solution.

We use this system for the performance, cost of ownership, agility, expandability of it, and the automation.

I manage this solution, but I don't think of the FlexPod solution on a whole. I manage all of the individual components including Cisco UCS Manager, UCS Director, and UCS Central. I work with all of the storage devices including the flash arrays and the filers. I work with the switches via Flex channel or on the ethernet side.

We use the solution's tiering to a public cloud for archival purposes. We have everything in-house for the most part, but there is some data that is not that critical but needs to be archived because of government regulations. We have to keep it for quite some time.

With respect to the history of innovation, it has affected our ease of use, cost of ownership, we use less manpower to manage it, and we have better uptime. As far as disaster recovery, that's been a really big plus because we have the two fabrics. 

This solution has definitely simplified our infrastructure from edge to core to cloud. It's a simple process, for example, the way you create the cloud pools. It's not complicated and very transparent.

Our staff has been made more efficient by using this solution, enabling them to spend time on other tasks. Basically, they have time to do things other than managing FlexPod. It includes day-to-day operations, working on and closing support tickets, and other mundane activities.

Our application performance has increased since we implemented this solution. One a scale of one to ten we were probably at five, and now we're at a nine.

The number of unplanned downtime incidents has absolutely decreased since we started using this solution. We went from having maybe a hundred tickets a month down to perhaps ten.

This solution has helped reduce our data center costs because everything is centralized now and we don't have to have multiple data centers, with equipment from different vendors, different support contracts, and so on.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the automation point because it's a lot less staff to have to manage it.

We would like to see the automation improved because there has been a learning curve having to create the workflows. They're looking at other automation tools, including one from Red Hat called Ansible. 

This solution is very stable. It has never gone down. We've had issues that were attributed to user error, but if everything is done correctly on it then you're not going to have to worry about any downtime.

This solution is very scalable. UCS, itself, will scale up to twenty chassis and you have eight slots in each one. That's scalability. The same thing with storage. If you need to add more disk shelves then you just add them. As far as bandwidth goes, we have seven Ks up into the core, which is over a terabyte worth of bandwidth right there.

The solution's unified support is very important to us. It's just one number to call and then we get supported on all of the different components.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate their technical support a nine.

Prior to this solution, I had experience with Vblocks. It is basically the same product, but on the storage side it uses all EMC and the compute is all UCS. All of the networking is still Cisco, VMware is still VMware.

The initial setup of this solution requires some training. Once you learn it then everything is simple, but in getting to that point, there is a bit of learning curve. The complexity comes from having so many different components.

The need to have skills from several different backgrounds. You need to have experience as a network administrator, a network engineer, a storage administrator, and a virtualization expert. It is a four-technology domain that includes network, compute, storage, and virtualization. Then you have a server administrator, and you have to combine all of these roles into one person. That is where the learning curve comes from.

On the Vblock side, they use VCE, but I don't know who they use on the FlexPod side.

We use Cisco validated designs but we don't do our own designs.

Our decision to implement this solution was not influenced by the fact that it integrates with all of the major public clouds.

FlexPod gives you the ability to manage the system in a simplified way. It gives you automation capability, which means a lot less manpower to manage it. Power and cooling requirements are lower. The total cost of ownership is lower. Finally, it just gives staff more freedom to do some of the other mundane day-to-day operations.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.