FlexPod XCS Reviews

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.

This sounds dumb, but it just works. I don't want to have to deal with support, and I don't need to because, again, it has just worked.

It allows me to focus on other things. Backing up databases. More efficient.

Everybody's short staffed. We're short staffed and so it's allowed me to take on other stuff, and it just sits there and runs. It's not sexy but it does the job.

Upgrades are always scary because you just don't know. Nobody has six or seven different systems sitting around that you can test on before you go into production data.

My complaints are all ticky-tacky, not from a "vision" perspective. If VSC worked properly. It's for disaster recovery. If you have storage networks that are identical across datacenters then it doesn't work for picking off SnapMirrors. That's not a FlexPod thing so much as just a NetApp product thing and they're aware of my issue with that.

Some of the things have not been incredibly intuitive, but once I figured them out they work. That's a matter of their engineers think differently than my mind works. For some, that's a Mac versus Windows thing right there. Windows makes perfect sense for some people and Macs make perfect sense for other people and it doesn't mean one's better than the other. It's just some people like different things.

One of the things that has been less than intuitive is how UCS views storage when you're implementing something new. Some of the 9X ONTAP stuff is just different. It's not less intuitive, it's just different now, and I think I've actually kind of adapted to that. When it's complex there's no easy way to do it, that's why it's complex. But for the most part, they made pretty complex things rather intuitive, so I'm okay with that. It's just different than my mind would think out of the box.

At least ten years, at this and another company.

So far so good. (I don't want to jinx myself).

I have no complaints. You have a DIMM go bad or you have a disk drive die or something like that, but for the most part it just sits there and runs, like I said, which is what I want.

There have been some things. Whether it's an upgrade, whether it's, "Oh, we've got to move this storage from here to here to support this," or whatever. Yes, there's downtime, but the majority of it has been planned. It's once a month, once every two months, something like that. It's not that bad.

I haven't had to cross that bridge yet, but I'm sure it's there if I need it. Don't get me wrong. Scalability's been a big thing because we suddenly needed to maintain backups for a lot longer and I needed more storage space. We went from a half a petabyte to a petabyte within months because we needed to and it worked fine, so I guess that's good, considering it wasn't part of the plan initially.

Well, the one time it was really a problem, it was good and they fixed the problem eventually. The other time they didn't make me feel stupid because it was my fault, so that was good, too.

I was hired to migrate a datacenter from an infrastructure that sucked to a new location on a better infrastructure, and so I put out the RFP for that and was involved in the purchasing decision, although not exclusively.

And unsurprisingly, FlexPod won. Partially, it had a leg up because that was what I knew backwards and forwards and trusted. I had an impact on that, and yes, it was intentional, but frankly it was the best solution for us.

Uneventful. It is more complex than setting up a laptop, so it took more time, but at the same time we did implement it in what most of our partners felt was record time, so that was good.

We did look at Vblock for about ten seconds til we got the price, and frankly we knew they weren't going to work anyway. Not just the price, but it didn't fit us. But that was the only other integrated one

We did sort of look a little at the one that HPE just bought, Nimble. We looked into 3PAR; and I didn't even know what EMC "product of the week" we looked at, but we looked at those as well.

The way the model is now, where, at least with NetApp, effectively you have a partner actually doing the implementation, not an actual NetApp employee - which is fine - I'm looking for good partner knowledge of it. Whoever's setting it up, I want them to know the product, whether it's UCS or whether it's NetApp or whatever. That's critical because I've actually had people that didn't really know what they were doing show up on our doorstep to set stuff up, and that's never good for anybody.

You can't just say you'd want it to be a simple "one button," push this button and everything works sort of a thing either. Not just for job security reasons but because I don't think it's possible, at least at this point in technological terms, to have things be much simpler and still give you the flexibility that you're getting. You get what you put into it. I probably could have made our setup a lot less complex, and I probably wouldn't have nearly the flexibility that I have.

A 10 out of 10 would be a "one button" mind-reading setup; and again, there goes my job. It would be things that just aren't available at this point, such as I'd like to pay very little for this and yet have zero down time, even for upgrades and things like that. It's just not there yet. Someday maybe it will be, but...

I would say it's more important to plan it out and do it right than it is to get it implemented quickly. I would say, no matter how static things are for you, there's going to be change and you probably should know how to make those changes or adapt to those changes as time goes by. That is part of the FlexPod, which comes down to the UCS side of the things. I did not envision needing to change networking as much as I have changed networking for a lot of the machines, so that ability has been really nice. So sometimes you don't know what you will need, what features. Sometimes it's just nice to have the features even though you're never going to use them, because you might.

Honestly, it's making sure that you only have one upgrade path when various patches are released.

There's only one throat to choke when something goes wrong.

I'm currently drowning in features. So maybe a simplification would be better. Fewer features.

Several months.

At the moment, I have had very few problems with the FlexPod system. However, the alerting is so much chattier than what I had previously, that I spent several months thinking that the world was ending. And it turns out, it was just a bug.

Frontline support was atrocious, but once you bludgeon them properly, you get through to somebody who knows what they're doing, and it's very quick, easy, and clean.

It was overly complicated, but that was our own doing. It's not necessarily the fault of the product.

Again, only had it several months, so I'm rating it a seven because I'm pessimistic. But that way, it also has room to grow.

• It's ready to use, just plug and play
• It's easy to manage
• Single administration console

One of the benefits of the solution is management. We do not need to contact multiple vendor OEMs for any VMware issues, NetApp issues, or Cisco UCS issues. We can conduct it all with a single point of reference.

One feature we would like to see is SSD with the Cisco UCS Mini already available.

Also, integration with the other OEMs. Right now it is their intent that we could integrate with the EMC and the Hitachi, but still there are a few more OEMs out there, customs.

About three years.

No, it's good. We have many more than 50 customers that are using a solution with this platform.

It's scalable up to whatever you need. We can integrate it up to 160 servers.

It's good. We can always get to the right person for help.

We have been involved in the initial setup many times for many customers, from day one.

It simplified our server farm. We were able to consolidate down to one rack from the three or four server racks we had before. We were running a lot of servers, which are supervisory control and data acquisition systems for power systems. We also run a lot with OSIsoft's PI solution.

It definitely gave us a more robust system than our original, old, individual servers. It also simplified management, both on the network side and the server side. It saved us a lot of time. It probably cut our management time into server-network troubleshooting, or just normal management, by 40%.

Right now I can't think of any, because we're so specialized in our environment. I think maybe going to a full solid-state would be beneficial. I don't know how beneficial it would be for us in the power industry, because a lot of our equipment in the field is maybe 20-30 years old.

We are interfacing with a lot of older devices. We're using the Fabric Interconnect back to our Nexus chassis, so I don't know if we can go up to 40GB yet. It's probably just added more speed, but we're limited by our connections out to the field anyway.

It's been very stable. We had one or two issues with a spinning disk, but there has been no impact to the network as a whole.

Scalability has also been great. We have been able to spin up new virtual machines as needed. We haven't run into any bottlenecks.

My server side technical lead worked with technical support more than I did. I think he's been very impressed with how good and responsive they are.

We needed to migrate away from our older servers. When we did the cost analysis through the FlexPod, and replacing each individual server, it just made more financial sense with the FlexPod in the long term. We were using individual Dell servers, or HP servers, it was kind of a mishmash.

I was involved with the initial setup as the network engineer at the time. That went very smoothly. The most surprising thing was when I connected Cisco Prime and had it search for a new sister device, it pulled in that app, or the UCS part of it, the fabric, and the connects, automatically.

We had looked at the EMC VNX series. I wasn't too involved in that, I only got pulled in when it came in to interfacing with the network.

We chose Flexpod over EMC because FlexPod had the Cisco commonality to it. That was one of the major reasons we went with the FlexPod. I had some experience at a previous job with the VNX, and that was a very good solution as well. But, for our environment we were trying to standardize on Cisco, and that was a big selling point.

I'd say, go for the NetApp with the Cisco UCS. It definitely will cut your management time down and it's a very reliable solution.

From the integration standpoint, it is a lot easier to integrate than a lot of people initially felt. Being able to leverage either block or file capabilities of the storage is something that has been beneficial.

Most customers had to look at doing that in a couple different approaches. Being able to have a truly consolidated system that provides all the different types of storage protocol has been a benefit.

Our customers are using this for virtualization. This includes doing something with an open stack style of implementation, running Hyper-V, or VMware.

A lot of VMware tools with VDI NFS capabilities are very key from the VDI standpoint. There are a lot of people who utilize VDI around it.

It has helped my organization in terms of ease of deployment. The approach of utilizing NFS and some of the key features that have been put in for VDI help us limit boot storm and other similar issues.

I see is a lot of those things that existed in the NetApp portfolio on its own. Now we are able to leverage FlexPod as an overall solution for both compute and storage, which is a normal progression.

I usually give everything a nine, because there's potentially something better out there that I haven't come across yet. Nine says there isn't anything better, and I hesitate to give anybody top marks across the board on anything.

In terms of the feature set, I can't really think of anything right now. I am looking for changes in architectural and reference designs, which makes more information available to make sure deployments go well.

I would like to see improvements in the documentation. I understanding how things are coming together and a lot of that is from the UCS side.

I have been working with NetApp and working with fast devices for a while. I have been getting up to speed on the UCS pieces on the FlexPod.

Some of those elements were a little bit different than the standard approach and with a new product line for Cisco. It is not just about networking, but also revolves around the compute. Most of that just requires additional documentation and a better explanation of how the management interfaces work.

The UCS director is nice, now that we've got an overlying umbrella that can manage multiple pod environments. Other than that, most of the benefits are really more customer driven. I do architecture design and deployments, and I hand off the infrastructure. It goes from there to the customer.

The stability has been fine. I haven't seen any real issues with any of the products across the board from either the UCS or the NetApp side with regards to the FlexPods. There has been no downtime related to components or system issues. Most of the downtime is due to customers not understanding the environment and not doing things correctly.

Assuming that they had things configured correctly for networking and things didn't fail over the way they expected, the same things would happen outside of a FlexPod environment.

It is a lack of understanding and making sure that the customer did things correctly. This falls under proper testing after the initial implementation and before the full production deployment.

Most of the issues tend to be typical customer types of situation where they didn't plan correctly or they didn't implement fully. They didn't fully do the testing before they got into production.

Scalability, obviously, is phenomenal. Once you have your base system in place, and you've got your architecture the way you want it, being able to add additional compute or storage is about as simple as it gets.

Technical support has been awesome. The overwhelming majority of technical support calls that I've made centered around FlexPod solutions that have been focused on the initial implementations where there have been certain code provisions about little bug issues.

I had one bad power supply show up in a device. Other than that, I haven't had any specific issues related to the environment.

We’ve worked with IBM, HPE, and Pure Storage. The only storage vendor that isn't an actual partner with Key Information is EMC.

I've been doing storage since Viber channel was invented and I've implemented Versa stacks and FlexPods. I don't think I've had an issue incorporating any other storage product in with the environment as well.

The advantage of FlexPod over the competition is ease of use. A lot of that is because NetApp already has a lot of customers who are familiar with the product. It wasn't a barrier of getting in with the FlexPod.

A lot of that was the reason we were allowed to come in and have a conversation. They were already buying NetApp storage. FlexPod added to that solution and that story.

We just really needed to come in and talk about the compute side of it and how that tied in. Most of our FlexPod work has been discussions around UCS and the Cisco side of things, and not around the NetApp side. I don't think I've run into a customer who isn't happy with NetApp.

I started using NetApp back when all they did was NFS and the waffle file system in the entertainment industry for SGI systems to store data.

I've been using them for years and years. I am now able to have block level access, as opposed to NFS. These are things that came out years and years ago, but these are the benefits that I see with this solution.

There is a common platform with both file level protocols, as well as block level protocols for a common storage infrastructure.

Instead of having to add your ICE storage and your fiber channel storage, or having an NFS gateway into those kinds of things, you can have everything incorporated.

Obviously, having all the protection capabilities of the snap features, snap vault, snap ears, and snap cleans have added value to it as well.

Selecting this solution really depends on the architects. The first thing I ask is why they think they need to upgrade and what it is that is driving it.

A lot of times, unfortunately, a lot of upgrades aren't really upgrades. They are just product refreshes. They are just making sure that customers understand that just doing a product refresh may, or may not, meet their future growth needs.

On my side, I try to help people understanding what they want to do, and why they are going about it.

We want to help them understand if there are any other future things coming into play that may, or may not, determine whether they are better off sticking with what they have. That could be a hybrid array, going with all-flash, or sticking with the spinning disc array with some flash cache for their environment. We want to make sure they're not getting too little or too much for what they really need.

Valuable features include the ease of use. The training was pretty good for our junior Marines.

The implementation was relatively easy and the OS supports resiliency.

Right now, we have our Enterprise Services on it, Sharepoint, our print server, and our VDI construct.

We also have some in-house, homegrown applications, and a whole bunch of admin servers and information insurance servers.

With the FlexPod solution we've been able to employ VDI, the first in the Marine Corps. It seems to be working very well.

We have our whole staff, from a three star executive down to the lowest person on it, and now we're extending those services across the United States. Our whole team supporting the whole FlexPod is eight people. That is relatively small in my eyes.

I don't think we've embraced the current solution fully, so we're I think two OSs behind right now.

I probably don't have an answer for that yet until we start getting the new solutions, the new OSs out.

I think they're going in the right direction. They have a virtual OS, they have different ways that we could maybe embrace different storage, but they're still maintaining the front-end. They are going forward with it and we just have to start looking at it with a little more detail.

Due to the FlexPod, there were no scalability issues. Due to our human error, I would say there were issues. But in terms of the equipment, it is built-in. As long as we're configured correctly, it has built-in fail over. It is highly available at all times.

We currently have eight servers, and we just got another FlexPod with additional servers so we can scale up to another 11. We're looking at establishing a co-op that will allow us to have an off-site presence. We are working on that now, but it is scalable. We just haven't employed it fully yet.

In terms of technical support, we have it from NetApp and Cisco. We called external people in. FCN came on site.

NetApp is always supporting us for technical support services. They have great quality. NetApp even provided support for networking stuff for us, so they were great. We’ve been happy.

I was involved in the initial setup. For the second one setup, for the one we have now, it was pretty easy. We tied into some of the existing hardware, i.e., the Nexus. Most of it was pretty easy. It had a slightly different OS, but it was relatively straightforward.

We looked at a lot of different vendors. We were just happy with the vendors that were in the original FlexPod.

The support was there and it actually serviced us perfectly. We looked at Dell. Dell's always has a solution there. They always want to try to get where we are.

The biggest competitor, looking at their solution, is the EMC solution set.

We decided to stay with NetApp because, of the disc. We like how it tracks the disc and we can move the disc around.

We have to pull out our discs regularly for accountability of our drives. NetApp allows us to do that a little easier for maintenance cycles.

We can actually put it back in with very negligible downtime. We like the service that we get and the name recognition. We're just used to NetApp.

Identify your requirements, make sure you know what they are, and don't fall short in doing so. If you do, that may drive you to a different solution. It's not all about cost. Rather, it is the value that it brings to you.

Our solution is an All Flash FlexPod, in conjunction with Cisco UCS. We appreciate the inter-operability and the ease of use of that setup. Basically it was just a Cisco design so we had high value in that. We are currently running a few SQL servers, mostly active directory and Windows servers.

Primarily our storage requirements were basically Windows documents and all the other miscellaneous documents for file storage. The All Flash FlexPod allowed exponential speed increase, so we can get our work done faster

I would like to see a better price point. Otherwise, we are pretty much set with the product and the features.

The All Flash FlexPod was deployed two years ago. We've been using that app with UCS for approximately six years. There was no down time for the All Flash. Maybe there was one day of down time for configuration or transition, but that's about it.

We've had zero stability issues since deployment, so the stability is very good.

In terms of scalability, we haven't really scaled much, as far as our most recent deployment.

Technical support is very good and very responsive. We were sent to the right person, and we found them to be knowledgeable. Once we get an engineer assigned, he resolves our issues very quickly.

We looked at Nimble Storage as well as IBM, EMC, Dell, and HPE. We chose NetApp due to familiarity. We had the six years of the deployments and we're satisfied with performance and ease of transition to All Flash versus another vendor. When selecting a vendor, we look for performance of the end product as well as the benefits for users.

Engage the partner and see what their suggestions would be as to tailor-make or tailor-fit the application and the solution. This app was a good fit for us because we're already the data customer.

The most valuable features are the ACI integration with overall FlexPod and the Application-Centric Infrastructure. This is especially the case with Vnomic automation software for SAP specific workloads. Those elements are great for us as a service provider. We love the integration with the UCS chassis and it allows us to scale. It really ensures faster realization of value for our customers. The type of workloads we are using it for are with SAP workloads at this point however we do plan on expanding into other enterprise-types applications in the near future.

The benefit is the realization of value for our external and internal customers, especially as we are leveraging Vnomic automation. Deployments take a lot of time. Manual deployments of SAP workloads can take months, but with this automation that we have now, we can deploy within weeks or even hours in some cases. This has tremendously reduced the potential for human error, soft dollars for deployment, and provides a secure and auditable environment for our customer base.

The CVD process requires additional development and validation from each of the vendors involved, which does not allow us to be at the cutting edge of technology. For instance, I'm currently waiting for the next generation of the FlexPod to come out that has the flash integration. As with any platform, scale is always the biggest thing. I would like to see some improvements in terms of scale especially in the way Netapp handles production SAP workloads.

I made a reference to not being able to leverage flash today as an example, an additional example of this would be the fact in the current iteration of the CVD we are following, from the ESX side, we are limited to vSphere 5.5 and from an OS perspective we are limited to RHEL 6.7, and not able to move up to RHEL 7.2.

In both cases this is due to the fact it hasn’t been fully validated from the vendor testing in their labs. From a SAP DB/application support standpoint, this limits our ability to provide some of the recent releases of SAP software like HANA 2.0 for instance as it requires the latest RHEL version (7.2) and ESX (6.x) to run in production.

While this is in the vendor’s roadmap to wrap up this year, I’m dependent on vendor lab testing as opposed to having our teams certify via our existing Agile methodology to ensure we can always provide the latest and greatest technologies to our customer base.

Stability, with the UCS/ACI/Vnomic/Netapp, is pretty good from what I've seen so far. I don't really have concerns from that perspective but I'll have a better feeling as this product matures. Following the CVD, it really helps us ensure that everything's been tested through-and-through with all the partnerships as a part of the CVD. We can have that piece of mind that it has been validated.

Scalability, with the ACI, is great. You can get up to a 15 chassis setup, depending on whether you are using 260s or 460s. That is great for us. There are limitations from the storage side that makes capacity management a bit difficult, but nothing strong reporting cannot resolve.

Considering that it is FlexPod, and you have got the 1-800-FLEXPOD line, it is great for us as a service provider. We don't have to chase down each individual vendor that is a part of that overall FlexPod. We can call one number and we get the support that ties in to the partner integration from that. They are very helpful and knowledgeable and always seem willing to help out, no matter what the issue may be. It's great.

We leverage 3PAR in some cases. It really depends on our customer base. The advantages of FlexPod over 3PAR are that FlexPod is all integrated. It's a little bit more native, overall. That's really the major difference there. Also, since Netapp is a fully NAS based deployment and 3par being a mix of FC/NAS, it makes it easier to manage the Netapp from a capacity/deployment view.

Some of the other advantages with NetApp, are that it scales within that environment. It's not really plug-and-play like 3PAR, from the storage app perspective. With that integration, however, everything is native. With the Vnomic software, it handles the automatic deployment of the storage. That's great for us because I don't need to perform manual touches on the environment. That really allows us to stay focused on our customers and the workloads.

With a CVD being provided for this solution, setup and configuration is pretty straightforward.

We redid our data center, which involved taking out the 6509 and some other things. We bought the complete solution and it went in relatively easy. We were up and running very quickly. We've had it for about six years now and had very little problems with it. We've just been building upon it over the years. We're a financial institution, so we run our core web servers, all of our applications for all our different departments, data warehouse, and lots of SQL servers. You name it; we have probably run it.

I would like to be able to get everything in at one time. I like the ability to spin it up and have it working relatively quickly. It's a time saver, and there is nothing missing, because everything came in at one time. There was no "this is missing" and "that is missing".

I was looking at the SF, because we were looking at doing some of the SolidFire stuff. Now, with FlexPod, I know we're at the point where it's about time for us to upgrade, so we are looking into that. NetApp is solid.

On the storage side of things, of course, it can always be a little simpler, but that's why we were looking at SolidFire, just to take it a little bit more out of needing a storage engineer to be able to do anything. We would like to just make things a little bit easier for our administrators.

We've had no issues with stability. I know on the Nexus and some other things out there, we look at the time and sometimes it's been up for three or four years, in which time it hasn't been rebooted. There is very little downtime.

We've really just scaled up the storage aspect of it. Each year, we add more storage.

Their tech support is great. Whenever we have a drive go out, the next morning it's already downstairs. We put it in and send the old one back. The can help with all the features, and that just make it easy for us. It's good.

We've just been adding upon this solution year after year. We started looking at some of the hyper-converged stuff, such as Nutanix and Cisco HyperFlex. Then, I started looking at the SolidFire stuff as well. We decided to stay with NetApp because we've already been using it. It's been successful, so it takes a lot to want to move to something else.

If they were going to upgrade their storage, I would tell them NetApp has been really solid for us. I can't think of any reason not to use it. That's a good thing with IT people, because usually if something's bad, we're ready to tell you.