FlexPod XCS Reviews

I'm on the network side, so I don't have to deal with the NetApp side too much. However, I am on the network side and I really love the fact that I can just swap out blades as fast as I can. We have the M4s in our FlexPod. I personally love it. We are running VMware. We are running a standard data center with domain controllers, Exchange, and primarily Microsoft products.

The main improvement is speed. If you need to troubleshoot or if anything goes wrong, you can swap it out extremely fast. It will rebuild itself and you are up and running in hours at most.

I know that there's a lot of features that area already out. We are the DOD, and we are two steps behind. We know of a lot of features that we're excited to move to, but we can't yet. In terms of improvement, I would focus on cost. It can be a little bit expensive.

The features are great. We know of things that are in the newer releases, and they will be great once we get access to them. This includes solid state drives that will speed up our connectivity.

We've had very few stability problems with it. It's been a very great product for us. Maybe one of these days we can move over to the new and improved SF.

We had to grow and we've added blades. We upgraded our NetApp appliances in it. So we have grown as the organization required. It has been simple to scale up.

We have NetApp support that covers us for anything that we need. We do have a very talented engineer that runs it on our side, so he doesn't have too many challenges. On the Cisco side, the UCF side, which is my domain, we go directly to Cisco and they help us with any issues we ever have. They are knowledgeable and helpful.

We evaluated IBM, they had a blade solution. We evaluated Dell and looked at the FX2s and their VRTX for some of our smaller sites. We decided to go with NetApp over Dell, because it all worked together so easily. Dell had a pretty good product and there is no denying that. However, FlexPod is just all-in-one. It has got a best-practice design built around it so there's no "Hey, does this NIC work in this scenario?" You don't have to worry about that with FlexPod.

Give it a shot. Call your vendors and just get it. They'll demo it for you, so use that. It is important to demo everything first, because there is a lot of money on the line just for a "I guess this might work out for us.”

The compute team that supports our NetApps does not have to call the network team. This means that everything is running properly and correctly. The users don't have problems with latency and there here are no problems in any of the backups, or in the systems that are tied into the NetApps. That tells me that it is a well-built and well-designed system. If it stays up and running and the network team doesn't get involved, then I will give it the highest rating.

Just the ability to have diversity in the backups, and that it follows our financial regulations in having multiple layers of backup. That app is a helpful tool for all of this.

I guess in time, you could probably use larger processors, and reduce the footprint of the system and increase throughput on it, so we can have higher-end models. I believe we do have the highest-end models. I know we have Enterprise. I think it actually has Enterprise written on the stamp itself. We have a lot of them, which means that they can probably compete with better processors.

From a physical aspect, I know they are stable. When we walk on our floor with our facilities teams, I never see red or yellow lights on them. They always seem to be performing properly. From a visual perspective, as well as from our monitoring team perspective, if there's a problem, they let the network team know about it. No news is good news.

It appears to scale well. We have racks and racks of them and there are no problems. We keep building and adding as needed.

I have not used technical support and that's an excellent thing.

When choosing a solution, stability is absolutely what I am looking for. It has to stay running. The software is fine. It's the hardware that we want to make sure runs, runs, and runs.

I was involved in the initial setup at one point. I was involved in verifying our infrastructure and there were no problems. The network assessment was clean. NetApps came in, they got plugged into the network, and everybody was happy. We closed down the project successfully, and nobody had to follow up. This means that it is running well.

I did not evaluate other solutions. I was just told this is what we have built, accommodate it, given these requirements, and it worked.

From a network perspective, it is very stable. We don't have any issues with this. I would recommend it, just because of its uptime and the fact that you can sleep through the night, and not get called at 3 AM. I have peace of mind from the stability. Peace of mind and stability are by far the biggest factors.

It's an integrated system with a single throat to choke for support. It's one phone call and if we believe it to be a Cisco problem, we call Cisco tech. If it turns out that it becomes a NetApp problem, then Cisco tech will engage the NetApp folks for support. It's a single phone call. We don't have to hang up and call the other and get into a finger pointing game. It is a time saver.

We have a lot of home-baked bank applications. We also use PointShop, so we run a lot of Microsoft boxed applications as well.

We're a VMware shop. We are a 98% plus virtualized in our environment. I appreciate the consistency in which it works. It stores data very efficiently. Those of us on the network side provide the path to get to it. We also provide the accesses, and it saves us a great amount of time because of that single feature of a single phone call.

It's been a very sturdy system. It's been a very reliable system and we've had no really great outages over the last six years related to the FlexPod environment. It saves us a lot of money, time, and resources.

I don't really have a great answer, other than a more scalable switched environment. That is what the Nexus 9K is going to provide for us. Nothing's perfect, so I guess we had some growing pains early on.

Some of it was teaching our staff how to deal with the new technologies, how to use it, and how to troubleshoot it. It wasn't perfect in that sense, but the product itself, it was very good.

It was complex to train people in with it. It was a newer technology for our resources, so it did take some time to get them up to speed.

There has been no downtime in six year, related to the actually filer, UCS compute, or switchback involved in the FlexPod.

It's scaled very well for us. We were able to add filers as we needed more storage. We were able to scale out on the existing 5K Nexus environment that we had.

So over the last six years, it's scaled well enough for us to acquire banks at the rate of about four or five banks per year. Now, in 2017, we continue to acquire banks and we're going to move our FlexPods into core locations. So we're going to buy new FlexPods and continue to scale and buy banks off of those.

We deal mostly with the Cisco technical support, but we make a single phone call, we're directed to FlexPod representatives who help to support the FlexPod environment or the NetApp environment, if you will. That has been very good.

We also have a resource from NetApps, specifically, who is a liaison for us to support and that resource is on call for us 24/7. That's been a great help as well.

The initial setup went very well. We provided the information about configurations that we would have liked to have seen. At the end of the day, after four or five meetings, we provided that information. FlexPod then showed up in a crate, ready to be powered on in the data center and start to switch data.

We did a bake-off between the VCE and the FlexPod. We did look at the Dell solution back then, it did come down to VCE and FlexPod.

FlexPod won out for two reasons.

• Pricing
• The resource that manages my data center was historically a NetApp guy. He liked that app and was comfortable with it, and that's what I think the deciding factor was.

To summarize, the comfort level with NetApp and the price.

I would tell them my story, about six years ago buying the FlexPod and how we purchased banks and scaled through it seamlessly. I have never had any downtime, and I feel like the support has been what has been advertised. I would certainly suggest buying that environment.

Ease of use is a valuable feature. In our case, we had multi-versions of FlexPod. We connected an additional storage app. Connecting to any type of storage would have been pretty challenging with another type of system. However, with this solution, it was fairly easy.

The connection to the server more-or-less updated the firmware version on it, made sure that it worked, rebooted, and then it booted up a second system. It was very simple to add additional storage.

Upgrading the operating system version wasn't as much as a pain as I'd expected. It was a pleasant surprise. With other companies out there, you have to jump through hoops to get your SAN controller or app storage upgraded, or do many types of operations where you potentially have downtime. We had zero downtime.

We didn't have to take down a single server, didn't have to take apart anything, and didn't have to do anything else. It was just a matter of connecting a couple of cables in the back, upgrading the firmware, and then upgrading the SAN controller.

It benefits the organization in that we had no downtime. In almost five years of operation, we have never had a single hour of downtime that was directly related to a storage problem. There weren't things like hard drive failures.

In any other company, it would have legitimately been an issue for us to get a hard drive out. But usually it involves some sort of extreme discussion with customer service agents about how important this is to our business operation, and there was none of that with NetApp. They adhered to the SLA.

I was willing to wait if the guy was willing to reset the hard drive. And that's more-or-less what happened. I had a failure, and within two hours of the notification of the failure, I had a new hard drive in my hands on-site. That's pretty impressive, regardless of how you put it.

I would like to see, perhaps, an interface that's a little more intuitive than the existing one. I think that goes to being more familiarity with other systems. I came from an ICE environment, and it sets you in your ways mentality.

When it comes to NetApp, you have to forget about some of the things you've done in the past, in order to kind of get yourself past it.

I wish that the interface was perhaps a little more cognizant. There are people coming from environments where ease of use isn't quite there. It almost sounds terrible, but I think that they could probably make everything a little bit easier to use, where the interface was maybe just a hair bit easier to understand and comprehend exactly where you are in the steps. But, again, you're talking to somebody who may be coming at it from being brand new to a storage environment.

There has not been any downtime. There's never been a downtime directly related to storage environment issue. Anything else was outside the storage environment, so it was typically another company's issue. It was never directly related to NetApp.

In terms of scalability, we've added/matched two additional shelves of storage with very little fanfare. There were no major problems. It was just a matter of upgrading an old SAN controller software, and that was it.

I haven't had to use the technical support much, but my interaction with them has always been very positive and they definitely know their information.

We evaluated HPE, LeftHand before HPE bought them out, and then they became HPE LeftHand.We've also looked at EMC. We've also recently considered HPE MSA technology, and their EEA technology, as well.

We looked HPE 3PAR, before they were HPE. We've looked at pretty much all the big storage vendors out there, such as Tintri and Nimble, but they are more bundled storage and compute.

We decided to stay with NetApp because I'm familiar with their systems. We're already a NetApp customer. So there's a certain investment in time and knowledge with NetApp that we have. We don't want to go back to reinventing the wheel every time we look at storage. We are happy with the product solution.

It's not all about cost. Overwhelmingly, the issue is that you shouldn't be as concerned with cost as much as you should with the scalability and the ability of a system. Even though you may be looking at a product that's more expensive than other equivalents out there, you're probably getting one of the best customer experiences out there, bar none.

I've had to use HPE support, and I've had to use NetApp support, and 100% of the time, I would wind up referring NetApp support overwhelmingly.

When you're looking at everything, it's not all about cost. It's also about usability, scalability, and performance. With all those applications, I've never once had issues with any type of performance, or had scalability problems with NetApp.

The only times we had downtime with our server/storage environment was because of SAN switching issues. One issue was related to a software upgrade on our SAN switches, the other was misconfigured zoning on the SAN switching environment. In both cases, it was human error and not system-intrinsic error that caused our downtime.

I think the valuable features of FlexPod are the integration with several products, especially when it comes to the support model.

If I have any issues, whether it is with be VMware, NetApp, or Cisco, I can call one place and I can get support. It doesn't matter which one I call. I think it's one of the most valuable pieces of it.

Its architecture has been proven, it works together, and it is trusted.

We are using a Citrix VDI implementation. We are about 99% virtualized, so pretty much everything that we do, from the desktop to the servers, is virtualized.

I like how everything just kind of works together. It's been one of those things that have been proven. There are White Papers, a trusted design, and support models. Those are the kinds of things that companies look for. We know there is going to be backing and help when something goes wrong.

We can reduce our team and it has saved us money because it works quickly. In the past, we've gone with other third-party vendors and other products. We ended up having to pay more money in the long run. Going with the FlexPod solution means that we have all the pieces. Having a proven solution and knowing that it works gives us peace of mind and ease of management.

It could always be better.

We have been using this solution for three years.

It is a stable solution. I can't remember the last time we had any kind of major outage.

Up to the point where we needed to replace our controllers on our storage, it had been pretty scalable. I think there is a time when we have to refresh some of the products.

When we needed to, we used the technical support. They were very helpful. It was easy to contact somebody. If one team didn't know the answers, they would be in touch with the other team. That's nice about having a FlexPod team that knows each other's products a little bit, so they can help you resolve your issues.

We worked with CDW consulting to do the setup and the configuration. It went pretty smoothly.

We looked at HPE and that was four years ago. We've worked with CDW. They brought in a number of other vendors with other storage systems. The one we chose fit in with what we wanted to do. We previously used a smaller vendor's storage solution. It didn't quite work with what we wanted to do. We weren't able to fit it in with our model.

Do your research. They all have their own niches. Don't go cheap. That's one thing we've learned: Just because you might see another vendor who offers something a little cheaper, it is not necessarily the best. It might not have the White Papers or the proven technology that works together. That's what is nice about FlexPod, that you do have those elements. This has been working together for many years. They had this relationship with these other companies and you know you'll have the support behind it.

A valuable feature is being a one-rack solution. It was easy to implement and integrate to the existing network. The complexity of how things connect was taken out of it. We use it for mostly for cloud television, CloudTV platforms, and storage of VMware images.

It's a storage solution. That's the benefit.

I do not like the NetApp licensing fees. They are exorbitant. That could become a turn-off to other companies. There are a lot of other streamlined and better solutions out there for a lower price.

It is very stable.

Scalability is very good. You have better horsepower solutions which are great. It is very easy and very scalable. FlexPod itself is pretty scalable. I am pretty happy with the solution itself.

Customer support is very good.

There are several solutions that we used, but I can't be specific for proprietary reasons. We have researched other solutions. We're always researching.

I was involved in some of the initial setup and design. It was very straightforward and very easy.

We are always researching other options. We develop solutions in-house when needed.

It's a great solution. I would recommend FlexPod, except for the licensing fee. I can speak about the implementation part. I don't know what the system admins would say. I'm not able to speak from their perspective.

I would say the ease of management and ease of support. Growth-wise, you can expand east, west, north, and south.

It integrates well with Cisco, NetApp, and VMware. They aren't pointing fingers. They just want to drive to a solution when we have an issue. We have VMware running on it. We have two FlexPods, one in each data center, running about 400 VMs between the two data centers. We run SQL, IAS, and some normal management VMs as well.

Training somebody on how to manage FlexPods is not real difficult. We can use someone who is more junior, to at least initially get up to speed with them. You can manage the storage well, as long as you do it with best practices. It is not a real difficult system to manage. I would say the latest release for NetApp has made that management even easier.

Before the ONTAP 9 release, NetApp was cumbersome and not easy to manage. NetApp as improved a lot in terms of simplicity with ONTAP 9. Pure Storage has made a lot of vendors step up their game on the simplicity side. ONTAP 9 has allowed for most tasks to be wizard-based and dashboards are now easy to read. Making improvements to the user-interface and management will help NetApp stay the leader in storage.

We have been using this for four years.

There have been no problems at all with the stability. It's rock solid. I've never had any issues with down time with FlexPod.

I can scale it east/west. I've added arrays to the system, and I've added storage within those arrays over the last four years with zero downtime.

As with anything, I think that technical support is getting better to drive to a solution. There have been some struggles to drive to what is actually causing problems. Some of our additional applications that we've purchased, like SnapManager for SQL and some of those add-ons for NetApp, didn't really function properly. I'm trying to drive to a solution between the vendor and us. It kind of was a struggle with some of that. I would give technical support a rating of 9/10 for being on par with everything. There is some room for improvement.

When selecting a vendor, I would say my most important issue is not price. It would be scalability and knowing where the company's future roadmap is five years down the road. That's more of a concern to me. I want to make sure the company is still going be around in five years and has a vision, as far as where they want to go.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. As long as you follow the diagram, it's not too hard to set up at all. It wasn't too complex.

The FlexPod technology is really reliable for us. We have no complaints about the reliability and the stability of the product.

We had an older SAN that needed to be improved and the FlexPod technology was chosen for the integration with Cisco and the NetApp storage. We used to have NetApp and Cisco on-site. It was just a natural merge to add the FlexPod technology.

The downside is that the administration is a little bit complex.

Also, don't use the NetApp team to implement it. I did so previously, and it was not the best experience of my life. It is a drawback that you need to use the NetApp team to implement it. It's not easy to work with them and not every technical specialist is a specialist.

We have been using it for two years now.

It is very stable. There has been no down time.

In terms of scalability, we have a project that is ongoing for the next few months. We are going to get into the scalability portion soon.

We did call technical support a couple of times and we had great support from them. They've been responsive to us.

They made the decision before I started working here. I know that they chose it for the reasons I mentioned.

It is complex to set up.

I know that it is really a good product. In the end, it is doing the job.

I like the consolidation in one rack. You have everything coming together, you just assemble it, and you're ready to go. You don't have to purchase different pieces of the hardware to have one solution. This is one of the best features.

We use it mainly for storage. We are just at the beginning, just deployed one in Asia-Pacific. So far, everything works fine and I assume that the colleagues from the datacenter will consider it for other regions, if everything goes well.

Previously, we used NetApp. The big advantage is that the connectivity is in one rack. As I mentioned before, everything is still segmented, but it comes with everything in one box. It is like buying a computer and everything is there already. You just have to turn it on.

The price is something that we are still working on. At some point, it's a bit more expensive than the solution that we had before, as far as I know.

We have no stability problems so far. I haven't heard about any major issues.

Scalability depends on the result that we will have from the one that we already purchased. I think the future will tell if we will scale well or not. I will definitely have this in mind as we move forward.

I didn’t use technical support for FlexPod, but only for NetApp. I know that we are using NetApp support. This is the case for the installation phase or forNetApp itself. I cannot comment on FlexPod support. I assume it was good. I can tell on you, through the eyes of my colleagues from the network part, that everything is fine. My colleagues from the datacenter have used support and they have had no complaints so far.

This is a tricky question. I don't think there was one major reason. It was a combination of the stability of NetApp, the integration with our environment, and that everything comes in one box.

I was involved in the initial setup from the network side of FlexPod and NetApp. I was not involved in the configuration of NetApp itself. In terms of the network side, as long all the information is provided completely, which has happened so far, I have not had any problem setting it up on our network infrastructure.

I would definitely recommend NetApp. Based on our results with NetApp, the stability, and what I know from my datacenter colleagues, it's a really reliable company.

It has 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 SCADA servers, which is a supervisory control and data acquisition system 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 on the server side. It saved us a lot of time. It probably cut our management time of server-network troubleshooting, or just normal management, by 40%.

I can't think of any improvements, 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're 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. It's probably just having more speed, but we're limited by our connections out to the field anyway. Speed would be the area where we would like to see room for improvement.

It's been very stable. We've had one or two issues with a spinning disk, but there was 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.

We have used the technical support. I know my server-side technical lead has done it more than I have. I haven’t heard him complaining. I think he's been very impressed and the responsiveness has been very good.

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

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

We had looked at the EMC VNX series at the time. And that point, I wasn't too involved. I only got pulled in when it came to interfacing it with the network. They chose FlexPod over EMC, due to the Cisco commonality to it. That was one of the major reasons why we went with the FlexPod. We knew Cisco, and we worked with Cisco already. 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.

Go for the solution with the Cisco UCS. It definitely will cut your management time down, and it's a very reliable solution.