FlexPod XCS Reviews

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.

The most valuable features are flexibility, high availability, and redundancy. It's the easiest way to deploy hardware. We use it with VMware. It's the easiest way to deploy solutions quickly and scale out.

In our environment, we are constantly expanding laterally. It allows us to create the capacity and the resources on the fly that we need to get our jobs done.

It provides ease of control and a simplified architecture that allows us to copy a DR, expand, and grow. We have been able to triple our capacity with the same staffing level. We've been able to increase our space and increase our performance without ever increasing the need to hire more people and train them. Training has been our biggest difficulty.

I would like to see an easier implementation, but I think that with newer versions of ONTAP and new versions of FlexPod, it's getting better.

It would be nice to have a single pane to manage all of it, but that's probably a pipe dream.

Every piece has its pluses on high availability and stability. NetApp is exceptional. DCS is perfect. I think it's a perfect marriage. We haven’t had any latency issues.

There haven’t been any issues. Whenever we need to add capacity, we just add another chassis, fill out the chassis and blades, and then add another chassis if needed; or add storage as needed.

They're awesome. I've only had one catastrophic hardware failure. It was resolved within an hour. That was years ago.

We are existing NetApp and Cisco customers. It just seemed like a natural fit. We didn't really consider many other options. We had the basic infrastructure there to begin with, so it was just a very natural, cheap move for us. We already had FC in place. We were already doing many of the things that FlexPod was going towards.
Cost was probably the biggest factor.

Plan for the worst. Hope for the best. Now that there is a clustered ONTAP, I can't see many other solutions being better. I know that everyone's going towards this hyperconvergence, but I think you still need to keep compute and storage separate. You never know where your growth is going to be.

Maybe I'm old school, but depending on your business model. We tend to grow storage more than compute at times; and other times more compute than storage, but it just depends on your particular needs. I like the separation.

A couple of the valuable features are the ease of data management and data portability. That would probably be the crux of it. That came into effect with migration from or upgrading an existing cluster to another cluster; it is quite easy to port across using similar technologies, etc.

Obviously, it has the high availability features; you've got storage failover, or takeover, to upgrade a node non-destructively. Those would be the main valuable features.

The main thing is providing high availability to internal business customers, whether it be just day-to-day operations, HA and, again, non-destructive maintenance.

Specifically, with ONTAP, I would like to see it support more snapshots for retention; greater than 255 snapshots. There are competitors out there offering far more than the 255 snapshots per volume; Nimble, actually, being one of them. Their current marketing blurb is 100,000 snapshots. I need to find out some more details on that. I’d like to see very long-term data protection, an increase in the number of snapshots.

I haven’t had any issues in the day-to-day operations. We have had a few stability issues with some major bugs with it, with ONTAP. We had a particularly nasty bug with one of the QLogic CNA cards, which actually took, probably, seven months to resolve. Eventually it was resolved. It was actually a new bug that was still under investigation with NetApp but that was eventually solved. That's been the only really major glitch recently.

Overall, it's been a very stable platform.

I used technical support for that bug, in conjunction with our SAN managing that process.

Technical support was very good. Obviously, we've used on other occasions as well when we've had difficulties and they usually have been resolved quite quickly.

We've been a NetApp customer probably since 2005, not so much in the FlexPod but actually from the initial FAS arrays. Because we already had the FAS arrays or the FAS systems, it was a natural progression, really. We were looking to refresh or move away from HP for our compute. With FlexPod, we already had the NetApp storage and it was sort of a natural progression. The price point was pretty good.

Initial setup was quite straightforward. I guess our first FlexPod implementation was with one of our data centers. It was a sizable deployment but quite straightforward.

At the time, there weren’t any other vendors on our short list. I guess we were looking at EMC in the early days but I don't remember what the reasoning was. We eventually decided on FlexPod.

When I choose a vendor, cost and ROI are the most important criteria that I look for.

Follow the best practice guides and you can't go wrong.

If you've already got a storage compute environment, a good analysis of what your existing environment is like, what your workload's like, will assist where you place data, where you place your volumes on the FAS system. You generally have a good understanding of what your existing workload is, so you can obviously scale and design your storage layout with FlexPod correctly or most efficiently.

I guess I'm a bit biased in my opinion but I've worked with it for probably seven, eight years. I’ve never had an issue with it and everything that I need to do with it, I've been able to do pretty much.

The ease of configuration and the reliability are the most valuable features.

Every deployment we’ve done has been on FlexPod. The ease of configuration saves us a lot of time and we can stand up in remote offices without highly-trained people.

I think the support has been our pain point, the hardware and setup are pretty good, and solid but the support could be improved. We always tell them about that.

We’ve been using it since 2009.

So far it’s been really good. It was rough for the first year or so on the Cisco side but last couple of years it’s been pretty stable.

It’s really easy to scale out, and I feel like it scales very well.

It's gotten better, as it was rough at the start. On the NetApp side they will open up the case for you with the other vendors. I had experiences where they didn’t know why we were calling or what a FlexPod was, but that was years ago and since then it has gotten far more streamlined.

Very straightforward and easy.

Peer reviews are not as important as user conferences but market research is there for a reason.

The most valuable feature is the mirroring and FlexClone capabilities on the storage side and with the Oracle database. It quickly creates a new database and copies the original, but it doesn’t need to disturb the original if you don’t want it to.

Probably decreased working time, as we now have a faster deployment of development and test databases.

We switched to the new NetApp clustered environment and discovered that the monitoring and reporting features are a little behind the older versions.

We have been using NetApp for over 10 years, almost 15 years at this point.

It's been really stable, and I don't think we've had any issue or outages since we've been using it.

Scalability has not been an issue for us in this environment, but in other environments it scales very easily by adding more storage.

Overall, the support from the NetApp side has been very good, and is quick to respond if there are hardware issues, etc. They are usually very good, although they don’t have their own field technicians, and a quick response time as well. This is true on the server side as well, quick response and it shows up in the expected time.

Deployment was not overly complex, it takes time but not overly complex. For our use, and the Oracle database, it’s more complex on the Oracle side of things (E-business suite).

We always speak to other vendors, whether EMC, Oracle for Exadata, those are the main ones.

We went with NetApp in the end because it's established in the environment already, and we just had to upgrade the hardware. It was something we knew worked and would do the job.

Customer references are important and peer reviews are very important. Sometimes we do a test or POC, but that’s hard to do.

Our primary use case for FlexPod is for better storage.

The FlexPod solution increased back-end productivity and streamlined our IT admin.

The most valuable features of FlexPod are high availability and scalability.

In the digital future, I would like to see included more code compatibility. The storage should be more mobile. We should be able to move it from place to place.

FlexPod needs more support on ML/AI networks.

FlexPod is very stable.

We're still working on scalability. We have to keep low price versions of the high-end equipment. I would like to see a little more data compression on the solution.

The FlexPod technical support has been fairly good. I cannot complain.

We knew that we needed to invest by talking with consultants.

The initial setup of FlexPod was complex in the way that we had to manage the data.

We did not use a consultant. We do it all by ourselves.

On a scale from 1 to 10, I would rate this product an 8. Consolidation is possible. 

FlexPod doesn't compare to other products. Do many tryouts first. Try to just mimic different environments to get a different view of the platform.

The consistent delivery that we receive from the products. We deliver it to different customers, and we know it will be a consistent end-to-end solution as well. So, this helps us from a delivery side of things.

According to the product managers, there are some new products coming which will address some of our concerns around portability and compliance.

With the design guides that we go through, it has obviously been vetted and validated. It is very stable in our eyes.

Generally, our deployments are on the smaller side. We have been able to leverage the FlexPod express side for smaller deployments. I haven't hit any larger scale ones, but from everything that I have read, it would scale relevantly.

With the support side, we deal directly with Cisco, not directly with NetApp. We do have support from all of the vendors, even if it is or isn't a FlexPod solution. The support that we get from NetApp is second to none.

I wouldn't say it is more complex. It is different, because there are a lot more components than if you were just going to buy a traditional compute only or storage only solution. So, there is an added complexity given the size of the deployment and the number of components. However, it is not difficult from a deployment perspective by any stretch. If you were deploying those components individually, it would be the same amount of effort.

I would rate it close to a nine or 10, because of what the product looks like, the validated designs which are out there, and the support behind it. It's a great product. That is why we sell it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

A combination of everything from best of breed, support, and if other customers who have used it have had good experiences with it.

It is for video solutions. It saves us a lot of money in our environment. My job is to make sure that the government saves money. 

The use case for us is that many users are able to use this when they travel out of the country. With computers right now, all you need to do is log into the website to access the resources, then you can use them in your flexible solution.

Right now, we are trying to deploy on multiple laptops. Using a VDI, which is part of FlexPod solutions, we are able to do this. You can use it on cellphone, iPad, etc.

The flexibility: I used to do the video blog solutions. It is very easy, because with NetApp, a lot of people use NetApp. There is more flexibility to configure with Cisco laser switches.

For the next release, because I know that we are using Pure Storage, what I want to see is the GUI interfaces on this UCS monitor.

The product is robust, stable, and has flexibility. 

It is very scalable.

I would rate technical support as a 10 out of 10. They are good and responsive.

At my previous job, I used to use Vblock, Dell 7000 series (from Dell EMC, Cisco, and BMC).

It was pretty straightforward. I was the main engineer during the initial setup.

• Read the white paper solution online about the product. 
• Engage with the engineers.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Relationship is the key, so they respond better. We may need an onsite engineer to come and do an evaluation for us.