FlexPod XCS Reviews

We are running mostly virtualizations. We use it for VMware, Hyper-V, and XenServer. On top of that, we use it for some Microsoft, Linux, Oracle SQL, and web development.

It's just a nice simple solution. There is a single number to call for support. If you call and say that you have a FlexPod, they will usually include the VMware or UCS pieces for you. You don't have to call Cisco or VMware directly. You can just call your FlexPod help center, and if they know it's a FlexPod, they'll help you with NetApp questions. They will also help you with VMware and Cisco UCS questions.

I would like to see a single upgrade download, so you could download an upgrade that would upgrade the NetApps that would have all the parts. Right now, you have to go and download the VMware upgrade pieces from the Cisco website. You have to download the Cisco stuff from their site, and then download the NetApp stuff from their website. It would be helpful if they had a single download area for the versions that work together. I can't think of anything else to improve. They support all the protocols: SCOE and NFS.

There are no issues at all with stability. Everything is redundant. The Cisco UCS platform is rock solid. The switches are rock solid. You have Nexus switches that are redundant in power and in usability. The NetApps are all rock solid because they have dual controllers. You are running cluster modes so you have lift migration and you have storage failover. There's really no downtime because everything is virtualized and everything is redundant.

Scalability is great. All three parts are real scalable. If you want to add more things to your VMware, you just add the ESXi host. To add to more to the UCS, you just add more blades. To add more to the NetApp, you just put more controllers or shelves under the cluster. The scalability is the same with all three products.

Technical support is awesome. We own a FlexPod, and so do my customers. They've seen a lot of stuff. They've worked with all three vendors. You don't have to call the other vendors, and they usually will bring in resources as needed.

We look at reports out there, and see who is up and to the right. I think that Pure Storage was leading the charge on SSD for a while, but the all-flash FAS has really been awesome.

The ability to do better deduplication is what the differentiation is right now. Who is doing the best deduplication and who is doing the best compression? Right now, the all-flash FAS with 9.2 is pretty awesome on deduplication and compression.

Go look for somebody who is doing it and has been doing it for a while. The FlexPods have been shown to be reliable. They work with two of the best vendors. Cicso: For the compute and for the networking, you can't get better. VMware: For the virtualization. They just work great together. There are other converge solutions out there like EMC, but I think that these are the three agnostic ones. EMC obviously owns a piece of VMware, so it's hard to know what parts they want to play. Maybe Pure Storage is the other agnostic, but I believe that NetApp, right now, is doing the best converged FlexPod design in the FlexPod space.

There was a lot of documentation around it, in terms of what works with what. Customers know that if they upgrade their NetApp to version 9, they know what versions of UCS they need to upgrade to and what versions of VMware will work with that.

The most valuable features are its modularity, scalability, and the ability to scale down the infrastructure and remove some of the physical hardware that was required previously. It gives us the flexibility to build upon it, whether we do one new service or we do the blade service. With the FlexPod, in general, with the UCS chassis and with NetApp, the way they can intermingle and work together seamlessly was a big benefit to us.

As I’ve mentioned, it allowed us to remove some of the redundant hardware aspects of our infrastructure. At the same time, it allowed us to upgrade our top-of-the-rack switches. We were using some of the legacy MDS fiber switches. The Nexus 5Ks gave us the ability to do fiber channel native and FCOE, as well as giving us that fast speed backbone bandwidth that we know we need for FlexPod.

We have greater flexibility than what we've had in the past. Most of our systems were legacy. We're starting to go through a process of upgrading the infrastructure. FlexPod gives us that flexibility to choose between remote sites or the headquarter site; and basically choose between FlexPod Mini, FlexPod Express or full blown FlexPod with 5Ks, UCS chassis and so on. I think the flexibility in the FlexPod designs is what really attracted our organization to it.

We really like the all-flash arrays and the solid-state drives. We’d really like to see, not so much from NetApp but from our perspective, going more towards the SolidFire and doing some metro clusters with NetApp.

So far, we have not had any issues with stability. We just started implementing or migrating some of the services, building some of the new services onto it. We're pretty young into the FlexPod but the future for FlexPod and for our organization looks bright.

As I’ve mentioned, we have a NetApp representative on site. He does most of the storage stuff for us. We rely on them quite a bit. They're fantastic. We get great support with them.

We were on legacy equipment already. We basically said, "What's the next big thing?" Obviously, being a partner with NetApp, they try to promote FlexPod as much as possible.

Initial setup was pretty straight forward. At first, it can be sort of daunting, with all of the components that are brought together, but once you actually start developing the service profiles and the servers, that's pretty much all it is. You've basically got a chassis that serves servers. Once you have the grand scheme of the design, the configurations after that were pretty simple.

I don't deal with the pricing too much but, from what I understand, we got a pretty good deal on some of the FlexPod equipment that we have.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

If you don't have a reseller that you can talk to, talk to some industry experts. Get a demo. Basically, get an idea of what the FlexPod can do for you and which deployment model fits best for your company.

As I’ve mentioned, given what we were dealing with before, integrating with Cisco and NetApp storage, the marriage between those two companies, they came up with a perfect solution that is pretty modular and flexible. We can scale it however we like it, to whatever site we're going to deploy it at.

I'm not too concerned about more integration between the Cisco and NetApp systems. Obviously, you're going to have some separation there, because they are two different companies. Obviously, the interoperability of the different components, being able to work together, is great enough as it is. Being able to have one user interface that controls everything, I don't think you ever get that but, who knows? Cisco could buy out NetApp; who knows? They might just absorb into one interface. For me, that’s not so important, but I can see where some customers, some users, might look at that as a benefit.

When I look at a vendor, the most important criteria for us is what type of premier support they have. If something breaks, do we have 24-hour support? Obviously, pricing comes along with those but I think support is most important to us.

There are very many features, but from experience, the single point of contact for support has been valuable to our customers. They do not have the headache of seeking support with multiple vendors. The single point of support supports hardware, hypervisor, and guest systems running in the FlexPod environment. (NOTE: Your level of support with the guest OS vendor such as RedHat MUST BE premium support, which means spending a little bit more on support, but total peace of mind.)

We don’t use it within our organization. We deploy this for other organizations. We can share the white papers once we are done with customers that we have successfully done this with.

It’s not the easiest solution to deploy and it doesn’t come integrated like VCE Vblock and HPE ConvergedSystem is (not really plug and play). To simplify what I mean, it’s like seeing a bed in the store; you buy it; and it’s delivered to your house with an easy-to-setup manual and the bed in different pieces with different sets of screws and you need to know what fits where.

If you have expertise setting up such environments, then you are good, but for customers or novices, it becomes a nightmare and stuff may actually be left out.

I have used this for the last four years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

Unlike most converged and “hypercoverged” solutions, you can scale up or scale out on either compute, storage, networking, or ALL. Sometimes, the client just needs scale on one aspect; for example, add in storage. The design doesn’t change. With hypercoverged, you find you need extra compute, you need to add a whole node (compute, storage, and networking), which means you don’t have a cost-effective solution that offers a true ROI or, with VCE Vblock, you need another block.

Technical support is outstanding (10/10). Remember, you will pay a little more for additional support for your guest operating system and app vendors such as Microsoft Exchange, but in turn, total piece of mind.

We previously used VCE Vblock, VSPEX, Nutanix, SimpliVity, VxRail, HPE ConvergedSystem, and many others.

We still use some of these products, such as Nutanix, because of many advantages it has especially with new private cloud clients (VDI, virtualization, etc.) and service provider architectures, but the bottom line for a customer is:

• Price in terms of ROI and value for money.
• Flexibility: Does the solution scale both up and out considering the previous point?
• Ease of management, reporting, provisioning (relieving the headache for day-to-day management of infrastructure).
• Support that goes beyond their own boundaries.

I must say, initial setup is the only challenge for a new FlexPod deployment team but once you have set it up, it is very easy to manage and scale.

Pricing and licensing is very affordable from a FlexPod perspective. Bear in mind, for total peace-of-mind support, make sure the guest operating system and off-the-shelf application vendors have premium support so that you can integrate all their supports together into one.

We deploy cloud solutions. We constantly evaluate products.

Definitely ensure you size the environment correctly.

The most valuable features are the service profiles and the temporary profiles that are available if you lose one of your servers. You can move the service template from one server to another. That's an advantage, as you can set it and there's not a lot you have to do. It minimizes the time you spend on administration. It is easy to use and to get support. There's a 1-800 number to get support from Cisco and they are helpful. 

My admin team doesn't have to spend a lot of time trying to provision servers. Provisioning servers used to take hours, and now it takes up to five minutes. 

In addition to that, it helps us with the automation. We use other tools that comply with FlexPod, such as Cisco UCS Director, to help us with workflow automation. That saves us a lot of time and money. My engineers can focus on running new stuff or trying to work on what matters most. They can work on applications more, rather than troubleshooting.

I would to see a little bit more in the FlexPod interface.

This solution is very stable. We haven't had any issues with it so far. It’s been running in our environment for the last three years without a single problem. The upgrade is easy, and there are a lot of tools available when you're planning to do an upgrade. Tools are available by the vendors to tell you which version you need to use for the different FlexPod components.

From the name "FlexPod", you know that it's very flexible. You can scale up or scale out if you need more computes, if you have blade servers, or if you need more storage. You just add additional shelves and then you have extra storage. If you need more virtualization, you just add more licenses, and you can accommodate more VMware ESX.

Before I got to this company, I worked at another company where we had one FlexPod device. We decided to deploy another FlexPod device. After I left that company, I went to another company and adopted the VCE solution. I got exposed to both of them and I was able to judge which solution was going to be best and meet the company’s needs. 

That company had an aged infrastructure that was obsolete. We had to do an infrastructure face lift. It was easy for me, as I was exposed to both VCE and FlexPod.

It made more sense to go with FlexPod. I already had expertise on how to use it, NetApp storage, and VMware. I didn't have to spend a lot of time training my team how to deploy a solution when we already had prior experience on how to use it.

In addition to that, the cost was good compared to other products.

Like VCE, OpenStack was a determining factor because it was going to take us a lot of time to deploy it. Rather than spending three months to deploy OpenStack, it was going to take us a year to get the solution up and running. 

The other solution we looked was Hitachi VSP. At the time, VSP was new on the market and didn't have a validated design by Cisco, EMC, or any of the other vendors. It wasn't adopted widely in the market. I did not feel comfortable going with that. FlexPod was more adopted and in use.

If you are looking into a new storage solution, look at the return on investment, what your requirements are, what types of workloads you need to use, and pick the best storage solution for you.

The most valuable features are reliability and the ability to give our end-users a reliable system with the performance, the IOPS, and the latency that they want. It just solved all our issues.

We're using all-flash FlexPod, and that's drastically increased the performance of our applications. Our gaming floor and our applications are more reliable.

I would like to see if it could come down in price a little bit. You get what you pay for, and it is good. It's a valuable appliance, but if it could come down in price, it would be great.

We've never had an issue. It's been stable from day one.

We've actually grown it. We've added more nodes to it and the scalability was awesome. It was piece of cake to scale.

We have used technical support and it was great. We opened a ticket, they worked it out on the back-end, and they gave us the solution.

Previous to this solution, we were using NetApp without FlexPod. We had a lot of issues, so this actually fixed those issues.

I was part of the decision to switch. I like the reliability and the all-flash performance.

I was involved in the setup. It was pretty simple actually. We had a form we filled out with all the information, and it was just taking one step after another. It was just a matter of populating the information.

We evaluated EMC. We were already invested in NetApp very heavily, so that swayed our decision in that direction.

When selecting a vendor, I want to know that they are tech-savvy. I want them to know our environment, our system, and how it functions on the back-end. I want them to help us out if we have any problems.

If you are really trying to find a solution to your problems, FlexPod will do it for you and fix it them.

The integration with Cisco is the most valuable feature.

Because we are a big virtualization shop, this tool has benefited our organization. I don't see the benefit from a management perspective, because we still have to manage each and every device separately.

The integration with Cisco is pretty valuable. It has definitely helped us to build our solutions as per the requirements.

I look forward to testing features in ONTAP 9 next-generation data management software during the pilot release. Let's see how that goes.

Stability is a big question mark. We having been using NetApp since 2014 and in the last two years, we have grown quite a bit across the globe. We are now using the FAS system.

We had one data loss incident happen in our organization. The other incident happened due to some known bugs. We suffered with lengthy downtime, so stability has not been fantastic.

It's not a scalable solution. I don't see any scalability occurring. We have 30-40 controllers. Controllers are not there so we can just sit there. I don't see that they are enough to scale out a solution. We have essentially bought AT&T, so we will see how it goes.

On the support side, we had to run to other vendors. If we required specification support, there were plenty of times where we got stuck in the middle of getting a solution. The technical support from NetApp and Cisco often say different things. I'm looking for better, centralized support.

We didn’t have a previous solution. It was relevant for us to get FlexPod from NetApp.

I was involved in the initial setup of FlexPod. When we first set it up, we did receive the help of a NetApp partner. We had an initial issue in which Cisco could not identify the NetApp filer. Cisco and NetApp took almost two months to get this resolved. The setup was very problematic.

There so many options now. It solely depends on your requirements. Some tools have good features, but I don't see any specifics of this tool that I could recommend to someone else.

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.

One of the valuable features is ease of use. Getting any environment set up is probably the easiest thing to do. You can set up the entire solution in about a day or so. When we have a requirement for a specific project, we don't need to worry about getting into different gears. FlexPod is a converged infrastructure, so when you get it, you have reference architecture. You just install it and start using it. Those kinds of features are really good.

The storage scales out and you can keep on adding your UCSs. Adding the whole scale-out technology is great. You can grow as you need to and that's a really good feature.

I don't think there's much to be improved with the tool since you can now scale out storage. Before that, this was a shortcoming in that you had to upgrade the head every time.

I would like to see the ability to combine a couple of FlexPods into a cluster. You cannot do that now. You cannot combine two FlexPods into a single entity, into a larger FlexPod. To the best of my knowledge, FlexPods are meant to be in silos and you cannot create clusters at all. If there is a way to do that, that would be interesting.

If there could be a FlexPod management piece, then you could manage all your FlexPods from a single console. That piece is missing even though there are some NetApp tools where you can manage. However, those management tools are specific for the storage.

I would like to be able to manage FlexPod as a single entity for all the different components. If there could be a single tool which can monitor all of them together, that would definitely give a big edge. It would be great if you could manage all of your FlexPods from a single location.

The tool is pretty stable. Stability-wise, I would give it the highest rating. If you follow the reference document, in terms of how to set up FlexPod, it's a very stable environment upon which to work.

I have used technical support, but not exclusively for FlexPod; maybe questions here and there related to the FlexPod environment. I don't think we have ever used FlexPod tech support which is there in NetApp. We have pretty competent resources in-house, so we never feel the need to use FlexPod support.

I was involved in the decision to switch to this product. We were looking for a tool that was designed for the way our organization works. We wanted a silo environment for different applications. Since we have segmentation in our company, we have different domains, and FlexPod really does fit in really well in those situations where you need a FlexPod for a particular application or for a job area. There’s an idea of implementing Citrix and VDI on it, so those kinds of applications are really good.

We were the first company to use EMC's Vblock implementation, and it was a Vblock pain. I was not there when the company selected Vblock, but I was told that there were a lot of issues. Being the first customer on Vblock was really a nightmare. We had to move to FlexPod. But it doesn't mean that Vblock was not good. Our timing on the purchase of Vblock was not right. Our expertise in the company was more Cisco driven and FlexPod really fit in well with that.

I was involved in the installation. FlexPod, or any converged or hyper-converged infrastructure, requires a lot of planning. Once you have your planning done properly, you can just work with networking and other teams. If you have a good coordination with the teams, it's pretty easy to set-up.

I was not involved in the decision-making process. Things have changed since Vblock was launched seven years ago. FlexPod and Vblock both have very similar architecture and I don't see any big pros and cons between them. I think it's just a comfort level with respective companies. If a company has more investment in Cisco and VMware, that's how the FlexPod architecture is designed. I have no comment on Vblock right now.

There were no other vendors at the time. I was going with NetApp only for non-FlexPod environments. That was when we started buying stuff, which was about six years back when there was no competition. However, everybody has their own FlexPod now. Nimble has something like their own stack. Pure has a Pure stack. Everybody's coming with their own converged infrastructure and we are looking around.

When selecting a vendor, partnership plays an important role. A good partner will provide a kind of an independent review of the different vendors. When we select a vendor, we look at:

• Our means
• Our relationship with the vendor
• The standing of the vendor in the industry
• The vendor's new innovative technology
• How the vendor is competing in the market
• How competitive the vendor is in terms of price.

We look at other technologies because other technologies do provide similar kinds of things as NetApp at a cheaper price. That's how other vendors are rolling over each other in the market right now. They can provide the same thing for less money. These are important things, but the company stability and their goodwill in the industry are important factors as well.

Our experience using this tool is that we have been very happy with it for over six year. The solution has given us whatever our company has wanted. It has delivered in a very short time and has quick turn-around for different projects.

I also suggest looking around. NetApp is a good case for us. It really solves our issues. Although there are other solutions available on the market, this tool is definitely worth looking at it.

FlexPod is not cheap and the way things are going, you could probably get the same thing at half the price from another vendor. NetApp has to be very competitive on the prices in order to really compete in this market.

The two big draws for us are the form factor and the converged infrastructure. We'd been using Dell blade centers and HPE blade centers before that. The density and the full integration between NetApp and the compute side, we really enjoyed.

The time to deployment is definitely a lot faster. It enabled us to replace really antiquated equipment. That was the big thing for us. Going with the converged infrastructure, as opposed to the non-converged that we were using before, really enables us to spin up the storage and the network side that much quicker.

Just continuing to improve upon speed would be my biggest area with room for improvement, the 10-gig backbone. I'd like to see that increase eventually.

We have been using it for two years all over the place. We haven't had one UCS or NetApp hardware problem on any of the FlexPods the whole time.

The stability has been top notch. We haven't had any outages at all.

It is absolutely scalable. We haven't scaled yet because we bought very large, but I'm sure it's going to be easy when we do it.

We used NetApp support for one of the problems we were having, and we solved it relatively quickly. I'm a big fan of NetApp support.

We previously used Dell blade centers and HPE blade centers.

We had vendors do it. I was kind of there peripherally with my team, but I was not overly involved.

The process was great. Our vendors really knew what they were doing, so even though it was our first FlexPod, they helped us power right through it.

We evaluated HPE, Dell, and FlexPods all at the same time. We went with the FlexPods. We thought that the price and converged infrastructure offering was more powerful than those offerings from HPE and Dell.

I don't remember what the HPE one was, but the Dell was like an EqualLogic SAN. The Dell just wasn't impressive in terms of features and management more than performance. We were a NetApp shop historically. This enabled us to get the converged infrastructure with NetApp as the back end. This was probably the most compelling reason for us.

Don't design it yourself. Use the certified designs, especially for FlexPod. The one time we went with our own design, we ended up going back and reengineering it so we could put in a certified design later on.

The most valuable feature is the scalability, how the infrastructure can grow. We can grow easily with the infrastructure.

We offer cloud services to our customers in Panama. We can grow when our customers ask for more capacity or more processing. We only add more servers or we only add more storage to the infrastructure.

Maybe the migration tools for all of the environments could be improved. We can change the storage in the infrastructure but when we need to change the switches or other components that we can change easily, I don't know how to migrate that component. I’d like to be able to migrate that much easier.

We have been working with FlexPod for four years, maybe, and we haven’t had any problems.

It’s very scalable.

We have not used technical support yet. We don't have any problems with FlexPod.

Last year, we bought Vblock infrastructure and CloudBurst infrastructure from IBM. We switched because they don't have the scalability and the performance that we have now in FlexPod.

We decided to invest in FlexPod because we have a good relationship with NetApp. We did not only invest in FlexPod; it’s possible that most of our clouds are NetApp.

It's very, very easy to manage and to build.

We evaluated EMC, Hitachi, IBM and Huawei. We chose NetApp because they have more capability with snapshots that the other environments and vendors do not have.
The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are price, performance, scalability, and management.

I recommend buying FlexPod technology.

I think other vendors have more scalability because they use higher-density disks and they can use clusters for storage. When we use a NetApp cluster, we only have a processing cluster. If one controller fails or a pair of controllers fails, all the disks that are connected to those controllers also fail.

We built FlexPod. We didn’t buy it. We bought the Cisco servers, the switches and the NetApp storage. When we built the first FlexPod, we bought infrastructure for the Guatemala and Dominican Republic data centers. We have the same infrastructure for all of the sites.