FlexPod XCS Reviews

Primary use case is for virtualization of our phone systems and our domain.

Being able to contact one place to get support, e.g., if it is the virtualization end of it, hardware, or storage. There is just one place to get support.

It has simplified our support.

• Reference design
• Ease of use
• Ease of support

They could improve their technical support team.

Unified management would be really nice, having one a single pane of glass to manage everything do with the solution.

It has been very stable. There has been no downtime.

Over the last six years, it has scaled very well.

On scale of one to 10, I would rate them about a seven. They need to have a specific phone number for you to call in for the FlexPod solution. Some of the partner support knows if it is for FlexPod, they will get you to the right department. 

Overall, I do reach the right person when I call them and they do offer the proper guidance.

We were previously using very individual systems, then our vendor suggested this. Also, because our phone systems, we were also using reference design.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We had a managed project team which did the installation.

We evaluated one other vendor.

We chose FlexPod because we were previous customers and know their support structure.

When considering a solution, look at it in total from purchase. Then, look at what is going on five years down the road. Do a comparison of expansion, ease of expansion, and everything else.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: reliability. We receive this now from the FlexPod solution.

• Ease of use
• Safety
• Total cost of ownership
• Return on investment
• Cutting your sysadmin's time in half
• The single pane of glass: Where you can configure your compute and manage your storage, all from a single pane of glass, and it makes it easier on management.

Also, the 1-800 number to call for support across the multiple parts of the FlexPod. So, FlexPod is basically a joint venture between Cisco, VMware and NetApp. You call the 1-800 number and you get supported throughout the stacks.

Total cost of ownership (TCO) is key. The other things are the sysadmin's time is approximately cut in half: managing servers, building servers, deployment, and automation.

It is uniquely valuable for a company in the financial services industry. It is critical for us to use the latest and greatest in technology to have that edge against competitors in our marketplace.

Add more automation into the Cisco UCS firmware upgrade process to make it more streamlined than it is today.

I have been using FlexPod since 2012.

We have had a few deployments of FlexPod, one for production and one for the disaster recovery (DR) sites, and we have been happy with it so far.

If you do not take the time to learn the technology before deploying it, you are not going to be able to deploy it as smooth and as fast.

It is very stable. We have had it since 2012, and we have not had major issues with it. As long as you know what you do and you schedule your patching, following the processes that you have in place. You will have minor issues with it.

It scales out really well. If you need compute, all you need to do, just add more blades into your chassis. If you run out of chassis, you can just add more chassis, then you can add more blades. Same thing with the storage on the back-end, you can add more storage shelves, whether it is SSD, SAS, or All Flash.

We have definitely used the tech support on multiple occasions, like with firmware upgrades, to get their opinion, and regarding interoperability matrices for the different products. If you upgrade the firmware for the CISCO UCS, you need to ensure the firmware version that you are upgrading to is going to work with your VMware vSphere and with the NetApp ONTAP software OS.

They are knowledgeable and we get through to the right people.

I was involved in the initial setup. It is straightforward if you understand the technology and how it works. If you are new to the technology, you will require some training for your people and your team.

• It's actually pretty easy to put together.
• It's very easy to keep up and maintain.
• Allows for quick use. I use power show on the system to actually get the infrastructure up and running.
• It runs solid, with no problems.

It's simplified the infrastructure (the backend infrastructure). I went from a 1GB infrastructure to 10GB, and it's been really good and fast.

They could improve on the small stuff, like fixing and replacing broken cables.

I am looking forward to playing around with the hyper-converged infrastructure, but that'll be on the next upgrade.

It is solid. You turn it on, you set it up, and it runs.

It's good. I brought in the older storage as well, so that's let me keep my existing storage. However, it's a small system.

I have had to used Cisco tech support for it, not NetApp. The Cisco support is amazing.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was fairly straightforward. There's enough diagrams and the validated architecture document basically had it all there for me.

I have a partnership with Fujitsu New Zealand, and their consultants there actually sat down with me and talked over what I needed, and came up with this solution.

I did look at the Hitachi Data Systems Hyperconverged Infrastructure, but it used virtualization for storage that I wasn't prepared to use simply because we already do a nested virtualized environment, so I didn't want virtualization on top of virtualization.

I run a very odd system in terms of what we teach our students. We virtualize the hypervisor, then they put virtual machines inside the hypervisor, and we use the NetApp Vsim for them to provision their own storage. We do some of the NetApp curriculum on that as well as and we do the VMware install/configure/manage course on top of it as well. So, I didn't want virtualization on top of virtualization for storage. That's what it amounts to.

It's a pretty smooth solution. For anybody wanting to get a small system to actually teach on as well as learn and use, you can't beat FlexPod.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

Trust relationship, either knowing somebody that actually knows them and has had a good experience, and if I find that then I'm not too worried. However, it's also about the personal relationship. It's about getting to know the people you're dealing with at the vendor. All three of them, Fujitsu, Cisco, and NetApp have just been amazing, particularly NetApp for me. They've done some amazing stuff with me.

That it works. That it does exactly what it says on the tin. That once it's set up, it does exactly what's its supposed to do. There are no "gotchas," there are no "oopsies." Not in this particular use case. There is no hidden BS that has to be satisfied, this, that, or the other. It just does exactly what it's supposed to do.

Up time, cost, predictability.

With the old Dell EqualLogic, EMC, up-time was always an issue. There was always something that created a problem here and there. We have, in four years, not had a single system-down issue. That's hard to beat.

The predictability of our system utilization: I can predict fairly easily when I need to go out and buy new shelves because I can trend it all. I can fairly easily predict where I need to open more aisles. I can fairly easily predict where I need more space. It just works.

The CLI part of it is still evolving enough that commands that you expect to do something become deprecated and you want to take their place and you have to keep up with the code base. In this code base you do this, and in this code base you do this, and in this code base you do that. But for the most part its good and, let's be honest, everything changes.

Automatic tiering would be good to have.

My biggest thing is I would love to see a native SMB or NFS front end to an optic store on the AFF and FAS platforms. Right now you want me to go out and buy a front end for it that creates an optic store on it and gives me the SMB interface. I would love to see that as a native part of the SBM. It doesn't have to be the end all be all; it doesn't have to be this hyper-scale thing but just the fact that I have it, so I can dip my toe in it, and I can get something that kind of works, that would be epic; that is my main thing.

The other big annoyance I have with Net App is the fragmentation of all the software. I have SnapManager, I have this, I have that, and they're all slightly different. They all look slightly different. They all come in different VMs. Some are OBAs, some are installed on Windows, some have weird requirements like, "No, no, no, it has to run on this version of Windows." It would be nice to just have all of that in one giant application and then just turn on and off different features based on license keys. That would make things easier.

About four years.

Great. It's been perfect for four years. You can't beat that.

So far I have not had any issues at all. The only couple of things I would like to see would be something, as I said, like internal tiering where you could automatically set up an aggregate spread across a 10K disc and have the controller automatically tier it. But now we're going all flash anyway so who cares? We've kind of brute forced our way out of the problems.

They're good. They're knowledgeable, absolutely. I have no complaints with the tech support that we have had to deal with.

We switched because EMC and Dell, and EqualLogic sucked and it was driving me nuts and it never worked.

It was a paradigm shift because every stack has its own set of unique ways of doing things and getting used to that and getting into that mindset took a little bit of effort but once you get it, it's clear sailing.

Upgrades are not complex.

We're a law firm. I think this product is valuable for pretty much anybody who has a large amount of data that they need to manage. I don't think that this product is uniquely valuable for a law firm.

I am a very happy customer.

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.

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.

I would say that the interoperability matrix tool (IMT) is the most valuable feature as it helps us define versions and components we use in our configurations.

This allows us to know what versions everything needs to be at, and we have one pane of glass to view that at.

I think a little bit about some of the other models, especially in the hyper-converged space where you add storage and compute at the same time, but on the converged side of things you add each as needed and not both.

Mixed – we’ve had a couple different issues with upgrading. Upgrading one vendor without the other has been difficult, e.g. to upgrade Cisco you need to upgrade NetApp etc.

I would say medium – it’s hard to move between one FlexPod to another, you fill one up its hard to move off of it.

Historically it’s been bad, but recently it got better. Previously, opening a FlexPod case was difficult you had to go from one vendor to another, now its better and they are using FlexPod back channels more, but it was difficult.

I would say setup was complex – most of the people who set up the first FlexPod have left and the upgrades have been modular and there are independent teams with that and that issue goes back to the scalability because were adding storage and compute at different times.

I think it depends on how you are organized. If you have hardware and storage in the same leadership chain its great. I think one of the reasons that we have pain, is that it doesn’t fit our business organization very well because we have two separate managers and therefore, there is stepping on toes.