FlexPod XCS Reviews

Ease of deployment is the most valuable feature.

I think that there are lots of benefits to using FlexPod. It goes back to the ease of deployment, especially with the projects I’ve been involved in. If you need a refresh on the whole infrastructure, it helps immensely.

I think that there is always room for improvement in any product. I guess the training availability and infinite scalability could be better, and it’s getting there.

It’s great – no issues with stability.

I didn’t run into any issues with scalability, and although I haven’t looked at the specs recently, but I believe it scales to most environments needs, and I’m still considering it for my new environment. We have a 30-petabyte environment, and we're looking to FlexPod for our database infrastructure.

I would say that I haven’t had to contact FlexPod specific support but Netapp overall I would give them an 8-9/10.

My initial setup was a partner, I didn’t know there were walk-through guides, but once I found those it was immensely better. It was cumbersome, but then eventually the installs were much simpler.

I would say that you should seriously consider it. It’s very worthwhile.

We primarily use it to provide compute resources for customers. It is basically a data center in a box, and it performs very well for us.

The biggest benefit for us, as a partner, is the ease of implementing it. Because the configuration tends to be relatively consistent, we have a series of configuration templates that we can just pretty much stamp out on demand. I can do an entire data to center deployment in under a day now.

It scales well. It allows us to have very flexible architecture but to have the same level of simplicity that we'd normally expect in hyper-converged environments.

I'd like to see a little bit simpler management pane. Using UCS Director to front everything is good and UCS Director is a good product and it's priced well for what it does, but for a lot of that upper mid-market, it's probably a little bit of overkill for what they need. They just want a nice, simply portal to go through and see what's going on. So if there was something that was middle of the road, it would be well received.

The stability has been awesome.

Technical support is very good. We've been very happy with the response we've received. I feel they guide us through the entire process. I don't necessarily get the right person the first time when calling, but I don't think you ever get that with a Support Desk.

We were just building stacks by hand. We were strongly encouraged by Cisco - we partner with them - and when the platform began to get some traction, we looked into it and got on board.

For me, the most important thing when working with a vendor is the flexibility. We have great partner relationships with Cisco and NetApp, but it's the flexibility of the platform and the product, the way we can sell and implement it, that makes it really easy for us.

The setup is not complex but there are a lot of moving pieces. There are a lot of components to go through and touch and configure the very first time, but once you get a couple under your belt it's very easy to go through and stamp it out from there. If you follow the standardized templates and the design guides, it takes a lot of the work out of it.

My advice is to read the design guides, that is the most important thing. Also, work with an integrator wherever possible.

I rate FlexPod an eight out of 10. If there was a simpler management pane, maybe a little bit more flexibility in terms of multiple hypervisors in a single deployment, I would rate it higher. But aside from those issues, we're very happy.

My favorite part is the storage side, allocating the storage, it's very easy. The WWNs, you got the virtual WWNs. It's a little different from physical servers. I like that it's pretty easy to provision storage.

From a user perspective, they have no issues.

As far as my role and what I do (my duties), it's easy. They are able to see their storage immediately, they don't have any problems with connectivity issues like you'll see on a physical server compared to a blade implementation.

Usability: It's a little bit convoluted. It'd be nice if they had it pretty straightforward. If it was a straightforward out-of-the-box configuration and could operate out of the box, that would be nice.

Ease to work with.

It's been six months, since it was implemented. Currently, we provide the back-end storage to the FlexPod.

So far, very stable. So far, it is okay.

Scalability is pretty good. You can extend it out, extend out storage as well your guest systems. Yes, it is not a problem.

I have not used technical support for either FlexPod or Cisco.

I was involved in the initial setup for the storage piece and it was complex. As far as the design, FlexPod is a complex piece of equipment. You just can't read a book and be ready to get it operational. You have to go through professional services that have some experience with it.

Do a little research, find out if the business case applies to them, how they could leverage it, and if it's something they could leverage in their environment. Get a PoC, that's another thing. Definitely get a POC for the product to determine if it's good for them.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Stability, after the product is implemented into an environment.
• Scalability
• Responsiveness to certain type of issues.

The most valuable feature is the converge nature of having compute storage on the network in one rack. We are able to use the virtual switching to add multiple networks, DMZs and sub-nets to be able to use the resource of the FlexPod itself. We are running the full gamut for minding business applications and web applications. We're also using the virtual switch pieces to run our Citrix environment that's also running on FlexPod.

It's greatly reduced the complexity of network storage and compute. It allows us to deliver services quicker. We can provision faster, we have great use of templates, so we can spin things up in minutes and provide services.

It probably already is in the product now, but at the time, we didn't have a really great SSD shelf that you can just plug and play in there. I know it is present today, but that was the only feature we were looking for at the time. There are probably some nuances in how the network and those types of things work. Maybe it could have more templates. Other than that, it's a great product.

We've been using for eight to ten years and we never had any downtime. It's been a great product for us.

In terms of stability, FlexPod has been great. I don't think we've ever had any downtime.

Scalability's been great. We've actually added shelves, we've got blades, and we've added storage. We even extended our presence inside the environment because of what we like inside the FlexPod itself.

In terms of technical support, it’s all been great. We have Phone Home support, which we haven't used very often at all. Any time we've needed any support at all, it's always been first rate.

I was involved in the initial discussions, evaluation, and purchase decision. My IT team was actually the hands-on team that did the setup of the FlexPod. Once we got it installed, got a little bit of knowledge transfer, they really enjoyed it. The solution brought everything together. It made it a lot easier to deliver services, because compute stores and networks weren't these discrete components they had to work on separately.

There wasn't that much hyper-converged at the time we went into FlexPod. It really was the game changer at the time.

We were looking at a new VM farm to start with, so we were looking at Blade Server solutions from HPE/IBM. What really did it was that FlexPod had all the components in one rack that we could basically turn on and forget.

We continue to evaluate solution on the market. We enjoy the UCS environment and that's the way we increase the blade. We like the way it integrates with the NetApp, so the FlexPod just really brought it all home.

Take a look at the product. If you go through your requirements and have to redo either your virtual environment or some of your SAN storage, look at putting your compute storage and network together.

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.”

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.

It is very powerful. It can support much more than just one FlexPod. One NetApp can support more than just one FlexPod. That's about it. It's powerful.

It’s a standard; it's a spec; so, it's very easy to assemble and use. It's the same across all environments. Our production guys can work on this FlexPod and know that it's the same over here, and it’s is the same over there.

It's saved lots of manpower. It's easy to set up. It's good.

We have about a dozen people administrating our storage.

I would like to see easier day-zero setup. We're having to get other tools to try and set up everything. It's not complex, but it could be faster. It's just time consuming.

It’s very stable; haven't had any issues with stability.

It is very scalable. We are expanding a little bit. We're using one NetApp across multiple FlexPods. We're doing multiple domains off of one NetApp now. It is very scalable and very easy to do.

I've been at my current company for a year. They were already using FlexPod.
I have previous experience with EMC and Pure Storage. Compared to those, I love FlexPod. I like the scalability, because it has the storage virtual machines. It's very easy to build upon that.

For people comparing NetApp vs Pure, or NetApp vs EMC, I'd tell them to seriously look at NetApp because of the scalability and because of the ease of use.

Initial setup was very good. The RESTful API is easy to set up.

Beat them up on pricing, because they’re not cheap.

Buy it. It's a good product.

One of the most valuable features is that I have one vendor that I have to contact to go to all my vendors. I don’t have to call Cisco, NetApp, VMware. I just make one call to one of them, they bridge all of that for me; that's nice.

Also, with the documented architecture, it's not something that we're testing right off the bat; it's been proven and it works.

It allowed us to streamline support tickets that come in. We don't have to call three different vendors. I just call one and they take care of all of that for us. It's been very helpful.

Each individual solution has its own cost benefit. It really fit within our organization. We had a lot of the existing technology there. We were just missing a couple pieces of it. So, once we got those pieces, we were able to certify it with FlexPod. We didn't need to buy too many new pieces. It fit into our original architecture.

We have cut down on the management team running FlexPod compared to our previous system. We've reallocated one FTE so far because of it. We can do more things with fewer people on the team.

I know there's some new Cisco stuff coming down the road that we might be looking at. UCS Minis: I know that they're going to be supported right off the bat.

Nothing's perfect. There's always room to increase: more hyper-conversions; smaller form factor is always on our mind; better ways to align disk up for us; how can we split off our disk correctly for each HA pair that we have, from a cluster standpoint.

There was a little mixup with, at least NetApp, coming to the market with flash. They've slowly gained ground in that marketplace; I’m waiting to see how that plays out. I know Mars was trying to be a big hit for them and then when they dissolved, that kind of set me back a little bit from a time standpoint. Mars was their all-flash platform; something separate from WAFL that we're doing with ONTAP. That had me looking at that infrastructure. That's the only reason why they lost a few points in my rating.

I have been using it for about three-and-a-half years.

It is a stable infrastructure. We've haven't had any major outages in the past three-and-a-half years since implementing it. There's been no downtime from a hardware standpoint that we weren't able to address quickly.

It is very easy to scale out the infrastructure, add more pieces to it as we needed; just kind of plug and go. That’s very easy.

That depends on when I call. Cisco is a little bit more difficult than some of the other ones, but calling it up has been great. They've bridged that gap a couple times at VMware as well.

We were using a mixture of Dell and HP solutions. We were using Dell 910s for a lot of our ESX environment. We were using old Cisco MDS switchers for fiber channel. We were able to consolidate all that infrastructure down and use one standard platform coming off the Nexus.

My engineers worked with one of our strategic partners to help implement the solution. It has been, from a design standpoint, much easier to get set up and running, and much faster than doing it outside of FlexPod.

We haven’t had any technical issues with getting it set up or with running it; none at all. I'm very happy.

It's a little more expensive to go down the FlexPod route, but I think the ease of management in having all the vendors aligned really helps us in the long run. There is more upfront cost, but less down the road that we have to pay; maintenance and support, man-hours, actually managing the system.

We already had NetApp in-house. It was very easy for us to use at least that as a storage platform, so it was just finalizing on the Cisco UCS part. We needed to come up with a hardware platform that we could use and UCS was the hardware platform.
HP’s BL series blade was the other one we were looking at from a blade standpoint.

We decided to go with FlexPod instead of HP because we were already a leveraged Cisco partner, a Cisco shop, with all of our route switch and all of our data center core switching. It was very easy for us, then, to assimilate the UCS chassis within our existing infrastructure without any other type of complexity.

Make sure you get all your requirements up front. Make sure that the protocols that you want to use are supported by your vendor. There are a lot of niche players out there that will say they will do something. When you get them onsite, they don't or they don't perform as well. We were looking at a couple of other flash providers, including Nutanix and Tintri.

Bringing them onsite for a demo works great, but when you start talking to people who actually use the solution... We found that in the demos, they couldn't live up to the promises they were making, or it didn't make sense to add more infrastructure in. I can't get rid of my core NetApp infrastructure, so it didn’t really make any sense to add another storage vendor in, and increase the complexity. Using FlexPod has been simpler than adding in another vendor.

NetApp might be a little more expensive but in the long run, it pays off for itself.
I’ve been very happy with their technical ability, their technical delivery, and the usability; it’s very easy.