FlexPod XCS Reviews

Converged Infrastructure and tight integration with Cisco.

The solution has allowed us to reduce the overall operational overhead – once you deploy the system, you run everything as policy based so everything is very simple. You now have network, hardware, and storage in one place.

The vision is not clear with NetApp as to how they want FlexPod to be, as they want it to be for everything but it's not. It needs a specific vision and agenda, what purpose is this solution for, etc.

I would say that the stability is semi-enterprise ready, but not fully from our use case. It has its own limitations, it’s supposed to be extremely flexible because of the architecture, but there are a lot of challenges in terms of supporting multiple hypervisors. But there are no tight integrations, and this leads to stability issues. If workload analysis is not done beforehand, then you may encounter problems.

It should be able to be full scale architecture, you cannot limit it to between eight and 14 nodes (approximately), and it’s a scale up architecture not a scale out.

6/10 due to mostly skill-set issues. There are not many experts in the converged infrastructure space, and it has taken us a long time.

It was complicated. You need to have professionals engaged, as it's not plug-n-play. It requires professional services help to get it up and running, and even then there is a huge learning curve.

The infrastructure should be de-coupled from the workload, there should not be any dependency. It should be abstracted, do not look to FlexPod as the solution, but as one of many solutions. You need to understand your environment and what you need.

Our primary use case for the solution is running critical infrastructure, and we deploy it on-premises

The storage efficiency and performance are valuable.

The solution could be improved by including automation for user updates.

We have been using the solution for nine years.

The solution is scalable. I rate it a nine out of ten.

The solution is scalable. I rate it a nine out of ten.

We have had a good experience with customer service and support, but it takes a while for them to attend to critical issues. I rate them a six out of ten.

Neutral

I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

It is the first phase of the hyperconverged systems. 

It simplifies the management of the entire system. 

• Some of the define features could use improvement. 
• It needs more power.

We could not tell with the infrastructure entirely. We had some performance issues, but as soon as we opened the FlexPod, the technical support fixed them.

It is scalable. If you want to scale up merely with capacity, it is easy.

Regarding technical support, if you have any questions with the new configuration, just open a ticket to tech support and they will fix everything.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

I was also in the installation phase, which was easy.

It is a complete solution.

The primary use case is for customers that want to replicate infrastructure over and over again and have a consistent architecture for their workloads. It's appropriate for larger enterprises that want the pod design in their data centers.

The most valuable feature is the ability to integrate different products into one validated design. That allows customers to understand and get the value out of the hardware, as it was designed.

I would like to see better operations, a single pane of glass to manage and monitor the entire design across VMware, Cisco, etc. I would also like the upgrade process to be a little smoother.

From my experience, it is a consistently stable, reliable product.

The benefit of it being a pod is you have a lot of flexibility in terms of the hardware and platforms that you choose to have in that validated design, depending on your particular needs.

I personally haven't experienced the tech support from NetApp, but I have heard good things about it from customers.

I think the setup is straightforward, with the designs that I've seen in terms of the physical topology. "This link needs to go to this link. You've got to configure it in this way." The validated designs do a good job in terms of the layer 1 and all of the configuration.

I rate FlexPod a seven out of 10. The reason behind that is, there is a lot of value in FlexPod, and FlexPod is incorporating a lot of the newer technologies, like ACI, into the design, rather than just keeping it an xOS, as an example.

We use FlexPod to simplify support, to accelerate troubleshooting by using the FlexPod in integrating. Whether it's a VMware or a UCS Cisco problem, or a Nexus problem, it makes support a lot simpler.

It keeps us on track. You have to stay FlexPod-certified, you have to really stay on track with your updates, but the troubleshooting and support aspects are really where it's the biggest bang for the buck.

Unified support. Being able to get a vendor from one company or another company on the line without having to go back through the call queue.

It's been very stable. I have no issues with it.

It scales fine, all three components are able to scale. If I need to throw on another chassis, I throw on another chassis. If I need more storage, I expand my NetApp portion of it. It's been easy.

Although it's really hard to automatically get the correct person the first time, what you can do is get someone from one stack, say VMware, and if they say, "Hey, it's not a VMware problem, it's a networking problem," they can loop in the Cisco person, give them all the information, and we can troubleshoot the Cisco or the networking portion of it. They might say, "Hey, you know what, it's storage latency. Let's loop in the NetApp partner." They can all talk in the backend and compare logs, versus me having to open three tickets and wait.

It allows me to loop in support from three different companies and not have to open a ticket with each company, and then have them say, "Send me the logs." Then have them say a couple hours later, "Well, we looked at the logs. It's not us. Go to the next guy." And then you go to the next guy and the next guy says, "Well, send me the logs, describe the problem." He takes a couple of hours, looks at the logs and says, "Hey, it's not us, it's the other guy."

We used physical servers, different storage, older legacy equipment.

The most important criteria when selecting with a vendor are 

• reliability
• technical expertise
• speed in response time.

The setup was pretty straightforward. We obviously engaged a reseller to help us with it. But putting the different components together is pretty straightforward.

We didn't evaluate others. We decided to go with NetApp and that drove the decision every place else. We went with the Cisco UCS chassis because that fit our solution.

Do your research. It's good for our business case but maybe it doesn't fit your particular business needs, or maybe there's a better solution out there. In our circumstance, it fit our needs and has performed as advertised.

Fully-supported end-to-end architecture using the compatibility matrices around it.

It makes our configurations more consistent and easier to troubleshoot.

The product is uniquely valuable for the industry because we've had some experience with a competing solution from another storage vending solution, and it was not nearly as stable.

Better integration with other vendors that are involved in the FlexPod solution, like Cisco.

About five years now.

It is very stable.

Five years ago, it was very scalable. Now, the technology has changed so much in the last five years, it's not the most scalable solution out there.

I have used technical support. It's very good. They were knowledgeable.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward.

We invested in this solution because we were trying to lower our costs and improve the time to implement and upgrade.

One of the valuable features is that there is generally one throat to choke, if you will.

If you have any problems you can talk to anybody and they'll understand the technical environment you are in, so it makes it easy to troubleshoot.

Whether it's an implementation or a new feature you want to take advantage of, you're troubleshooting an actual problem.

We run pretty much our entire infrastructure within our VMware FlexPod environment. We have application servers, SQL database servers, network monitoring servers, and all our users' data.

All of this is part of the same NetApp system. So pretty much everything that runs at our company, whether it is comprised of financial databases or football analytics, it all runs on a virtual server which is running within FlexPod.

The benefits of Flexpod are that we have a small IT team and it makes it easy for everybody to run and connect things. It just works. If we ever do need to troubleshoot, or increase a feature set, or things like that, just knowing that we can talk to someone who understands the environment makes it a lot simpler to get things moving forward so the whole process goes quicker.

ACI is coming and we're going be working with that. The ability to get that implemented within the VMware, Net App, and Cisco environments, so we can have a little better mobility between our different sites would be helpful. I think right now, that's probably a little complicated for us. Other than that, we've just recently moved to flash for our VMs and everything is pretty solid for us and it is working well.

I am referring to how can we improve our NetApp/Cisco/VMware Flexpod installation. Cisco’s ACI is something we are looking into to see if we create even more flexibility with the networking and security of our Flexpod between our sites and our virtual server infrastructure.

We've been using NetApp since 2004, and we've evolved to FlexPod in 2009. I've been involved in the steps all the way, and we've had a great relationship with our integrators, NetApp in general, with Cisco, and VMware.

It really is kind of "set it and forget it" solution. In my job, I'm kind of a Jack-of-all-Trades, if you will. We have to do a lot of different things, so I'm doing not only the VMware, the storage, and the networking, but I also do firewalls, email, and all the other application servers.

The simplicity of the FlexPod and how well it all works together with all the different systems really is a time saver. It's also easy to help teach other people in our department how to handle things. The training process isn't too long. We've been in it for a long time and it's pretty straightforward and we haven't really had any problems with the inner workings of the different systems.

In terms of scalability, we are a highly visible company and we have ten to twelve days a year where there are eighty-thousand people in the stadium. You need everything to work.

On the whole, we are a small, to mid-sized company and everything's worked well. We've scaled it up slowly over the last ten to twelve years, and we've been using our NetApp system and our Cisco network. I know it would scale really large for us, but we're generally a smaller scale.

I've always had great technical support when it comes to NetApp, or even calling Cisco, or VMware. NetApp has always been really solid for us, and we've been big fans. You get connected pretty quickly to someone, especially if you have a large problem. We don't have a lot of problems, so it's usually not hard to reach somebody, get answers, and find out what we need to do make things work.

The setup was pretty simple. It works well, it's not too hard to get everything connected, and you can use the most efficient and best practices.

We went through a process recently and we probably looked at six or seven vendors and this solution kept coming back to us. We are a smaller shop, and the flexibility of the FlexPod system, in particular the FAS2650 for us, and all the different protocols that we're running on an all-in-one system, was a no-brainer for us.

When it came back to it, we just stuck with NetApp because it was really the best solution for us. We looked at Pure Storage, Nimble, and Tintri. They all have great feature sets and things like that. However, the assortment of protocols for us was a huge feature set, and not being locked into just doing the block level protocol. We really wanted to keep our systems in place. It's really nice to have just that one pane of glass for our storage system. So, NetApp was really a no-brainer to stick with.

I guess it depends what your roles are. We are a one-stop shop, so we have to do all these different things. So for us it was important to accomplish a lot of different goals with one system. So, I would just ask someone: "How easy do you want things to be? Is support important to you? Is it important to work with different vendors who all know how the whole system works? How much time do you need to save when you're doing support?"

• It is a converged platform.

• It is a support model. I can call directly into NetApp and our customers can call directly into NetApp. And when they're troubleshooting an issue, whether it's on virtualization, their compute, the storage side, they have that one level of support. This is big thing for our customers.
• The simplicity of the model itself.
• The overall management aspect of it.
• Being able to manage using tools like OCI from NetApp.
• Being able to manage the entire pod, create things, provisioning, automation, and orchestration. Those are built in to converged stack. That's a big help for our customers.

One of the biggest benefits is the workloads that it can manage. It's not tied to a specific workload and is very diversified. You can do backups on it, you can do production data, you can run virtuals, you can run bare metal, and it will support almost every workload that you can have.

For me, it's the integration with things that are not part of an ONTAP solution. It is simple management platform that I can manage my NetApp from an ONTAP perspective to the E-Series, to a StorageGRID, to a SolidFire environment in one management layout. That would be the one thing I would want the ability to do.

Deployment is a whole lot better now than it was five years ago. It's very simple. We can stand up a standard FlexPod usually in a matter of a half a day. That involves racking, stacking, and starting the configuration of the aggregates, or the Cisco platform, that goes with it.

Stability is built on the redundancy of the platform itself. So you have redundancy throughout the system. The storage platforms have redundant controllers. Customers are very very comfortable with a model, knowing that it is going to be up 24/7/365.

In terms of scalability we can scale to a cluster in CDOT, but we had issues. The cluster CDOT and the evolution of that platform ensures that we had the right mixing rules, because there challenges around that piece of it. So scalability is a big selling point for our customers, and knowing that it's not "rip and replace" is a big thing.

Technical support, from a NetApp perspective, is a model of having an eco-system of Cisco,NetApp, and VMware, or 1800 number that I could call into. In our case, we actually have a network operation center. We place first call for our customers, and then we call directly into a service line. It makes our life much easier and it streamlines the process just for customers.

We get the Level-3 guys and we've had a great relationship with NetApp, and that really helps as well. I can't speak for new partners, who are just coming on, but for us, it's been fantastic.

I was involved in the initial setup. I do all the architecting, I do the set up and configurations for some of our customers. In my previous company, we sold 194 FlexPods to the Department of Veterans Affairs. We architected that entire solution and we helped with the deployment process. We've been very involved in that.

Really in a converged stack, not a hyper-converged, because NetApp doesn't have hyper-converged, now with SolidFire. From a converged stack on a FlexPod, we do work with VCE on the Vblock aspect. We work with HPE on their platform as well. Those are usually the three that we have been competing against. The advantages of NetApp over competitors is honestly the price. There are aspects of VCE and Vblock that have a better overall management stack, than what we have on the FlexPod side. But from the perspective of cost, we always win with NetApp on pricing.

So the first thing is you have to know your workload. A lot of customers go in, and what they do is they push on infrastructure without understanding the applications. So to any customer, I always tell them, you have to do an assessment of the application, understand the characteristics of the application. That will drive the solution, whether it's all-flash, whether it's a hybrid model, or whether it's just spinning disc. So until we know the application stack, I don't even talk infrastructure.