FlexPod XCS Reviews

It’s basically very scalable and reliable. Also, the total cost of ownership is low. It’s an effective solution for any company, and it fits for our needs.

It's easy to deploy, and efficient. The efficiency in thin provisioning and deduplication has suited all sorts of applications in our business.

Awareness amongst the customers could be better. Also, the customer base, enhanced blogs and discussions are needed, as there's a small user base right now.

Stability is 100% or 99.99999%, 24/7/365.

It's very scalable, and its horizontal scalability is great.

Excellent whenever you call you can speak to either NetApp, Cisco or VMware and they are all great.

Straightforward, very systematic and streamlined. A lot of centralized virtual desktops.

We looked at a lot of vendors, but we selected this because it seems to be a strong business going forward.

The fact that it’s a validated design, so you are not running into any gotchas.

By having a FlexPod we're able to call a vendor and they can use back channels and reach out to other two vendors to get us a solution, instead of each vendor passing the blame from one to another. It's one stop shopping.

The price.

It's very stable, and just runs and runs and runs until you upgrade something.

It's very easy to grow and very simple. There's nothing major to add more chassis and blades, or storage if you need to.

Their support is dynamite, and it's a lot easier to escalate with NetApp than with VMware. VMware has taken us a lot longer than with NetApp.

It’s very complex if you’re new to it, but once you’ve done it its pretty easy.

I would like it to be cheaper but other than that nothing to add. As much as I can try to get the price lower, why should I have to negotiate in the first place?

I would say do it, do it now. Spend the money and buy it, it makes it easy.

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 fact that it’s a validated design, that’s the most valuable feature, plus it has a single point of contact for support.

It’s the single point of support, so you don’t get handed off. If you have a problem with a piece of it, you don’t get one of the vendors saying “it's their problem.”

I really don’t have anything. It's what we use, we have four in our main site, and two in our disaster recovery site.

It's hyper stable.

It’s as scalable as you want to make it. We have not had an issue yet where we couldn’t grow to scale.

It’s top notch because of that single point of contact. Our provider will escalate the call for us.

Initial setup is complex as it’s a complex solution, but it’s a validated design so it all comes ready to assemble.

We bring in support to set up, so we used a vendor team to help deploy.

I’d advise them to get one that’s bigger than you need obviously, the nature of the sheer growth that the industry is seeing is logarithmic not linear.

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.

I think that the most valuable features are the integration of the components and the support model.

I think the integrated support where, if I call NetApp support and it’s a problem with UCS, the fact that I have a one-stop shop will provide a cohesive support structure for me, and that’s huge.

And it’s not very costly. We acquired the parts of the FlexPod individually.

I’m sure there is room for improvement, there always is, but I’m hard-pressed to tell you what could be improved.

It's rock solid.

We haven’t had the need to grow it, but based on how scalable I know the three vendors are, I don’t see any issues.

It’s been excellent – they are very responsive. Traditionally, when you have multiple vendors, before FlexPod, everyone does a lot of finger pointing, and the fact that all these companies work together is invaluable. This makes my life as a customer much easier.

We did it piecemeal, but it was very easy.

I would say, what are you waiting for?

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.

The most valuable features of the solution are the ease of support and industry leading technology – in storage, servers and networking, as well as virtualization.

• Ease of troubleshooting is good
• Ease of further deployment or expansion

In the config advisor tool, it could be more specific in pointing out or letting you know what to fix when it confronts issues.

It’s extremely stable.

It’s extremely scalable, which is excellent. Either adding storage to the existing cluster, or more nodes, and then the same thing on the Cisco side – more blades or chassis – all of it is extremely easy.

It's very responsive, good customer support.

It's been efficient for the customers to call the NetApp support line and then they can help assist in opening cases with the other vendors.

The setup is fairly straightforward. We have used all three vendors for a long time.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the pre-design. I don’t have to think – it’s a proven and pre-certified architecture that just works.

From my perspective there is not much to improve on and NetApp has gone through great strides to make it a great product with great top-notch support.

I’ve been dealing with them for three to four years and its just sound equipment.

It's rock solid.

It’s extremely scalable. We’ve gone through growth cycles, especially with clustered on tap, and it’s a very easy process.

I think support is fantastic, without a doubt. Anytime I have an issue via email or phone its squared away.

It’s pretty straightforward, there are tons of deployment guides out there which for the most part are spot on.

I think that the most valuable feature is the pre-validated design, the reference configuration, as all the integrations have been done, and you don’t need to go through a teething phase.

I think that the time to deploy is quicker. Support is more straightforward with less finger pointing between the vendors so the time to resolution if you do have a problem should be quicker.

The thing that stops up from jumping in more is that we are resource constrained, I have to piecemeal what we have, and I can’t stop using something because it’s old. I can’t just say “here is a reference architecture” create a clean environment, I have to use my legacy components. We can get a lot of the benefits, but the FlexPod needs you to do it all at once.

Ir's very good, no outages to report so far. You can mess anything up but nothing that is the fault of the product.

It’s not a concern, it can scale to larger than my organization would ever need. We're not a huge organization.

All of the vendors involved are pretty good – Cisco, VMware and NetApp, and we have good support from them all.

That’s the selling feature – configuration is essentially done for you. It’s good. Less of a puzzle and more of a procedure.

That’s the selling feature, the configuration is essentially done for you. It’s good, and less of a puzzle, and more of a procedure.