FlexPod XCS Reviews

I think the valuable features of FlexPod are the integration with several products, especially when it comes to the support model.

If I have any issues, whether it is with be VMware, NetApp, or Cisco, I can call one place and I can get support. It doesn't matter which one I call. I think it's one of the most valuable pieces of it.

Its architecture has been proven, it works together, and it is trusted.

We are using a Citrix VDI implementation. We are about 99% virtualized, so pretty much everything that we do, from the desktop to the servers, is virtualized.

I like how everything just kind of works together. It's been one of those things that have been proven. There are White Papers, a trusted design, and support models. Those are the kinds of things that companies look for. We know there is going to be backing and help when something goes wrong.

We can reduce our team and it has saved us money because it works quickly. In the past, we've gone with other third-party vendors and other products. We ended up having to pay more money in the long run. Going with the FlexPod solution means that we have all the pieces. Having a proven solution and knowing that it works gives us peace of mind and ease of management.

It could always be better.

We have been using this solution for three years.

It is a stable solution. I can't remember the last time we had any kind of major outage.

Up to the point where we needed to replace our controllers on our storage, it had been pretty scalable. I think there is a time when we have to refresh some of the products.

When we needed to, we used the technical support. They were very helpful. It was easy to contact somebody. If one team didn't know the answers, they would be in touch with the other team. That's nice about having a FlexPod team that knows each other's products a little bit, so they can help you resolve your issues.

We worked with CDW consulting to do the setup and the configuration. It went pretty smoothly.

We looked at HPE and that was four years ago. We've worked with CDW. They brought in a number of other vendors with other storage systems. The one we chose fit in with what we wanted to do. We previously used a smaller vendor's storage solution. It didn't quite work with what we wanted to do. We weren't able to fit it in with our model.

Do your research. They all have their own niches. Don't go cheap. That's one thing we've learned: Just because you might see another vendor who offers something a little cheaper, it is not necessarily the best. It might not have the White Papers or the proven technology that works together. That's what is nice about FlexPod, that you do have those elements. This has been working together for many years. They had this relationship with these other companies and you know you'll have the support behind it.

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 feature is the defined architecture, so you know you're going to be using best practices. That's key and important to us. We use the segmented layer 2 architecture that we got from a design on FlexPod, and that's helped a lot.

As opposed to just applying something like a NAS with systems, I don't know that this product necessarily does improve the way I work. We haven't changed a lot of our practices. We follow best practices, generally, anyway. We haven't engaged; we haven't had an issue where we've needed to engage Cisco and NetApp together. I think that would be a benefit if we had an issue or we needed to get everybody involved.

I’d like to see cloud features, for sure, and auto-scaling type things would be good. Automation is important, and that will be more important going forward.

I don't know what they would need to do to earn a better rating from me. I know that, when we do block workloads on NetApp, fiber channels specifically, it hits the filer pretty heavy. I don't know why that is. We're going away from fiber channel anyway.

It’s stable.

It is very flexible and very scalable. We've grown our cluster, so we haven't had a problem.

For tier 1 cases and system down type of issues, NetApp support is very good; for OFFTAP, not good. I've provided that information to them many times. Their OFFTAP support is not the best.

We were doing a technical refresh of our systems and of our storage. That's where we combined that to use a FlexPod-type architecture, to do both of those things and make sure that we're aligned with best practices.

Determining the architecture was complex, because you need to make sure that you know what your requirements are. Then, once you've designed it, initial setup was straightforward.

We looked at other vendors. We keep our eyes open all the time.

The replication was why we chose NetApp, SnapVault. Not a lot of storage vendors do block-based replication with being able to maintain a different set of snapshots on the secondary and the primary. Everybody does SnapMirror, or does a mirror of some type, but SnapMirror XDP or SnapVault is something that NetApp has that most storage vendors don't have.

In general, global- and enterprise-level support is the most important criteria when I’m looking to work with a vendor.

Spend the time up front to architect it, get the details, and make sure your plan is solid.

The single line of support is valuable.

It's a validated design, so there's not a lot of questioning to it. Storage and server compute comes in and it's ready to go. When we needed the storage and compute to run our apps, the FlexPod seemed like the right choice because it was a validated design and setup. There wasn't any question to the config. It came in a rack; plug it in, ready to go.

The biggest thing is, it just gave us a standardized platform for our virtualization, so it was consistent across the board. Storage was NetApp, compute was UCS and we had VMware on top of that, and it was just plug and play. Everyone knew how that worked.

I'd say the biggest area with room for improvement would be some enhancements to the management tools, but from what we saw at a recent NetApp conference, that's coming. I think NetApp's already heard the change and I think that's what's coming. For us, it would've been just some of the management tool changes they've shown us that that's in the works or already coming out with 9.1.

Other than that, I don't have anything else from our use cases. We just refreshed our FlexPods with AFF-based FlexPods. That was pretty much all you could've asked for really.

Stability is great; we haven’t had any issues.

Scalability is great; we haven’t had any issues.

We have not needed to use technical support.

The existing solution was a decade old; we had to invest in a new solution.

Initial setup was straightforward; it took a day.

We've got a good team I guess and some good PS partners. We sat down, we went through the design so we knew what we were getting. The equipment showed up, they implemented it and because it's a validated design and everything's already there, it's just, power it up and go. Then we just move our workload on to it and off we went. We had no issues.

The pricing was competitive against what else was out there. We were already a NetApp shop, so it made it more of a sell for us because we already had the knowledge in-house for NetApp and ONTAP. Going to the FlexPod was easy in that sense.

The only other one we looked at was EMC. We weren't really thrilled with what they had to offer.

In general, when I’m looking for a vendor, pre- and post-sale support is important: the actual tech support that they provide; the ONTAP support guys, from once it's installed; implementation resource support from the vendor. When it comes to the pre-sales and the design and then the concepts, we've always found that NetApp’s engineers and SCs are always there. They walk us through everything. They validate it all. We get a lot of support out of them and that's a big requirement for us.

For us, the big incentive would be the support that you get out of NetApp and the partners that we have in our town. There are a lot of strong NetApp FlexPod people. Thereare a lot of FlexPods out where we are. If you're looking for a solution that you know is going to work and that you're going to get some solid support and backing from the vendor throughout your process from start to finish, it's going to be the NetApp guys.

I’ve given it a perfect rating based on our experiences. We've rolled out multiple racks of FlexPod and we've never had an issue. We've got two data centers full of it and we've not actually had to call NetApp support. We've never contacted support even when we had a couple of drive failures. They're proactive on that, so the drive shows up and gets swapped out. We never actually opened a ticket for anything other than those two automated ones.

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 most valuable feature is the single-vendor support model. NetApp and Cisco are partnering in the support so you don’t have the finger pointing.

Also, the fact that the hardware and software is pre-qualified to work together and supported by each vendor is good.

I think that it could be improved in terms of the reporting, but really that is pretty good as well, so I cannot think of anything that can be improved.

We have zero stability problems.

The scalability on paper is great. We know that it's scalable, but we have not scaled since we bought it.

Technical support is excellent.

The setup was complex, but mostly because of our environment. It wasn’t difficult but it was complex.

I would say that it’s a great solution for customers who want to guarantee out-of-the-box compatibility and performance.

Unified management is valuable, and it has a smaller footprint than non-unified solutions.

Leveraging the expertise of NetApp, and getting a lot of third-party support for it. We’ve been able to transition to a hands-on approach, which is good thing. We were thinly staffed, but now we can properly staff to be more hands-on with our system using FlexPod.

Make sure there’s current centralized virtual desktops. I get caught in the upgrade matrix quite a bit, which is an indication that it hasn’t been tested. Need more currency in IMT.

It's solid, but it’s difficult to integrate newer hardware because it's kind of locked down. It can be disruptive sometimes, because it’s something that you don’t want to have to make a lot of changes to. It makes it difficult to consolidate when you're adding stuff on, and wanting to be consistent for software and hardware sets. 3240 limited to four SAN nodes in a cluster was problematic for us.

It's scalable, but it takes someone to make the right decisions in terms of planning and sizing.

It was already in place when I got there. From the inside-out, it can be complex because its biggest problem is that if you stray from centralized virtual desktops, it can be difficult to work with.

Must have a sense of how everything operationally will be going into FlexPod. Must plan scaling up and out. The problem I run into the most is unanticipated growth, so keep track of growth factors and do not overextend FlexPod. It is usually a performance vs. capacity issue.

Flexibility of the platform. It allows you to grow whenever you want, and to build the data center as you want. It can get associates to change their work because they don’t have to do grunt work as it has automation, network, and datacenter design. The job is done, and you don’t need to worry about it. The team can be freed up to do more interesting IT, such as building datacenters.

It’s an important tech, and should be a part of IT admin. It’s a one-stop shop that keeps the lights running. It’s not a matter of money, but a matter of staffing.

The capacity to grow at a very rapid pace at a quarter of the cost in terms of physical hardware and staffing -- just put up rack, deploy FlexPod, and it’s up and running.

It compares well with Vblock to provide centralized datastores to all locations that are all linked together with a datacenter fabric.

It needs to go down the Vblock way, because in an integrated system, you need a big block of technology between the reference architecture and the lego-type system.

No issues encountered.

It's very scalable, and able to grow with the business.

You can add more disks, and computer power, which is very simple to do. It takes care of adding blocks back into your data center and any upgrades to storage, hardware, or network.

We often work with our TAM who are always around to help us work better as an interface between our engineers and NetApp’s, so we’re escalated to Tier 1.

We don’t even need to talk to Cisco because their tech support is unified with NetApp.

It loses points because they’re a little behind the competition in the hyper-converged infrastructure pace. When you get to see what the other environment sees, you know they need to catch up to others.

It’s a good solution to implement, and easy to get to work, it’ll provide flexibility and agility you need for a datacenter, but it’s a start of the journey. You need to be on top of it.