FlexPod XCS Reviews

It is versatile, and the profiles and things that you can create with it are good to work with and make it easy to replace the hardware.

It has made it easier to deploy new virtual machines. We use it for our virtual machine environment. Before, it was a lot just having to get the hardware ready. Now that the FlexPod solutions are built up, they make it a lot easier as far as networking.

Easier integration from the beginning, which they have put improvements in as far as setting it up. It was just a large learning curve for us at first.

Probably two to three years.

Once we got implemented, it was very stable.

It should scale out based on what I've seen.

We haven't had to scale out yet. We have fairly small environments, but many of them and they are all separated. But based on the solution, I think we could scale it more if we needed to easily.

I have used it from the storage site, from the NetApp side, and also from the Cisco side. I contacted either vendor.

At times it's difficult to get to the right person, but eventually, depending on how far you push, you can get to the right person. Once I reach the right person, they are knowledgeable. Generally, my experience working with tech support is fine.

We were on a platform, which we thought didn't have a long life from another vendor.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was pretty complex.

There is a steep learning curve on the Cisco side to set up profiles.

I had pricing from separate vendors. I got storage from NetApp and Cisco Blade Servers, so I don't know. I didn't buy it as a package, so it's hard to say.

We bought the Cisco and the NetApp separately and integrated them ourselves, so that probably made it a little more difficult. But we followed all the guidelines that were published from both Cisco and NetApp regarding how to put them together. Now, it is sold as an already built together package, which probably would make it easier.

It's an all-in-one validated design. We don't have to worry about making sure that thing A supports thing B. It's all top-down, integrated, and validated, which means for us, it's going to just work.

It let us not worry about the minutiae of the configuration, and instead worry about how we put systems and applications online and the maintenance to build a new environment.

It uniquely valuable because it's leveraging first-party products and services. Systems, which we already would use, now they are all integrated with each other, so we don't have to worry about going out into the market and finding those components separately, then making sure that they work together the way we need.

Surprise me with something I haven't thought of.

Maybe it's out-of-the-box and can configure itself. Something that's beyond the simplicity that I already think is there. Abstract away some of the technical details of setting it up, so you don't need the experience of an engineer to come in and do the work.

About four months.

The stability is fine so far. It's solid. It's a rock.

The scalability is fine.

Technical support is a non-issue. That's another advantage with FlexPod, in particular, is it's one single endpoint for support. We don't have to call around and there's no finger-pointing between organizations.

Our old solution was outdated, old, and out of support. We were at our hardware refresh point of three to five years.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was straightforward.

From the integration standpoint, it is a lot easier to integrate than a lot of people initially felt. Being able to leverage either block or file capabilities of the storage is something that has been beneficial.

Most customers had to look at doing that in a couple different approaches. Being able to have a truly consolidated system that provides all the different types of storage protocol has been a benefit.

Our customers are using this for virtualization. This includes doing something with an open stack style of implementation, running Hyper-V, or VMware.

A lot of VMware tools with VDI NFS capabilities are very key from the VDI standpoint. There are a lot of people who utilize VDI around it.

It has helped my organization in terms of ease of deployment. The approach of utilizing NFS and some of the key features that have been put in for VDI help us limit boot storm and other similar issues.

I see is a lot of those things that existed in the NetApp portfolio on its own. Now we are able to leverage FlexPod as an overall solution for both compute and storage, which is a normal progression.

I usually give everything a nine, because there's potentially something better out there that I haven't come across yet. Nine says there isn't anything better, and I hesitate to give anybody top marks across the board on anything.

In terms of the feature set, I can't really think of anything right now. I am looking for changes in architectural and reference designs, which makes more information available to make sure deployments go well.

I would like to see improvements in the documentation. I understanding how things are coming together and a lot of that is from the UCS side.

I have been working with NetApp and working with fast devices for a while. I have been getting up to speed on the UCS pieces on the FlexPod.

Some of those elements were a little bit different than the standard approach and with a new product line for Cisco. It is not just about networking, but also revolves around the compute. Most of that just requires additional documentation and a better explanation of how the management interfaces work.

The UCS director is nice, now that we've got an overlying umbrella that can manage multiple pod environments. Other than that, most of the benefits are really more customer driven. I do architecture design and deployments, and I hand off the infrastructure. It goes from there to the customer.

The stability has been fine. I haven't seen any real issues with any of the products across the board from either the UCS or the NetApp side with regards to the FlexPods. There has been no downtime related to components or system issues. Most of the downtime is due to customers not understanding the environment and not doing things correctly.

Assuming that they had things configured correctly for networking and things didn't fail over the way they expected, the same things would happen outside of a FlexPod environment.

It is a lack of understanding and making sure that the customer did things correctly. This falls under proper testing after the initial implementation and before the full production deployment.

Most of the issues tend to be typical customer types of situation where they didn't plan correctly or they didn't implement fully. They didn't fully do the testing before they got into production.

Scalability, obviously, is phenomenal. Once you have your base system in place, and you've got your architecture the way you want it, being able to add additional compute or storage is about as simple as it gets.

Technical support has been awesome. The overwhelming majority of technical support calls that I've made centered around FlexPod solutions that have been focused on the initial implementations where there have been certain code provisions about little bug issues.

I had one bad power supply show up in a device. Other than that, I haven't had any specific issues related to the environment.

We’ve worked with IBM, HPE, and Pure Storage. The only storage vendor that isn't an actual partner with Key Information is EMC.

I've been doing storage since Viber channel was invented and I've implemented Versa stacks and FlexPods. I don't think I've had an issue incorporating any other storage product in with the environment as well.

The advantage of FlexPod over the competition is ease of use. A lot of that is because NetApp already has a lot of customers who are familiar with the product. It wasn't a barrier of getting in with the FlexPod.

A lot of that was the reason we were allowed to come in and have a conversation. They were already buying NetApp storage. FlexPod added to that solution and that story.

We just really needed to come in and talk about the compute side of it and how that tied in. Most of our FlexPod work has been discussions around UCS and the Cisco side of things, and not around the NetApp side. I don't think I've run into a customer who isn't happy with NetApp.

I started using NetApp back when all they did was NFS and the waffle file system in the entertainment industry for SGI systems to store data.

I've been using them for years and years. I am now able to have block level access, as opposed to NFS. These are things that came out years and years ago, but these are the benefits that I see with this solution.

There is a common platform with both file level protocols, as well as block level protocols for a common storage infrastructure.

Instead of having to add your ICE storage and your fiber channel storage, or having an NFS gateway into those kinds of things, you can have everything incorporated.

Obviously, having all the protection capabilities of the snap features, snap vault, snap ears, and snap cleans have added value to it as well.

Selecting this solution really depends on the architects. The first thing I ask is why they think they need to upgrade and what it is that is driving it.

A lot of times, unfortunately, a lot of upgrades aren't really upgrades. They are just product refreshes. They are just making sure that customers understand that just doing a product refresh may, or may not, meet their future growth needs.

On my side, I try to help people understanding what they want to do, and why they are going about it.

We want to help them understand if there are any other future things coming into play that may, or may not, determine whether they are better off sticking with what they have. That could be a hybrid array, going with all-flash, or sticking with the spinning disc array with some flash cache for their environment. We want to make sure they're not getting too little or too much for what they really need.

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.

The integration between Cisco and NetApp was quite key for us, and the VMware as well. The whole FlexPod stack is pretty key to that.

We are using FlexClone to clone our production environments into Dev and UAT. We used to take a week per environment to do this, now we can get it done in a couple of days per environment.

It is uniquely valuable, because we haven't seen any other vendors in the market who are doing something similar to what the FlexClone technology is doing.

We've had a few technical problems, if those weren't present, then it would probably be perfect.

Two and a half years.

It is very stable. We've been running it for the last two and a half years in our production and DR sites, and we haven't had any issues whatsoever.

It is very scalable. We've had to expand the storage infrastructure a few times, and have had no problems with scaling it out.

I have used NetApp technical support. The first level is probably pretty average. As soon as you escalate above the first level and you start speaking to the second and the third levels, then the support becomes very good.

We spoke to NetApp, because one of our biggest concerns that we had was cloning our environments. We had to have identical replicas of our production environments in Dev and UAT, and the flexible solution was the best option for us at that point.

We contracted through a third party to do the initial setup.

The most valuable features are its modularity, scalability, and the ability to scale down the infrastructure and remove some of the physical hardware that was required previously. It gives us the flexibility to build upon it, whether we do one new service or we do the blade service. With the FlexPod, in general, with the UCS chassis and with NetApp, the way they can intermingle and work together seamlessly was a big benefit to us.

As I’ve mentioned, it allowed us to remove some of the redundant hardware aspects of our infrastructure. At the same time, it allowed us to upgrade our top-of-the-rack switches. We were using some of the legacy MDS fiber switches. The Nexus 5Ks gave us the ability to do fiber channel native and FCOE, as well as giving us that fast speed backbone bandwidth that we know we need for FlexPod.

We have greater flexibility than what we've had in the past. Most of our systems were legacy. We're starting to go through a process of upgrading the infrastructure. FlexPod gives us that flexibility to choose between remote sites or the headquarter site; and basically choose between FlexPod Mini, FlexPod Express or full blown FlexPod with 5Ks, UCS chassis and so on. I think the flexibility in the FlexPod designs is what really attracted our organization to it.

We really like the all-flash arrays and the solid-state drives. We’d really like to see, not so much from NetApp but from our perspective, going more towards the SolidFire and doing some metro clusters with NetApp.

So far, we have not had any issues with stability. We just started implementing or migrating some of the services, building some of the new services onto it. We're pretty young into the FlexPod but the future for FlexPod and for our organization looks bright.

As I’ve mentioned, we have a NetApp representative on site. He does most of the storage stuff for us. We rely on them quite a bit. They're fantastic. We get great support with them.

We were on legacy equipment already. We basically said, "What's the next big thing?" Obviously, being a partner with NetApp, they try to promote FlexPod as much as possible.

Initial setup was pretty straight forward. At first, it can be sort of daunting, with all of the components that are brought together, but once you actually start developing the service profiles and the servers, that's pretty much all it is. You've basically got a chassis that serves servers. Once you have the grand scheme of the design, the configurations after that were pretty simple.

I don't deal with the pricing too much but, from what I understand, we got a pretty good deal on some of the FlexPod equipment that we have.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

If you don't have a reseller that you can talk to, talk to some industry experts. Get a demo. Basically, get an idea of what the FlexPod can do for you and which deployment model fits best for your company.

As I’ve mentioned, given what we were dealing with before, integrating with Cisco and NetApp storage, the marriage between those two companies, they came up with a perfect solution that is pretty modular and flexible. We can scale it however we like it, to whatever site we're going to deploy it at.

I'm not too concerned about more integration between the Cisco and NetApp systems. Obviously, you're going to have some separation there, because they are two different companies. Obviously, the interoperability of the different components, being able to work together, is great enough as it is. Being able to have one user interface that controls everything, I don't think you ever get that but, who knows? Cisco could buy out NetApp; who knows? They might just absorb into one interface. For me, that’s not so important, but I can see where some customers, some users, might look at that as a benefit.

When I look at a vendor, the most important criteria for us is what type of premier support they have. If something breaks, do we have 24-hour support? Obviously, pricing comes along with those but I think support is most important to us.

It's easily integrated. We have WFA and Cisco UCSD; that integration works quite seamlessly. So far, for self-provisioning and for our internal cloud, for the private cloud, that integration works nicely. That's a cool thing.

The integration and all of the levels of automation, everything is there. The support is the first thing that needs to be improved. The second thing is that because there are so many products out there, they need a common management tool. I don't think they have that particular management tool, a centralized tool. I can see into WFA and so on, but that is still in the initial phases. I would like to see more on that automation.

I have been using for the past year.

It is stable; it's semi-stable. Because cloud IT itself is new, standards and procedures are likely not universally defined. It is semi-stable.

That's the challenge. Scalability is the challenge; running out of network ports, running out of storage. If you have very unpredictable workloads, then scaling is a big challenge.

Support is something that has gone a little bit downhill in the past two years. They don’t have a complete devops model. Looking over the past eight years I have been using NetApp, over the past two years, it's not been that great, compared what is used to be. Response time is the challenge.

The company has been using FlexPod for a while, actually; three years.

For the customer, upgrades are very straightforward; nothing to worry about. You just click a few things; it's easy. The upgrades are not that much of an issue.

Go for it. One thing to be aware of is the support, but the rest is good.

When I’m selecting a vendor such as NetApp, in the business that we are in, I look for stability. When it comes to stability, reputation will matter; how long have they been in business and for how long they have proved themselves. The reputation is one of the things. Stability is the key thing.

My primary use case is for private cloud, database servers, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

It allows us to deploy and fly fast quickly.

The feature I have found most valuable is data protection architecture as a whole. Integrating applications like Oracle, SQL, VMWare is a key differentiator. Operations are elementary and consistent. You realize this when you have to scale, and all the management keeps the same way.

Areas for improvement would be the integrated support task force with all vendors, the communication with and recognition program for resellers, at scale documentation I believe it would be more detailed (Graphs and Projections @ latency/IOPs/Throughput). I would like to see more integration with the public cloud in the next release.

I've been using FlexPod for ten+ years.

This solution is surprisingly performative and high available. In addition, all components are fully redundant.

This solution is highly scalable. Because of the nature of flexibility on a solution, we can customize any component, which is great. Still, when we get off the documentation (cause is too flexible), we have to double attention to the limits of individual components.

The technical support for this solution is fine. However, there is some room for improvement, especially when the cases involve the ecosystems. For example, the support team could have a unified war room.

Positive

For the initial customer or engineer, installing for the first time, this product sometimes is challenging to set up. For more senior customers who have automated scripts, it's much easier. Deployment takes a few hours, perhaps around half a day.

When the operations matter, you definitely have to look at FlexPod. I see Flexpod as a singular competitor for two reasons, once you scale the solution as you need and the operations and administrator's effort keep the same. The flexibility allows you to scale just the necessity you need with no waste of investments. I would rate this solution as ten out of ten.