FlexPod XCS Reviews

The most valuable feature is the flexibility because it scales to meet your needs. You don’t have to buy, like with other converged solutions where you have to buy hardware and storage at the same time, here you buy what you need.

It’s very stable, especially now. In its infancy UCS had its problems, but now it's rock solid. The nexus code has been rock solid. NetApp is bullet proof. Everything has to be configured correctly.

If you have FlexPod support, you have the support because you have Cisco and NetApp working on the same case to get the problem solved. Sometimes, vendors will pass off problems to one another, here they work hand in hand.

Configuration can be daunting the first time you look at it, but once you’ve done it a few times it's less so. There are a lot of little setting you have to make sure you configure, and every time it is a little different.

Licensing for fabric interconnects could be better. If you want to enable more ports, you have to buy licenses which can be costly, and you have to go back to Cisco and start the process again. It’s not a cheap product.

I work with the support side. Having the support structure, having the availability of one line and, having two vendors for that one call is a huge advantage over other solutions.

It's a validated infrastructure, meaning that they're pre-validated. Cisco and NetApp have come together to essentially pre-validate against certain use cases. So a lot of the legwork and design have been eliminated.

Because all the testing and all the validation has been pre-done, a lot of that legwork does not need to be done at the user level. You can deploy faster. A lot of the solution is pre-validated, meaning that it just works out of the box.

They've just recently announced the SolidFire integration, which I think is pretty cool. We don't have any experience with that yet, but I'd like to see more details come out of that.

I don't think any solution is perfect, there are always little squeaky wheels that can be tuned, but the product works very well. It's not a perfect solution because, obviously, it doesn't always fit everybody, there are unique requirements that people have.

We've been using it more than five years.

Stability, I think it works really well.

We've had some issues where, the customer didn't necessarily know what their workload was, so they didn't necessarily know what kind of FlexPod solution they needed. But, for the most part, it works well.

It scales well. Obviously, with cluster-mode and ONTAP, you can scale nodes pretty much to what you need it to be.

I've used the FlexPod support. Cisco will take ownership of that and run with it. I can get through to the right person and they're knowledgeable, absolutely.

My industry is IT consulting, so my company has a lot of clients that are in various verticals. It can be healthcare, it can be education, so depending on what vertical they're in, they'll have a requirement to have a certain converged solution that they know that will work.

You've got flexibility within it. It's all profile driven.

And the personalities of the blades within the solution. One could fail, you just pop a new one in and you have SAN booter, you have SD cards that you can just pop right in and it's back up and running. I like the redundancy that you get with that.

It's usually a great fit for most customers, depending on the size obviously. I just feel like it's one of those golden bullets in a lot of cases, to just get something on the ground with them and to have something that they're happy with long term.

About five years now.

It's great. Haven't had any problems with it. I mean, sure there are bugs like anything else, but it's always been solid.

With any software release you're going to have false alarms and you're going to have some failures that you have to upgrade to resolve, but they're usually few and far between, which is great.

It's really scalable. UCS domains, you can just continue adding more if you need to. It's all based on how many you can plug into a set of fabric interconnects, so it's very scalable.

I've had to use tech a lot but it's always been really great. Sometimes there are some language barriers but it's always good.

It's solid compared to everything else I see out there. All these other server manufacturers don't quite have the same level of integration that the Cisco has with this product. I really do like how Cisco has pulled it all together compared to, say, Dell or any of the other manufacturers. It's just much more simple for me to work with, and eventually to customers, it's a great hand-off when it's time to leave.

• Ease of use
• Easy expandability
• They're quick to respond.

We haven't had a single problem with it yet.

It has improved the way our organization functions tenfold. We can deploy servers, storage, and everything else quickly. When we need to expand, we can do that quickly as well. It's just easier all around.

It has helped us grow. As our casinos grow, it has helped us expand and add the storage and everything which we need. It has given us the performance and stability that we need for applications, and it has allowed us to expand our Disaster Recovery (DR) and backup strategies.

I would like to see a little bit more monitoring. OnCommand Unified Manager is great. It just kind of gives you a really good high-level overview. So, I would like to see a little more detail.

We have had it for six years.

Extremely stable. We haven't had a single problem. It has never gone down. Our upgrades are within an hour, so our uptime is incredible.

Scalability is also extremely easy. In fact, right now, we're looking at HCI for its scalability as well. I don't see another product out there that's as scalable as NetApp.

We've just started adding additional heads for clusters. We went to cluster mode last year. So, we've added in some cluster switches, and we've started scaling out.

We have used them, but very rarely. When we do use them, they have always been really quick to respond. Getting knowledgeable people on the phone pretty quickly. It doesn't seem like you ever have to go through so many hoops just to trying to diagnose a problem. It's been extremely valuable.

We didn't have any centralized storage at all. When we purchased it originally, it was all to expand and growth, and everything else. NetApp was our vendor of choice.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was pretty straightforward. Since then, we've swapped our controllers, and all that has been pretty straightforward. We have not had any problems with it being too complex.

The price point is pretty competitive. I'm pretty happy with where the price is right now, but it can always be cheaper!

The automatic revisioning via the ability to provision through a single interface and touch all the components along with it. That really helps us to spin up things like test apps, DevOps, and all that stuff in one interface.

It cuts down on the time needed to provision anything. So if a business unit says, "Hey, I need this, because I need to do analysis on this portfolio that I'm going to buy", or "Are these customers going to pay?" We can provision things very quickly and they can get to work on making money.

It's uniquely valuable because the hyper-converge (buzzword) has taken over right now, but our converged infrastructure, even though it's three or four years old, is still doing everything we need it to do.

Maybe some of the graphical interfaces could be a little more user-friendly from the Cisco side of things.

I'm interested to see how the Converged System Manager comes out. It allows you to see all the components in a single graphical interface. Right now, we have to go to a couple different ones to see everything. We can execute scripts in the background against everything, but it would be nice to see a picture. That way we can give that to the executives, and say "Here, check out this cool thing we have." They probably don't understand it all.

The company was using it before I got there. I have been there for about four years, so at least four years.

I started working on NetApp products in 2008.

We haven't had any downtime in four years. I don't have any problems at all with the stability.

There are some upper limits that we're never gonna reach. I don't have any concerns about scalability or increasing it.

We have used it that much. Of course we have used some of it, but most of it is for a failed hardware or something like. We haven't had any major bugs.

We've never had any issues with tech support. So I would say we're very well-supported and satisfied with the way they do things.

The previous solution was physical servers with a storage so everything was separate, administered separately, and they decided "Hey, let's go with this FlexPod to size everything together with unified support and unified products." So that's why they chose it, to slim things down, but at the same time, to gain some functionality that maybe they didn't have before.

The initial setup predates me.

The valuable features are scalability and all-flash. We are using it with Cisco UCS Blade Servers, so the Cisco switches work very well as a unit. It provides us with the performance we need for our customers to get data on time. Our top customers are very happy with this solution.

The main benefits are scalability, modularity, and fast data transfer. I think the business benefit is a faster response time.

I would like to see the data fabric of the entire system because. The government is looking to deploy a government cloud solution. We want a data fabric which needs to be managed, for the entire cloud environment.

In this regard, if we use storage on our premises for our cloud infrastructure, along with some other vendor like Azure or AWS. We are wondering how all this data will be synchronized and if we can get a common solution and common input. That is the next challenge, not only for me, but for all of the members of the team.

I have been very happy with the scalability.

In terms of technical support team, the support is being provided by a partner of NetApp. However, NetApp people from India do visit us and they ask us if we are facing any problems. We hope to receive very good service from NetApp in the coming days.

I was as consultant for the initial implementation. The team was happy with the implementation.

We looked at other solutions like EMC, but NetApp was the most cost-effective solution.

I would highly recommend NetApp as a storage solution. I am impressed with all types of storage. In terms of choosing NetApp, FlexPod has a very good hyper-converged infrastructure and flash storage. It is a very good way of being cost effective. There are a lot of vendors, but not that many of them are as cost effective as NetApp.

We have everything on our FlexPod.

Because we use it everywhere, it is standard to set up. Therefore, if you can manage the set up in one place, then you can manage the whole infrastructure.

• The ease of use
• The ease of administration
• It is easy to manage.

I would like to see synchronous replication and easier automation in the next release.

I love the stability. It is stable.

I love the scalability. It is scalable.

The technical support is slightly above average. I would like them to have quicker escalation.

We were previously using Dell EMC and HPE servers. I prefer NetApp over Dell EMC.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used World Wide Technology and DataBank for the deployment.

We have seen ROI.

It is a good proof of concept.

A valuable feature is being a one-rack solution. It was easy to implement and integrate to the existing network. The complexity of how things connect was taken out of it. We use it for mostly for cloud television, CloudTV platforms, and storage of VMware images.

It's a storage solution. That's the benefit.

I do not like the NetApp licensing fees. They are exorbitant. That could become a turn-off to other companies. There are a lot of other streamlined and better solutions out there for a lower price.

It is very stable.

Scalability is very good. You have better horsepower solutions which are great. It is very easy and very scalable. FlexPod itself is pretty scalable. I am pretty happy with the solution itself.

Customer support is very good.

There are several solutions that we used, but I can't be specific for proprietary reasons. We have researched other solutions. We're always researching.

I was involved in some of the initial setup and design. It was very straightforward and very easy.

We are always researching other options. We develop solutions in-house when needed.

It's a great solution. I would recommend FlexPod, except for the licensing fee. I can speak about the implementation part. I don't know what the system admins would say. I'm not able to speak from their perspective.