FlexPod XCS Reviews

The simplicity of having an all-in-one solution.

Simplicity.

Make it cheaper.

About six to eight months.

It's very good.

It's very good as well.

We haven't used it.

I wasn't involved in it.

We went out to tender.

We're in finance. I don't know if this solution is uniquely valuable in our industry but it works for us. It's not perfect but it does what we expected. We haven't had any problems at all.

Honestly, it's making sure that you only have one upgrade path when various patches are released.

There's only one throat to choke when something goes wrong.

I'm currently drowning in features. So maybe a simplification would be better. Fewer features.

Several months.

At the moment, I have had very few problems with the FlexPod system. However, the alerting is so much chattier than what I had previously, that I spent several months thinking that the world was ending. And it turns out, it was just a bug.

Frontline support was atrocious, but once you bludgeon them properly, you get through to somebody who knows what they're doing, and it's very quick, easy, and clean.

It was overly complicated, but that was our own doing. It's not necessarily the fault of the product.

Again, only had it several months, so I'm rating it a seven because I'm pessimistic. But that way, it also has room to grow.

• Certified architecture
• Unified support

• Unified support
• Reference architecture

The service catalogue and gallery. I find it difficult to go through documentation, and I would like to see user cases we can refer to. Would like to follow a specific work flow.

There's been no issues, and it's been great.

With cDOT, it's very easy to scale out, and that's the reason we went with it in the first place.

It's been great, and any issues have been taken care of right away.

It's complex because we didn’t buy FlexPod out-of-box, we put it together ourselves and went through lots of changes in our environment, so it's complex because of our own doing.

Pick your partner wisely, as they have a lot in your success. Go with someone with a history in FlexPod.

• It's ready to use, just plug and play
• It's easy to manage
• Single administration console

One of the benefits of the solution is management. We do not need to contact multiple vendor OEMs for any VMware issues, NetApp issues, or Cisco UCS issues. We can conduct it all with a single point of reference.

One feature we would like to see is SSD with the Cisco UCS Mini already available.

Also, integration with the other OEMs. Right now it is their intent that we could integrate with the EMC and the Hitachi, but still there are a few more OEMs out there, customs.

About three years.

No, it's good. We have many more than 50 customers that are using a solution with this platform.

It's scalable up to whatever you need. We can integrate it up to 160 servers.

It's good. We can always get to the right person for help.

We have been involved in the initial setup many times for many customers, from day one.

Ease of cabling is the most valuable feature of the solution. Service profiles are also easy to use.

I would say that the cabling helps me, and it simplifies the environment for me and it is very fast.

There is nothing I can think of at this time.

We have been using it about a year and a half.

It's very stable, no issues with it so far.

Awesome – adding a chassis is very easy.

I haven’t had to use them yet which is actually a good sign.

Straightforward because the documentation was great.

I would say that flexibility is the most important factor we look at, and also, for us, the worldwide availability is very important.

I used the solution as disaster recovery (DR) for backing up the IBM Power series infrastructure. The primary site is running our core application, which is based on Java and Oracle databases installed on a SUSE Linux environment.

The solution was simple to deploy, but we faced challenges with replication between the primary site and secondary site.

The fact that all the components were integrated, and its simplicity to deploy. The deployment took less than a week since there was no networking and/or storage integration.

Compatibility issues with replication. The Oracle table formats were not working and storage replications did not work as well, until we had to introduce other components to make it work. This is a good solution, but only if its on both the DR and DC for replication compatibility.

• Ease of configuration 
• Ease of training for whoever is going to be using it

Deployment time is probably one of the biggest ones. You can get it set up and start using it in a quick manner.

I think it could be a little bit more flexible and if they found a way to implement more of a supported cloud solution to it, I think that could help a lot. 

Then there's things like AltaVault which, if there was a way to have that as a shipped feature with it, could be useful as well.

Six or seven years.

Solid. Very good.

Pretty good. I think there is some room for improvement. It depends on how big of a company you're at, but we outgrew some of the solutions that we had installed and then we ended up having to custom-build a different solution.