FlexPod XCS Reviews

We use it for everything except for ERP. We use it for VMware, VDI, SQL, and a mix of Windows and Linux.

FlexPod has enabled our staff to be more efficient. They spend less time managing multiple tickets with multiple vendors. If we open a ticket with Cisco and the issue needs to have NetApp pulled in or VMware pulled in, our contact is still Cisco and they still have ownership of the case, as opposed to, without FlexPod, the process would be opening a ticket with Cisco. Cisco would need to check something on the NetApp side. Then we would have to engage NetApp, open a NetApp case, coordinate some time to get everybody together on a WebEx, and then they could say that it's a Windows problem. Then we would have to open a ticket with Microsoft and do the whole thing again. The support is nice to have.

It has decreased the unplanned downtime incidents by around 10%.

Knowing that everything works, having a single place to be able to find out compatibility and things like that are the biggest benefits of this solution.

FlexPod's validated designs for major enterprise apps are very important in our company. For example, running our SQL clusters, being able to have compatibility information, and validated design information, for everything from SQL versions, OS versions, switching, firmware versions, and UCS and models of whatever hardware we're using, having all of that pre-validated and available is nice.

We do not use their storage into public cloud.

We have found that it simplifies our infrastructure from edge to core. It's just nice to have that single source of pre-validated designs and reference architectures.

The history of innovations has not affected our operations. We've been pretty stable. We haven't really done a whole lot as far as, being on the bleeding edge of anything.

Unified support for the entire stack is pretty important. It's nice to have. It makes it a lot easier from our perspective, to be able to make or have a single point of contact, for issues that are kind of gray as far as where the problem lies.

It hasn't saved us CapEx.

It's been stable. 

It's scaled easily to what we need it for. 

Support has been good. There were a few hiccups early on but it's pretty well streamlined now.

The initial setup was straightforward. It would have been set up the same way if it wasn't called FlexPod. We're using Cisco Nexus, which is Cisco UCS, NetApp storage, and VMware are all things we would have done anyway.

We did the setup ourselves. It was piece by piece and it was built by us and then validated.

If you're a Cisco, NetApp or VMware shop then go for it.

I would rate FlexPod an eight out of ten. Not a perfect ten because it could use better integration on the network side between UCS and the switching layer. The fact that LACP is not supported on UCS blades isn't so great. It would be nice if it was.

We use FlexPod for all of our tier two and tier three storage, in all of our business units.

The ability to scale on demand allows us to get the capacity for the customer in a much more efficient manner in a better timeframe.

From an infrastructure standpoint, we have more cohesiveness between the teams. This was a concern to us and we're working to solve it so that we can operate in a more efficient manner.

From an ESX node standpoint, using this solution has reduced our footprint tremendously. I would say that it has decreased by approximately thirty-five percent.

We have done a lot of consolidation on the storage side. We have been able to put into one cluster what would have taken three or four in the older environment. It benefits us because there is less administration.

Some of our applications were on solid-state flash disks and some were on a hybrid platform. This new configuration is all-flash, solid-state, so nobody should have complaints about the performance.

The storage performance has most likely increased anywhere from ten percent to probably twenty percent, attributed to the all-flash, solid-state hardware.

We have seen a more efficient use of compute resources because we have fewer nodes committed. I would say that we are probably thirty to thirty-five percent more efficient.

Our maintenance costs have absolutely been reduced. We were going to have to pay between one and two million dollars, and by putting this in, we're avoiding those costs.

Our TCO has been reduced because one big piece of our former infrastructure was made up of Cisco SAN switches, and they are pretty pricey per port when you're using fiber channel. Now, we're using iSCSI, so we're saving a lot of money.  

The most valuable feature for me is that you can swap out pieces when you have to lifecycle your equipment. You never have to go through a big freeze, but instead, do small pieces at a time. It reduces the migration hassle.

The tools bring the compute and storage together so that we can see it in a single pane of glass.

I would like to be able to pull in a file to specify a configuration upfront, rather than go through a lot of screens. There is a lot of manual effort there, and that is one place that mistakes can happen.

In the SolidFire interface, if you use the GUI, you have to create one run at a time, or one device at a time, which is something that needs to be fixed. Having to do that is ludicrous.

The stability has been good so far. We have had some drive-type issues where we had to apply a new code level, but in my opinion, it is just part of the normal business transactions. The storage nodes cause certain drives to act as though they've failed, but they really haven't. You just have to remove them, re-insert them, and they work again. It is a bug.

We've grown and grown, and we've done it all online, so there are no concerns around scaling from a storage standpoint.

We have been in contact with technical support a few times. Not a whole lot. I don't have any concerns with them.

The setup of this solution is lengthy and complex, but we have been speaking with people about how to make it more efficient.

The complexity has a lot to do with when you're initially setting the equipment up. There's a lot of values that you have to plug into their various screens, and then you also have to do a reboot to pick up whether it's going to be a storage node or a compute node. Then, they're looking to fix status too, and you have to do a reboot after that, so you lose forty-five minutes and if you have a large install, that's a long time to build the environment.

We used some of the professional services that were tied to the bundled packages.  We also obtain our hardware and resources through a third-party called WWT, and everything is great with them.

ROI is difficult to figure out but I can say that we have had two to three million dollars in OE savings by deploying this and getting rid of older equipment.

Even though this is a fairly new product, it is very appropriate for business solutions, and not just your mom-and-pop shops. It scales rather well, and to me, the big thing is the rolling upgrade scenario as far as when it comes time to lifecycle your equipment. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Two hour production products are fully running in AWS. For the FlexPod, we just run everything on it.

We bought all the parts separately. So, we are running a certified FlexPod design with the AFF A700, UCS chassis, and Cisco Nexus FIs.

We are using both AWS and Azure.

The solution makes our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward. The environment is more homogeneous, so there are not as many technologies to study and learn. People can focus on improving their knowledge in existing technologies.

It simplifies our lives.

We use a smaller footprint of equipment right now.

• The compact design
• Cost savings

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization are very important. We use all certified designs to be eligible for the enterprise support and to receive support promptly. That is why we extremely rely on the certified designs and best practices.

There were a lot of elemental failures, like RAM or blades.

Hardware stability needs improvement. We replaced a lot of RAM this past year. We had to replace the complete blade once after extensive troubleshooting. Any given time, we have approximately one blade down within the entire infrastructure, unfortunately.

The stability is good. It breaks sometimes.

The solution has decreased the unplanned downtime incidents in our organization. We have almost eliminated downtime (by 90 percent) since using FlexPod.

The scalability is very expensive.

The technical support is good. We haven't needed to contact Cisco support regarding FlexPod as the entity. For NetApp and UCS, we receive a lot of attention.

The solution’s unified support for the entire stack is very important. With FlexPod, you receive a higher attention level when you ask for support. This is very beneficial in a time-sensitive business.

We did not have FlexPod before. We had a bunch of standalone HPE rack servers.

We switched after analyzing the performance needs and what customers wanted to spend.

We reduced the environmental footprint, like reducing electricity costs and heating. However, we are hosting our data centers from somebody else. We reduced our footprint of equipment by approximately 80 percent. Meaning that about 70 percent of our cabinets right now are empty because we switched to FlexPod.

For the deployment of UCS, we uses an integrator and fellow reseller. Our experience with them was very good. Everything works.

The application performance improved by 50 to 70 percent.

Cisco and NetApp were on our shortlist.

I would rate it an eight (out of 10).

Everything with NetApp right now is our DR and restore strategy. We have all of our VMs installed in an on-premises FlexPod.

We have another filter down in our DR site and everything is replicated using SnapProtect and SnapSuite.

The validated designs for major enterprise applications are very important to our organization. We have to make sure that everything is fully supported, end to end, and that we're not going to have any problems. When people have trouble they resort to finger-pointing and complain about the network, servers, or storage. With the one validated design, we contact NetApp and get support for everything we need.

This solution has had a serious impact on our organization. How do you measure not having outages? It has allowed us to do business without any interruptions, which means that I can sleep well at night. After the last hurricane, we were completely up once it ended because we just brought up all of the VMs using VMware.

With respect to the history of innovations, the strategy that NetApp has taken with Cloud volumes online, Azure NetApp files, and all of those things, is good. We've already started using cloud volumes online and we're putting in a new solution with NetApp where we're going to be tiering everything off to Azure because we have a huge presence there. For example, we have an SQL server there, and we're going to be replacing the drives that are on SQL with Cloud Volumes Online so that we can leverage efficiencies. Other data, such as shares, are also going to be tiered off to Azure so that we don't have to be using production cycles, production backups and IOPS and everything, locally. We're instead going to send it to cloud storage.

Using FlexPod has absolutely made our staff more efficient.

This solution has increased our application performance, but we have been using this solution since 2003 and no longer keep metrics.

Our data center costs have been reduced because we've been able to shrink our data center. About ten years ago, we were at about one hundred and seventy servers. Now, we're down to eight blades. We've gone from seven racks down to two racks in the data center, and if you think about power, cooling, and everything else, it's a significant saving.

The most valuable features of this solution are efficiency and simplicity. You don't have to waste a lot of time managing things.

We have had some problems with SnapSuite and the replication functionality.

This solution is extremely stable, rock-solid.

We haven't had any failures, hardware-wise, in several years. The only issues that we have had were with SnapSuite, and it was related to replication. For this issue, we engaged with technical support.

This is a very scalable solution.

The unified support for the entire stack is extremely important for us. Anytime we have an issue, even though we haven't had any recently, we need to get it resolved as quickly as possible. Having a single vendor to go to for everything just makes it that much easier.

When we have had to contact technical support, they were very responsive, they follow up, and they take ownership of the issues right away. I would rate them a five out of five. 

We have always been using NetApp, although about twelve years ago we went through consolidation. We had Dell storage, some Hitachi, some IBM storage, and then we had a NetApp filer. Our multi-vendor hardware came about from purchasing the cheapest thing that we could get when something else was needed.

When we met with our NetApp rep, they came in and suggested that we consolidate. We had been having trouble with backups, using Syncsort, and they suggested that we move to SnapProtect and get everything on NetApp. They helped us to take everything off of all the other storage, consolidate down to NetApp, and then replace our entire backup solution with SnapSuite and SnapProtect. After that, they made sure that everything would replicate back up to the DR site.

The initial setup of this solution is fairly straightforward. Obviously, you need to know what storage systems are being used, etc, but in general, it is straightforward.

We use Insight, formerly Datalink, to assist us with the maintenance of this solution. They are excellent. They helped with our implementation and they help us to deploy all of the solutions. If we have any questions about designs, where we are going in terms of the roadmap, etc, then between Insight and NetApp they are invaluable when helping us to make decisions.

I would say that we have seen ROI, although I do not have numbers to support it.

I am looking forward to using the cloud enablement that they have been working on.

In the last three years, I lost money that was budgeted for capital expenditures, meaning that I have had to give it back because I literally have nothing to buy. We do have operating expenses and we have the capability, but everything that we are doing is moving into Azure, using managed services and software as a service. This means that we've been reducing our hardware footprint significantly. Especially with the efficiencies that NetApp brings, we don't need as much storage space.

My advice for anybody researching this solution is to evaluate your workloads.

NetApp is definitely the way to go.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We have a custom-built FlexPod with a Cisco 6332-16FI and an AH-700.

It is being used as our primary network infrastructure.

The solution’s validated designs are pretty important for major enterprise apps in our organization. We follow them to make sure that we're compliant.

This solution runs our VMs. Our SQL databases, for example, are in our VMs, so everything is virtualized.

Implementing this solution has made our staff more efficient because once it is built, it's a matter of provisioning additional VMs. It's pretty simplified.

I think that with the new all-flash array, our application performance has been improved.

We did not have very much unplanned downtime before implementing our current solution, so I can't say that our new solution is much different in that regard.

This solution has probably not reduced our data center costs because our previous solution was relatively small. It was just one rack.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the stability.

I would like to see a more centralized support model.

To this point, stability has been good. We have had no downtime since I built this solution.

In our previous FlexPod, I think that both of the UCS-FIs went down during the firmware upgrade. That caused an outage. I do not know all of the details because that was before I joined the company.

We can expand using additional chassis and additional disk shelves.

The solution's unified support for the entire stack is beneficial. Basically, it's kind of all-in-one.

The technical support for this solution is ok, although we dislike using the online robot. It's caused delays in us reaching out to a real support engineer.

I built the current FlexPod and it was pretty straightforward.

We had another FlexPod that was built by somebody else. It's easy to build and we are in the process of migrating all of the workloads over. We're always refreshed.

I also have experience with Vblock.

We do not use the solution’s storage tiering to the public cloud. We are not using the cloud at all for the moment.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to engage some type of professional services just to set it up if they are unfamiliar with the technology.

This is a solution that I recommend, and if you're already familiar with other similar technologies then it is pretty simple to put it together.

We do not have the license for NDME yet, and we would like to see how much improvement it is over our current setup.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

It's a tenant environment. We sell it off to customers who need an environment, depending on the scale of their company, where there might be a couple of servers or 100 to 200 servers.

We are our own cloud provider. We use VMware vCloud Director because we provide that to our customers.

For UCS, we are on version 6.2. For NetApp, we are on 9.5.

Our private cloud sector of our company has grown exponentially thanks to the ease of deployment of the FlexPod architecture. We are also able to deploy a console to customers who want on-prem environments in a smaller deployment structure with a UCS Mini and direct-attached storage. So, it's helped us exponentially grow the business.

All-flash has helped the company a lot, especially for business critical applications. We found that customers want more performance than ever based on what is out there in the market. We find that innovation and integration with the whole FlexPod design has helped a lot.

The guides that we use to install FlexPods are always up-to-date. This is really helpful, especially if there is a new product with NetApp moving so far forward and Cisco as well. For them to join together and update a centralized document for the install process, it is really good. It helps us understand if there are features from the first version that we installed while upgrading that we need to implement. Those are in the document. So, we find that document useful and helpful when moving forward.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization is very important. It helps us to understand what we need to do and deliver, doing it at a supported level for our customers.

It would be nice to have something like an automated, upgrade solution The tasks needed to upgrade the hardware within FlexPod are still quite behind compared to some of its other aspects. That's more on the Cisco side. For the NetApp side, the upgrade process is quite simple. It's been simplified. So, that's something that could be looked at.

It has gone to HTML5, but it's still quite a bit bland. It still seems a bit like there were some features in the Java version that are quite hard to get into in the HTML5 version of UCS Manager, where you go to a profile and you need to drag it in. You can't move the box across. All the boxes are different sizes. If you have a lot of names, then you can't move it across, which is quite annoying when you're trying to do it.

I would like more with the integration pieces, e.g., more with the REST APIs to be able to access it remotely.

The footprint in the data center is quite large, especially when you scale out. Maybe find some hardware in the future, where if a new blade comes out, then Cisco can say, "Look, we'll buy those blades back off you, and we'll give you this blade for X amount of money." A buyback scheme would be good for hardware, and even NetApp as well. Something like a buyback scheme for blades and stuff moving forward would be good, because I know that they're going to put more power into them. E.g., replacing four blades might equal one blade, which would be awesome, but we are still going to have those four blades around. Maybe having something where it will give you this much money for these blades so we can upgrade. That would be perfect. 

With the upgrading, making that a little bit more streamlined and a bit easier to do, so it doesn't require as many man hours to do. I would like prerequisites for an upgrade.

It's very stable. Since we've had it in, knock on wood, it's been absolutely flawless. We've had some issues, but that's to do with the upgrades and mainly with the fabric interconnects, and they can be a bit finicky. They're not as robust. They're robust in a way if you don't touch them, they look fine. But, in the upgrade process, we've had a lot of issues where there would either be corrupted images or they wouldn't upgrade, which would cause one of the switches to fail. Some of that stuff is very worrying. But from a performance perspective, it's worked as it should.

It's highly scalable. It scales really well, but that also comes back to how you want to scale it. In terms of whether you want to add more chassis and if you want to add anything more to that. Then, that comes under the costings of the data center because the chassis are quite big. However, the scalability of it is perfect. We haven't had an issues with it.

The technical support is pretty good. I would give it a seven or eight out of 10. A full 10 would be having the automated upgrading, getting them to do the upgrades, as that would take a lot of time off us having to do them. I am sure that there is a team you can get for that support, but it's quite expensive. Maybe that type of support for upgrades can be bundled in when someone buys a FlexPod deployment. Most of our time on the environment is spent on upgrading of the infrastructure.

We have really good support from NetApp. We get really good, really fast support from Cisco, as well. E.g., if there is a failed memory chip in one of the host servers that needs replacements, they are always on time. They send it out when they need to, and if the problem is not resolved, then they move that forward to the next tier.

We used NetApp from the start. Before my time, I'm not too sure what they were using. I think before it was just storage on servers, like integrated in. As long as I've been here, I've been using NetApp. 

At the time we went with that solution, public clouds didn't exist. However, knowing that it does integrate with public clouds is an absolute bonus. It's awesome because we're moving towards that type of integration. Knowing this makes our lives a lot easier because we don't have to move from where we are to get to where we want to go. We've already got what we want, which is absolutely amazing. So, it's great.

We are very strong NetApp partners.

The initial setup was straightforward. Complexity was added more from a customer perspective, where you need that custom setup for what they require. With the bundle, we did get to go to training for FlexPod's deployment and that sort of area. That also helped us a lot to understand the nuts and bolts and detail of what it is as well, which helped a lot with that knowledge.

We work with Cisco and NetApp for the deployment. The guides are absolutely intuitive. You go from start to finish, deploying it all in one. In terms of time, we have used them to reference different aspects of how we should set it up if there are custom requirements, because not all deployments are put it in and deploy it as we go. We have had some custom requirements over time, but the initial one was just straight in and cable. It was quite intuitive for us, which was good. We didn't need for anyone to come out and install it.

I haven't seen ROI.

From an application point of view, customers have seen an improvement in response times for mainly database-based applications, and the need to have a lot of reads and writes for all-flash storage. The upgrades with the hosts from UCS to the new blades with PASA processes and more memory have also improved.

From a flexible deployment and scalability point of view, we got NetApp. From enterprise and beyond, they are doing above and beyond anything that anyone else is doing at the moment.

Cisco are the leaders in LAN technology. With their hardware for unified communication of the UCS bundle, it's so straightforward and easy to set up. It integrates with a lot of other major vendors, which makes our lives a lot easier.

I would definitely support integrating FlexPod within a company, depending on their requirements. Even if it wasn't a a full, flexible deployment, just having a smaller deployment of the UCS Mini with a smaller NetApp for a customer, it is so scalable. You can do it for a smaller customer to an enterprise customer. I would fully support them implementing this into a data center based on their requirements.

The solution has made our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward, but there's still a lot of manual overhead that needs to be done. We're installing new chassis or upgrades. Upgrades is a really big one.

We find that the UCS shells are still quite power intensive. Maybe moving forward to the new releases of the blades that they have in their FlexPod deployment, we might be able to change a couple of blades to one blade because the power is exactly the same. They have the same quality of processing and memory. Right now, we find that it does take up a lot of space and power. Hopefully, in the future, once we do go through the upgrade process, pull out the old blades, and whatever we need to replace, we might do that.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. Nothing is perfect. You always have that one percent where you say, "Aw, I wish it was doing this," but at the end of the day, it can't. You're always going to be a bit picky.

The primary use case is storage for medical imagery.

We have significantly less latency now with our imagery.

It certainly has increased the speed of operations.

The solution has made our staff more efficient because it is easier to manage. This has enabled them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward. From a management perspective, the interface is much easier to use.

Reliability and convenience are its most valuable features.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization are fairly important. Speed-wise, we are not having any latency issues.

The solution has not reduced our data center costs.

I have no issues with the stability at all. It's a very stable platform.

The solution has decreased unplanned downtime incidents in our organization by 15 percent.

I'm very impressed with the scalability of the solution. It can be expanded almost infinitely.

The technical support is very good.

Our old solution was horrible and slow. We were using Dell EMC. We switched due to perceived latency.

It was very simple and straightforward. I had it racked within half a day and connected.

For deployment, we used NetApp personnel and a reseller. The experiences with them were good.

The solution has improved application performance in our organization by 30 percent.

Our licensing costs are about $50,000 per year.

Dynamics was on our vendor shortlist. 

We chose FlexPod after consulting with the vendor and NetApp.

Definitely consider NetApp. I would rate the product as a 10 out of 10 because it is fantastic. 

We are using for the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for our hospital.

We are using a primary and secondary data center model. We have two locations where one is the primary and the other is the DR.

Essentially, it's reduced some of the overhead from our team of administrators, so they can focus on other areas.

The solution has simplified infrastructure from edge to core to cloud, which has given us some bandwidth to focus on some other core initiatives that we have.

The solution has made our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward. With the administration, it's given us a bit more time to do research and process development, even investing some time in automation.

We had everything that we needed to start it, stand it up, and get it working, then develop a proof of concept to see how it works. We could also scale it out to meet our business needs over time.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization are very important. It's basically become critical to our organization to have that system functioning a 100 percent of the time. If that system is not functional, then our doctors and nurses can't provide the care to the patients in an effective way. So, it's important that it is stable, works, and easy to understand.

There is a history of issues with hardware availability. For example, we'll buy an array or a filer with a particular configuration and particular size of drive, sizing it appropriately. Then, as we grow, they're like, "Oh, you can always get more." Then when you go to get more, that model or type of disk is no longer available. 

It becomes this big process to try to figure out what we need to get, how it'll work, and how that'll integrate into the system. That could be simpler. They could do a bit more to guarantee the availability of parts. Obviously, not being the largest storage vendor, I know they can't sometimes control what the hardware vendors do. However, a bit more transparency and communication about this would be helpful.

The solution has decreased unplanned downtime incidents in our organization. So far, it's been very stable. We haven't really had any issues with it.

We did have one issue which was related to a misconfiguration with the power that did cause downtime. That was the first issue that we had since we put it in about two and a half years ago.

There was a misconfiguration with the power configuration. This relates to UCS where it was set to the grid incorrectly. Then, based on the population of the blades, it was overpopulated and there was a power issue. One of the circuits was actually connected to a low voltage circuit which caused some issues. With that, we lost almost the entire chassis for a period of time. It was not fun.

It is just a system that we can scale as we need.

The scalability is good. We're in the process of systematically replacing all of the desktop computing environment in our health system with the VDI. Our plan is to take what we have and grow it to meet that need.

We have used technical support a few times, mostly just for questions. 

The solution’s unified support for the entire stack is really important. We can't ever find ourselves in a situation where something is down, and it's integrated with another vendor application and we're looking for support, that all the vendors are pointing fingers at each other. One of the requirements that we have for standing up a system like this is that it has this type of support.

We had primarily used another vendor for our Tier 1 storage applications, then when the all-flash options came out, they were seemed to be doing better. It was a more reliable, well-developed product. We actually switched when we upgraded our existing arrays to the all-flash offerings that NetApp had.

I wasn't the primary person for a good portion of the time that we've had it. Now that I've taken over that role, I'll be digging into it a lot more.

The setup is complex, but not unreasonable. There is a lot to learn. There is a lot to do to make sure that all of the versioning is compatible. I know NetApp offers some tools if you're not familiar with it or you haven't done it before. I'm not sure that I've seen everything or know all the places to look for that information. So, it can be a little anxiety provoking in that sense.

We have a partner through NetApp who does consulting for us. They came in and helped us configure it. The experience of working with them was good.

The main return on investment would be that instead of having to refresh all of our desktop hardware we have been able to go reimage existing machines and use those as thin clients, then also purchase new thin clients rather than buying actual hardware. It also reduces the overhead of having our technicians deploy those systems and maintain them.

If there are cost savings, they are are minimal, whether it's CAPEX or OPE. They balance out, as the vendors get paid one way or another.

Develop a relationship with a partner. Those resources for us have been invaluable.

I would probably rate it about an eight (out of 10). That's just because it does meet the needs, but It's not perfect. Nothing is. There are some features or advertisements about what its capabilities are, but when dig into it or you get down the road, it's not exactly what it was advertised as.

We are experimenting with the solution’s storage tiering to public cloud right now. We haven't really gotten too far into it, but that's something that we're actually looking to do.