FlexPod XCS Reviews

Our primary use case for this solution is virtualization. We run both VMware and Hyper-V.

We currently have an AFF8040 that is running with Cisco UCS in our FlexPod solution. We have a four-node cluster, where we have the AFF but we also have a second cluster with spinning disks. It's nice to have them clustered because I can move my high-performance workloads over onto the SSD, easily. If we have things that we determine aren't taking advantage of the SSD, I can volume migrate it back to the spinning disk and not waste high-performance capacity on workloads that aren't utilizing the speed of the SSD.

The solution's validated designed for major enterprise apps are very important to us because we would prefer not to open support calls, and with the validated configuration, it just works.

We are not yet using this solution for tiering to a public cloud, but it is something that we're looking into.

This solution has improved our organization in that we have reduced administration time and reduced troubleshooting time. We know that the performance is there when we need it.

The history of innovations has had a positive effect on our organization. NetApp is always coming up with features that I want before I know that I want them. For example, it was helpful when we no longer had to dedicate a certain number of disks to our root volume.

In terms of application performance, bringing the AFF in has made a huge difference in some of our manufacturing and labeling applications.

With the Cisco UCS, having the profiles and being able to swap hardware in and out is super valuable.

This solution is easy to set up and maintain.

I like the fact that NetApp has fully embraced the cloud and the SaaS backup is available. I always hear from my other cloud engineers that Microsoft backs it up, but I don't trust that. I want my snapshots.

The only support call that we have had in six years was related to an ONTAP upgrade, where one of the controllers didn't patch properly.

This solution is incredibly stable. In the past six or seven years that we have been using NetApp, aside from the disk replacement calls that we get occasionally, I have only had one other support call. We see disk failures once or twice per year.

The other support call was related to an ONTAP upgrade where one of the controllers just did not patch properly. The other clusters were still working fine on the other controller, and we got support involved. It was a known bug and they took care of it. The cluster was back up and running with full stability in under an hour.

We have not had to scale this solution much, although our CAO has tasked us with being fully cloud by 2025. 

I haven't had to open up any support cases recently. That said, the unified support for the entire stack is very important to us. If we ever did need to open a support call, we know that NetApp and Cisco are going to work together for a solution. When you get solutions that aren't paired like that, a lot of the time you get vendors pointing the finger back and forth at each other and bounce the support tickets back and forth. Knowing that NetApp and Cisco have worked together to verify this solution and are committed to working together to solve problems is very important for our organization.

On the occasion where we needed to use technical support, it was excellent.

We were using IBM SAN and HP servers before this solution, and our uptime has increased from about ninety-five percent uptime to five-nines or six-nines.

Our IBM SVC SAN was over-engineered. The person that brought it in didn't want to take the time to properly size the solution, so they just overbought. We switched to this solution because management wanted us to look for ways to cost-save.

I had a very small amount of experience with NetApp while I was with a previous employer, but the storage people at the company spoke very highly of NetApp. We brought them in to compare cost, features, and performance, and NetApp was brought into the environment after that.

This solution is super easy and straightforward to set up. It is almost "set and forget", and everything works really well. It actually took longer than it should have, simply because I stopped the engineer and had him walk me through every single step so that I understood what he was doing and why he was doing it.

Without my interruption, he could have spun it up himself in a couple of hours. However, it was important for me to understand how the system was deployed and why things were set up the way that they were so that I was able to support it going forward.

We brought in a company called MCPc to help us deploy initially. Interestingly, the technician from MCPc who helped us with the deployment ended up becoming our NetApp sales engineer, so I still work with him to this day. I knew nothing about NetApp at the time, so he got me up to speed initially. Then I went to a couple of NetApp Insights and took a couple of certification courses, and I am very comfortable with it now.

The total cost of ownership with this solution is good.

Prior to choosing this option, we looked at a smaller IBM solution, as well as solutions from EMC. The big winning factor for NetApp was cost. At the same time, since we've brought NetApp in, I've found that NetApp's storage efficiency is unparalleled.

I recently had a discussion with a business unit in one of our remote sites that needed some more performance out of their 2650 and they were telling my bosses that they could get an IBM SSD solution for $10,000 USD. Their cost of adding a NetApp shelf would be $26,000 USD. I have no idea where they got those numbers, but never in my entire career have I experienced IBM being cheaper than anybody else.

When we factored in storage efficiency and cost savings that we get from using Commvault IntelliSnap for backups, it makes absolutely no sense to use anything other than NetApp.

When we originally looked at bringing Commvault into our environment for backup, using Commvault streaming technology, we were looking at several million dollars for backup. When we went through this with the NetApp rep and actually looked at how much streaming backup we needed for Commvault, and how much could be done natively with IntelliSnap, that cost went from several mission dollars down to a quarter of a million dollars. That was huge.

We are a very lean organization, so this solution has not necessarily made our staff more efficient. If we were not already that way then we wouldn't get anything done.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is to make sure that you include FlexPod and be sure to consider the costs in the evaluation. I cannot imagine a situation where the total cost of ownership is not comparable. 

This is a solution that makes my life easier and I can always count on it being up. For me, that is the most important thing.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Our primary use case is a mixture of workloads. We have VMware, Citrix, Oracle and SAP, which are all running within the FlexPod stack.

It created lower total cost of ownership. Previously, we had disparate storage and servers, and there were bits of kits everywhere. Now, we have two data centers with almost identical setups in both. We are Active-Active, but we can easily swing workloads across to one data center, if need be, because it's the same underlying technology.

It's a common platform, which provides for ease of use between all of the blade servers. It uses all the same tech, moving service profiles seamlessly across from one blade to the next. There is also combined support.

There are too many management products: System Insight Manager, Oakum, etc. There are a lot of them and you have to know which one to use at which time. Whereas, with competitors, they have a single pane of glass view which has everything in it.

It is stable. We haven't had an outage in the last year that has been caused by anything related to the FlexPod. It has been 100 percent available.

The solution is resilient. It is easy to spin up another blade with the same service profile as the existing one, then within seconds you are up and running. This can also be done in combination with VMware SRM, Oracle Data Guard, or one of the other vendors' software solutions on top with little downtime. 

It seems scalable. It scales more than we need. I love that we will be able to scale out into the cloud and utilize that when we need it.

The technical support is good. We generally call directly to either NetApp or Cisco. Every time that we have called the support has been good, NetApp especially. We've found that they stick with a problem all the way through to the end (24/7) by switching their engineers, though the underlying problem maybe even isn't a NetApp component.

We had such a disparate collection of servers and vendors which didn't make sense since it meant having a lot of different support contracts. We had different servers, switches, and hardware coming out of support, and keeping track of that was quite difficult. We made the decision to move to consolidate data centers. In that decision, we decided to go with FlexPod.

We followed the validated design. Although on paper it looks quite complex, we followed the validated design and working closely with NEC, who has set up other data centers similar to ours. It was easy.

It has saved our engineers time. The initial setup to get the service profile set up took some time, but now each new blade that is put in is up and running in ten minutes. The previous service that we had would have taken about half a day to a day.

We work with NEC, who was good.

Batch jobs which used to take two or three hours in the evening are now running in ten to fifteen minutes. This is a significant improvement.

We looked at other vendors: IBM and Dell EMC. IBM was our existing vendor at the time, and we found their support was poor. We trialed Dell EMC and FlexPod was the better solution. We were pleased with the way FlexPod went in and worked.

Trial it. See if you can get a demo to a trial system, then put some big workloads through it and see what performance you get.

I like the validate designs. I like the way they are put together and give you an easy building block to configure and set the system up. The one negative is the interoperability matrix. This could cover a more wide range of partners. For example, we have upgraded the whole firmware across the stack, and looking at the matrix, everything looked green. However, something in Oracle would cause us an issue during the upgrade, then we would have to either rollback or sit with support. While support has been good with getting to the bottom of things, it would be nice to have more confidence when we are going into an upgrade that it will work.

Today, it looks like the software design solutions will be able to support our move into the cloud much easier than I initially thought. We are only just starting that transformation now, but I see with Data ONTAP and Cloud Volumes ONTAP, it looks like we will be easily moving our data into the cloud and making better use of the compute that is up there rather than having to expand out in our data center. 

We have four or five weather events every year which cause a huge strain on our systems with customers logging in and working out whether they have power or not, or how long the power outages will last, and whilst that happens, our databases are getting absolutely hammered. Now, historically we've had to build our data center to be able to cope with those big workloads. It's only four or five days a year, so we are effectively wasting money when we don't need to. If we can burst out to the cloud, it would really help.

I think it is innovative with this move to the cloud using ONTAP. With the whole NetApp product range being very similar in its look and feel in the cloud as it is on-prem, I feel comfortable that our engineers will be able to spin up and utilize it quite quickly.

We don't use FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud.

We use it for generalized workloads in a hypervisor situation, either VMM or Hyper-V. It is used for any particular workloads that the government has for this purpose. It is sometimes used for dedicated hardware as well, so it provides the flexibility as we need it. We can also grow because we can easily expand it from its initial chassis.

It gives you a lot to work with. The problem with this is then you don't know what you want to do anymore. By making it very versatile, it also gives you too many choices.

Depending on how we deploy, we are seeing application performance improvements as we have plenty of horsepower in the solution. However, at the moment, we have development issues, not performance issues.

The ability to have the configurations for it: The blades, the service profiles, and making a standard for it. This makes it easy for the other members on our team when setting things up, because there is already a template for them to use.

I like that everything is integrated, and we can change the port to whatever we need, e.g., Fibre Channel. It is very nice to work with, as it gives the ability to have more choices: Do we want to have more Fibre Channels, iSCSI, or some type of MetroClusters? We can do all this with if we have bandwidth.

The ability to manage the templates across sites. We would like to easily take out the configuration of one FlexPod and copy it over, just making minor changes. There is a way to do it, but it's clumsy.

There is a bit of a learning curve for a new person in understanding FlexPod and going through each of section of making a template for SAN, hardware, networking, etc. The flow isn't very good. The software should be more geared to a top-flow design versus a bottom-up.

I would also like them to improve some integration on the HCI part.

It's very stable. I find it's almost mainframe grade.

We had issues where we had some of the aisle modules failed. Even though its half the system, it was still up and no one actually knew why it was down. It was down for a few days before we could get it fixed. However, it didn't affect anybody else and that includes our major environment. This was at one of our bigger sites and nothing happened.

It scales easily. We went through an upgrade of adding additional chassis, and it wasn't a big deal.

Their technical support is very good. I don't think we have had a call that lasted longer than a couple days, and it was only for one issue where something didn't work properly. It wasn't exactly a hardware problem, but it wasn't a software problem. It was just one of those strange anomalies.

The upgrade was straightforward. There wasn't anything special involved. What we found out is that since no one is using templates properly that we could have done things even faster if we had used the templates. Since then, we use them all across all the sites.

We have seen our data center rack space collapse about 90 percent. We have a data center which only has two racks now out of the 20 that were there previously.

We have also reduced our manpower with the solution.

We may consider another solution for the HCI. We have not decided yet.

Know what your use case will be for and figure out whether you are going on-premise or want a hybrid solution. This will change what you need. If you are going to do some hybrid stuff, you may need to decide to create your own software to make the hybrid connection or you can use HCI. This may change the things you want to buy.

We are trying to decide if we want to go to a private, hybrid or multi-cloud environment. We don't have any services to deploy VMs yet on the cloud.

We have been using FlexPod for five years. We use it for our Epic environment.

We get a unified, collaborative support model. It conforms with the CVD and it helps us with maintaining supportability. All of our vendors give us the support that we need in a timely and effective manner.

It has also been very versatile. We have others that do not exactly conform with it and yet we still benefit from the collaborative support model. And we're not required to go to a certain thing if it doesn't work well or isn't the best case for our situation. That's been wonderful.

We're using the Epic environment on-demand workflow, and that has saved us quite literally thousands of man-hours by helping us refresh, back up, and create new instances. We wouldn't have been able to do so if it wasn't for all of that time-saving. Being able to have SUP, REL, and REL VAL DR instances, we would need to double our staff, at least, to be able to do that.

• The design has already been validated.
• The support element, the lack of finger-pointing, where all of the different vendors are working together collaboratively, sharing data, opening tickets with one another.
• We already use UCS and it goes well with the vendors that we have picked.

At the beginning, there was a little bit of confusion among the support folks on how to open up tickets with the others. There needs to be a little more helping of the partners to make sure that they are able to handle opening tickets with the other vendors.

For our Epic environment, aside from an environmental data center problem, a heating issue, we have not had any issues whatsoever with the infrastructure. From a resilience perspective, we've set it and we've been able to forget it for the most part.

We planned a five-year model for our Epic environment, so that we haven't really needed to scale. For other areas of our environment, it has scaled fairly well. The data mobility helps a lot with that, if we have to do a refresh. It's just simply vol moves, etc.

One thing to note would be that we're now looking to go into a MetroCluster IP with our FlexPod. Going from Fabric to IP, we're not able to do that with vol move. Still, we can do SnapMirror relationships and get all that data moved over.

The one other thing would be that in the transition from 7-Mode to CDOT there was no unplanned downtime, and it went very well with all the tools that NetApp has provided us.

Just fantastic tech support. The chat functionality gets us in touch with top-level engineers when we need it. As a hospital, that level of support is priceless.

We had been using Dell EMC storage before, VPLEX, etc. We had a good bit of experience with that. 

Because our VAR helped us with a lot of it, from our perspective it was very simple.

Initially, for our Epic environment, we used OST. Our VAR, PEAK Resources, also specializes in converged infrastructure. It went fairly well. It was a little bit rocky at the start, but that's why we picked our VAR. Their experience and the level of investment that they make in NetApp are fantastic. They helped us a lot.

We looked at Dell EMC VCE very seriously, as it's a converged product. NetApp was a lot more flexible, it didn't require a forklift approach. We had a really great experience with NetApp specifically. We were already using Cisco, for both network as well as compute, and it just seemed like just a great play, to have that flexibility and to have the support model to help us. And it has proven to be great.

If a colleague was looking at this or similar solutions, I would help them to understand what we've done with it for Epic and the success that we've had. I would share with them the examples of converged support as well as the stability that we've had. They are what has really made this a success story.

Regarding private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, I love it. The idea of the state of Fabric. We haven't been able to leverage the public cloud portion of it yet, but the whole vision of the data movement is where we want to stay, so that we're ready for the cloud where we can do that. As for private, we're looking to bring up StorageGRID to be able to offload cold blocks on our AFF. That kind of a feature set is wonderful. We don't use FlexPod for managed private cloud.

In terms of FlexPod being innovative when it comes to compute, storage and networking, it stays current. We're not five versions back because we're having to be conformed with other solutions. It seems like NetApp is doing a great job of making sure all their vendors are keeping things up to date. There have been some other than Day One-types of events that it's impossible to really get to. We're not waiting long for things to come up.

As for improvement in application performance, we started with an All Flash Epic so we've had really wonderful sub-millisecond latencies from the get-go. We haven't experienced degraded performance.

The primary use case that we have for most of our customers is where they're in a converged environment and they also have file system storage. It's primarily where they're looking for a solid NAS-based appliance that also runs business-critical workloads well, with a highly available architecture.

The focus is data center workload as well as VDI workload. And once they've already got it, why not use it for file storage as well as other things to replace Windows file servers. It's easier to deal with a NetApp - which is typically more secure - than a Windows Server that you're going to have to patch constantly.

For most of our customer base, the benefit is the cooperative support model. While we tend to offer ourselves to our clients as a first call for support - because we are familiar with the environment - when they choose to call NetApp or Cisco directly, the cooperative support model means they can get passed back and forth between the two organizations freely. It works really well.

For me, it really goes back to the protocols; the fact that it can run the entire stack in terms of protocols. The integration for most of our customers is VMware; the full-stack integration. They're into the VMware environment. Also, the ability to do rapid cloning, the whole nine yards. I don't know that there's anything I wouldn't pitch it for in most data center workloads.

In terms of a future release, I don't know that there is anything that I would specifically ask for. I'm happy with it and I like to see how they continue to evolve it.

As the industry as a whole is moving more toward the simplification of IT, that is something where both Cisco and NetApp could look to improve further. Just simplifying the day to day management, the day to day issues that arise, and building more intuitiveness into the interfaces would help. Especially from our customers' perspective, thinking about it from their shoes, a lot of them are wearing a lot of hats. Having things built into monitoring tools that actually provide suggested workarounds or suggested resolutions; continued improvement there is going to go a long way.

It is an incredibly stable solution. Back when I was a customer still, we were previously an all-HPE shop that switched to UCS. Stability with UCS was unparalleled, and it's the same thing with NetApp. I have never seen a more resilient HA product out there then NetApp's solution. If I want to know that I'm putting my workload on a solution, from a storage perspective, that is going to be up 100% of the time, I'm going to choose NetApp.

Scalability is an area where NetApp has definitely grown, once they got out of strictly 7-Mode and moved over to cluster data on tap. The scale-out architecture versus scale-up architecture was more beneficial there and actually carried more weight within the industry when you started to see what some others were doing.

On the UCS side of things, I struggle with it back and forth, tying everything back through the fabric interconnects. I see that over time they're not going to scale out as well as they scale up, and you're going to have to replace them at some point. But it's still a much more scalable architecture compared to some of the competing solutions that are out there, like HPE Synergy.

I get frustrated with TAC (Cisco's Technical Assistance Center) from time to time. Whether it's TAC or NetApp, working through level-one technical support has always been a challenge because it's usually a very scripted conversation. When you're an organization like ours, where we're troubleshooting for our customers all the time, you run through the common scenarios already, before turning to support. I like to be able to work my way up a little bit more quickly, and I've learned some tricks over the years to get to a level-two or level-three tech before burning too much time. 

Especially when you look at the fact that we also sell a lot of HPE and Nimble, solely because Nimble had great tech support - when you made that phone call, they picked up immediately - that's something that really went a long way toward improving their customer satisfaction. I'd love to see NetApp and Cisco do something similar to that. 

When I was a customer we still had NetApp, but it was all 7-Mode and then we were running HPE c7000 chassis. When we switched over we went to UCS Nexus and had upgraded to CDOT with brand new clusters at the time.

With my current organization, we sell a lot of solutions in many different categories but this is my go-to solution because of my comfort level with it, for sure.

When I'm having these conversations with customers, ultimately it's based around what the solution outcome needs to look like, what are the business requirements, what are the business needs and building it out from there. The biggest thing to take into account is the challenges that they're having, whether it's performance, or specific workloads and specific needs they have. A lot of customers use NetApp as just a NAS box, and I really try to do my best to get out there and evangelize that it's far more capable than that. I would say the same thing with UCS.

I have a lot of experience with setup. I'm somebody who loves to dive into CLI on the NetApp side. I love to build the entire thing from scratch and not really use any of the setup tools that are out there. There is definitely a little bit of a learning curve for FlexPod still, especially as you're building out from scratch. But, at the same time, they have both done a great job at working to simplify that deployment process and make it more straightforward.

In terms of maintaining the same level of guidance, had we been working with one vendor as opposed to two vendors at the same time, they both have their own individual best practices and there are a lot of best practices out there. There isn't necessarily one that's really the best. I think that there is enough crossover between them that I don't know that it really makes a big difference.

I rate FlexPod at eight out of 10 because there is always room for improvement, although there is nothing off the top of my head that I can specifically call out. Going back to the simplification of IT, everybody can always do more to really simplify things because we live at a time where so much of what we do is "a little bit of everything."  As we go through the continued evolution there, that is really the biggest area that both NetApp and Cisco could really improve: to simplify management, to simplify the monitoring, and the maintenance. 

Also, bringing down that cost of entry as well and keeping the costs lower would help to us get it into more small to midsize businesses. FlexPod Express is a great product, but continue to bring down that cost of entry.

My advice is "do it." It meets the needs of small to midsize business all the way up to the large enterprise that needs to scale in a massive fashion. It's a great product, it's a great solution, and we're really happy with it.

We use FlexPod in our data centers. We serve all of our infrastructure off of it, which includes Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, and Citrix. It is all virtualized. We are also using the file share from FlexPod with Snapshotting and SnapMirroring for disaster recovery (DR) between data centers.

We haven't experienced any data loss while on NetApp. The stability of it has probably been the biggest benefit. Because of FlexPod's performance and flexibility, our company is doing much better than what we previously used.

We found FlexPod to be innovative when it comes to compute, storage, and networking. We've taken advantage of their storage optimizations to obtain better use out of the space. We upgraded to All Flash FAS (AFF), which has provided a huge performance increase that we haven't barely scratched the surface of. We have plenty of overhead, so that's always nice when taking on tasks which might have otherwise taxed a smaller system. However, we have a lot of overhead, so this isn't an issue for us.

Because of the stability that we have had on it, it has met our needs on everything. We haven't had a shortcoming in performance nor data loss.

In regards to DR and backup:

• Performance
• Stability
• Capability.

Validate designs are hard. They don't validate all of the available options. We don't generally end up in a validated configuration. We did on our initial install when they first rolled out the FlexPod platform. Over time, we've done upgrades, and we don't necessarily fit into a validated design anymore.

We would like them to improve the validate designs. It is hard to stay in a supported config with the software and firmware versions of the platform. It's always a concern to ensure things not only work well, but they work at all. If we run into incompatibility inside of the NetApp, Cisco, or VMware versions, it can cause real issues.

They should continue to educate and support their Tier 1 support, so we have better, faster resolutions. As the years have gone by, we haven't quite received as good resolution at Tier 1 as we used to. Occasionally, scheduling techs onsite is problematic. There are some gaps in the handoff between the call-in support to on-site support. It would be nice if this was cleaned up, so we didn't have to be quite as involved with verifying techs will be on site or ensuring that techs onsite receive all the information.

As long as it stays in a supported config, the stability is very good. If you leave the supported config, you get directed to come back into a supported config if you have any issues.

We have good resiliency with our FlexPods. I don't know if we've taken advantage of the built-in HA. 

We haven't had much experience with scalability. We gave ourselves room to grow into the product. We've only done any real scaling at refresh time. 

It has not always been the single point of contact for all of vendors who participate as it was sold to be. Occasionally, we end up having to go to each vendor, and there isn't as much cross-vendor support as we had wanted.

There is always room for improvement in support. We want the intercompany communications to not have us have to contact vendors separately to work on one issue. We want them to own it internally, which would be a lot more helpful. This is what they're supposed to do.

Compared to some other vendors, we still receive good support. Unfortunately, the issue being that they still seem to be separate support buckets rather than integrated support. It's hard to ding the platform overall, but that's probably where I would ding it at the moment.

We were using HPE G-Series Servers. We needed a lot more space and performance, since I'm not sure that we had good performance metrics at the time that we moved solutions. However, we were looking to expand our Exchange environment and have more SQL. We wanted making sure that we had enough I/O, and the FlexPod system had it. In addition, integrating with UCS made it much more flexible to add compute in our VM environment, and we were going from physical to virtual at the time. Thus, we cut down on the amount of space and power that we were using by going to blade chassis.

The initial setup was complex at the time our deployment where there was a lot of moving parts. My understanding is that they have since tried to implement more streamlining. 

We used Plan B Technologies out of Maryland, and we also used NetApp. We had a good experience with the install. It was all-new moving parts for us, since FlexPod was brand new at the time. We spent a fair amount of time whiteboarding the solution with them. We visited Raleigh-Durham to go on campus to see some of the hardware to get a better understanding of what we were going to be buying.

We have seen an improvement in application performance. We are pushing a lot more I/O and flexibility. We came from systems which did not have thin provisioning. Therefore, we are more flexible in being able to give out space or have I/O, especially with the AFF being all-flash. 

We probably looked at Dell EMC. We were on HPE SAN for quite awhile. I don't know if we looked at anybody else.

One of the deciders for us in looking at NetApp was, even years ago, they just seemed to be in a much better position in the marketplace. We were pretty confident that they would be around in five years, whereas, some of the other smaller vendors might not be, especially with consolidations going on.

We have saved time with Snapshots, SnapMirrors, and backup and DR capabilities versus other platforms that we have looked at in the past. However, for new deployments, we have not saved, because we don't have any automation on top for deploying VMs or shares. It doesn't really seem to be part of the FlexPod platform.

We don't use it for hybrid cloud, multi-cloud environments, or Managed Private Cloud.

Everything that we are looking for feature-wise seems to be coming out in ONTAP or VMware releases.

We use FlexPod XCS in our data center to provide IT services like hosting. We also use it to store in-house applications. 

The tool provides a single point for storing applications and it increases the availability of them. It also has improved the way we handle applications within VMware. 

I like the way we change the primary and secondary services in operation. 

The tool is obsolete and we are migrating to HPE. It should improve the pricing. 

I have been working with the product for 11 years. 

I would rate the tool's stability a ten out of ten. 

I would rate FlexPod XCS' scalability an eight out of ten. My company has 6000 users for the product. We use it every day but usage will decrease due to migration. 

FlexPod XCS' setup is complex and I would rate it a six out of ten. The product's deployment took six months to complete. A partner company helps us with the tool's maintenance. 

The consultant helped us with the deployment. They first delivered the equipment and a specialist did the connections and equipment assembly. 

The solution's ROI is good. I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

The product's pricing is high and I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

I would rate FlexPod XCS a nine out of ten. Our experience with the solution is good and we use it well. 

In general, we use it for our storage and computing work loads.

We had challenges finding the right partner regarding performance, flexibility, and support from the vendor. FlexPod is an all-inclusive solution, so we found the right one.

We have about 1,000 end users and 2,500 endpoints.

It provides a good, stable base for all our workloads.

FlexPod’s prevalidated architectures are quite important to our organization because it guarantees that things work together as expected.

FlexPod has helped reduce troubleshooting time by 30% on architecture configs.

The most valuable features are performance and compatibility between devices.

The native integration between different platforms is quite important because it is secure and works together without any interfering issues.

The flexibility, operational efficiency, and scalability of FlexPod are quite high. 

I would like to see increased performance.

I have been using it for about 10 years altogether. Since we have been using NetApp and Cisco devices for several years. Since FlexPod has been available, we have been using it.

I would rate the stability as nine out of 10.

I would rate the scalability as eight out of 10.

When we need the support, their reaction time is quite good. I would rate it as eight out of 10.

Positive

We previously had several components for different workloads, using HPE and other storage providers. After that, we switched to NetApp and Cisco devices. In the end, we switched over to FlexPod's integrated and support solution.

I mainly did the network part of the deployment. My inclusion tests were quite straightforward.

We used NTS in Austria.

We have seen a reduction in support needs.

FlexPod has reduced our overall TCO and simplified our operations. 

The pricing and licensing are quite expensive. However, compared to other solutions, it is okay.

We evaluated EMC and HPE. In the end, we chose FlexPod. The differences between solutions were the flexibility and performance aspects as well as the cost.

It is quite important to have a converged solution. Then, you can have all the components responsible for stability and performance together in one place.

In general, the solution is quite good. I expect improvements in every area over time.

I would rate the product as eight out of 10.