FlexPod XCS Reviews

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.

FlexPod is a single product that you can manage. It has very good scalability. We can scale our UCS Servers. We can carry 12 storage nodes in the FlexPod. The main benefit is its single, all in one solution from server switch to storage.

It is enterprise storage. The latency is about five billion milliseconds, which is coming from the cloud servers. 

We have seen an 80 percent improvement in application performance.

If there are any failures, or anything needs to be addressed, we can make one call to support for assistance. 

No matter how busy the data is, we can put the data in the right place at the right time.

We would like to see a new design that comes with more productivity or graphics. Currently, the vendors, like HPE and Dell EMC along with NetApp, all have very similar products. We want more diversification.

The solution is resilient, because it has good scalability, and other products in the market don't have this. It has scalable storage and service. 

The scalability is innovative for both compute and storage. With other products, we can't scale the storage space, we have to buy more storage. E.g. with Dell EMC, if we want more storage with VxBlock, we have to purchase another VxBlock.

The technical support is good. I have been working with NetApp for the last two to three years, and they have solutions readily available for bug and code fixes. 

The initial setup is not complex. It is user-friendly since it is a single solution with all the components delivered in one package.

NetApp does some of our installations on some products, like SolidFire. However, they pass the data on to us, and we have to do the configuration.

It saves a lot of time because it is a single product. We also save time with the installation.

It is cheaper than other products. For example, Dell EMC VxBlock is more expensive.

We also evaluated EMC VxBlock, which has a similar design. Both products have flexibility.

The difference is NetApp's response time of 0.5 milliseconds, which we felt was very good.

This flexible is very good for private cloud solutions.

We use FlexPod for everything: Running our virtual stack, all our research data, etc.

Moving from rack and stack servers (Dell EMC and HPE) to having an overall encompassing design with UCS, NetApp, and VMware, made us more resilient. We can lose nodes and drives and also stuff can go down, but there is no downtime. We can recover quickly. 

It makes disaster recovery (DR) easier as well, if you have a FlexPod set up in one place, then add a DR set.

It can scale, compute, and storage independently by what we need. As opposed to in the hyper-converged realm, you are sort of locked into a linear growth pattern.

I would like them to simplify the UCS configuration. I appreciate that they have about a billion options and a million switches that you can mess with, but this creates a lot of confusion sometimes. I feel like you almost need a Master's course to figure out what you're doing with UCS.

It's extremely stable.

The solution is resilient. We have suffered failures before without any downtime.

We are constantly scaling. I just added half a petabyte of storage not too long ago to the storage site. Adding new nodes and making new UCS clusters allows us to scale any way that we want.

• With NetApp, technical support has always been great. 
• With Cisco, it depends. 
• VMware is horrible. I hate calling them for anything.

We were running on legacy rack and stack; just single servers doing single things with server sprawl and multiple racks of servers. It's not a great way to do things. That's what drove us to FlexPod.

The initial setup was complex. UCS is not the easiest thing to configure from the ground up. The networking pieces can get confusing, especially when you are talking about virtual segmentation. It is not as easy as other things now on the market, such as hyperconverged.

Coming from a rack and stack server model to FlexPod, it has saved us a lot of time (approximately hundreds to thousands of hours).

We also looked at VxBlock from Dell EMC.

If you need to scale, storage and commute independently, then you want to go FlexPod. If you don't have that sort of need and want something simple and easy to throw up and use, despite some of its shortcomings, hyper-converged is probably the way to go. It really depends on how big you are and what you need.

Versatility is great. However, in this day and age, it is probably more complex than it needs to be, especially on the Cisco side. I am not a huge Cisco lover. UCS is getting long in the tooth. It's great for what it is, but it is now overly complex compared to other solutions on the market.

FlexPod was at one point on the bleeding edge. Now, I think the bleeding edge is hyperconverged, and I know Cisco and NetApp are looking into that independently.

We use FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud, which is great.

I don't love the Cloud. It is a good space for second copy backups and maybe bursting into the cloud depending on what your application workload is like. However, I'm not a lover of the hybrid cloud model, or even going fully into the cloud, unless you are willing to undertake the paradigm of creating your applications and workload for it. Moving your legacy info into the cloud is expensive and a bad move.

My primary use case for FlexPod is for usage at our remote and small branch offices.

It has had a big, positive impact, because now everything is centralized. I do not have to have a storage or network admin, nor a hypervisor. Everything is preconfigured. Therefore, we can ship it and manage it remotely from any server. It is all in a box. 

We have been very impressed with it.

The biggest challenge that FlexPod helped me with: Now, I am not replying everyone at all my remote locations. I have approximately 38 small offices. Previously, I provided a lot of physical service, and replied to people. 

How I fixed the issue: I configure a FlexPod. I will ship it. I will install it. Then, everything I can, I will manage from my main office. Thus, I reply to fewer people at all my locations.

We would like something like a FlexPod Express; we want a smaller version for small offices. At the moment, we have medium and larger offices, plus data centers, but we are also looking for something for smaller offices. A smaller, customizable, express solution, which would fulfill our local, small office needs.

I want to use the expansion to its fullest extent, scaling by deploying 10 to 15 virtual missions in a given FlexPod. Right now, all my virtual missions are approximately five or less, which does not appear to be utilizing the product fully. I want to have scalability in any situation, even during major outages. 

We have been using it for the last four years. It has not had any outages yet, and I have had about eight deployments so far.

I use FlexPod for small remote offices. I do not come across scalability often because I have a three node minimum, which is working out well. If we want to scale, we would need a lot of technical assessment. However, from what I have read and heard, it is easy to scale, so it should not be a problem.

Once in a while, we do call Cisco. Sometimes Cisco will transfer call to NetApp. Sometimes my admins, by default, will call NetApp. Either way, it works fine. No one pushes back and says, "Why did you call Cisco or NetApp?" Both companies partner behind the scenes getting us the support that we need and help guide us through the process.

We did not have a previous solution. We used to use Dell, IBM, and HPE machines, which were all old. We used to always have a lot of problems with other domain controllers, file servers, DNS, and DNCP. 

Everything is now in FlexPod and virtual. It is always up and running.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. We do leverage a reseller to size it. Our partners are RoundTower and WWT. They configure the sizing, then they install the basic hardware. Afterwards, they will ship it to us. 

We configure the hypervisor and storage network, then we ship it to branch office.

We are looking at the Dell solution, and also we are looking at Cisco Flex. 

Right now, there is no immediate need to switch over.

This is the best hyperconverged infrastructure. No need to be worried (or scared) on how these three solutions will sit in a box. Everything is prepackaged and rebuilt. It is seamless when you want to install or ship it. No complaints.

Most important criteria when working with a vendor: We were concerned how these three partners, NetApp, Cisco, and VMware, would come together for network, storage, and compute. At the beginning, we were a little concerned. It has been four years now with no issues, and it is going well.

We use it for some 90 servers and systems. It runs our primary student information system, we have our phone systems through it, our email. Everything is running on it, all critical functions, all critical servers.

Because it's virtual, I don't have issues. All the hardware that's tied into it, whether it's memory, disk, etc., it's all seamless. It's not a big deal to make changes, it's not a big deal to upgrade. I've had drives that have failed. It's not a big deal, you just pop it out and pop the new one in and everything's fine.

I really like the architecture and I like the fact that on the storage side I can swap it out. Right now I'm on NetApp, I might go to Pure Storage. I have the flexibility. But as far as the equipment itself, the way it's all bundled together, from the UCS perspective, its rock solid.

I run all the critical applications for the university on my FlexPod solution. It needs to be up 24/7, 365. I don't need "five nines," I need "eight nines" - and it stays up.

I'd like to see a little more on the provisioning and the replication piece. I've defaulted to Veeam as our vehicle for backup. I'd like to see more insight and more analytics.

I'm going to pick on Cisco: Their products are great and they do a great job. But, especially in this day and age with the college dealing with the EU and GDPR and a lot of other issues, I really need the analytics; that's what really helps me to sell me the solution. It's a cost. Whatever I can do from an analytics side that helps me deal with different things, will only help. GDPR and the EU's requirements are more security based, but there are also some data components buried in there regarding how you are handling the data. How are you storing it? For some of those pieces, I really need a good solution. I don't want to say analytics is lacking, I just want more analytics.

Scalability is fine, I'm on my third or fourth iteration with it. As far as I can see, I'm probably going to stick with it.

For the most part, technical support has been on the software side with VMware. As far as going through TAC, we have not had to use it too much. I've been on FlexPod now for about seven, or eight years, and the number of times I have called TAC on issues is very very small. Most of the time, if there is something, I deal with my VAR and they have been great to deal with. I've never had any major issues.

TAC has been really good. The other thing that I do is I work very closely with my account manager, he's a great guy, Tyrone. He has been great to work with and the nice thing for me is that he has brought in the right people. From a data center standpoint, Jamie has been up to see me I don't know how many times. I say, "Here's what I'm trying to do," and they say, "Here are the different options you have," and they try to help us figure out the right way to go, from their perspective. I bring in my guys and we try to put it all together.

I really like the team approach, for me, it's an advantage. I do have other options but it's just so easy to work with them. I get what I need, I get the scalability, I get the future-proofing. I don't have issues. I have too many other things to worry about. If I can eliminate one I'll take it.

Before FlexPod it was all physical servers. Believe me, the time savings, the issue reduction, I can't say enough about the solution over physical servers, to do it justice. It's night and day.

When I'm looking at a vendor, cost is always a component but that's not number one. My number one is their professionalism in getting me through from soup to nuts: from the start of the project all the way to the end, to make sure that it's running right. And on "Day Two", support. If they cover that whole project, I'm good.

The setup is pretty straightforward. The biggest thing I would say to you if you were looking at doing one is, really look at your VAR. Find one that has done it before and that will help you to make sure you don't have any major pitfalls.

I've recommended Flexpod a few times. Every one of them has been extremely happy with it. It's a solid workhorse, especially in shops like mine where we're in the small to mid-range and I don't have the people to sit there and just babysit something. I have too many things for them to do. This product is really good. I don't want to say it's a set-it-and-forget-it, but the daily, hands-on is so light. The visibility - even though I pick on the analytics - is decent. I can get my guys to manage it, but it also frees them up so I can get them working on other things, which is critical in this day and age.

We're using a FlexPod cluster with Cisco UCS and NetApp AFF. It's a four-node cluster. We use FlexPod for everything in our company. We're a financial company.

Our previous solution used to take 24 hours and now we're down to seven hours. It has really good performance. 

It simplifies infrastructure from edge to core but not to the cloud. We have five people running operations and they are quite busy. But for the scale of VMs for the customers, we need to have at least two more men to deal with infrastructure.

We just got AFF so we've got all flash on the environment now. This really speeds things up from something like eight milliseconds for I/O latency to under one millisecond which is great.

FlexPod has definitely made our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks. We're going more into automation now and we don't have to build all the VMs by hand. We automate this.

It has also improved application performance by around 50%. We're getting back more scale. I'm very happy with the performance of the database now. It has also decreased our data center's costs. We don't use so many racks anymore. We compressed all the stuff and we have a higher compute and more IOPs in the smaller racks.

Support of the firmware is the most valuable feature. The solutions' validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization is very important. It ensures our ERP system runs smoothly on those machines.

We don't use the storage tiering to the public cloud.

FlexPod has not decreased the unplanned downtime incidents in our company. There was a problem with the back-end configuration and we had a downtime of three hours. We encounter more downtime on procedural tasks we have to do than on technical tasks.

In the next release, I would like to have a better monitoring option in which I can see the full stack and can then decide which steps to take.

In terms of the stability, once it's up and running, it runs really smoothly.

Scalability is excellent. 

Their technical support is good. It would be better if some P2 cases would be looked at from P1 guys as well, to give more experience to these orders. Last time we had four weeks on a P2 case, which wasn't very good. We have a task force and within three days, we managed to get through the problem. So this could have been resolved actually two weeks before.

We chose NetApp because we've used them before and we trust them.

The initial setup was complex. We are implementing ACI as well, application centric infrastructure and this is complex to the network. We are pushing a virtualization layer on to the network which is really complex.

We used an integrator who was great.

We looked at Dell EMC and NetApp but Dell EMC was expensive. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. An eight because it's very reliable but there are some flaws which you need time to tackle them. There are some things that can be better. Better integration would make it a ten. 

I would recommend this solution to someone considering it because of the support it comes with and the high-performance. We can scale it up to a level which we will never reach.

We provide this solution to customers for their data centers, and we also use it internally, for our data center, to host customer data.

This solution is right there in terms of leading-edge digital equipment.

It is definitely easier for us to maintain and do build-outs, so it takes a lot less time to set things up for the customer.

We have seen approximately a twenty-five percent increase in application performance.

The most valuable feature is the ease of setup. When we're bringing out the new solution, it's easy to get everything in the rack. When we need to add to it, later on, it's easier to have all of that stuff there and add as we need it. It's easier to bolt-on, and the integration between the pieces is a lot easier on the setup side, too.

The management is easy. Some of the stuff we have is an older generation that can’t do connectivity into the inner site. But, for everything that we can put in there, we can see all of the customers from that one pane of glass. It makes it simple.

It enables us to run mission-critical workloads. We are running one hundred to one hundred and fifty SQL and high-demand database servers.

I’ve gotten a lot of use out of the validated designs because that is what I go by, whenever we’re building out systems for the customers. It seems like they stay pretty up to date on the newly released products.

As we do much of the Tier-I support ourselves, and thus don't normally need it, there is time wasted in moving up to the next level.

This is a solid solution, and I don't have any issues with stability.

This is a resilient solution. We have a lot of clusters set up, and we haven’t had to worry about server failures because when we do have a server fail, the other ones pick up the workload pretty seamlessly.

Scalability is easy, and we can pretty much have anybody do it.

We can scale that really easily, and we’ve been doing that. We were probably one of the first Cisco customers that came on when the UCS line came out, so we have a lot invested in the architecture.

We have used technical support from time to time.

Most of the time, we end up having to get a tier above. We're able to do a lot of the Tier-I troubleshooting on our own. We have a lot of engineers that can handle that, so we do spend some time trying to get past Tier-I in order to get the support we really need.

We were already a big Cisco partner when they came out with this line, and it was something that we just moved right into. Once we saw that it worked, and saw how easy it was to scale it out, we just decided to go that way to save a little extra money.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward and very easy.

There is a thirty-five to forty percent reduction in the time required for deployment.

We handled the implementation in-house.

My advice for anybody considering this solution is to get in touch with an account manager at Cisco, then visit and see a demo. I know that when we were first looking at it, an account manager came out and brought a senior engineer with him. They saw the solution and went over it in great detail. It was easy for us to see the gain that we were getting from the product.

I think that people still need to do their own due diligence and look at other solutions. Once you get those two or three solution sets and compare them, I think you'll see that this one is probably the best one out there. This solution is right there with leading-edge digital equipment.

Overall, this is a good solution. It has saved us time on the setup, as well as maintaining the system, and we haven't had to do a whole lot of troubleshooting with it.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

FlexPod can be used for all types of workloads. At my company we are using FlexPod for the SAP HANA product.

The application that is running on the FlexPod that we are working with runs better on FlexPod because of the technology itself. It saves on time to do backups and restores, protection, and of course deployment and roll out.

In addition, the support that you can get from all three vendors - VMware, Cisco, and NetApp - with one call, is a value-add.

We have also seen a large percentage improvement in the performance of some applications. We can back up and restore within minutes, whereas before, when the program was running on a different platform, that would take eight to 12 hours.

FlexPod comes as an engineered solution. We can use it for smaller, medium, or large solutions and we can scale it as we need. That's the reason that it's very useful.

I find it very resilient. I would trust FlexPod to the point that I would put a lot of different things on it.

It is stable as long as you do your due diligence. With all the updates and upgrades, there is always a chance of something going wrong. However, the built-in resiliency annuls those risks to some degree.

Scaling it was not difficult. The scale of the FlexPod for a company I worked with before was about eight nodes.

If you get the right numbers and give the right information you can get to the right support. Otherwise, it's a nightmare. Once you get to the right people, it's perfect.

What made us switch was the fact that we had limitation challenges with the old product. Everything was a little bit different every time. FlexPod helped us solve the problem so that we are deploying something that is the same all the time.

I did not really notice anything complex or anything you couldn't figure out for yourself or by picking up a phone or looking up the documents. They were able to produce the system within 24 hours from the time the boxes arrived at the data center.

We used an integrator. That experience was not as good as it could have been. There is room for improvement the second or the third time around.

It was either FlexPod or build our own "FlexPod" ourselves. With FlexPod, and the automation, everything is the same all the time.

Using FlexPod as one product, understand that you are putting yourself in the hands of three of the major technology leaders. You are not only getting a product, an appliance, but you are gaining experience. All these things work together to help you decide for today and tomorrow.

If you want something really fast to deploy, you are going to use a Validated Design; everybody's compliance and all that is taken care of. But you can make a FlexPod-like build and you can later go certify it as a FlexPod design.

Regarding private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, every solution is here to answer a problem. So the question is: What are the challenges? Based on those you can then use the proper solution. NetApp people usually tell us that the hybrid vision is the best, and I tend to agree with them.

In terms of the solution being innovative for compute, it's very useful for the storage engineer. If there is a problem with the host, he can replace the base hardware and put the intelligence right back in the same box. In that way, every type has been kitted out, without anyone having to rebuild anything from scratch.