FlexPod XCS Reviews

We really like the flexibility. I love that – it doesn't happen a whole lot, but – anytime we have a blade die or even just bad RAM, I grab that service profile, throw it on another blade, and we're up and running without any issues.

We're also a pretty siloed environment. I love that we're not having to add new ports and stuff every time we add a new server; we already have everything connected. Worst case, if we're adding a new VLAN, networking adds that VLAN to the trunks to the fabric interconnects, and we're up and running without a long process. It used to be, we would have new builds run up to weeks, whereas now I roll out a new VM in 15 minutes; if I have to add new network connectivity, it might be an hour or two but that's it.

I like the user interface a whole lot. The new 3.1 release has the HTML5 interface. I finally don't have to mess with Java. I still have jump servers with specific versions of Java for FlexPod we've deployed at different times that are running different codebases. I don't have to mess with that anymore. I'm looking forward to that new equipment.

We actually run one of several private clouds within our company and it is all on FlexPod. We run it as a profit center. We're able to give all our internal clients the fastest response time of any of our server teams and the flexibility to, if you need a VM with one CPU and a couple gigs of RAM, or if you need 20 VMs with eight CPUs and 32 gigs each, it's all the same to us. We have the blades to support it all.

I haven't really come across a whole lot of areas for improvement. There are features I'd like to see in our deployment that are already available; all-flash trays, and items like that. It's there; I need to find a project that justifies getting it rolled out in our data center.

Everything works pretty well. I think they should just continue to add more features and capabilities for hybrid cloud, especially items such as cloud bursting to one of the public clouds. Specifically, they need to make sure that, for our client site, it integrates with the FedRAMP clouds; it's got to be Azure Federal or AWS Federal. It can't just be to the regular public cloud.

I haven’t yet come across any features in other solutions that I’d like to see in FlexPod. Some of the newer storage vendors have slightly easier-to-use GUI interfaces, but I weigh that compared to the control and other features I have, such as SSHing into my NetApps. It'd be nice sometimes for quick stuff, but it's not worth giving up the control I have with the NetApp filers there.

There's always something new down the road, something new that can be done, but I think it's doing as well as possible. It seems like they keep getting new features, new ideas out there. We have flash on all four of the different lines now, continuing to evolve more cloud control with the UCS Director; it keeps growing. I love it.

We've been running it six years now.

We've been running it six years now and I just ordered my gen-4 gear; it should be here at the end of the month. I've had no issues.

I do some consulting, too, and have deployed it for a bunch of clients at smaller scales. I've not had a complaint yet.

I’ve occasionally needed to use technical support; generally, just with drives. Half the time, our rep will contact us to schedule the drive shipment before we even notice the email from the alerting. We love it.

We’re absolutely happy with the technical support. NetApp has the best tech support, which I've heard is part of the interview process to get the job there. I've heard rumors that it takes multiple days and is brutal, but they're the best guys we've got. We deal with lots of large vendors, and NetApp definitely has the best support teams.

With our particular case, our previous company had spun us off without any IT staff, so we were using third-party IT and we were trying to bring IT in house. Because we were having to build our IT staff from the ground up, the flexibility and all of the things that FlexPod made easier means it is a whole lot easier to bring IT in-house. We didn't need multiple storage people, server people. We had it more integrated, and had the single company to call for any issues we had bringing that all up.

I was not involved in the initial setup. Another couple of guys on the team did it. We did the initial setup with Firefly, who was our vendor, and provided week-long training. We each got to set up several of the blades, but Firefly did the initial UCS setup. I've done other UCS implementations since then from scratch, though.

I love the setup. I think it's very simple. I'm biased; I'm a CCIE Data Center. I like it enough that I have put a lot of time into it. I took a client from all physical to all virtual in a four-day weekend, with all-new switches, new SAN, new UCS, and in four days I already had, I think, their first 10 or 15 servers moved from physical to virtual on UCS setups.

We ran through all the primary vendors, but it was all one-off; there weren’t any converged solutions at the time, six years ago, when FlexPod first came out. It was either work with HP, Dell, Hitachi, EMC, etc., or have only one place; it’s better to have everything in one place.

Definitely take advantage of all the training you can, particularly the UCS portion of the setup. It's very much a one time setup if you do it right the first time. I use the reference install guide for the VMware on FlexPod, even for installs that aren't using NetApp storage because it's so well-written. It's 175 pages but it gives you not only what to do, but why to do it and even full configurations you can copy-and-paste in to make sure that everything really is "set it and forget it". You can just continue to operate your business, serve your clients as well as possible, and not have to go back and try and fix things.

We’ve never had an incident where we set it up and it hasn't worked; there have just been little things, such as when I didn't think and was setting up the first of the two fabric interconnects and put dash-A at the end of the name. I forgot that it adds A and B anyway, so that client is UCS-CompanyName-A-A or -A-B. As long as I followed the guides, I've never had an issue.

I really like good support when I’m looking at a vendor; that’s one of the most important criteria for me. I'm big on vendors that have good training. I want a vendor that wants to support their clients, wants their clients to be better educated. I don't want a vendor that wants you to always call them and maybe bill up a support call. I want the vendor that gives you the training so you can operate the equipment best yourself; still have good support when you do have to call, but give you the information you need so you can do it yourself and operate it as well as possible.

FlexPod is a converged infrastructure consolidating the data center and server forms and providing a new contract. It's used primarily for reducing virtual machines, so FlexPod is used for consolidation, optimization, and rationalization purposes.

The most valuable feature of FlexPod is that it allows you to get the old compute storage and the network switch or the fabric of the network in one box. You can use pods to have a tiny cloud in the box, which is one of the best features of FlexPod.

In FlexPod, I also found the utilization and virtualization of resources better because, typically, you'll buy and trigger a scroll of physical servers and virtual servers, so with FlexPod, the process becomes more disciplined.

As FlexPod is more of a consolidator, it gives you a compute, a network, and storage in a single box. While that's cool, when transforming a data center from what it is today into what it needs to be tomorrow, you must also pay attention to resiliency, security, and performance. FlexPod will do very well on the average app, but there's room for improvement in performance and the data center side, which should be optimized, but that's not a focus of Cisco.

Cisco is a network company that's transitioning to provide a converged infrastructure solution, which means it wants to be more than just a network and provide network storage and computing, so obviously, you don't become a highly performant entity overnight in the database space, which is what Cisco needs to do. Cisco can do that well because it supports open-source databases within the converged infrastructure it delivers to the client, but there's always a handicap in that area.

There's room for improvement in the setup and configuration of FlexPod as well.

I started using FlexPod in 2017, and the last time I used it was in January 2022.

The stability of FlexPod depends on what you are putting in there. The client I used the solution for was coming off a mainframe he had for many years, so the question he asked me was, "Can FlexPod deliver the same performance, scalability, reliability, and resilience that the old legacy system gave the company?" The answer is yes, so, to that extent, FlexPod is stable, but this question becomes a bit more around nuance because it depends on what you are loading. For example, if you use it for the banking industry and try to drive high-performance, high-scale applications, FlexPod may not be as reliable.

The initial setup for FlexPod is not straightforward, but it's relative, meaning you need the talent to set it up. It has a two-layer setup and configuration. One is the infrastructure layer, and the second is the provisioning of the application layer.

For example, simply setting up the box is not enough. You need to set it up and configure the box for it to be an environment. That environment could be for testing, development, or production, and you want a controlled mechanism to do that. Even if the physical entity is ready, you still have to fire up some virtual machines. For example, if you have clients with VMware hypervisors and others, you need a tool to do that, such as a VMware tool if you're working with VMware products.

This is not necessarily a Cisco issue, so I'm not saying that the process for setting up FlexPod is too complicated. Cisco is trying to provide you with a tiny cloud data center in a box, and it's converging all the infrastructure into a single box, which means you must make that box work for you by firing up VMs, and then loading the proper application on top of that, whether you built it or you bought it. There's a lot of complexity on that level that Cisco can work on or can partner to optimize, so it's less painful for the end user or customer.

I'm using the Cisco product, FlexPod.

I can recommend FlexPod to others if it's used correctly or for the right purpose. You get into trouble if you use a tool for the wrong purpose.

For what I was using FlexPod for, which was for a client that didn't have a lot of volume and stress in terms of the applications, I'm rating the solution as eight out of ten. However, if FlexPod will be used for highly transactional, high-volume applications, it's a four out of ten.

I have been working with FlexPod for a while now. I recently shifted my job and have been working with a solution included in FlexPod. Most customer use cases that I have seen are either using it as a database management system or for a VDI solution.

There are a lot of points for configuration.

We are using a private cloud with Azure, but the newer versions integrate with Cisco Intersight.

You get data privacy with it. 

The solution helps to optimize our operations with insight gained from Intersight Active IQ or CSA.

The integration part of things is the most valuable feature. You are getting a whole set of things under one roof and rack. There is support for everything, which is one of the cool things.

The designs are pretty good. Cisco, NetApp, or the OS vendor keep on updating them, which is one of the good points. They will send out a new document about a design refreshment. Everything integrates perfectly with Cisco's new chassis and NetApp version 9.9.

The different modules perfectly integrate with each other because of the Cisco UCS part. For a single chassis, you might have eight plates powering up. Then, there is Nexus, which integrates with your FIS pretty smoothly. For the storage part of it, some solutions have MDSS, and some don't. However, getting them configured is pretty much a few clicks.

I like the continuous CI/CD upgrade cycle with this solution.

They just announced that they are going to move it along with Intersight from Cisco. That can be a private or public cloud, which is one of the areas where it can grow more and has a lot of potential.

I have been using it for somewhere around three to four years.

The solution is resilient.

It has become easier to monitor and automate processes using the solution.

We get everything under one roof instead of just modulating parts.

It is scalable. I have seen the solution used on multi-site environments. I have also seen somewhere around 2,000 to 2,500 people using it on a single site. In other use cases, I have seen it being used in smaller environments, where the data capacity is assigned. Something that I discovered myself, the data relevancy needs to be really good.

If the network or site is down, you just need to go to a single vendor. You don't have to open up multiple cases with each vendor to get things done. That is one of the financial benefits of this solution.

The technical support is pretty good. Rather than running to different vendors, you can open up a case with any of the vendors, who will then communicate with each other to get things resolved. So, customers can go to different vendors for a single issue. From my perspective, if a case is being opened with Cisco, I have seen their people working with VMware to get things resolved. 

I would rate the customer support somewhere between 7.5 and 8 out of 10.

Positive

I have not previously used another solution.

If you use the design document, everything is pretty straightforward. The racking and stacking are pretty easy, in regards to the physical stuff. Cisco and ONTAP are pretty simple to configure if you follow the proper design.

You just need to do a couple of clicks for your UCS. The same goes for Nexus. It depends upon the configuration, but it is pretty easy to deploy. Once that is done, it is just how you want to use your storage, which is the only contribution that you need to do because everything else is taken care of. 

It takes a maximum of two or three people to deploy the solution, e.g., someone to do the physical work and another person to configure everything. 

Once the physical work is done, the configuration part comes in. That is when your switches and UCS integrate with each other. I have done the configuration on Nexus and UCS parts, where I definitely needed help.

We have seen ROI through IOPS and network latency. 

I did not really evaluate other options before choosing Flexpod because it is a leading product in the market for converged use cases.

The private cloud environment is one of the major selling points for it.

Usually, people move to a different solution when it comes to getting a hybrid cloud solution, e.g., a CA solution or HyperFlex. This is where I have seen it get a bit distorted.

I would highly recommend it for core and multi-cloud solutions.

The way that they are making the progress, it will still be a relevant solution going forward. Where there is a need for big data, this solution can be considered.

I would rate this solution around 7.6 out of 10.

We have FlexPod Mini for the primary data center.

FlexPod's validated designs for major enterprise apps in our company are important because there is stability. There are zero downtimes and high availability. There is good support for the systems that you can run on the platform. FlexPod is a validated architecture, and basically, the spectrum of what's supported is pretty wide. So, you can run pretty much everything without thinking twice about it.

It provides unified support for the entire stack. For example, if you have an upgrade or a new version on NetApp, there is a compatible version for the Nexus switch, and there is a compatible version of VMware and/or Cisco UCS firmware. Instead of upgrading piece by piece or guessing what is going to work with what and whether there are any bugs, for an upgrade, you can follow the chain and what has actually been validated. It reduces a lot of overhead for the team.

It has made our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward. Instead of designing or trying to follow the lifecycle of each piece of equipment, by working with a unified stack, we do it once, instead of doing it five times for five different pieces.

It has definitely improved application performance in our company, but I don't have a baseline.

Integration is most valuable. This is a reference architecture. So, we don't have to design something from scratch and figure out how it is going to work. 

We would like one-click upgrades.

NetApp released a new version with a new interface. For somebody who has been used to the old interface, it's a change. It is taking time to adjust to the new interface, and it would be nice to have some of the old features in it.

We are very positive about it. It has been a great experience. We've actually refreshed the hardware which indicates that it is working and is stable. We are satisfied with it, and we're just continuing with this.

Our experience is positive. We've refreshed it. We've purchased additional NetApp, which speaks of the positive experience. I would rate it a nine out of 10.

This was our first experience with it. Before this, we'd buy hardware, storage products, and networking products, and we tried to integrate them. Whatever surprises we got, we dealt with them. With a validated architecture, there's a little bit more confidence that whatever you're putting in place has been validated, and then you got two major names, NetApp and Cisco, behind you.

In technology, I'm afraid there's really not much that's straightforward.

We have some skills to do some of the tasks, but for implementations, we usually go for integrators. The experience with the integrator was great, and the time was basically within an acceptable timeline. The project timeline did not extend, and from that perspective, the implementation was straightforward. You can have some expectations for start and finish.

We worked with our integrators to look at the available solutions and follow the market trend based on our requirements, and this one checked most of the boxes. At the time, instead of NetApp, there was HP storage or HP servers with HP storage. Based on the previous experience and experience with the staff, integrator's feedback, and market popularity, the choice was Cisco/NetApp.

If anyone is just going from a conventional SAN to VMware Hypervisor, it is the most reliable option moving forward. Following technology trends, if you're moving from a conventional server to SAN and you would like to integrate from encryption to SAN-to-SAN replication to any features—ranging from security, ransomware protection, and DR—this solution covers it.

It simplifies infrastructure from edge to core, but I don't know if it also simplifies from core to cloud. 

We are not yet using FlexPod's storage tiering to a public cloud. We also haven't fully adopted most of the innovations, such as all-flash CI, private and hybrid cloud deployment, secure-multi-tenancy, end-to-end NVMe, cloud storage tiering, but we are getting there in terms of whatever trends are there in the market within cloud integration, flash, and NVMe. It is improving our infrastructure, and we will be there. We are currently in the process of adopting some of these.

It has only theoretically decreased our company's data center costs in terms of floor space, power, or cooling. That's because when we went into FlexPod in a data center, we were migrating from one data center to another. At the moment, they still coexist. We are still in transition. So, in terms of cooling and power, we are still cooling and consuming power in both locations. Until we completely go off one of the data centers and move some of the workloads to the cloud, practically, there won't be any reduction in the data center costs. 

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

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 have a bank customer in Brazil who sells a lot of credit cards.

The solution simplifies infrastructure from edge to core to cloud.

The solution has made our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks that drives our business forward.

The most valuable feature is the one support. Anytime that a customer buys a solution for a server, storage, or network, once they have trouble in their environment, everyone wants to find out who was wrong. With FlexPod, everyone is wrong and there is unified support. The best way to solve the problem is have it be everyone's problem, not just one person's problem. For FlexPod, you can call NetApp or Cisco, and I think it's the best way to solve the problem that the customer has.

The best improvement is the validated designs. Everything has compliance. Sometimes when you have a trouble with a machine, or in your switch or storage, you can just call one place to solve the problem. 

The all-flash with the fabric interconnect, along with the connections between the solution, that is the most important aspect.

It is not easy to implement. 

The networking configurations with UCS need improvement.

The application performance has improved in our organization. The configurations of the networks are very substantive. If the customer has trouble, we just have to make the configuration one time, then everything is okay.

The scalability is good because if you want to grow your environment, then you can do it. It has compliance, stacks, and nodes.

I would rate the technical support as a 10 out of 10.

The solution has decreased the unplanned downtime incidents in our organization because of the high availability of the solution. Sometimes, customers have talked about how good the support is. When they call to open a case, we can solve it in two days. To solve a problem, it use to longer: two weeks. Now, it can be solved in two to three days.

The initial setup is a little complex.

We are the integrator. We have five or six people to implement it. In our company, we are segmented, like networking, server, storage, etc.

Before this solution, the customer had around 15 people managing the environment. After purchasing the solution, they had just one. Their OPEX was better after this solution, and the ROI was very fast. ROI happens in about two years.

I think it has reduced data center cost but we don't have this feedback from the customer.

We would like everything in one piece of hardware. This way we can just sell the product like a silo by putting everything in a stack together.

I would rate it a nine (out of 10). It is the better way for the customer to has less troubles and problems.

You have one configuration and one compliance with two companies, Cisco and NetApp. I think this is the best way to make solutions.

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 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.