FlexPod XCS Reviews

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.

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.

The ease at which it scales and its redundancy factors. It's extremely redundant and easy-to-scale.

The software integration, the APIs, are really good. Because everything is going to such a hybrid world, it's better to push things through software than it is to do it manually. The more that they're making the commands the same in your cloud solution versus your private solution is great. It's making our lives a lot easier.

It's very quick. It's very fast. Because it's so highly-scalable and redundant, it's easy to buy new products and scale up quickly onto business demands and needs.

As far as data center technologies or blueprints, it's pretty high up there. But FlexPod has the ability to grow with your company and it has the ability to provide many solutions, and we have yet to find a problem that we haven't been able to solve with our infrastructure. It's been great.

There are certain things that are just hard to do on a physical infrastructure, like for instance you need to make petabytes of data available at high speed. That's really hard to do in private data centers. I'm not really sure how they could do that without making direct links between them, or something.

They can try, but I think really the hardware just needs to get better. I don't know there's a lot they can do about that, other than just let time pass. They already do a great job. There's just certain things that are made better for the cloud as opposed to a private data center, and I'm not sure they can really fix those until the hardware gets better.

They're already doing things that I would like, especially on the Cisco side. They needed to do a better job of allowing API access, and they've done that. So has NetApp, actually. There's a lot of services we would like to put through a software manager, and that was a problem like five to six years ago. Nowadays, it's getting a lot better and as they add more to it, it's just getting better every year.

It is stable. Everything is built with redundancy in mind. Everything is built with doubles and has double paths, so it's highly redundant, constantly. It's one of the main reasons we picked it, to be honest.

We have used Cisco and NetApp's support.

NetApp has been great. They're always quick to respond. The best thing about NetApp, is they are willing to work with other companies quite quickly. Some other companies have a difficult time. They're like, "Oh, it's this person's fault," but NetApp is willing to work together often.

Cisco is a bit tougher. They have more products and more features to troubleshoot, so sometimes the tech support doesn't work quite as well as NetApp's, but it's not bad. It's better than Microsoft's.

I was involved in the initial setup. As with most pieces of technology, you can make it as complex as you want. However, they give you the tools and the resources to be able to make it complex without it taking a ton of man hours.

"Don't undersell some of the features that FlexPod provides to you." A lot of people will see the price tag on like, Dell's chassis systems or the EMC and they're like, "Oh, this is great," but they don't realize the things that they're giving up in the manageability of using a FlexPod, and the redundancy built into FlexPod. If your company really needs to be up 100% of the time, and you need to do a private data center, I don't know if I could realistically actually recommend another blueprint.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

Reliability is a big one; being able to be depend on it. Also, giving you features without getting too complex about it. The best example I can give is NetApp versus EMC. NetApp, you buy ONTAP. When you buy ONTAP, you have everything that ONTAP gives you. It gives you the tons of features that come in the box. For EMC, each single one of those things is another thing I have to buy. It's 29 or 30 packets or software updates I have to buy from EMC. I really appreciate that NetApp just bundles it together and says, "Here's what we do. Here's what it is. Here's the tools."

I appreciate that they do that. They also do a great job of updating it, unlike with EMC, you have to buy and piecemeal things together. You're like, "Oh, I needed this feature." They're like, "Well, you've got to buy that new thing." I don't need to do that with ONTAP. I just buy it and it's all there.

This sounds dumb, but it just works. I don't want to have to deal with support, and I don't need to because, again, it has just worked.

It allows me to focus on other things. Backing up databases. More efficient.

Everybody's short staffed. We're short staffed and so it's allowed me to take on other stuff, and it just sits there and runs. It's not sexy but it does the job.

Upgrades are always scary because you just don't know. Nobody has six or seven different systems sitting around that you can test on before you go into production data.

My complaints are all ticky-tacky, not from a "vision" perspective. If VSC worked properly. It's for disaster recovery. If you have storage networks that are identical across datacenters then it doesn't work for picking off SnapMirrors. That's not a FlexPod thing so much as just a NetApp product thing and they're aware of my issue with that.

Some of the things have not been incredibly intuitive, but once I figured them out they work. That's a matter of their engineers think differently than my mind works. For some, that's a Mac versus Windows thing right there. Windows makes perfect sense for some people and Macs make perfect sense for other people and it doesn't mean one's better than the other. It's just some people like different things.

One of the things that has been less than intuitive is how UCS views storage when you're implementing something new. Some of the 9X ONTAP stuff is just different. It's not less intuitive, it's just different now, and I think I've actually kind of adapted to that. When it's complex there's no easy way to do it, that's why it's complex. But for the most part, they made pretty complex things rather intuitive, so I'm okay with that. It's just different than my mind would think out of the box.

At least ten years, at this and another company.

So far so good. (I don't want to jinx myself).

I have no complaints. You have a DIMM go bad or you have a disk drive die or something like that, but for the most part it just sits there and runs, like I said, which is what I want.

There have been some things. Whether it's an upgrade, whether it's, "Oh, we've got to move this storage from here to here to support this," or whatever. Yes, there's downtime, but the majority of it has been planned. It's once a month, once every two months, something like that. It's not that bad.

I haven't had to cross that bridge yet, but I'm sure it's there if I need it. Don't get me wrong. Scalability's been a big thing because we suddenly needed to maintain backups for a lot longer and I needed more storage space. We went from a half a petabyte to a petabyte within months because we needed to and it worked fine, so I guess that's good, considering it wasn't part of the plan initially.

Well, the one time it was really a problem, it was good and they fixed the problem eventually. The other time they didn't make me feel stupid because it was my fault, so that was good, too.

I was hired to migrate a datacenter from an infrastructure that sucked to a new location on a better infrastructure, and so I put out the RFP for that and was involved in the purchasing decision, although not exclusively.

And unsurprisingly, FlexPod won. Partially, it had a leg up because that was what I knew backwards and forwards and trusted. I had an impact on that, and yes, it was intentional, but frankly it was the best solution for us.

Uneventful. It is more complex than setting up a laptop, so it took more time, but at the same time we did implement it in what most of our partners felt was record time, so that was good.

We did look at Vblock for about ten seconds til we got the price, and frankly we knew they weren't going to work anyway. Not just the price, but it didn't fit us. But that was the only other integrated one

We did sort of look a little at the one that HPE just bought, Nimble. We looked into 3PAR; and I didn't even know what EMC "product of the week" we looked at, but we looked at those as well.

The way the model is now, where, at least with NetApp, effectively you have a partner actually doing the implementation, not an actual NetApp employee - which is fine - I'm looking for good partner knowledge of it. Whoever's setting it up, I want them to know the product, whether it's UCS or whether it's NetApp or whatever. That's critical because I've actually had people that didn't really know what they were doing show up on our doorstep to set stuff up, and that's never good for anybody.

You can't just say you'd want it to be a simple "one button," push this button and everything works sort of a thing either. Not just for job security reasons but because I don't think it's possible, at least at this point in technological terms, to have things be much simpler and still give you the flexibility that you're getting. You get what you put into it. I probably could have made our setup a lot less complex, and I probably wouldn't have nearly the flexibility that I have.

A 10 out of 10 would be a "one button" mind-reading setup; and again, there goes my job. It would be things that just aren't available at this point, such as I'd like to pay very little for this and yet have zero down time, even for upgrades and things like that. It's just not there yet. Someday maybe it will be, but...

I would say it's more important to plan it out and do it right than it is to get it implemented quickly. I would say, no matter how static things are for you, there's going to be change and you probably should know how to make those changes or adapt to those changes as time goes by. That is part of the FlexPod, which comes down to the UCS side of the things. I did not envision needing to change networking as much as I have changed networking for a lot of the machines, so that ability has been really nice. So sometimes you don't know what you will need, what features. Sometimes it's just nice to have the features even though you're never going to use them, because you might.

The valuable features are just the simplicity of expanding the hardware when you need to and containerizing everything into a single platform.

On FlexPod, we are using Cisco collaboration. Not just Cisco, but other collaborator tools as well. Collaboration is our focus, versus general data storage. So we use it for anything from call manager to contact center, to call reporting.

The collaboration is a very niche group. They focus on voice and do not focus on storage. Their focus is on phones and application. I wanted to keep their focus there. I don't want them to worry about the data, the storage, the drives, the servers, and all that hardware. Those are the biggest benefits. For me, the benefit is insuring that they continue focusing on the work that they need to do and not worry about the hardware. The hardware is so reliable and just easy to use.

A single pane of glass to manage all of the components. As you know, FlexPod has multiple components from Cisco, to Vmware, to NetApp. I would like to have a single pane of glass from which you could monitor.a

Stability has been great so far. We had it in place 9-10 months now, but we're also a platinum partner as far as the service. That way we can receive monitoring. In case one the drive fails, a new drive is shipped, and somebody even comes in and puts it in for you.

We haven't grown yet, but that is why we purchased it. It is to easily expand when we need it.

We haven't used technical support yet.

We were coming to the end-of-life with our hardware, and we needed a platform that could easily grow. We were using the traditional stand-alone servers. We then went to the Cisco C-series, then we started virtualizing, and then we needed something bigger.

I was responsible for the initial setup and it was a breeze. Everything came shipped, plugged-in, and ready to go.

We evaluated IBM, Vblock, and Nutanix.

The factors that made us go with FlexPod were the components that were in FlexPod, NetApp being a big one of those, and Cisco being the other big name. When you think about storage, you think NetApp. There are a few others out there. When you think about routing switching, you typically think Cisco.

Cisco has done a great job coming into the server environment, and I believe in developing partnerships with companies and putting their weight behind it. These companies will continue to perform in in the future. Think about who you would invest in the stock market. Who are you going to put your money in?

Another large hospital, certainly, should focus on the longevity and the simplicity of the solution. I'm really all about the simplicity of it. I have to keep things simple. In IT, we have a habit of making things very complicated, and it's really difficult to change your thinking to keep things smoothly.

The most valuable feature are probably the inter-app ability that it offers; knowing that everything is compatible; and the validated designs that we get with that.

Ease of set up and administration; knowing everything that we have is going to be working optimally. Getting that kind of support, too, when we call in. We can open up a FlexPod case if we have an issue and then we have vendor support across everything that's in our virtual environment.

It might be improved with some refinements to tools, such as the virtual storage console and similar items. We've had a few issues with that. The same thing applies, as far as the Cisco side; the UCS manager is kind of bulky and slow; a Java-based kind of thing. Maybe they could just refine the tools that we use to manage it.

It's really good, it's worked well, but we've had a few issues with various parts of the hardware, with our fabric interconnects from Cisco. We actually had to replace two of them because of some sort of corruption that was on them. We did an upgrade on it. Apparently, the specific version we upgraded from to the specific version that we upgraded to, there was a known bug that would cause corruption on our partitions on there. We had to replace those like three times because of issues we had. That was a big pain point, but besides small things like that, it's been pretty rock solid. That would be why my rating is not higher than it is.

I think it was just one of those things that's just so under the radar that it took them a while to even dig up that it was an issue. I referred to it as a known issue, not being that it happens a lot but known that there was some documentation that had pertained to it. It was one of those things, tough to catch until afterwards; already done.

It's pretty stable; as good as anything else that I've used.

Scalability is good, I guess. I'm not sure I can comment too much on that because we haven't grown our environment too much since we set it up.

Technical support has been pretty good.

It was already implemented when I started at my company, and then I just setup another new environment after I had gotten there.

I was involved in setting up one of our FlexPods. It was pretty straightforward. The most complex part was probably the fiber channel setup. If I would do it again, maybe I would look into more of an NFS-type setup; make that a little bit easier. Otherwise, you had the FlexPod, and as far as from the Cisco side and everything, it was pretty straightforward.

We were just kind of sticking with it for now, because of the validated design; knowing that there are lots of other users that are using the same product; the tried and true results. Our environment requires having a very stable environment. Otherwise, our company loses a lot of money. We wanted to get into something that was well reviewed and know that lots of other people are working with it.

Give it a look. See if it fits your environment. That's kind of it, for anything you purchase, because it's got to fit your environment; it works for us. It works for what we're trying to do.

For our company, the FlexPod solution really hit a sweet spot because it leveraged existing technologies we had with new blade server technology and NetApp's scalable, expandable storage.

We were due for a server hardware refresh, and so we examined solutions from several vendors. We worked out an impressive deal with Cisco to go along with NetApp, who we're already a customer of and VMware vSphere. When we brought that all together, things just fell into place.

Management is still by separate screens. I need to go to NetApp to manage the enterprise storage. I need to go to the vCenter client to manage VMware, and I've got the UCS Manager. My best hope is some kind of combined client in the future.

We've been using FlexPod for just over three years.

We've had one stretch of downtime. It was very short. Unfortunately, it happened on a weekend, and it was related to the failure of a hardware DIMM in one of the blades. Our partner and Cisco worked very quickly to remedy that.

I can give you a perfect example of how this FlexPod solution is scalable. When we first put it in, we had our baseline activities WE wanted to do. Then shortly afterwards, the company decided to go to JD Edwards as a ERP system. We needed to buy additional compute resources. It was quite simple to buy another chassis, some more blades that were aimed for that solution, and buy additional shelves of disk and just connect it to our NetApp filer.

The support we've got from NetApp has been pretty flawless. If something has gone wrong, it's usually been something like a disk fails. For enterprise storage, that's a given, but we've not had any issues where we've had any appreciable downtime outside of scheduled maintenance.

It is complex. I would recommend to anyone considering a FlexPod to get a partner who has done it before because with FlexPod there's a lot of work up front, but if you get it right up front, everything beyond there is smooth sailing.

I mentioned earlier that we added additional chassis and blades. Because we had done the work ahead of time, set up the templates and profiles for the blades, it was very simple to just insert the blade, power it on, apply that profile, and it's up and ready to go.

I look for a vendor with an established history of innovation of stability. That's one of the things with NetApp and Cisco. They're leaders in innovation in their fields. I'm entirely confident in the solutions I have with them today and the solutions they're going to provide tomorrow.

Recommendation to peers: I would recommend that they would really regret it if they didn't at the very least invest in and consider a FlexPod solution.

I'd give it firm 9.5, simply because I don't believe in giving tens out. Literally, it's been in our situation pretty flawless.

The solution suits converged infrastructures, where the customer gets a complete system with Cisco servers, NetApp Storage, and Cisco switches.

FlexPod XCS needs to improve its pricing. 

I have been working with the product since September. 

The tool's pricing is fair. 

The tool is recommended for companies with an employee count between 50-500. Bigger companies look for individualized solutions. You must look for a different solution if you have a complicated or bigger infrastructure. I rate the product a seven out of ten.