FlexPod XCS Reviews

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.

We use it for running our VM environment. We have three different data centers that use FlexPod: two in North America and one in Europe. Our daily job is important.

We use it FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud, which is fast, reliable, and trustworthy.

Since we started, we have been improving and changing the hardware and performance.

The solution is innovative. It handles virtual networking. Also, it can upgrade blades and  continue working seamlessly, which is excellent.

The option to allow me a different storage connection. 

• We would like FlexPod to have more power, though it is not lacking in power now.
• The old design of FlexPod made it difficult to remove old hardware and add new servers.
• We would like them to have better features to integrate with the cloud.

I am happy with the stability. I haven't had any major issues with it in four years. This includes upgrades.

We have never had a problem with the hardware, even when something apparently fails. The response from the support is amazing. We can have changes for things up in less than four hours.

We started with three initial chassis. Now, we have six in Miami, ten in Toronto, and six in Europe.

The tech support is good. They could improve their response times. However, the tech team knows what they are talking about. So, I'm happy with them.

We were previously using NetApp, which is why we wanted FlexPod. We wanted to virtualize our servers, but also needed more storage and power.

While I wouldn't change a thing, it was not easy coming from our old environment. You have local and different servers and have to pull everything together. It took us a year and a half to deploy the first FlexPod and have it be total functionally. After that, the process was simple. Nowadays, things are easier to deploy.

We used NetApp and Cisco for the deployment. Our experience with them was good. NetApp install all our storage center apps and Cisco handled the computer environment, which is stable.

We have seen ROI. We have saved time, money, space, and power consumption on new service deployments. We have a data center in Toronto which had ten racks on one of the new servers. This was all reduced to two racks with six chassis, which is amazing.

While initially the application performance was slower, we now have seen 100 percent improvement in application performance after all the required connectors were added.

The idea of validate designs is excellent.

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.

We use it to implement our core data center and server environment.

Due to the way the equipment is all together, with its resiliency, typically we have zero downtime. We run simulations for the military, and the lack of downtime is highly important, given the amount of money we run into it. We don't have to worry about downtime.

Having the capability to seamlessly move from different equipment, that's the way to go.

We have found FlexPod to be innovative, when it comes to compute, storage and networking because of the fact that NetApp and Cisco work so closely in streamlining, specifically with Validated Designs. The networking is there. I don't have a problem with transferring from physical to the virtual environment. It allows us to have that seamless storage. We lose hard drives and we don't even know about it because it's so good. The tools provided with the FlexPod allow us to be more efficient with the smaller team that we run.

The most valuable feature of FlexPod is all the vendors' synyergy together. I just have to log in and start working with it. Everything is there, and with the failover I don't even have to worry about the systems too much.

In addition, I live by the Validated Designs. I do exactly what those designs say and I haven't had a problem as a result. For example, they used to do the FCoE. They figured out there was a problem and they went over to the NFS. I moved over and I agreed with them. It worked better.

I would like them to integrate the NVIDIA GRID into the system, so we could easily deploy certain solutions with the FlexPod.

The solution is very resilient, to the point that sometimes we didn't even know it went down, because we don't actually look at our log at times. We find components that were down but it just moves and takes care of itself.

The solution is very stable. Typically, if something goes down, it's a fan or a hard drive. We haven't had any major issues and we've been running FlexPods now for about four years.

The only thing we have scaled are the blades within the UCS. The fact that they allow us to use the same chassis and just swap out the blades, that part was interesting for us. Same idea with the NetApp equipment in the FlexPod. We don't have to worry about the shelves. We can replace just the drives and go higher up on that side. It allows us to scale without doing a full-bore rack replacement.

Because of my environment, we have dedicated teams. We get instantaneous support. So it's not fair for me to answer this question.

We had a mixture of workstations, some rack servers, some floor servers. We knew that wasn't working. We were being pushed to try to virtualize what we could. That's what drove us to it. The fact that we were able to clean up all that, got rid of racks of equipment, it was just the way to go.

The initial setup was straightforward. We sat down with Cisco and NetApp, as well as World Wide, and said, "This is what we want to see." And they built the FlexPod based upon our requirements. After that initial work, everything came in quite easily.

We used a reseller, World Wide Technology. I love them.

I haven't had to put in a request for new rack space. Our footprint is down to two racks that run our entire core. We run multimillion-dollar exercises through it. But it's hard to quantify ROI because we had nothing previously. We weren't keeping track. And then we went to this system. I just know that in the last four years, other than buying some minor upgrades, we haven't spent any money.

There were no other options. I've been with Cisco since 1995.

Go with the FlexPod. It's a very easy solution. There are dedicated minds behind it. You will notice an improvement.

We save time and money with the solution but I don't know how to quantify them because we only have a few physical servers. Everything has been built into it so we haven't had to buy things. So we're not aware of what it would have cost us, by not going with it, because we went all-in on the FlexPod design. Similarly, regarding application performance improvements, I can't say because we went straight into the system.

Regarding thoughts on the solution vis-a-vis private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, unfortunately, we can't move into a cloud other than private. We're starting to investigate how to do it. I don't know how much of a player it's going to be for us, due to our environment. If we deploy it out, it will be used for private cloud, but we don't do so currently.

Realistically, I would rate it a nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement. 

What we wanted to do with the FlexPod solution was get VMware, our NetApp, and Cisco solutions, all in one. Also, to be able to take all of our physical servers and move them into a virtual environment, which we were able to accomplish.

It took a server room where we had 280 servers and another with 180 and condensed them from 15 racks down to three racks. It's helping us in the data center with all our environmentals: we're talking about heat, air conditioning, our FM200s, all of that. It brought all of those down, so we're saving money there. Plus, we're saving money in support because we're condensing it all down. In addition, we're getting the ability of VMware, which is virtualization, so now we have redundancy on all of our boxes, instead of them being physical.

One of the most valuable things is the support. The reason for the FlexPod was that we didn't want solutions where everybody was pointing the finger at each other, blaming each other. With this solution, NetApp really takes control and really wraps its support around the whole solution. It gives us the ability to call one place and to get support and get the product up and running, smoothly.

In terms of features for a future release, that's more for my engineers to answer rather than me. For me, right now, no complaints. My big thing is getting the complaints - they come to me - and since we went to this system, we've had no complaints.

We have had it up now for about two years and we haven't had a problem with it yet.

We have already scaled it. In the last two years, we've already extended out with more hard drive space, with more memory, with more processing power. No problems whatsoever.

Their support is absolutely up to par. I even like their automation support. This morning, I got an email saying that one of our drives had a problem, and they were going to replace the drive. They send it to us and then they show us how to put it in.

We were using all standalone solutions. We had Dell standalones, we had HPE standalones, etc. The problem with the standalones was, if one box went down, whatever application was on it went down too.

When this whole age of virtualization came out, I made the choice that we needed to go that way, for a couple of reason. We have a slim IT department, our resources are valuable, and this allows us to put resources in other places and not have to worry about the technology.

What I like, when choosing a vendor is when they bring solutions to the table, and then they go through with those solutions.

I wasn't involved personally in the initial setup but my staff was. It was very simple. We got on with NetApp, we got the Cisco guys together, we got our VM guys together. NetApp really took the lead and just pushed us through. So it was a very simple setup.

We had all of the options, but not as a FlexPod, rather as separate solutions. We were looking at VM, we were looking at HPE, and this solution brought it all together in a nice little package for us.

Definitely go with FlexPod. It's a great solution, especially with - I keep bringing up NetApp - but NetApp is a great company to work with. They really take the lead. I think it's worthwhile. You'll take your server farm from 200, or however many you have, condense it into one virtual environment, with the backing of Cisco, with the backing of NetApp. I think it's a perfect solution.

I would rate FlexPod a 10 out of 10, absolutely. The best.

The use case is that it is running with multiple applications with VMware, and this a two data-center model, Flexpod, along with NetApp storage. It's quite useful.

Prior to FlexPod, we only had a physical environment. At that time we decided that we had to go to a 100 percent virtualized environment. From a physical environment, we were able to work into the FlexPod where we leverage all the virtualizations.

It provides us with a lot of agility, on-demand or through orchestrations. We deliver hundreds of servers. It has created a lot of agility in this environment.

First of all, it's a converter. It's not dependent on, it's not coming with specific storage. I can leverage its multiple storage abilities. We have various kinds of storage in our environment, like IBM or NetApp. We can mix those types of storage with the FlexPod environment.

The biggest problem we have seen is, we were using the vStorage which comes with the NetApp environment, a kind of fiber connect. We were missing fibre channel connectivity and we got lots of I/O errors. This is the one big problem we have faced with FlexPod.

I would like to see more orchestration tools in FlexPod because we virtually end up with integrating the v-orchestration tool within FlexPod. I would like to see something like that included within FlexPod.

We don't see the much DR capability within the FlexPod so for that, we have to maintain our own DR capability with DSRM.

FlexPod is pretty stable. It has worked in this environment for more than five, six years and still, for the next four to five years, there will be some piece of the FlexPod here. It's pretty stable.

There is a scalability issue with the FlexPod in terms of scale out. We always have to go and procure this piece in the data center. We always have to order a new piece of equipment for the FlexPod. That increases the cost.

We have professional support. They are pretty responsive and they support us.

We switched because of the virtualization. We were a completely physical environment and we wanted to go to a virtual environment. That is the reason we went with FlexPod.

Regarding our most important criteria when selecting a vendor, this is a very big organization and there are multiple vendors. So it's all about the partnership. In this organization, we choose the vendor at the very beginning for three years or five years and go with the long term.

Although I was not involved in the initial setup, I saw when we were moving from physical to virtual that it was pretty smooth. The initial challenge was the configuration within the data center. But I don't think it was a technical challenge.

Right now the Cisco is there. This is a Cisco shop and an IBM shop too.

I would rate FlexPod as a seven out of 10 because it has gone through a long journey in our organization and we have had pretty good support. The FlexPod environment still exists and, according to the roadmap, it will go to 2020.

In terms of advice, this is all about converged and hyper-converged. If you are looking to convert your environment, then I would definitely suggest going with the FlexPod.

We use FlexPod primarily for automation and growing capacity.

Delivery speed and integration speeds have increased. The solution has enabled us to run mission-critical workloads. Our SQL cluster is on there, which is high IOPS.

All-in-one solution is great for when you don't have a lot of staff, with multiple disciplines. It has increased productivity because we only have a staff of four people, so we are able to focus on other items like innovation. It also has simplified our support experience.

FlexPod has also improved applications for us. It handles IOS better.

It is easy to set up, maintain and has great stability.

One touch upgrades would be nice.

FlexPod is very stable and resilient. You just stand it up, and you don't ever have issues with it, so it's been the best storage array in platform we've seen. We've never had a problem.

We've been told from our sales team that it's going to scale really well, but we've never actually tested this. We only have one.

We have a very high opinion of the technical support team.

We've always been roll your own, setting up the UCS, and the external storage arrays, and then plugging them in and zoning it in, so the fact that it's an all-in-one solution is great.

We use Infinidat and EMC. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

It would be nice to have had this years ago when we first started out, instead of a hodgepodge of different storage and compute technologies within our data center. It'd be nice to just have the one and scale it out.

I like the validated designs because they're fully baked, but they do take a while when there are upgrades that need to happen, for all the vendors to come together and certify their solutions in a matrix.

I would rate FlexPod as a ten out of ten. It's innovative, easy, and reliable.

We use it mainly for consolidation in the data center.

Because the platform is a hyperconverged environment, we expect more from the technologies that manage it. We expect people to know system storage, networking, and virtualization. In the past, a lot of engineers were specific to either virtualization or network. However, there is a need now for everyone to know an element of all of those factors so they can better manage these hyperconverged and converged platforms.

Orchestrating and automating deployment of servers and storage are its most valuable features. We use it for automating the profile for specific VMs. The orchestration is innovative.

What I like about FlexPod, there is a lot of knowledge based on it and a lot of field experience now. There are design templates that we can deploy, and follow best practices leveraging other peoples' experience and expertise. This way, we can always follow best practices when deploying it.

I would like more orchestration and networking in-between the VMs, the virtualization layer for networking. I would like to see better tools for this. For example, the VM to VM networking needs to be better.

The stability is solid. 

I have found the platform to be resilient, mainly because all the hardware is fault-tolerant. It has built-in HA, so if one of the components goes down, you're covered by the platform itself.

I have multiple models. You can start out with one or two platforms, then scale it up. They have some great management tools that you can use to orchestrate the whole environment. So, you don't have to go to one server at a time. You can manage a multitude of them.

I would rate the tech support as a ten out of ten. They have a consolidated support team, so you can receive the help you need since they have dedicated support. When you call, you're going to get virtualization, storage, and compute support.

The industry is going mainly for CAPEX, where people are spending less on individual devices, and most of working capital is going to converged or hyperconverged systems. Basically, we can leverage whatever money we're spending on the solution and get more technology built into the same platform.

There is a workbook, so we just use it with our client. It helps us know what they need for implementation. The workbook categorizes all the different information they need, so they know what to expect during the installation. This make the setup clear and concise. They can review the workbook and have plenty of time to fill it out. 

We use an integrator for deployments. Our experience with them has been solid. They deliver what they say they will deliver. They get the northbound network connectivity correct. 

A lot of times with converged or hyperconverged platforms, one of the hardest parts is the networking. When you hire a consultant or an integrator, you expect them to know the unwritten rules of implementing. Sometimes, those are battle-tested; things you learn in the field. That's what I'd expect from a consultant or an integrator.

You get better management and orchestration, but it still costs you money. You won't be spending less money to go to new technology. You're just getting more. You're still spending a lot of money.

We evaluated IBM VersaStack and Dell EMC with their VxBlock.  

FlexPod has more time in the field with more street knowledge. Their support and professional services are better, because people have experience with it. There is not a lot of field knowledge on VersaStack yet. While VxBlock is solid, FlexPod has more experience in the field.

The solution is trustworthy, and it has proven itself too. You get what you pay for. It's the oldest hyperconverged platform in our industry. There's something to be said for that.

The solution works great for multi-cloud environments because you can segment the platform.

FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud makes it easier to manage a large number of environments for a company. This makes it a bit more streamlined on management, deployment, and orchestration.