FlexPod XCS Reviews

Our environment is completely virtualized. Therefore, we are using Cisco UCS and NetApp as back-end storage.

We're using FlexPod on Managed Private Cloud only today, and it's good. It's doing its job and we are happy so far.

We were a small company when we started, like a startup. We have been using this FlexPod since then, and now, we have grown to about mid-scale. However, FlexPod is still able to scale out the way we want, and we are happy with it.

It comes as a package. Since we are dependent on our virtualized environment, and FlexPod provides a small to mid-class environment, FlexPod is the better solution than going with a different product for each individual infrastructure stack.

The solution is innovative when it comes to compute storage and networking. Each environment has knowledge of another in a FlexPod environment. This would be difficult to operate separately. 

We are at the level where we want it to be on serving our applications, our storage, and whatever traffic we want.

The validate designs and overall versatility can be very complex. Because when you try to do automation, there are many bits and pieces tied together. Sometimes, automation gets a little tricky for provisioning. We would like simplicity in the automation.

We would also like better management of cases. For example, if you open a FlexPod case, it's not always straightforward. It would be nice to have centralized resource to open FlexPod cases and ease up management of our cases.

I would like more support on the next level transition to hybrid cloud.

The stability has been strong.

We have had some occasions where we had issues with the performance. We sometimes have had issues with the coordination between vendors, whether its Cisco and NetApp, and bringing them all together. Opening a FlexPod case is not straightforward. Other than that, the stability is good.

It is scaling to our needs. We don't have any issues.

Even though the automation is complex and it is stubborn, it scales to whatever the level that we want to performance-wise and availability-wise. 

We did not use a previous solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. We got all the requirements, then gave them to the consultants who came back telling us what is a requirement and what is a design. We discussed it, and this made the rollout pretty simple. Other than finding out what bits and pieces we needed, the instillation and execution administration was pretty straightforward.

We used a consultant who was good. They helped us initially with all the FlexPod deployments.

As a startup, for the amount of budget we have and the amount we spend, we are getting what we expected.

FlexPod was the only vendor on our shortlist. We went with FlexPod based on our requirements. Also, we have a file-based, virtualized environment, so we thought NetApp would be the right choice for our file-based environment.

I would say, "Definitely consult FlexPod."

I am saving time in my work and so are my colleagues.

I would like to go with the hybrid environment. My tech is built to accommodate any application, independent of the stack where you are, whether it is on on-premise, AWS, Google, or Azure. This way you have ease of moving the application in and back, providing flexibility. However, I would stick with the hybrid as the best way to start with public clouds because of security.

Primary use case is for a telecommunications company. We have used it for housing virtual servers for an internal corporate network, as well as for a service provider network.

We installed two FlexPods in two different geographical diverse locations to give full redundancy. This housed all of our virtual servers. It made everything easier to have in one place.

Support was the main feature for us. Having everything in one as far as combining NetApp and Cisco devices, yet also having one place where we could call and actually get support from very knowledgeable people.

There were several different management consoles that we had to deal with: UCS, VMware, and separate ESXi installations. Maybe one interface console where we could manage everything from might be a little easier.

It is very stable. We have had absolutely zero problems.

It is very scalable. We actually started with only two blades in one system and four blades in the other, and we had capabilities for eight blades. Thus, it has allowed us to be very scalable throughout the entire life of the product as we owned it.

We have had great support, and this is when we have called for any problems, which have been very minimal to start with. 

The only time that we had to use support is when we installed the system. Part of the system from the UCS was damaged in shipping, which was no fault of the FlexPod, but we went through support to have it replaced. It was no problem at all.

We came from physical servers installed on old operating systems. We had around 20 to 30 physical servers. Not only did FlexPod reduce the power requirements in the data centers that we were running, but it also decreased repair, decreased support, and allowed us to have everything in one system as opposed to all these individual different branded devices that we previous had functioning.

We originally switched to FlexPod because everything was going to virtualization. We started doing some investigation and research into why, and found out that it was an overall better solution. In the long run, it ended up saving you money, putting everything together into one solution, and allowing you to utilize all your resources for multiple machines. Therefore, if you needed a new server, you did not have to go out and buy a physical server, you just spun up a new virtual machine, and you're done.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We had a company come in and help us set everything up. After they turned it over to us, it was very straightforward and easy to use, as much as you can expect from a system that large.

We purchased FlexPod though Datalink. Be sure you use a known company to be sure you get the correct licensing and products for your specific needs.

For FlexPod, the whole package itself, including the support and the different vendors who worked together is great (even though it costs more than the other solution we were looking at). There are other things in there that you have to consider, such as the support, devices, how long it has been out on the market, and how well it lasts. 

We went to other telecommunication providers and asked what they have and how well they were satisfied with it. We found some providers who were using FlexPod and some who were using other products. The ones who were using the FlexPod seemed to be a lot more satisfied with their product overall.

Overall, as an entire package, it has everything that we need and support is very helpful when needed. It is still installed and working today problem free.

Look at your needs and what you are looking to do. See what fits your needs better. There is not one solution or company that will be a fit all.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We look at everything as a whole package. As far as support, how long its been out on the market and what they offer. Support is probably the biggest, but for whatever product that we buy from a vendor, it needs to be solidified for a while and tested out on the market, aka tried-and-true.

The value in FlexPod is that we have to deploy a virtual suite to 280 locations around the world. FlexPod gives us the opportunity to deploy a product which is fully built and racked with minimal touch installation when it arrives onsite, so we can do all the configuration remotely. 

It is hard to think of any additional features. It has everything that we need to reach it in some of the worst circumstances given the limitations on the size of the rack and the stack. The product is very well done.

It is very stable. We deploy to a lot of countries where they have unstable infrastructure and we have had very few issues with the stack.

It scales very well. If we need to add additional virtual host server capacity, we can throw in another C220 server or additional storage with a NetApp shelf. It is fantastic for that. Our sites range from quite small to up to 3000 users.

The technical support is very good. Being unified under one single point of contact for all products in the stack is very good. We found that our time to open/close incidences is much better than when we were doing it on individual components with individual vendors.

We have absolutely seen ROI. We have saved between two to four million dollars on travel alone over the past 24 months. We have deployed this to 75 percent of the sites where we will be deploying it. We have a little over 200 units installed. The travel savings alone has been huge for the organization.

I would give it a nine out of 10, simply because it has helped us change the way we do business: From being a receive, integrate, box up, ship out, unbox, and rerack. It has been fantastic and changed our business model.   

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It is all of it. 

• Support
• Reliability
• Flexibility to adapt on the fly when we need to modify and install, then support certain circumstances.
• Meet the needs which were not outlined in the original project.

FlexPod has been fantastic.

It takes the time to market, then shrinks and shortens it.

The most valuable thing for me as a partner, as well as our customers, is the shorter time to market. 

In addition, the most important pieces are:

• The partnership between NetApp and Cisco.
• The engineering effort and time.
• The resources that they put into writing the CBDs.
• Doing all the lab validations.
• Having this product supported as a converged infrastructure.

Both NetApp and Cisco need to do improvements in their day-to-day operations management upgrades, and they are working on it. 

A piece where FlexPod has come up short in the past and an area for them to improve upon: single pane of glass management and single pane of glass upgrade process. It gets a tricky, because there are two different companies and two different partnerships. You do not buy it as a single product; you buy it all at once, and deploy it. 

It is extremely reliable. The length of time of this whole program has been reduced, greatly. FlexPod is very innovative on a month-to-month basis, but it is also extremely stable and well-supported because of the leadership and partnerships put in place.

It does scale well. I do not want to infinite scalability, but it is no different than a traditional data center. Silos, network, and storage, and compute; it is all of those same components. It is just prevalidated and predesigned. 

I used an analogy the other day. Someone learning how to cook and someone else figured out the entire recipe for you, you just have to cook it. When you go to scale, you can scale whichever pieces of the infrastructure that you need, either collectively, or you can leave it.

Because of the length of time that FlexPod has been around, it has been proven. The support center, Level 1 all the way through to the specialists, understand how the program works. NetApp's support understands the partnership with Cisco, VMware, and Microsoft, and the entirety of the system. 

At this time, they have become very good at understanding limits. They can have a management and/or partner issue during the deployment and still maintain the ticket. Our customers love it.

It is very straightforward. 

If we had never done it before, someone else has been the design guide, someone else has been the deployment guide, and it is step-by-step. If you have never deployed NetApp or Cisco before, you can follow these guides. If you have, they are just an augmentation of what you already know, and just a bunch of best practices, so you can get it up and running in a much quicker fashion.

It has a lot of big partner resources, which are consistently behind it, such as thousands of engineering hours and new CBDs coming out every year. It has both proven infrastructure which has been running for the eight-plus years, as well as being innovative. Every time Cisco comes out with a new Blade, Fabric Interconnects, or new switches, or NetApp comes out with new arrays, they are being integrated into the product that year as well as being integrated into the rest of the data conference suite. From that perspective, you are not really inventing anything; you are taking proven things and implementing them in a particularly efficient manner.

Customers use it to consolidate their resources, rather than having a more extravagant and very high-cost center. FlexPod seems to be a simpler, more economical solution and, obviously, it is a lot easier to work on.

Our clients will use it for anything from healthcare (a lot of surgical) to major consumer distribution, universities or higher learning institutions. Large customers, like Digital Realty, who do business with smaller companies, all try to get the same type of solution.

I am from the old school. When FlexPod came out, everybody ran away from it, and went to GDC at Cisco. However, here it is, and it is huge and very convenient. The advantage is being able to consolidate everything into a relatively small chassis.

I like the combination of the brands that they decided to include, in terms of its compatibility, e.g., they integrated UCS into this solution. That is the real advantage: its partnerships.

I look forward to seeing some of the innovations that they come out with for the FlexPod solution. It has been one of those products that I do not criticize it too much. I just look forward to seeing what else is there and the new thing that they are going to come out with. So far, I have been happy with what I have beem seeing.

However, for a lot of our customers, the complexity of FlexPod can be a little overwhelming. When I talk to the customers and they stop speaking technically, they start speaking emotionally, that is when I realize, "We need to get back to talking to them about what FlexPod is." It is a term and a partnership. 

If there is something wrong on the NetApp side. Let us focus on that. I have noticed a lot of customers, they will kick it over the fence. It is FlexPod; it is that mystery animal. The room for improvement is to better present it to those users, so they will not have to be afraid of it. Once they realize, "This is actually a good product." They will turn around on it and stop trying to run away.

It is pretty stable. There are a few tweaks needed. There are a few things that they can always improve on. Altogether, when you are looking at that many different flavors being mixed into the same bowl, it works well. I am happy with that.

It is definitely scalable. This is a great platform that you can build from. If you need to think about scalability in the future, this is the solution because you can stay small and build it out as you go, as you grow, and stay ahead of the market.

In terms of selecting a vendor to work with, collaboration is important because the product is the product. It will sell itself. What supports that? Collaboration. This means being able to work with technical support and engineers to deliver a solution for the customer, who does not care about the challenges that we have to face. 

The customer just wants the product and that is our goal: To be able to deliver something from behind the "green curtain." If they love it, they buy it, then they want to buy more of it. We have to plan for it and integrate it with our future endeavors. That is what we are all here for.

I have not paid attention to ROI. 

As far as the real value, it is a simplistic consolidation where I can actually talk to somebody on the phone, and say, "You should not have to leave the room or go to another floor. This should be laid out like this." 

It is very convenient, and that is a good value right there.

Usually, I will find some type of "phoned-in designs". Something they want to call their "FlexPod." There are a lot of imitators out there. There are a lot of guys who will buy some NetApp and Cisco products, etc. Then, they will say, "Let us put this all together." However, FlexPod has something good here. That is why it caught my eye.

Do not be afraid of it. Roll your sleeves up, and get into it, as it is not that hard. Speak the language, and if you don't, call somebody.

We're using it for general purpose virtualization or converged, as well as in specific cases like electronic medical records. That is the big one.

In the partner space, it gives us a validated solution that we can deploy and it's very repeatable for us. It helps our customers in that they can have confidence that it's going to work exactly as it's supposed to.

It has also helped reduce troubleshooting time—easily hours per week—on architecture configs.

FlexPod’s prevalidated architectures are very important to our organization. It has to do with predictability for applications that are always up and that sometimes are life-safety or life-critical applications. Especially in healthcare, it is absolutely critical that we have a validated performance platform. It has to work every time.

A lot of small things could be improved. I'd like to see better integrations with some of the third-party tools, like Terraform. That would be good. We use Ansible to deploy and that's good, but it's slower than it needs to be.

I've been using FlexPod for more than five years.

The stability is a 10 out of 10.

We haven't done much scaling yet on this most recent one, but in general, the scalability is very good. It's a 10 out of 10. It's very easy to grow very big.

The technical support is good. It's not perfect, things never are, but we've had very few issues. It's also relatively new. We'll see in a year. Maybe my opinion of it will go down, but it's been good so far.

Positive

I have experience with Vblock, Vxblock, and FlashStack.

With FlexPod, we have a lot of validation around performance. Especially in the medical world, it's a very well-known entity, so we don't have to struggle a lot with finger-pointing. Those are all good reasons why we picked it.

It is a complex deployment, but we have done it a lot of times so it's not that hard. We have it all scripted. We have a ton of automation in the deployment process.

For healthcare, it is almost always on private cloud. That is still very much the standard. It's mostly Azure and some AWS, a little bit of GCP, and some others. One of the big EMR providers has its own hybrid cloud that is purpose-built.

The most recent one I did was a big EMR. It's a moderately sized NetApp AF series and a bunch of Cisco UCS with NDS storage. It is a reference flash tag straight out of the CBD with 150 nodes.

Our customers definitely see ROI. We generally model the TCO for them over time and we're generally pretty accurate. They usually get their payback on the product-based converged solution in two years or less. They usually avoid having to add headcount.

The solution's flexible consumption has definitely reduced our customers' TCO. It allows them to do more without their having to add staff to support it. The flexible consumption is a good option for some customers and not for others. We have some who love it and some that don't.

They're going to spend the money on the solution one way or the other, and flexible consumption lets them spread it out over time and pay as they grow. That's great for some, while others just want to do the CapEx because of tax reasons or the like. Neither one is better. They're just different and they're both fine.

Overall, the solution works pretty well. The biggest complaint I have from customers is the cost.

The flexibility, operational efficiency, and scalability of FlexPod are very good. We also use other products too, like FlashStack, and these solutions are equally good or similar in most ways. I have a very good opinion of FlexPod, and we've been using it for a long time.

In terms of comparing converged infrastructure solutions and picking the most cost-effective one, you have to pick what works for you. Think about who's going to support it. If you're hiring a vendor, like me, you want to make sure that you trust me and that I'm going to be around. If you're doing it in-house, make sure that you're picking the one that your people can run.

The vendor delivers a fully-configured prebuilt system with a certain baseline on it. We can ship it to five continents. They can roll them into place, plug in two power cords and six network cables, and we are off to the races.

Remotely, we have installed 230 systems globally (no domestic) in the past 22 months.

The product is pretty good for our environment. It is overkill for our environment. In places that we are putting these, it could serve 2000 to 3000 users and it has to serve 50 users for us. It is a sledgehammer system approach, in that we are putting systems which are not necessarily rightsized, but they are redundant because they are going to places which are fairly isolated.

• Integrated support: It is all under one support contract. 
• The convergence is excellent. 
• It is number one in reliability.

It is a stable solution. The downtime that we experience are typically related to power or facility issues in countries which have less than stable power, or it may be related to WAN outages in places that do not have solid telecom services.

It is scalable. We could throw another host server or shelf in there. We have Nexus switches at the top of the stack. If the hardware survives, the product will probably last us ten years.

Generally, tech support has been really good. Where we have issues, the vendor steps in and assists. It has been very good.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

Cisco NetApp products are a pretty die-hard.

The compute team that supports our NetApps does not have to call the network team. This means that everything is running properly and correctly. The users don't have problems with latency and there here are no problems in any of the backups, or in the systems that are tied into the NetApps. That tells me that it is a well-built and well-designed system. If it stays up and running and the network team doesn't get involved, then I will give it the highest rating.

Just the ability to have diversity in the backups, and that it follows our financial regulations in having multiple layers of backup. That app is a helpful tool for all of this.

I guess in time, you could probably use larger processors, and reduce the footprint of the system and increase throughput on it, so we can have higher-end models. I believe we do have the highest-end models. I know we have Enterprise. I think it actually has Enterprise written on the stamp itself. We have a lot of them, which means that they can probably compete with better processors.

From a physical aspect, I know they are stable. When we walk on our floor with our facilities teams, I never see red or yellow lights on them. They always seem to be performing properly. From a visual perspective, as well as from our monitoring team perspective, if there's a problem, they let the network team know about it. No news is good news.

It appears to scale well. We have racks and racks of them and there are no problems. We keep building and adding as needed.

I have not used technical support and that's an excellent thing.

When choosing a solution, stability is absolutely what I am looking for. It has to stay running. The software is fine. It's the hardware that we want to make sure runs, runs, and runs.

I was involved in the initial setup at one point. I was involved in verifying our infrastructure and there were no problems. The network assessment was clean. NetApps came in, they got plugged into the network, and everybody was happy. We closed down the project successfully, and nobody had to follow up. This means that it is running well.

I did not evaluate other solutions. I was just told this is what we have built, accommodate it, given these requirements, and it worked.

From a network perspective, it is very stable. We don't have any issues with this. I would recommend it, just because of its uptime and the fact that you can sleep through the night, and not get called at 3 AM. I have peace of mind from the stability. Peace of mind and stability are by far the biggest factors.