FlexPod XCS Reviews

We're using the mirroring capability of the FlexPod. We're having the two heads in separate data centers that are approximately one mile apart with dark fiber. We really like the capability of having that high availability and high resiliency within our data structure, our data centers. That's one of the features.

High availability is outstanding. We haven't had any problems with that.

We've got a FAS6210 and performance is really outstanding, as well.

The high availability feature is what we were really looking for, because we have a campus center, where we have two data centers on campus. So, it just made sense. It was the best fit for us at the time to be able to do that mirroring between the data centers, and be able to also have other aggregates for other purposes; all built into one SAN.

With the hardware and the way that the matrix is formed to validate the infrastructure, everybody does their homework and makes sure that everything is going to be fully supported. When you do have an open case, there is one point of support and you do not have everyone finger-pointing at each other. That was the other big advantage and big selling point for us; that was another feature that drew us to the FlexPod.

We're running a 7-mode right now. With CDOT out there and it being the current operating system, that's going to be a challenge for us. Our roadmap is to go to CDOT gradually over the next two years, so the scalability for us isn't as much of a factor. We're not adding shelves. We're not going wide. We want to be able to scale up and that, honestly, is a bit of a challenge because there's no direct migration between the two right now. That's going to be something that we'll have to look into within the next two years. That's on our roadmap.

I'm not up to date on all the options surrounding that migration right now, but CDOT and 7-mode don't translate. You can't just migrate or upgrade from one to the other seamlessly. If they come out with that, that's something I would look forward to. It's always been a challenge to go from one SAN to the other. There's newer technology, sometimes third party, that can help you get there, but usually it is not possible to have a seamless translation or transition.

The only other area with room for improvement is the interoperability matrix. Sometimes, when the newer versions of any of the partners’ firmware or software come out, there's still sometimes a lag of the partners to support all of those new components. Sometimes, when we are going to a newer version of ONTAP, not everything is supported. Therefore, we can't go to that because of this or because of that. For instance, with vSphere 6, we were held back some because of the hardware interoperability matrix not supporting all the components.

We have used technical support, although not recently. We've pretty much gotten what we expected out of it. We haven't had any major, major issues. We did have some performance issues. That was a couple of years ago; it took a while to track down. Overall, I think support was adequate and we did finally get what we needed. This was pretty much only directed towards NetApp. It wasn't really the Cisco or the VMware components. The support was directed between the parties and handed off appropriately whenever we've needed it.

We were previously using something I would not really call a "SAN", definitely not an enterprise-level one. We got to the point where we kind of handcuffed ourselves by not being able to expand or grow that system. It was really at the limits of what we could do with it.

Obviously, fiber channel versus iSCSI is definitely the direction we wanted to go, plus we wanted the high availability. At the time, we looked at a couple other systems and basically the FlexPod definitely met our needs the best. Also, we knew that it could grow.

In fact, about a year or year and a half ago, when we were spec'ing out our system and making a decision on a SAP ERP program, one of the deciding factors for adopting that technology was that we already had the infrastructure to support it because we had the FlexPod in place.

Initial setup was complex. We were making a pretty big forklift in our environment by putting that in. The design took quite a while, but I'm glad that we did take the time to do that design because it allowed us to have an environment that suited us very well for three-plus years now.

Basically, EMC was the bigger other vendor. We did look very briefly at HP but EMC was the bigger vendor that we were looking at, at the time.

We eventually chose FlexPod mostly because of the FlexPod system’s ability to be split into two different data centers with, basically, one system. Price point was another one, but it just suited our needs almost to a T; it really met the requirements that we were looking for at the time. EMC could do the same thing but it was basically two separate systems and it was a much higher price point.

The most important criteria for my company when selecting a vendor to work with are the stability of the company, the quality of the product, customer service and support. That’s a big deal for our company. We want to make sure that the company that we're dealing with has a similar culture to our own, which is high customer service. We value that.

The idea of the FlexPod: We've all probably experienced the difficulties of working without that type of reference architecture and that acknowledgement of the support. You waste a lot of time because there are going to be problems. There are going to be troubles that you have to go through and the vendors working together on the support has been a value to us. I think almost everybody in this industry has probably gone through that at some point, where you know that a problem lies with one of these three manufacturers, but you spend way too much time finger-pointing and you don't get to the heart of the issue. That was one of the definite advantages of the FlexPod.

Overall, it's really suited our needs. At a time when the storage is kind of a moving target, I think that we did get what we paid for; we have a valued product. We have not had any type of bad experiences that, to me, that would steer us away from NetApp in the future.

The most valuable features are the integration and the ability to have support, planning and installation from a single service provider.

Integration between the UCS blade side and the NetApp side is excellent.

The ability to really leverage the 10-Gb connections between the UCS to the Cisco Nexus switch and then to our NetApp really improved performance for us and allowed us to experience a huge amount of growth with no loss of performance.

Also, we've been able to move to and implement a new ERP system, J.D. Edwards. Because of the modularity of the system, when we need more compute resources, we just buy more blades. If we need more disk, we just buy disk shelves. They integrated very easily.

It simplified our workflow.

Right now, we have no flash at all in our NetApp side, so one thing we're looking forward to is going to ONTAP 9. We're also looking forward to looking at integrating some flash shelves to see what the performance will really be. Everybody tells me it's fantastic.

We're rolling out J.D. Edwards location by location so the amount of performance we're going to need is going to grow and grow and grow. So far, there's been no problems but I like the fact that I have that growth path to put in flash and improve performance if necessary.

In a perfect world, I would also love to be able to manage everything from a single pane of glass. I think we're talking about such disparate technologies that I would understand if that is very difficult to happen. In our environment, I'm in control of Cisco UCS manager and the NetApp side but when we get to the Nexus switches, I don't even have the log-ins, our networking guy does. That's something that I don't have a problem with. He's very good and he works very well together with me. It would be nice to have control from a single pane of glass.

We have been using it for about three-and-a-half years.

We've had exactly one issue and that was a related to a hardware failure, a RAM stick, that took down one blade. It was at a SQL cluster, so the other blade just took over flawlessly. We didn't have any downtime.

The scalability is tremendous.

Before we went with FlexPod, we were still a NetApp customer. We were using Dell rack servers connected via 1-Gb links for NFS and 4-Gb fiber channel for block storage and still running VMware vSphere. Things were okay but it was time for a hardware refresh. At that time, we evaluated Dell, HP and Cisco UCS; both rack and blade servers. We pretty much eliminated HP right away. One of the reasons we decided to go with the UCS was that our NetApp reseller was very much certified with Cisco and had a good reputation. As I’ve mentioned, it would have that one source, where we could get support for everything through that reseller. It also didn't hurt that Cisco offered a fantastic deal, where they quoted a price for their blade servers almost exactly the same as what Dell wanted for their rack servers. The price is a huge factor for our company. We're a privately held company, so price is often the primary factor.

For the initial setup, I worked with a reseller. They had two awesome engineers, one from the UCS side and one from the NetApp side. They worked hand-in-hand with me and the people at MacLean-Fogg to make sure we got everything done right. That is the real key with the FlexPod. If you get all your definitions and all your profiles set up correctly in the UCS manager, then adding a blade is very simple. You put in the blade, you turn it on, you apply that profile to the new blade and you're up and running.

The big thing with a FlexPod is, you've got to get it right at the beginning and then everything from that point on is very simple.

The most valuable feature has been the single stream of support. We no longer have to go between vendors to see where the problem lies, so we avoid finger pointing, etc.

Also, we like the streamlined integration for our data centers. As we deploy new sites, or refresh hardware, we know what specifications we are installing ahead of time.

I think that new developments in what each vendor offers that makes the overall system easier to configure and manage could be better. Customers could be more aware of what to plan for in the future to be able to scale and grow. It depends what the technologies and protocols are in the environment.

It's been very stable, we have not had many outages, and if we have, there has been a misconfiguration during setup. However, once it's fully deployed, it's been smooth.

The scalability has been great, whether it's VMware, or if you need more blades, or storage that needs to grow is also easy to expand. We went through a storage expansion, but we built the network portion a bit bigger so it was ready for the expansion. We had physical ports available, it's things like that.

The support has been good. We’ve had issues that once we got to the bottom of the specific issue there were struggles with the individual vendors, but overall once they analyze the problem, we are pointed in the right direction.

The initial setup was a learning curve, but once we got the hang of it, it wasn't too bad.

It’s not perfect, nothing is, but it’s very good. I would say that it’s definitely worth the investment just for the ease of implementation and the pre-qualified support packages that are included. You know that the architecture and the implementation/environment will be supported by all vendors involved.

Our primary use case is virtualization. Most of our virtualized environment runs on FlexPod.

Once you set up the underlying infrastructure, it's very quick to add more capacity or add more compute or networking.

We have also definitely saved time for new service deployments, on the order of many weeks - two months, three months.

Ease of deployment. Once I deploy the chassis and I have the back-end storage, configuring more UCS servers is very quick. I can deploy a new UCS server within minutes.

I would like to see them reduce the complexity, that would be my number one request. Right now, doing simple things is pretty complex. You have so many options. It might be better if it was more wizard-driven, as opposed to going through five hundred dials. It's not very easy or intuitive.

It's stable. We haven't had any issues. We have it deployed for multiple customers and they have all been very stable.

We have found the solution to be resilient. We test it. Before we turned over the product to the customer we did a lot of testing. No single point of failure. VMware, UCS, NetApp, we pulled cables, we did failovers, everything was seamless. Very good.

We have a customer that has five chassis and it scales very well. It is very easy to scale up and wide.

I haven't had any issues, I've called Cisco, NetApp, VMware. It's been pretty good.

We switched to FlexPod because of cost. The cost of our previous solution was too high. I couldn't scale out as easily as I wanted to.

Setup is complex. They don't follow the norms. You expect certain things to be a certain way but once you start deploying you go, "Ah-ha." I found three or four "ah-ha" moments or "gotchas." It wasn't very straightforward. I had to do some digging to find out the right way to deploy it.

I'm not the one who would capture ROI figures, but I'm sure we have seen ROI.

Nutanix, SimpliVity, and Vblock. We went with FlexPod because I think NetApp is a better product for the back-end storage. The other two are the same.

I would suggest doing a mini FlexPod PoC. That is probably the best way to kick the tires and find out what the product is all about.

I have seen an improvement in application performance but I can't attribute that to the UCS or the FlexPod environment because I'm running on an SSD. It doesn't matter if it's FlexPod or not, it'll still run fast.

I haven't really dealt with validated designs. I go to Cisco and grab the product line from there and just deploy according to that. I don't really deviate too much from the already-architected solutions.

In terms of private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, right now we're only doing private. Private is pretty much doing business as usual, nothing different about it. I haven't really looked into how we can take it to the cloud yet. We don't use FlexPod to manage private cloud.

As for the solution being innovative when it comes to compute, storage, and networking, when UCS came on first, that technology was innovative. I haven't seen much innovation from them recently.

I rate FlexPod at eight out of ten. They still have some room for improvement. As I said, the complexity is still pretty high. If they can get a handle on the complexity part I would give it a nine or ten.

We had a lot of disparate technologies which were spread around to different sites. It was the ability to converge a lot of different data and platforms into a single common platform that we could then scale horizontally and vertically.

I do not have a lot to comment on here.

The next evolution of what we are doing is going to be disaster recovery and business continuity between the US and Canada. In six months, I could give you a different answer.

It is stable. With the partnership that we have with NetApp, and also to a certain extent with VMware, whenever we have a problem, they have been super responsive. From the SnapMirror technology to the NSX platform that sits on top of FlexPod, they have been almost as good, if not better, than the integrator that we originally worked with.

Scale for us was really important. We were taking multiple data centers across the US and Canada and consolidating them into two regional data centers. We did not want all of the out-of-pocket expenses upfront. We knew with the FlexPod that we could scale out as we consumed more of those smaller data centers.

The time to be able to answer our call to the time to get to a technician who understands what we are telling them, and even though they may not be able to help us resolve the problem, they are knowledgeable enough to tell us what to do to prepare to talk with a Tier 2 or 3 type person. Then, from there, there is the ownership to the resolution, then the followup by our account executive.

We were early adopters, and there was some complexity involved. That is why a good integrator partner is important. We are a little bit ahead of the curve, and the market has matured since then. 

After the first FlexPod, the second and third got easier and easier for us to deploy. We are now self-sustaining in the configuration portion of managing it, and also in the ongoing operations.

We are in the process of finalizing our ROI. 

We looked at VxRail, FlexPod, and going to different managed service providers, including going to AWS directly. The FlexPod gave us a quicker time to get up and running. The actual cost and negotiation was on par, if not better, than the other things that we were looking at. The labor to operate it is about 30 percent less than we anticipated.

I would have to rate it a nine, because 10 would be nirvana, where I would just press Next> Next> Next, then it is done. I know life is not that easy, but maybe someday it will be. As far as the technology that I am looking for, it is still at least two or three points above the next competitor.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: My relationship with NetApp goes back about six or seven years, maybe longer. My account executive was on point to make sure that what we were buying would not just sit on the shelf, and what we were buying was actually being used relevant to best practices. He came in on a quarterly basis with a scorecard and report card that would say, "Are we on point? Are we doing the right things that we should be doing? Are we paying attention to the right things?" That brought up a different sense and perception of what I think an account executive should be. The technical engineer who is supporting them as well facilitated a very successful relationship between NetApp and us. It became a very strategic relationship, almost like a partnership. I value that, and I never relied much on technical support because they were always on point before I needed to make a call outside to them.

It has not improved my organization, because the products work so well on their own. We have not had any issues with it. Knock on wood.

It just works fine.

The assurance and the peace of mind that we get from knowing if we had an issue with either the NetApp equipment, Cisco equipment, or our VMware enviroment, we can call one number for support, then everyone works together and nobody is pointing fingers all over the place.

It is very consistent. We have had other systems that we have had to replace. Other vendors who we are migrating away from, or have already done so.

However, we are fully onboard with NetApp at this point. We love the company and their products with their ease of use and support.

We have several NetApp systems and we know that if we run low on space that we can add a shelf. We just recently did a head swap on some older systems, and it went fine. There were not any big issues.

NetApp's tech support is top-notch. We have a good relationship with our local guy. If he does not know the answer right away, he reaches out to somebody in the larger office and we receive answer very quickly. We are very happy with support.

Depends on who you are talking to whether the initial setup is straightforward or complex. Setting up a NetApp is one thing, setting up a Cisco UCS environment is another thing. We did not buy it as a FlexPod. We bought all the ingredients individually, then registered it as a FlexPod because it is licensed as such. 

We had subject-matter experts doing their roles. In the end, they realized it was a FlexPod and it should be registered as one. 

As far as ease of management, we do not have to hire more people to administer it or cross-train someone who is not necessarily an expert in one thing or another. If they do not know it and the primary person is out, then we can just call, someone will answer and help us out.

ROI is not a question or concern.

I would give it an eight or nine out of 10. I am not going to give anybody a 10, because you cannot achieve it. We are very happy with NetApp and Cisco, and our FlexPod solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Cisco and NetApp are best of breed. We just fell into this from years of using other products and vendors. 

At some point, you learn along the way that this company over here does a good job and I have heard good things, and this other company also does a good job. Then, these two companies find each other and you get a great solution.

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.