FlexPod XCS Reviews

Flexibility and performance are the most valuable features. We are a financial company. Performance is very important for us, when it comes to processing data on SQL databases. Scalability is another example of us installing a new 8080 and migrating data from 8040 to All Flash on the 8080.

It's flexible; it's adaptable; it's pretty fast; and it's non-disruptive. That's a huge part of what gives it an edge over other technologies these days – the disruption to the business – because our kind of business is an online business. It has to be 24/7 and zero disruption for the users. It is just great for business.

There is room for improvement in the GUI for the NetApp side. There's a lot that they could do on the CLI side. However, for a lot of novice admin users for NetApp, where you want to delegate certain work to the rest of your team, if you have a new person who joins the team or doesn't have enough experience with the CLI part, the GUI is an easier way for a novice user to use the appliance.

It exists today, but not enough. I've seen some improvements in ONTAP 9 from 8. Some features were added that were not available before, like zeroing spare disks; other features that are there as well. The world is moving more towards GUI rather than CLI. That's because it's less time-consuming. The graphical interface is better. Also, IT administrators are becoming lazier to learn the commands and memorize all the commands that have to do with simple operations; move a volume, create a LUN or something like that. Moving towards GUI would help a lot in administering the appliance, for sure.

I’ve never had any stability issues. What's nice about it is, if we approach NetApp for support, they support us on all the stack. If we approach Cisco for support, they support us throughout the stack. It's a pretty integrated solution. Also, nobody points fingers at anybody else. From the experience I've had with them, if we call Cisco, they support us on everything that has to do with the FlexPod. If we call NetApp, they support us on all FlexPod components.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. It's just great. We increased our space. We moved to flash disks from SATA and SAS. Again, no disruption; better performance; and it's all transparent to the business.

IT has a major problem when it comes to explaining where we stand to the business. All the business understands is, “I want to be always online. I want to have better performance” – whatever that means to them – “and I want it to cost me less.” It's an expensive solution, but when you compare that to what FlexPod actually does, and the performance it provides, it's pretty good.

Technical support is excellent and they support you on the Cisco equipment, too; on the Nexus. We have a Nexus 5K and a Nexus 7K. They've got pointers: where to go, what to do, what you have to look at. It removes the headache from our side, going back and forth between two different companies; one is the storage; the other is the network; and everyone is pointing performance issues on the other. But this solution tells me, “You know what, we work together. It’s our product and we'll help support you on any component,” which is a great thing.

I think the team that I joined had a different vendor. They migrated from that vendor to FlexPod because we're scaling out our business. The business is doing well, so we have a plan to scale out 10 times the business size over the next three years. That's why we addressed all other different solutions and we found the FlexPod would help us out when it comes to scalability.

If we buy the appliance right now, we don't have to buy the full size, but if we want to scale out, it gives us that option to scale out as big as we want it. Our business tripled over the last two years and we're starting to create performance labs to see how much it's going to handle when we go 10 times our size. FlexPod is helping us out with that a lot.

In general, for the backend IT people and the infrastructure team, support is one of the most important criteria when choosing a vendor. When you call, I don't want to be waiting on the line. This is the smallest example I can give: waiting on the line for a callback and support that just keeps pointing fingers at other appliances. We look for the quality of support; getting to solve and follow-up on our issues; RMAing items, if need be; and proactivity.

With NetApp, we have the online support where, if one of the disks goes down, NetApp automatically knows about it and they approach us saying, “Hey, you've got a disk that's going down. If your alerting is not working, our alerting is working. We need to send you an RMA for this disk.” Those things make an IT department feel more secure because it is not only us having to watch our back to show that we're doing a good job for our business; we've got somebody else on our side doing that for us, as well. That's another good thing.

Because it's a scalable appliance, most IT people tend to aim to get the biggest thing because you might as well. You want to cover your back as well, and all of that. But scalability; you've got to have in mind scalability. When looking at FlexPod, buying the basic thing could cost you a little bit, but you have that flexibility of adding and scaling up in FlexPod. You don't have to go all-in like we used to with a lot of different appliances.

It's non-disruptive. That's a huge thing. You want to build something that you can say, “OK, the business is going to grow. We are anticipating the business is going to grow three times the size.” You don't want to buy an appliance now and then, when you want to add an extension to it, you have to take the business down. That doesn't look good for you as an IT department. It also doesn't look good for your appliance, saying, "Why do we have to go down for eight hours or 12 hours? We've already invested so much money and now you're saying we're going to be disrupted for 12 hours." So, FlexPod eliminates that for you.

Start small, have in mind that you can scale out, and scale up, too.

A few of the reasons why I gave it a perfect rating are support; scalability, of course, for the appliance; and scalability for the company itself. NetApp is growing; now they're adding SolidFire to their portfolio. I've taken a brief look at SolidFire. I've noticed that they're dealing with it as a separate entity – not separate technology, but definitely a separate entity – that you can add to a portfolio of NetApp, whether it is EF or FAS; now, they've also got SolidFire.

I'm hoping to see NetApp integrate SolidFire into the OnCommand GUI itself. That way, we wouldn’t have to deal with two separate appliances in the back. That would add more headache to the administrator – having to know two different appliances, adding command capacity and administering two different technologies – rather than integrating them into one and having one admin side. It is new technology so I would give them an almost-perfect rating, but SolidFire is a great technology to add to your portfolio.

I'm a pro-FlexPod guy, which is where this comes from. We haven't faced any usability issues with it before. We've faced a couple of performance issues that turned out to be outside the FlexPod, not within the FlexPod. It turned to be a Microsoft database issue that some on the DB team were able to resolve. Performance-wise, the performance tools give you a great insight on what's going on in your appliance or in your FlexPod; knowing where you could do some enhancements, or where you can help troubleshoot some problems for developers or for the database teams; saying, “This is where we need to enhance or this is how our appliance is performing.” It's pretty cool.

The most valuable feature is that FlexClone and all the components are integrated into one single rack. The FlexPod in itself helps us in reducing the complexity of cabling and also creating new designs, because they're all validated by Cisco, NetApp and VMware. That's the best part of it.

We have a validated design from these major vendors and we use all of them; we being the cloud service providers. We can use this as a platform to focus in our business while we have a validated design. We don't have to invest time in designing an infrastructure.

I would like to see end-to-end automation that would enable service providers to get the infrastructure with faster provisioning, decommissioning, or even performance analysis; end-to-end includes compute, network, storage and applications.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are accessibility, product quality, and support.

Stability is pretty good. As a service provider, it has met all of our requirements, but we are interested to see more compatibility with the compute and the virtualization partners like, for example, with Oracle. That's a very great, vast area, where there seems to be two worlds: Oracle on one side; and VMware, NetApp, Cisco, and all of them, on the other. They have to come together to integrate and provide more compatible solutions.

With us being Oracle service providers for Oracle databases and applications, it's a niche area, and FlexPod still isn't there.

NetApp with cDOT is a scalable, performing solution for us, so it has been awesome.

NetApp support has been really great; parts arriving on time and getting to talk to the engineers. We have had several situations where we had services down but we could engage the critical case team, which is superior support within NetApp. We could arrive at proper solutions and get the services back.

We were previously using HPE 3PAR and then we migrated to NetApp. It wasn’t that HPE 3PAR did not serve the purpose, but NetApp having the validated design helped us to arrive at the solution even faster. We know that they have a strong engineering team. It is not that NetApp would just buy other companies and add to their portfolio, but because of their strong engineering team, they invest in their own research and bring out products. It also reflects in the support, when in need.

Initial setup was straightforward. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, we have a virtualized platform like Oracle VM. We don't have a straightforward FlexPod validated design for that, but we could use the compatibility matrix and with support from NetApp and Cisco, we could build a platform.

We were actually considering SolidFire but they eventually were bought by NetApp. Otherwise, we are even now considering Oracle engineered platforms such as PCA and Exadata.

We eventually chose NetApp because of the ease of administration and faster provisioning. It again depends on how NetApp would scale to fit into Oracle and Oracle virtualization platforms. That would be a decision point to continue with NetApp.

Evaluate multiple products. It all depends on how the product would actually fit into your use case. NetApp FlexPod fits well into our use case, so I definitely encourage you to evaluate NetApp and SolidFire.

It has been part of our success so far. I would give it a perfect rating if it fit into all the virtualization platforms that I’ve mentioned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We've been running it six years now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our organization relies on it as the backbone of our infrastructure, which we use to provide services to multiple clients in a multi-client environment.

While I don't have exact figures, there are definite savings in terms of capacity, particularly when using an all-flash storage solution. We may be achieving around a twenty to thirty percent reduction in capacity usage. The familiarity with the architecture has improved troubleshooting, as we now know precisely where to focus our efforts, particularly when dealing with performance-related issues.

Managing the system is straightforward, and we find it easy to handle overall infrastructure upgrades. The main advantage is consolidating everything into a single rack, which helps optimize power consumption, especially in CRM.

Perhaps having a unified interface for managing the entire company could lead to improved efficiency and performance.

I have been using it for eight years.

Once it's installed, it remains stable. Hardware failures are infrequent, aside from the occasional need to replace components.

It is scalable, allowing us to expand our workload capacity.

I'm quite impressed with the support provided by NetApp. They are incredibly responsive, and you can expect immediate assistance. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We used NetApp in combination with HP products at my previous company. This combination worked well, but FlexPod offers more in terms of operational simplicity, making it easier to manage and operate.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Regarding the architecture, the connectivity involving switches, servers, and other components is quite straightforward

Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

Our customers use this solution. It's a validated design and there's one solution for compute and storage. The validated design is an advantage when you take all of the separate parts.

The flexibility between Cisco and NetApp is valuable. When there are new parts of new devices like the new AFF 400, then the speed is not fast enough to implement what the customer asks for, but the design is not validated. It's faster to validate the design for new equipment.

FlexPod's unified support for the entire stack is very important. Before, the customers would log a ticket by Cisco and a ticket by NetApp. It's better when vendors can partner and look for a solution together. 

It improves application performance for our customers. Before FlexPod, you could make a design and that design was not strong enough for some applications and now there is a good validated design. The validated design gives space for the applications to run or not. Performance has been improved by 50%. Before we had to make separate designs, now, we are more confident that a design is good to work for the type of application. 

It has decreased unplanned downtime incidents. 

It's easier to sell to a customer because it is a validated design but sometimes the customer wants another feature and then it's a problem. You must build each block separately, that's a disadvantage sometimes.

The stability is good. 

It's very scalable. 

Sometimes we reach out to the NetApp support from the NetApp part or the Cisco part but the engineers by us are also certified to install FlexPod. We have had good experiences with them. They speak the same language as us which is an advantage. 

Our customers choose this solution because of the validated design and for the one-stop solution where it's one contract. It's one building block which is an advantage for the customer instead of buying separate items.

Our customers also look at Dell EMC. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

Two hour production products are fully running in AWS. For the FlexPod, we just run everything on it.

We bought all the parts separately. So, we are running a certified FlexPod design with the AFF A700, UCS chassis, and Cisco Nexus FIs.

We are using both AWS and Azure.

The solution makes our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward. The environment is more homogeneous, so there are not as many technologies to study and learn. People can focus on improving their knowledge in existing technologies.

It simplifies our lives.

We use a smaller footprint of equipment right now.

• The compact design
• Cost savings

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization are very important. We use all certified designs to be eligible for the enterprise support and to receive support promptly. That is why we extremely rely on the certified designs and best practices.

There were a lot of elemental failures, like RAM or blades.

Hardware stability needs improvement. We replaced a lot of RAM this past year. We had to replace the complete blade once after extensive troubleshooting. Any given time, we have approximately one blade down within the entire infrastructure, unfortunately.

The stability is good. It breaks sometimes.

The solution has decreased the unplanned downtime incidents in our organization. We have almost eliminated downtime (by 90 percent) since using FlexPod.

The scalability is very expensive.

The technical support is good. We haven't needed to contact Cisco support regarding FlexPod as the entity. For NetApp and UCS, we receive a lot of attention.

The solution’s unified support for the entire stack is very important. With FlexPod, you receive a higher attention level when you ask for support. This is very beneficial in a time-sensitive business.

We did not have FlexPod before. We had a bunch of standalone HPE rack servers.

We switched after analyzing the performance needs and what customers wanted to spend.

We reduced the environmental footprint, like reducing electricity costs and heating. However, we are hosting our data centers from somebody else. We reduced our footprint of equipment by approximately 80 percent. Meaning that about 70 percent of our cabinets right now are empty because we switched to FlexPod.

For the deployment of UCS, we uses an integrator and fellow reseller. Our experience with them was very good. Everything works.

The application performance improved by 50 to 70 percent.

Cisco and NetApp were on our shortlist.

I would rate it an eight (out of 10).

It's a tenant environment. We sell it off to customers who need an environment, depending on the scale of their company, where there might be a couple of servers or 100 to 200 servers.

We are our own cloud provider. We use VMware vCloud Director because we provide that to our customers.

For UCS, we are on version 6.2. For NetApp, we are on 9.5.

Our private cloud sector of our company has grown exponentially thanks to the ease of deployment of the FlexPod architecture. We are also able to deploy a console to customers who want on-prem environments in a smaller deployment structure with a UCS Mini and direct-attached storage. So, it's helped us exponentially grow the business.

All-flash has helped the company a lot, especially for business critical applications. We found that customers want more performance than ever based on what is out there in the market. We find that innovation and integration with the whole FlexPod design has helped a lot.

The guides that we use to install FlexPods are always up-to-date. This is really helpful, especially if there is a new product with NetApp moving so far forward and Cisco as well. For them to join together and update a centralized document for the install process, it is really good. It helps us understand if there are features from the first version that we installed while upgrading that we need to implement. Those are in the document. So, we find that document useful and helpful when moving forward.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization is very important. It helps us to understand what we need to do and deliver, doing it at a supported level for our customers.

It would be nice to have something like an automated, upgrade solution The tasks needed to upgrade the hardware within FlexPod are still quite behind compared to some of its other aspects. That's more on the Cisco side. For the NetApp side, the upgrade process is quite simple. It's been simplified. So, that's something that could be looked at.

It has gone to HTML5, but it's still quite a bit bland. It still seems a bit like there were some features in the Java version that are quite hard to get into in the HTML5 version of UCS Manager, where you go to a profile and you need to drag it in. You can't move the box across. All the boxes are different sizes. If you have a lot of names, then you can't move it across, which is quite annoying when you're trying to do it.

I would like more with the integration pieces, e.g., more with the REST APIs to be able to access it remotely.

The footprint in the data center is quite large, especially when you scale out. Maybe find some hardware in the future, where if a new blade comes out, then Cisco can say, "Look, we'll buy those blades back off you, and we'll give you this blade for X amount of money." A buyback scheme would be good for hardware, and even NetApp as well. Something like a buyback scheme for blades and stuff moving forward would be good, because I know that they're going to put more power into them. E.g., replacing four blades might equal one blade, which would be awesome, but we are still going to have those four blades around. Maybe having something where it will give you this much money for these blades so we can upgrade. That would be perfect. 

With the upgrading, making that a little bit more streamlined and a bit easier to do, so it doesn't require as many man hours to do. I would like prerequisites for an upgrade.

It's very stable. Since we've had it in, knock on wood, it's been absolutely flawless. We've had some issues, but that's to do with the upgrades and mainly with the fabric interconnects, and they can be a bit finicky. They're not as robust. They're robust in a way if you don't touch them, they look fine. But, in the upgrade process, we've had a lot of issues where there would either be corrupted images or they wouldn't upgrade, which would cause one of the switches to fail. Some of that stuff is very worrying. But from a performance perspective, it's worked as it should.

It's highly scalable. It scales really well, but that also comes back to how you want to scale it. In terms of whether you want to add more chassis and if you want to add anything more to that. Then, that comes under the costings of the data center because the chassis are quite big. However, the scalability of it is perfect. We haven't had an issues with it.

The technical support is pretty good. I would give it a seven or eight out of 10. A full 10 would be having the automated upgrading, getting them to do the upgrades, as that would take a lot of time off us having to do them. I am sure that there is a team you can get for that support, but it's quite expensive. Maybe that type of support for upgrades can be bundled in when someone buys a FlexPod deployment. Most of our time on the environment is spent on upgrading of the infrastructure.

We have really good support from NetApp. We get really good, really fast support from Cisco, as well. E.g., if there is a failed memory chip in one of the host servers that needs replacements, they are always on time. They send it out when they need to, and if the problem is not resolved, then they move that forward to the next tier.

We used NetApp from the start. Before my time, I'm not too sure what they were using. I think before it was just storage on servers, like integrated in. As long as I've been here, I've been using NetApp. 

At the time we went with that solution, public clouds didn't exist. However, knowing that it does integrate with public clouds is an absolute bonus. It's awesome because we're moving towards that type of integration. Knowing this makes our lives a lot easier because we don't have to move from where we are to get to where we want to go. We've already got what we want, which is absolutely amazing. So, it's great.

We are very strong NetApp partners.

The initial setup was straightforward. Complexity was added more from a customer perspective, where you need that custom setup for what they require. With the bundle, we did get to go to training for FlexPod's deployment and that sort of area. That also helped us a lot to understand the nuts and bolts and detail of what it is as well, which helped a lot with that knowledge.

We work with Cisco and NetApp for the deployment. The guides are absolutely intuitive. You go from start to finish, deploying it all in one. In terms of time, we have used them to reference different aspects of how we should set it up if there are custom requirements, because not all deployments are put it in and deploy it as we go. We have had some custom requirements over time, but the initial one was just straight in and cable. It was quite intuitive for us, which was good. We didn't need for anyone to come out and install it.

I haven't seen ROI.

From an application point of view, customers have seen an improvement in response times for mainly database-based applications, and the need to have a lot of reads and writes for all-flash storage. The upgrades with the hosts from UCS to the new blades with PASA processes and more memory have also improved.

From a flexible deployment and scalability point of view, we got NetApp. From enterprise and beyond, they are doing above and beyond anything that anyone else is doing at the moment.

Cisco are the leaders in LAN technology. With their hardware for unified communication of the UCS bundle, it's so straightforward and easy to set up. It integrates with a lot of other major vendors, which makes our lives a lot easier.

I would definitely support integrating FlexPod within a company, depending on their requirements. Even if it wasn't a a full, flexible deployment, just having a smaller deployment of the UCS Mini with a smaller NetApp for a customer, it is so scalable. You can do it for a smaller customer to an enterprise customer. I would fully support them implementing this into a data center based on their requirements.

The solution has made our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward, but there's still a lot of manual overhead that needs to be done. We're installing new chassis or upgrades. Upgrades is a really big one.

We find that the UCS shells are still quite power intensive. Maybe moving forward to the new releases of the blades that they have in their FlexPod deployment, we might be able to change a couple of blades to one blade because the power is exactly the same. They have the same quality of processing and memory. Right now, we find that it does take up a lot of space and power. Hopefully, in the future, once we do go through the upgrade process, pull out the old blades, and whatever we need to replace, we might do that.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. Nothing is perfect. You always have that one percent where you say, "Aw, I wish it was doing this," but at the end of the day, it can't. You're always going to be a bit picky.

We use it for generalized workloads in a hypervisor situation, either VMM or Hyper-V. It is used for any particular workloads that the government has for this purpose. It is sometimes used for dedicated hardware as well, so it provides the flexibility as we need it. We can also grow because we can easily expand it from its initial chassis.

It gives you a lot to work with. The problem with this is then you don't know what you want to do anymore. By making it very versatile, it also gives you too many choices.

Depending on how we deploy, we are seeing application performance improvements as we have plenty of horsepower in the solution. However, at the moment, we have development issues, not performance issues.

The ability to have the configurations for it: The blades, the service profiles, and making a standard for it. This makes it easy for the other members on our team when setting things up, because there is already a template for them to use.

I like that everything is integrated, and we can change the port to whatever we need, e.g., Fibre Channel. It is very nice to work with, as it gives the ability to have more choices: Do we want to have more Fibre Channels, iSCSI, or some type of MetroClusters? We can do all this with if we have bandwidth.

The ability to manage the templates across sites. We would like to easily take out the configuration of one FlexPod and copy it over, just making minor changes. There is a way to do it, but it's clumsy.

There is a bit of a learning curve for a new person in understanding FlexPod and going through each of section of making a template for SAN, hardware, networking, etc. The flow isn't very good. The software should be more geared to a top-flow design versus a bottom-up.

I would also like them to improve some integration on the HCI part.

It's very stable. I find it's almost mainframe grade.

We had issues where we had some of the aisle modules failed. Even though its half the system, it was still up and no one actually knew why it was down. It was down for a few days before we could get it fixed. However, it didn't affect anybody else and that includes our major environment. This was at one of our bigger sites and nothing happened.

It scales easily. We went through an upgrade of adding additional chassis, and it wasn't a big deal.

Their technical support is very good. I don't think we have had a call that lasted longer than a couple days, and it was only for one issue where something didn't work properly. It wasn't exactly a hardware problem, but it wasn't a software problem. It was just one of those strange anomalies.

The upgrade was straightforward. There wasn't anything special involved. What we found out is that since no one is using templates properly that we could have done things even faster if we had used the templates. Since then, we use them all across all the sites.

We have seen our data center rack space collapse about 90 percent. We have a data center which only has two racks now out of the 20 that were there previously.

We have also reduced our manpower with the solution.

We may consider another solution for the HCI. We have not decided yet.

Know what your use case will be for and figure out whether you are going on-premise or want a hybrid solution. This will change what you need. If you are going to do some hybrid stuff, you may need to decide to create your own software to make the hybrid connection or you can use HCI. This may change the things you want to buy.

We are trying to decide if we want to go to a private, hybrid or multi-cloud environment. We don't have any services to deploy VMs yet on the cloud.