FlexPod XCS Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most valuable features are the ACI integration with overall FlexPod and the Application-Centric Infrastructure. This is especially the case with Vnomic automation software for SAP specific workloads. Those elements are great for us as a service provider. We love the integration with the UCS chassis and it allows us to scale. It really ensures faster realization of value for our customers. The type of workloads we are using it for are with SAP workloads at this point however we do plan on expanding into other enterprise-types applications in the near future.

The benefit is the realization of value for our external and internal customers, especially as we are leveraging Vnomic automation. Deployments take a lot of time. Manual deployments of SAP workloads can take months, but with this automation that we have now, we can deploy within weeks or even hours in some cases. This has tremendously reduced the potential for human error, soft dollars for deployment, and provides a secure and auditable environment for our customer base.

The CVD process requires additional development and validation from each of the vendors involved, which does not allow us to be at the cutting edge of technology. For instance, I'm currently waiting for the next generation of the FlexPod to come out that has the flash integration. As with any platform, scale is always the biggest thing. I would like to see some improvements in terms of scale especially in the way Netapp handles production SAP workloads.

I made a reference to not being able to leverage flash today as an example, an additional example of this would be the fact in the current iteration of the CVD we are following, from the ESX side, we are limited to vSphere 5.5 and from an OS perspective we are limited to RHEL 6.7, and not able to move up to RHEL 7.2.

In both cases this is due to the fact it hasn’t been fully validated from the vendor testing in their labs. From a SAP DB/application support standpoint, this limits our ability to provide some of the recent releases of SAP software like HANA 2.0 for instance as it requires the latest RHEL version (7.2) and ESX (6.x) to run in production.

While this is in the vendor’s roadmap to wrap up this year, I’m dependent on vendor lab testing as opposed to having our teams certify via our existing Agile methodology to ensure we can always provide the latest and greatest technologies to our customer base.

Stability, with the UCS/ACI/Vnomic/Netapp, is pretty good from what I've seen so far. I don't really have concerns from that perspective but I'll have a better feeling as this product matures. Following the CVD, it really helps us ensure that everything's been tested through-and-through with all the partnerships as a part of the CVD. We can have that piece of mind that it has been validated.

Scalability, with the ACI, is great. You can get up to a 15 chassis setup, depending on whether you are using 260s or 460s. That is great for us. There are limitations from the storage side that makes capacity management a bit difficult, but nothing strong reporting cannot resolve.

Considering that it is FlexPod, and you have got the 1-800-FLEXPOD line, it is great for us as a service provider. We don't have to chase down each individual vendor that is a part of that overall FlexPod. We can call one number and we get the support that ties in to the partner integration from that. They are very helpful and knowledgeable and always seem willing to help out, no matter what the issue may be. It's great.

We leverage 3PAR in some cases. It really depends on our customer base. The advantages of FlexPod over 3PAR are that FlexPod is all integrated. It's a little bit more native, overall. That's really the major difference there. Also, since Netapp is a fully NAS based deployment and 3par being a mix of FC/NAS, it makes it easier to manage the Netapp from a capacity/deployment view.

Some of the other advantages with NetApp, are that it scales within that environment. It's not really plug-and-play like 3PAR, from the storage app perspective. With that integration, however, everything is native. With the Vnomic software, it handles the automatic deployment of the storage. That's great for us because I don't need to perform manual touches on the environment. That really allows us to stay focused on our customers and the workloads.

With a CVD being provided for this solution, setup and configuration is pretty straightforward.

The most valuable feature is the scalability, how the infrastructure can grow. We can grow easily with the infrastructure.

We offer cloud services to our customers in Panama. We can grow when our customers ask for more capacity or more processing. We only add more servers or we only add more storage to the infrastructure.

Maybe the migration tools for all of the environments could be improved. We can change the storage in the infrastructure but when we need to change the switches or other components that we can change easily, I don't know how to migrate that component. I’d like to be able to migrate that much easier.

We have been working with FlexPod for four years, maybe, and we haven’t had any problems.

It’s very scalable.

We have not used technical support yet. We don't have any problems with FlexPod.

Last year, we bought Vblock infrastructure and CloudBurst infrastructure from IBM. We switched because they don't have the scalability and the performance that we have now in FlexPod.

We decided to invest in FlexPod because we have a good relationship with NetApp. We did not only invest in FlexPod; it’s possible that most of our clouds are NetApp.

It's very, very easy to manage and to build.

We evaluated EMC, Hitachi, IBM and Huawei. We chose NetApp because they have more capability with snapshots that the other environments and vendors do not have.
The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are price, performance, scalability, and management.

I recommend buying FlexPod technology.

I think other vendors have more scalability because they use higher-density disks and they can use clusters for storage. When we use a NetApp cluster, we only have a processing cluster. If one controller fails or a pair of controllers fails, all the disks that are connected to those controllers also fail.

We built FlexPod. We didn’t buy it. We bought the Cisco servers, the switches and the NetApp storage. When we built the first FlexPod, we bought infrastructure for the Guatemala and Dominican Republic data centers. We have the same infrastructure for all of the sites.

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 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).