FlexPod XCS Reviews

As far as improvement, I don't know of anything immediate other than the performance with the All Flash. For our disaster recovery (DR), we rely heavily on SnapMirror technologies to accomplish our disaster recovery in VMware SRM. The most immediate benefit is definitely the performance.

When it started out, we did not purchase it as a FlexPod. It sort of organically grew into a FlexPod: UCS, VMware, and Cisco for the network. 

The storage is reliable in its performance.

The only downtime that we have had has been our fault with misconfiguration issues.

It does scale. It scales very well.

I have to admit that I don't call them directly, but everyone on my team has nothing but good things to say about them.

It was organic. We were running IBM storage. We knew we wanted to run a different storage, so we looked at NetApp, which was a good fit. We had run it in the past. So, we decided to go with NetApp. We were already switching from HPE to Cisco UCS for our compute side, and we already had a Cisco network. With the VMware added onto it, we started talking to NetApp and they told us that we could certify it as a FlexPod. So, we just organically grew into the FlexPod product.

From all of the feedback that I have received, it is an easy, straightforward system to set up and maintain.

None that we have measured. We do not measure any of our equipment or our data center, as far as ROI.

I would rate it as a nine out of 10, because I rarely rate anything as a perfect. It does have issues. We have had bugs which have been released, even though they have been minor. As far as the configuration (going back to configuration issues), on the UCS side, sometimes it is difficult to set up. However, once you get it set up, it is easy to add additional compute to it.

It is used as a data storage infrastructure. We also use it for ERP applications, a combination of SYSPRO and SAP. 

Performance-wise, it is actually doing quite well. The end users are very happy with it.

It has improve my organization through cost savings. I belong to a cost center. I need to try and find ways to optimize solutions by actually reducing costs as opposed to running up the bill.

• TS Series storage functionality
• Scalability
• Flexibility
• Rich features

It is fairly stable. I have not heard about any issues since it was deployed.

It is definitely scalable.

I have not used it personally.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Storage is very expensive. To buy MIC cards and additional storage either on-prem or in the cloud, the IT department does not have money for it, so you need a more niche product or a more flexible way to store your data. That is the benefit that you get from this product.

The strategy of the blueprint and the roadmap were done by the global company. They did the testing in the global company, then once they were happy with the results from the test lab, it was made the standard for the global company and each zone had to comply with it.

It is always best to test it, whether in a DevOps environment or do a demo, before actually going fully live. You need to make sure it behaves right in a new environment, because there is no environment that is exactly same as another. It might work on my environment, then you try it on yours and it does not work, then you will blame the product. However, the issue might not be with the product, it might be something else. So, it is very important to make sure that you test it, you do a POC on your environment, and watch its behavior.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

It is a partnership, more than a transactional relationship. You often find if you work for a massive, FMCG company, like AB InBev, that you will not find all the feature sets that you require as off the table products. 

What I want to see:

1. When you engage your customer and say, "This is what you are trying to go through. This is the direction we are trying to go through."
2. Often our customers want required feature sets, which will help our business going forward as well as keeping the vendor fulling aligned.

I would say the ease of management and ease of support. Growth-wise, you can expand east, west, north, and south.

It integrates well with Cisco, NetApp, and VMware. They aren't pointing fingers. They just want to drive to a solution when we have an issue. We have VMware running on it. We have two FlexPods, one in each data center, running about 400 VMs between the two data centers. We run SQL, IAS, and some normal management VMs as well.

Training somebody on how to manage FlexPods is not real difficult. We can use someone who is more junior, to at least initially get up to speed with them. You can manage the storage well, as long as you do it with best practices. It is not a real difficult system to manage. I would say the latest release for NetApp has made that management even easier.

Before the ONTAP 9 release, NetApp was cumbersome and not easy to manage. NetApp as improved a lot in terms of simplicity with ONTAP 9. Pure Storage has made a lot of vendors step up their game on the simplicity side. ONTAP 9 has allowed for most tasks to be wizard-based and dashboards are now easy to read. Making improvements to the user-interface and management will help NetApp stay the leader in storage.

We have been using this for four years.

There have been no problems at all with the stability. It's rock solid. I've never had any issues with down time with FlexPod.

I can scale it east/west. I've added arrays to the system, and I've added storage within those arrays over the last four years with zero downtime.

As with anything, I think that technical support is getting better to drive to a solution. There have been some struggles to drive to what is actually causing problems. Some of our additional applications that we've purchased, like SnapManager for SQL and some of those add-ons for NetApp, didn't really function properly. I'm trying to drive to a solution between the vendor and us. It kind of was a struggle with some of that. I would give technical support a rating of 9/10 for being on par with everything. There is some room for improvement.

When selecting a vendor, I would say my most important issue is not price. It would be scalability and knowing where the company's future roadmap is five years down the road. That's more of a concern to me. I want to make sure the company is still going be around in five years and has a vision, as far as where they want to go.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. As long as you follow the diagram, it's not too hard to set up at all. It wasn't too complex.

The valuable features are the ease of use and being able to make one call to tech support when I'm having an issue; I can call Cisco. As they're drilling down, if they see it's a NetApp issue, then they reach out to NetApp. I don't have to make that call.

The simplicity of the design is already in place. It's easy for implementation; that's what we've liked about it.

The benefits are quicker implementation and that we have a baseline, because we go by the FlexPod design structure.

We use a VAR to help us implement these items. With their assistance, and our guys, we're usually able to take care of it fairly quickly.

I’d like to see some more troubleshooting capabilities; being able to drill down and pull reports easier, especially from the Cisco side. That would be great. Unfortunately, from what we've seen on the Cisco side, you have to download logs and upload them to their tech support to get any true information. Being able to see some real-time functionalities of troubleshooting would be nice.

After the initial turn up of the FlexPod setup, we haven't had any major outages. We've had one or two minor hardware failures, but it didn't cause a complete outage. The call-home features reported it, and the items were already shipped to us, next day. We had the items replaced, but there was no impact to end users.

Scalability-wise, we do like the features of the Cisco UCS pieces. We're just now learning about the NetApp piece of the FlexPod. As far as that, we haven't really scaled it much. We only have one FAS8080, but we're curious to see how easy it's going to be in the future.

We had outgrown our EMC array and we were looking at alternatives. We began talking to multiple storage vendors. We selected NetApp because they are Meditech approved, which is our EMR at the hospital. We had spoken with a few other hospital entities that have had NetApp in their environment for quite some time. We're very pleased with it.

After our initial reviews and design with our VAR, initial setup actually worked out very well. We already had Cisco UCS in place. Racking the NetApp array, we had that done in probably two hours, and then it was powered up and provisioning within 3-4 hours; in less than a day, we had it up and going, which was really nice.

I looked at Pure Storage and Nimble; we did go back to EMC because we had been an EMC shop. As far as the ease of being able to install it quickly, without having to do a complete redesign of our SAN environment, was very appealing, as well as price point. The price point was quite good compared to the others we looked at.

Do your reviews. Put some thought into what you want and what you need. Try to plan out 3-5 years. Give yourself an idea of your growth. Things like that. How you want to be able to manage that. Make sure that you have all those ideas down and discuss them before you start implementing anything; especially with the FlexPod, because there are so many options. You want to make sure that it's going to sustain you, not just now, but 3-5 years out.

The most valuable features are the validation by NetApp and Cisco, that it is preconfigured and preconfirmed, the flexibility and the ease of deployment.

It can spin up sites quicker and faster and in production, so it cuts the lead times and results in more production.

It's always the same: upgrade and expandability into the future; maybe a little more forethought on that versus having to have outages when you're going over to the next feature. For instance, a smooth transition, because changing from 7-mode to cluster-mode is a little clunky and then you add on to that. But, I know, that's technology.

They've done an excellent job going into cluster with version 9 and the later versions of 8. Everything's more GUI, so you have a choice of doing command line or doing GUI, whichever works better for you at the time. I thought that was an excellent change for them versus just being command line.

Nothing's perfect. Everything can improve. Just because I haven't thought of it or haven't hit it, it doesn't mean it's not out there.

It's pretty stable. It depends on bugs that are found. For the most part, it's been very stable for us.

It’s very scalable. We've been able to connect different sites and add them on where we've need to grow and then shrink down and move things; I like that a lot.

We just used technical support to do firmware upgrade. It was very favorable. It was a professional, concise, quick, to-the-point answer. I enjoyed actually engaging them.

I was a recommender of FlexPod. The decision to go with it was made by management.

I've previously used the Vblock solution. I've used the HP solutions as well. EMC is overly complicated, disparate systems kind of lopped together, and I don't like their management interface that much. HP has a pretty strong solution as well. The FlexPod is a bit more integrated, consolidated and easier to deploy. Between the two, I would choose NetApp. If I didn't have a choice, HP would probably be my second.

The HP solutions are a little complex. Support is not as swift as with the NetApp FlexPod solution. The advantages of HP are similar to NetApp: it's one-stop-shop, one SKU, one deployment, a prevalidated system.

The Vblock is okay with EMC on it. Having that solution where you can get one SKU and scale it out, if you choose to go EMC, is good, but that's about it .

We do deployments all the time. I was involved in the last one. We deployed FlexPod for one of our locations. The documentation and validation for it was very simple and easy to use, as compared to some other products that I've deployed.

I think it was easier, in addition to experiencing it before, because of the way the instructions come in, the support, the setup of how you actually physically assemble and connect the components, and the ease of management definitely put it ahead of other solutions.

FlexPod is definitely easy to deploy and go with. If I had to recommend it, I would definitely recommend the NetApp FlexPod solution.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is that their product works. That's the most important thing. Then second is customer service and getting to solution. I hate a lot of side talk, empty promises – nothing becomes of it – just to get the sale. Really, make sure the product works and then you get the support that you need and not chatter.

We were trying to come up with a unified vendor for a hyper-converged solution. Our deployment model was SASE.

Using the solution definitely opened our eyes to how our current infrastructure wasn't performing as well as it should. It made us redefine a couple of RFPs for vendors to provide new types of solutions.

It also helped reduce troubleshooting time on architecture configurations. Our troubleshooting time has dropped by at least 25 percent.

We really like the integration between NetApp and Cisco and how fluid the transition would have been from our previous compute and storage vendor.

FlexPod's native integration with hyperscalers is one of the reasons we chose to look at it and NetApp. That is one of the key components of our infrastructure. That native integration is very important. All of our servers, everything that we have on-prem, runs on it. We haven't moved fully to a hybrid or in-cloud model yet, so we need to be able to run things locally for operational purposes.

I used it at a previous job for about six months and we evaluated it at my current organization for 90 days.

We had no qualms with the stability of the solution. It was up for the entire duration with no problems. We ran into zero issues.

We had contemplated getting multiple FlexPods, but once we evaluated them to fit our models, we determined that one would probably do. The scalability is there, but our exposure to it was not relevant.

We had it spread out across four data centers in a single geographic campus. Multiple departments would have had resources on the equipment if we had gone with the solution.

Tech support from NetApp and Cisco is pretty good. We engaged them multiple times throughout our evaluations.

Positive

We did not have a previous solution.

I was involved in the original spec'ing, scoping, and architecture of the solution. But the integration and implementation was up to some other folks on the team.

We definitely saw a lot of operational cost savings using FlexPod. As far as capital outlay goes, that was a little bit too much for us to swallow and we weren't able to recognize enough savings in that area to afford it.

If the flexible consumption had really minimized our upfront spending, we definitely would have gone into it, but we found that the "cost containers" were not enough to make the operational life cycle of the FlexPod equipment worthwhile for us.

The pricing and licensing were tough to swallow. We would have liked to have had the solution be part of any state or other government GSA contracts.

Everybody wants to see a cheaper and more cost-conscious solution instead of the solutions that are out there today.

We evaluated Pure Storage, Nimble, which is now HPE, and we also took a look at some larger EMC solutions.

The flexibility, operational efficiency, and scalability of FlexPod are amazing. This product would have been the solution that we went with outside the price. The functionality and features that it provides are, bar none, the best in the industry.

The product itself is great. It is just that the cost and licensing are prohibitive.

But for someone looking for the most cost-effective solution, I would definitely tell them to consider this as one of the products to evaluate.

We use FlexPod for all of our tier two and tier three storage, in all of our business units.

The ability to scale on demand allows us to get the capacity for the customer in a much more efficient manner in a better timeframe.

From an infrastructure standpoint, we have more cohesiveness between the teams. This was a concern to us and we're working to solve it so that we can operate in a more efficient manner.

From an ESX node standpoint, using this solution has reduced our footprint tremendously. I would say that it has decreased by approximately thirty-five percent.

We have done a lot of consolidation on the storage side. We have been able to put into one cluster what would have taken three or four in the older environment. It benefits us because there is less administration.

Some of our applications were on solid-state flash disks and some were on a hybrid platform. This new configuration is all-flash, solid-state, so nobody should have complaints about the performance.

The storage performance has most likely increased anywhere from ten percent to probably twenty percent, attributed to the all-flash, solid-state hardware.

We have seen a more efficient use of compute resources because we have fewer nodes committed. I would say that we are probably thirty to thirty-five percent more efficient.

Our maintenance costs have absolutely been reduced. We were going to have to pay between one and two million dollars, and by putting this in, we're avoiding those costs.

Our TCO has been reduced because one big piece of our former infrastructure was made up of Cisco SAN switches, and they are pretty pricey per port when you're using fiber channel. Now, we're using iSCSI, so we're saving a lot of money.  

The most valuable feature for me is that you can swap out pieces when you have to lifecycle your equipment. You never have to go through a big freeze, but instead, do small pieces at a time. It reduces the migration hassle.

The tools bring the compute and storage together so that we can see it in a single pane of glass.

I would like to be able to pull in a file to specify a configuration upfront, rather than go through a lot of screens. There is a lot of manual effort there, and that is one place that mistakes can happen.

In the SolidFire interface, if you use the GUI, you have to create one run at a time, or one device at a time, which is something that needs to be fixed. Having to do that is ludicrous.

The stability has been good so far. We have had some drive-type issues where we had to apply a new code level, but in my opinion, it is just part of the normal business transactions. The storage nodes cause certain drives to act as though they've failed, but they really haven't. You just have to remove them, re-insert them, and they work again. It is a bug.

We've grown and grown, and we've done it all online, so there are no concerns around scaling from a storage standpoint.

We have been in contact with technical support a few times. Not a whole lot. I don't have any concerns with them.

The setup of this solution is lengthy and complex, but we have been speaking with people about how to make it more efficient.

The complexity has a lot to do with when you're initially setting the equipment up. There's a lot of values that you have to plug into their various screens, and then you also have to do a reboot to pick up whether it's going to be a storage node or a compute node. Then, they're looking to fix status too, and you have to do a reboot after that, so you lose forty-five minutes and if you have a large install, that's a long time to build the environment.

We used some of the professional services that were tied to the bundled packages.  We also obtain our hardware and resources through a third-party called WWT, and everything is great with them.

ROI is difficult to figure out but I can say that we have had two to three million dollars in OE savings by deploying this and getting rid of older equipment.

Even though this is a fairly new product, it is very appropriate for business solutions, and not just your mom-and-pop shops. It scales rather well, and to me, the big thing is the rolling upgrade scenario as far as when it comes time to lifecycle your equipment. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The valuable features are just the simplicity of expanding the hardware when you need to and containerizing everything into a single platform.

On FlexPod, we are using Cisco collaboration. Not just Cisco, but other collaborator tools as well. Collaboration is our focus, versus general data storage. So we use it for anything from call manager to contact center, to call reporting.

The collaboration is a very niche group. They focus on voice and do not focus on storage. Their focus is on phones and application. I wanted to keep their focus there. I don't want them to worry about the data, the storage, the drives, the servers, and all that hardware. Those are the biggest benefits. For me, the benefit is insuring that they continue focusing on the work that they need to do and not worry about the hardware. The hardware is so reliable and just easy to use.

A single pane of glass to manage all of the components. As you know, FlexPod has multiple components from Cisco, to Vmware, to NetApp. I would like to have a single pane of glass from which you could monitor.a

Stability has been great so far. We had it in place 9-10 months now, but we're also a platinum partner as far as the service. That way we can receive monitoring. In case one the drive fails, a new drive is shipped, and somebody even comes in and puts it in for you.

We haven't grown yet, but that is why we purchased it. It is to easily expand when we need it.

We haven't used technical support yet.

We were coming to the end-of-life with our hardware, and we needed a platform that could easily grow. We were using the traditional stand-alone servers. We then went to the Cisco C-series, then we started virtualizing, and then we needed something bigger.

I was responsible for the initial setup and it was a breeze. Everything came shipped, plugged-in, and ready to go.

We evaluated IBM, Vblock, and Nutanix.

The factors that made us go with FlexPod were the components that were in FlexPod, NetApp being a big one of those, and Cisco being the other big name. When you think about storage, you think NetApp. There are a few others out there. When you think about routing switching, you typically think Cisco.

Cisco has done a great job coming into the server environment, and I believe in developing partnerships with companies and putting their weight behind it. These companies will continue to perform in in the future. Think about who you would invest in the stock market. Who are you going to put your money in?

Another large hospital, certainly, should focus on the longevity and the simplicity of the solution. I'm really all about the simplicity of it. I have to keep things simple. In IT, we have a habit of making things very complicated, and it's really difficult to change your thinking to keep things smoothly.