FlexPod XCS Reviews

The most valuable feature is that it’s all treated as one piece with regard to support. If you have any problem with it and you need to get through to either the Cisco team, or even some of the partners such as VMware and so on, it's one support case, so my team isn't hunting around for someone to actually figure out how to fix their problem.

As I’ve mentioned, the simplicity is a benefit, as are the reference architectures.

A couple things could be improved, for example, the interconnect switching. They need to be more flexible. If you already have an all-Cisco, all-certified solution, requiring you to buy the NetApp interchange switch is silly. It should all be one package. They've got to be more flexible on how they deal with that.

I'm looking for making it as simple as possible, leveraging as much as possible my existing infrastructure; not having weird, odd bits and baubles that are kind of added on.

It's been highly stable. We've been really happy. We've moved off of HP platform onto the Cisco server platform. We've been using NetApp, but it tends to be a more kind of integrated, overall solution.

We’ve had no problems scaling it; we're just over 9 PB right now.

As I’ve mentioned, we were previously using HP. We decided to switch because we had actually seen the FlexPod at a conference and at a number of other things. We were looking at the solution. At first, we had a specific application that we needed a closed-loop solution on. We tried it with that. When we saw it and liked it, that's when we decided to do a larger deployment with it.

We are working our way out of the C7000 line of BladeSystem infrastructure. We got in Gen 6, I think. We're at Gen 9 now. I just signed a PO for a bunch of Gen 9 gear. Those systems, where we've had them, have been rock solid and have lasted us the entire thing. The storage piece to HP was a little less convincing. Particularly since they are kind of leaning on 3PAR and their storage keeps changing. We weren't as convinced. We had a lot of NetApp and we just felt more comfortable staying with it. When we saw that NetApp had partnered with Cisco, it seemed like a one-shot kill; it seemed like a good idea.

We’ve looked at a lot of different things. At the time, we were looking at what EMC and some other vendors could do. We were definitely looking at HP, around some of their server stuff and some of their server integrated storage server solutions. But, FlexPod is where we ended up.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is reliability. We're in banking, so we are looking for something that's going to be stable and secure.

As long as it's within your budget, it's a great one-shot deal that allows you to really have an integrated platform that you can just build off of.

It's definitely an expensive solution, but it has been a really robust solution. We know what we get with it. We definitely like the vendors teaming up and having a more integrated solution.

For our company, the FlexPod solution really hit a sweet spot because it leveraged existing technologies we had with new blade server technology and NetApp's scalable, expandable storage.

We were due for a server hardware refresh, and so we examined solutions from several vendors. We worked out an impressive deal with Cisco to go along with NetApp, who we're already a customer of and VMware vSphere. When we brought that all together, things just fell into place.

Management is still by separate screens. I need to go to NetApp to manage the enterprise storage. I need to go to the vCenter client to manage VMware, and I've got the UCS Manager. My best hope is some kind of combined client in the future.

We've been using FlexPod for just over three years.

We've had one stretch of downtime. It was very short. Unfortunately, it happened on a weekend, and it was related to the failure of a hardware DIMM in one of the blades. Our partner and Cisco worked very quickly to remedy that.

I can give you a perfect example of how this FlexPod solution is scalable. When we first put it in, we had our baseline activities WE wanted to do. Then shortly afterwards, the company decided to go to JD Edwards as a ERP system. We needed to buy additional compute resources. It was quite simple to buy another chassis, some more blades that were aimed for that solution, and buy additional shelves of disk and just connect it to our NetApp filer.

The support we've got from NetApp has been pretty flawless. If something has gone wrong, it's usually been something like a disk fails. For enterprise storage, that's a given, but we've not had any issues where we've had any appreciable downtime outside of scheduled maintenance.

It is complex. I would recommend to anyone considering a FlexPod to get a partner who has done it before because with FlexPod there's a lot of work up front, but if you get it right up front, everything beyond there is smooth sailing.

I mentioned earlier that we added additional chassis and blades. Because we had done the work ahead of time, set up the templates and profiles for the blades, it was very simple to just insert the blade, power it on, apply that profile, and it's up and ready to go.

I look for a vendor with an established history of innovation of stability. That's one of the things with NetApp and Cisco. They're leaders in innovation in their fields. I'm entirely confident in the solutions I have with them today and the solutions they're going to provide tomorrow.

Recommendation to peers: I would recommend that they would really regret it if they didn't at the very least invest in and consider a FlexPod solution.

I'd give it firm 9.5, simply because I don't believe in giving tens out. Literally, it's been in our situation pretty flawless.

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.

We use FlexPod for customer data center solutions — as well as internal solutions in our data center — to host customer data.

FlexPod is easier for us to maintain and do build-outs with scalability. We're able to install a lot of the build-outs and service profiles more quickly and it takes a lot less time to have all that stuff set up for the customer. It cuts down on the man-hours it takes to get an implementation done.

The ease of setup is probably the most valuable feature for us. When we're bringing out a new solution, it's easy to get everything in the rack. When we need to add into it, later on, it's easier to have all that stuff available and then just adding to the installation as we need to in order to build it out. It's easier to bolt on components that are already created than to make them from scratch or retrofit them or replace components. The integration between the pieces is a lot easier on the setup side, too.

There are not really any additional features that I could think of that are not available already. As technology is enhanced, that may change.

We don't have any issues with stability as far as the product is concerned. It's solid. Issues are not directly related to the product itself.

We can scale the solution really easily. We've been doing that fluidly. We were probably one of the first Cisco customers to come online when the UCS line came out. We have a lot invested in our architecture and we pass that on to clients.

Scaling is easy to do. We can pretty much have any one of our clients do it on demand.

We use technical support from time to time. Most of the time if we really need assistance we end up having to get above the tier one support. We're able to do a lot of the tier one troubleshooting on our own. We have a lot of engineers who can handle that. We spend some time trying to get past tier one when we already know the issue is more complicated in order to get to the support we really need.

The setup is generally pretty easy and faster than most other systems.

We do our own installations as we are the ones who install for clients.

We have historically been a really big Cisco partner. We started doing more with hosted client opportunities for data. When they came out with that line, it was something that we moved right into as a natural progression. Once we thought it worked and saw how easy it was to scale it out, we decided to go that way and save a little extra money while scaling out the usage of what we already had in place.

I would probably rate the product as a seven out of ten. The amount of time it saved us on the setup, maintaining the system and the fact that we haven't had to do a whole lot of troubleshooting with it makes it valuable. 

As far as people entertaining the solution, they should go look at their equipment, know what their pain points are and then get in touch with somebody at Cisco. Reach out to an account manager or see a demo. I know when we were first looking at it, an account manager came out to us and brought a systems engineer with him. We had the opportunity to see the solution and they went over the potential benefits in great detail. It was easy for us to see the gain that we would be getting by implementing the product. 

People need to do their own due diligence in researching new solutions. Exploring other solutions is important to determine which particular solution is the best fit. Once you get the possibilities down to two or three solution sets that may work for you, compare them rigorously before committing. One will probably stand out as the best be it because of budget, features, capabilities or application.

We sell FlexPod and enable our customers to leverage it to run their data centers.

Based on the fact that our clients can use code to program the system, they are able to deploy solutions that are a lot more reliable. That enables them to focus more on their business, rather than solving technology problems.

• Flexibility
• Programmability 
• Scalability
  

I think they are working on it, but I would like to be able to log into a portal and see the end-to-end solution and understand where it stands, from a supportability perspective. Something like that has been there, in one form or another over the years, but I believe that they're working to make it something that's more well-supported going forward.

It's very stable.

It scales very well, absolutely.

Technical support is knowledgeable, we reach the right person when we contact them. We, ourselves, also provide first-call support for FlexPod.

Setup is very straightforward. We understand the customer requirements. We take those and translate them into the configuration scripts. We can set it up very quickly and reliably and get them into production a lot faster than most traditional solutions.

Our most important criteria when working with or selecting a vendor include their maturity in the market, their customer satisfaction, their NPS score, and their ability to be flexible as a partner to us

I rate FlexPod highly because it was the first converged solution that was supported by all of the vendors at the same time, which is as flexible as it is, from a scalability and supportability perspective.

My advice is to make sure you understand the business requirements and size it appropriately.

I like the management interface in UCS and then UCS Director. I like how I can still automate, the API that you can do with FlexPod - you can work with it through API - which is what we have to have for our environment. We have to produce more with less people. We have to have workflows that can do it a lot faster.

There are a lot of features that the storage and the environment has. I, personally, like the feature with the profiles on the UCS side. You can just take out blades and replace them, and you're back up and running in no time.

Faster provisioning, meeting SLAs, deadlines. We are able to produce more with less resources.

I would think more cloud integration, a lot more flexibility with adapting to different things. Not saying that it does not already. I'm just trying to see if I could do a lot more things with it, in regards to AWS and Azure. A lot more flow.

The mission that NetApp has with the whole fabric, if they can do a lot more with it within the FlexPod, that would be good. They're working on it. Nothing bad to say about it. That's where they're going with it.

Not necessarily with, say, with cloud sync, with cloud ONTAP, with the fabric pools and all that. I guess I want to see other customers do a lot more cool stuff with it, so that I can do it. That's pretty much how I do it. We look at other people, see what they've done, proven, and then we say, "Okay. Let's do it. Let them jump off the cliff first before we go."

I'm thinking vendor agnostic, right? Where instead of having to build your FlexPod, here's your Cisco, here's your Nexus, here's your storage and all that, maybe Cisco can buy out NetApp and then they just have this one big box. Or the other way around. NetApp buys Cisco and then there's just this one box and everything's right on it. You have this big chassis with blades and you just swap everything out. Technically, you could do that with UCS already.

About a year.

It's very stable. As far as being tested and proven by the different vendors, Cisco, NetApp. But it's also stable in the code, UCS on the NetApp side, on the storage side, on the switch side. It's all proven code. It's been around for a long time. I see it as something that's reliable, stable and the fact that everything's redundant, so you don't have to worry about it.

Currently, I think it's great because they support, for example, cluster. You can scale that beyond belief. Then, there's also the UCS domains, you can have multiples in there and expand it, so I think it has no problems scaling.

Unless you're talking a really, really large environment with, say, beyond the petabytes. And even then... Maybe you could run into issues with management, but still I think UCS Director provides value with that.

It's a one-stop shop. It's good. I like it. They were knowledgeable, and if they weren't, they knew where to find the information.

We switched because we needed a converged infrastructure.We didn't have it. We had bunch of siloed environments across the board.

We chose NetApp because it helped us unify what we already had. All our training experiences with UCS - we have an environment of UCS, we have VBlock. We decided, "All right. Let's use the training that we already have and let's take UCS and let's take all the virtualization that we have and let's just continue to use it." We had NetApp already, so might as well just take NetApp with it.

FlexPod has been around for a long time. We said, "All right. Let's PoC this," so we PoC'd it. We got a lot out of it, lot of the requirements were met. It worked well for what we had.

Not complex.

Upgrades, the same, not complex. With ONTAP, you just have to pick your order, find out how you can upgrade them and do your UCS, do your Nexus switches, do your storage. Not difficult.

There was Nutanix. We do have a few Nutanix in there. It's just not as well known.

It's easy to manage if you start out correctly. If you don't, if you just spaghetti everything out and do all kinds of weird things within it, and don't keep standards, you always, like anything, create chaos.

We're in the financial industry but I think FlexPod is valuable for a lot of industries, not just this one. I don't see it as a one niche for just financial, could be for everything.

Right now, I think it's a great product. I don't give anybody a 10 unless they're outstanding, perfect in every way.

It's an integrated system with a single throat to choke for support. It's one phone call and if we believe it to be a Cisco problem, we call Cisco tech. If it turns out that it becomes a NetApp problem, then Cisco tech will engage the NetApp folks for support. It's a single phone call. We don't have to hang up and call the other and get into a finger pointing game. It is a time saver.

We have a lot of home-baked bank applications. We also use PointShop, so we run a lot of Microsoft boxed applications as well.

We're a VMware shop. We are a 98% plus virtualized in our environment. I appreciate the consistency in which it works. It stores data very efficiently. Those of us on the network side provide the path to get to it. We also provide the accesses, and it saves us a great amount of time because of that single feature of a single phone call.

It's been a very sturdy system. It's been a very reliable system and we've had no really great outages over the last six years related to the FlexPod environment. It saves us a lot of money, time, and resources.

I don't really have a great answer, other than a more scalable switched environment. That is what the Nexus 9K is going to provide for us. Nothing's perfect, so I guess we had some growing pains early on.

Some of it was teaching our staff how to deal with the new technologies, how to use it, and how to troubleshoot it. It wasn't perfect in that sense, but the product itself, it was very good.

It was complex to train people in with it. It was a newer technology for our resources, so it did take some time to get them up to speed.

There has been no downtime in six year, related to the actually filer, UCS compute, or switchback involved in the FlexPod.

It's scaled very well for us. We were able to add filers as we needed more storage. We were able to scale out on the existing 5K Nexus environment that we had.

So over the last six years, it's scaled well enough for us to acquire banks at the rate of about four or five banks per year. Now, in 2017, we continue to acquire banks and we're going to move our FlexPods into core locations. So we're going to buy new FlexPods and continue to scale and buy banks off of those.

We deal mostly with the Cisco technical support, but we make a single phone call, we're directed to FlexPod representatives who help to support the FlexPod environment or the NetApp environment, if you will. That has been very good.

We also have a resource from NetApps, specifically, who is a liaison for us to support and that resource is on call for us 24/7. That's been a great help as well.

The initial setup went very well. We provided the information about configurations that we would have liked to have seen. At the end of the day, after four or five meetings, we provided that information. FlexPod then showed up in a crate, ready to be powered on in the data center and start to switch data.

We did a bake-off between the VCE and the FlexPod. We did look at the Dell solution back then, it did come down to VCE and FlexPod.

FlexPod won out for two reasons.

• Pricing
• The resource that manages my data center was historically a NetApp guy. He liked that app and was comfortable with it, and that's what I think the deciding factor was.

To summarize, the comfort level with NetApp and the price.

I would tell them my story, about six years ago buying the FlexPod and how we purchased banks and scaled through it seamlessly. I have never had any downtime, and I feel like the support has been what has been advertised. I would certainly suggest buying that environment.

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.