FlexPod XCS Reviews

Our environment is completely virtualized. Therefore, we are using Cisco UCS and NetApp as back-end storage.

We're using FlexPod on Managed Private Cloud only today, and it's good. It's doing its job and we are happy so far.

We were a small company when we started, like a startup. We have been using this FlexPod since then, and now, we have grown to about mid-scale. However, FlexPod is still able to scale out the way we want, and we are happy with it.

It comes as a package. Since we are dependent on our virtualized environment, and FlexPod provides a small to mid-class environment, FlexPod is the better solution than going with a different product for each individual infrastructure stack.

The solution is innovative when it comes to compute storage and networking. Each environment has knowledge of another in a FlexPod environment. This would be difficult to operate separately. 

We are at the level where we want it to be on serving our applications, our storage, and whatever traffic we want.

The validate designs and overall versatility can be very complex. Because when you try to do automation, there are many bits and pieces tied together. Sometimes, automation gets a little tricky for provisioning. We would like simplicity in the automation.

We would also like better management of cases. For example, if you open a FlexPod case, it's not always straightforward. It would be nice to have centralized resource to open FlexPod cases and ease up management of our cases.

I would like more support on the next level transition to hybrid cloud.

The stability has been strong.

We have had some occasions where we had issues with the performance. We sometimes have had issues with the coordination between vendors, whether its Cisco and NetApp, and bringing them all together. Opening a FlexPod case is not straightforward. Other than that, the stability is good.

It is scaling to our needs. We don't have any issues.

Even though the automation is complex and it is stubborn, it scales to whatever the level that we want to performance-wise and availability-wise. 

We did not use a previous solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. We got all the requirements, then gave them to the consultants who came back telling us what is a requirement and what is a design. We discussed it, and this made the rollout pretty simple. Other than finding out what bits and pieces we needed, the instillation and execution administration was pretty straightforward.

We used a consultant who was good. They helped us initially with all the FlexPod deployments.

As a startup, for the amount of budget we have and the amount we spend, we are getting what we expected.

FlexPod was the only vendor on our shortlist. We went with FlexPod based on our requirements. Also, we have a file-based, virtualized environment, so we thought NetApp would be the right choice for our file-based environment.

I would say, "Definitely consult FlexPod."

I am saving time in my work and so are my colleagues.

I would like to go with the hybrid environment. My tech is built to accommodate any application, independent of the stack where you are, whether it is on on-premise, AWS, Google, or Azure. This way you have ease of moving the application in and back, providing flexibility. However, I would stick with the hybrid as the best way to start with public clouds because of security.

We primarily deploy FlexPod with customers that have defined business requirements. For customers that have used it in the past, we basically rinse and repeat because they do like the product and reuse it continually.

For our support side, our service desk, it's very helpful. They've got a single point of contact. They know what the solution looks like. It's a consistent experience for them as well.

The most valuable features are that the solution is vetted and validated and it's supported end-to-end.

I was speaking to some product managers at NetApp yesterday, which is good. There are apparently some new products coming around the whole FlexPod side of things with regards to auditing, to ensure everything is configured correctly. It's basically a "delta" if there have been any changes. It's important to us, from a support perspective, to know if there have been changes and what impact they have actually had.

It's stable. I haven't had any issues at all.

Scalability is not something we have really hit. We generally deploy on the smaller side of things, but we haven't had any issues with size or anything like that.

We haven't called NetApp directly but we get tech support through Cisco and we get absolutely great support from them. They guide us from A to Z.

We didn't work with a previous solution. Our background was all Cisco networking. Then, when Cisco came into the compute market we moved into it.

When selecting a vendor my most important criteria are support and validated designs.

There are a lot of components to it, but setting up FlexPod is what we do every day, so it is easy enough for us to go through and do. We've got some intellectual property that we have built around it, but it becomes second nature.

My advice is to reach out to people who have used it. It's a good solution and the proof is from the users who use it.

I would rate it a nine, close to a 10 out of 10. The support is great. It's a validated solution. It's the best-of-breed of all the products that are in the FlexPod as well. It's just a great solution for us.

There's one number to call if you have a problem, they can get it fixed.

Also, it's good to have everything set up the right where you know; all this works together if you do the config right. There's no performance issues.

The simplicity means I don't have to spend all day troubleshooting gremlins.

It helped make things easier so we don't have the tracking down gremlins. Before we used this it was, "Oh, this server's not working right. Why?" And then we have to dig through; and we haven't had any of those since we started with FlexPod.

I know there are other versions of FlexPods beyond what we use. I've only dealt with basically the Cisco NetApp VMware version. I can't think of any other features that I would need.

It's always nice if it's cheaper. We've been locked into all this. We could save money and go with HyperV but then you have other issues. There are always things you can do to save money but you have to ask yourself if it's worth it.

About three years.

No issues. Very stable.

We haven't had any issues with that either. If we have to add, we add, and it all works together.

Honestly, FlexPod-related, we haven't had any. Very rarely do you have problems that are related to the FlexPod. If anything, we'll have issues with VMware that are not related to anything else, then we have to go to them. They are responsive and knowledgeable.

No. We've used bits and pieces of it; the three different pieces, we have always used VMware. We're always using that app but then kind of brought UCS into it and then built the FlexPod.

We switched for the simplicity of having one number to call.

I came in after it was already setup. I do firmware upgrades and some things like that. It is not complex.

I think it's valuable to anyone. I don't think it's related to industry, rather it's for anyone who runs a datacenter.

It is very powerful. It can support much more than just one FlexPod. One NetApp can support more than just one FlexPod. That's about it. It's powerful.

It’s a standard; it's a spec; so, it's very easy to assemble and use. It's the same across all environments. Our production guys can work on this FlexPod and know that it's the same over here, and it’s is the same over there.

It's saved lots of manpower. It's easy to set up. It's good.

We have about a dozen people administrating our storage.

I would like to see easier day-zero setup. We're having to get other tools to try and set up everything. It's not complex, but it could be faster. It's just time consuming.

It’s very stable; haven't had any issues with stability.

It is very scalable. We are expanding a little bit. We're using one NetApp across multiple FlexPods. We're doing multiple domains off of one NetApp now. It is very scalable and very easy to do.

I've been at my current company for a year. They were already using FlexPod.
I have previous experience with EMC and Pure Storage. Compared to those, I love FlexPod. I like the scalability, because it has the storage virtual machines. It's very easy to build upon that.

For people comparing NetApp vs Pure, or NetApp vs EMC, I'd tell them to seriously look at NetApp because of the scalability and because of the ease of use.

Initial setup was very good. The RESTful API is easy to set up.

Beat them up on pricing, because they’re not cheap.

Buy it. It's a good product.

It runs extremely well. Once the initial setup’s completed, it's very steady and continues to run great. Having something that is kind of like an industry standard is extremely helpful, because there's a lot of information such as other customers’ reviews and issues that they ran into; that becomes nice to have.

For our organization, it makes it extremely consistent across the organization. All of our infrastructure guys are working off of the same things, even if they're at different sites.

We've been able to expand our capabilities with the same manpower.

At a recent NetApp conference, I was hoping to hit some of the sessions to see the ease-of-use for setup, to make that a little bit faster. That way, it's not taking a bunch of guys a lot of time to get that set up. As I’ve mentioned, it's run rock-solid for over three years, so there's not a lot of areas with room for improvement.

The reason why I haven’t rated it higher is that the initial setup was extremely difficult. We had transitioned from different technologies and so we were trying to learn, as well as set it up correctly.

We’ve had it for three years.

It's extremely stable, at least in our environment. We've had very minimal issues. Most of the time, it's a hardware failure; something along those lines; it’s outside of the control of anybody. Things run for three or four years and then, "Oh no, it broke." It's been extremely stable for us.

I know that it's extremely scalable, but when we purchased, we purchased a large amount. We haven't actually exceeded our usage at this point. We're still running at 70% of what we had originally purchased.

The technical support has been great at the customer site that I support. We have vendor support that sits on site, so I can go knock on somebody's door. It's really helpful. They've been very responsive.

We were using HP for blades – the HP C7000, C3000s – and the FlexPod. The FlexPod implementation actually was dramatically different for the setup. Once it was set up, it ran a lot more stable.

In terms of speed, we did see an improvement over the HP blades, but we also upgraded from seven-year-old equipment to three-year-old equipment. We had a massive increase. We purchased on a forecast of five years; this is what we think we will be in five years. As I’ve mentioned, we're at about 70% right now. I think that we overpurchased it. It was a dramatic shift when we first got it and it's still holding up well.

Compared to the HP solution that we were previously using, it's considerably more stable, outside of the initial setup. It’s better in almost every way, outside of the initial setup. The stability; the flexibility that it gives us. It is scalable if we ever need to add additional capacity in.

We decided to invest in a new solution when we were migrating to a new data center. We looked at a bunch of different vendors because we were going to put all brand-new gear in. We already used NetApp previously and so we went to the FlexPod architecture to become more standardized across the industry.

Initial setup was extremely difficult. It takes a lot of time to do the initial setup, at least with the version we had. It looks like there are newer tools that are out to make it a little bit better and faster for the initial setup, but when we first did it, it was extremely difficult.

It took us a few days to get it up and running. That was where the down points were. It took so long to get it set up, where some of the older technologies that we had used set up a little bit faster, but they weren't as flexible or stable with what we were trying to accomplish.

It's provided a good return on investment. It's allowed us to do more with the few people that we actually have.

We looked at HP and then we also looked at Dell. I don't remember what the servers were, but it was similar technologies.

We decided to go with NetApp because of the FlexPod. There was a lot more documentation, "Hey, this is how you set it up; this is what we're trying to do."
We already ran Cisco, and we already ran NetApp. Bringing the Cisco UCS chassis in just made sense; having a product that was supportable by all the different vendors. It was more consistent across the board.

Make sure that it meets the requirements that you're looking for as well as being scalable in the future, because data's constantly growing. You have to be able to forecast a little bit forward. NetApp is configurable, and the ease of use will make configuring it a lot easier. That’s probably why I would recommend it: NetApp itself doesn't have a steep learning curve.

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.

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.

We run our VDI system on FlexPod, so I like the fact that it's easy to make changes to it. It was really easy to install, setup and get users involved. The user experience is really cool because you can bring up desktops on Apple, Windows and Linux systems. It really solved a lot of problems.

It solved a big problem for us; it solved a big user contention issue that we had with file stores and user data all over the place. Now, it's all centralized.

The only thing that comes to mind is more hooks in the Citrix side for working with Citrix more interactively. Speaking from the storage side, it is very straight forward and it's just like allocating storage for any other device in your environment, which is really cool.

Improving integration between the different interfaces would possibly help us. The thing about FlexPod is that you don't have to do any architecture to it; it solves the problem. You plug it in, and it solves the problem for you. It's hard to comment on where to take it to the next level. If we’re going to take it to the next level, being an engineer, I'd redesign the whole thing. :)

It's really good; it's very good the way it is. It's a great solution to an existing problem.

It’s been stable; it's been great. We've got great up time with the NetApp storage. The UCS servers are rock solid.

We have not had any scalability issues yet. We're probably six, seven or eight months into it, and we don't really have an expansion plan for it at this point.

I have not used technical support for this product in particular.

The previous solution was just a standard desktop Windows laptops and desktops platform and we just moved our users to FlexPod. We had user, data and file shares all over the place; now they're in a central location. The user experience for desktops was haphazard and they were getting a lot of different calls to the help desk on different issues with individual work stations. Now, if there's a problem, it's going to be a generic problem for everyone but it's a lot easier to troubleshoot a desktop issue or roll out another application for a user. It's very easy to add an application. I think it's a great productivity and time-saving tool.

From the outside, initial setup looked very, very complex but with FlexPod and everything being together in one unit, it actually makes it very easy, very simple to implement. I think that it was a little complex but it went very smoothly in the implementation and installation.

We have a relationship with NetApp and EMC, and it was kind of a pure play to go with NetApp. We have a Cisco relationship, also, and we have some in-house Citrix talent or skill sets, so it was easy to make that choice.

As far as some of the important criteria I look for in a vendor, we've got a relationship with our NetApp vendor. I can only really address the storage side because my interaction is only from the storage side. I usually don't deal with the UCS server side, the VMware side, or the Citrix side. I really can't comment on those but we've got a really good relationship with NetApp itself. They help to drive the purchase and make it easy for us in purchasing.

Work closely with your vendor. From the storage side – I always start with storage – you need to build a team that includes VMware, the storage people, the Citrix guys and someone who knows UCS. Once you have that team in place, your things are going to go very, very smoothly.

We haven't really had to look at expanding it but, I can see that it'll be an interesting experience doing expansion on the storage side, so I think four stars would be accurate for usability and implementation.