FlexPod XCS Reviews

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.

The most valuable feature is the fact that it’s a complete package, that’s the biggest advantage, and it can be rolled out pretty quickly. The last company I was at, we rolled it out in 90 days, and that was a pretty big environment.

The Citrix portion of it for one, as your desktop is available anywhere on any platform, and with any OS. You can really use it anywhere, even on an iPhone in a movie theater if you need to, although I don’t recommend it.

Very stable, it's highly available with only .9999 downtime, not .99999, which is an uptime designator.

We have found it to be very scalable, and that it affords you a lot of options.

We had a partner work with us and so it was really good. The only drawback is that you have three to four technologies, and you need someone to sort out which problem is whose responsibility. Our project manager took that on as a deliverable, and ran incident management for the solution.

Initial setup was very straightforward.

The cost is an issue – it is not a cheap solution and the other piece of it, is that for EMC users (like my current company) it may not be relevant. We had 80% EMC usage so it wasn’t relevant for us. We could have used the FlexPod EMC but I think cost was the main issue there.

Peer reviews are very important in our research.

Unified management is valuable, and it has a smaller footprint than non-unified solutions.

Leveraging the expertise of NetApp, and getting a lot of third-party support for it. We’ve been able to transition to a hands-on approach, which is good thing. We were thinly staffed, but now we can properly staff to be more hands-on with our system using FlexPod.

Make sure there’s current centralized virtual desktops. I get caught in the upgrade matrix quite a bit, which is an indication that it hasn’t been tested. Need more currency in IMT.

It's solid, but it’s difficult to integrate newer hardware because it's kind of locked down. It can be disruptive sometimes, because it’s something that you don’t want to have to make a lot of changes to. It makes it difficult to consolidate when you're adding stuff on, and wanting to be consistent for software and hardware sets. 3240 limited to four SAN nodes in a cluster was problematic for us.

It's scalable, but it takes someone to make the right decisions in terms of planning and sizing.

It was already in place when I got there. From the inside-out, it can be complex because its biggest problem is that if you stray from centralized virtual desktops, it can be difficult to work with.

Must have a sense of how everything operationally will be going into FlexPod. Must plan scaling up and out. The problem I run into the most is unanticipated growth, so keep track of growth factors and do not overextend FlexPod. It is usually a performance vs. capacity issue.

Our primary use case for the solution is running critical infrastructure, and we deploy it on-premises

The storage efficiency and performance are valuable.

The solution could be improved by including automation for user updates.

We have been using the solution for nine years.

The solution is scalable. I rate it a nine out of ten.

The solution is scalable. I rate it a nine out of ten.

We have had a good experience with customer service and support, but it takes a while for them to attend to critical issues. I rate them a six out of ten.

Neutral

I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Things got a lot faster. We can pull and test in DEV systems much more rapidly and are clearing up a lot of DBA time. In the past, every time we tested it, we needed to be refreshed. In the past, it would take a day of our DBA's time, and now it's just point, click, and ten minutes later it's done.

FlexPod has improved our application's performance. It is now ten times as fast. 

Unplanned downtime incidents have decreased. We've had two and a half years with zero downtime. 

The most valuable features are the reliability and tools such as SnapCenter and SnapManager. We use them a lot. They make life easier.

On the surface, validated designs for enterprise apps are not that important but it's knowing that they work, and if they don't work, I can get support for them. We did have some pretty nasty bugs early on, around four years ago, but we haven't had problems.

It is 100% stable.

I don't have any problems with scalability. 

Support is able to fix our problems but we don't use them much. 

I haven't had many problems, so FlexPod's unified support hasn't been that important. But if I did have a lot of problems, it would be important. I'd rather just not have problems, so that's a good thing.

It worked for me at my last company so we went with FlexPod. It's what I know. It's what I trust, it's comfortable, and it's worked well for me in the past.

It was more expensive than others but the reliability in the tools has saved us money in that regard, so it's worth it.

It is more complex than just basic storage systems. That's intimidating to some people but it works well for me because I've learned it, I know it, I've been using it for ten years and it's not a big deal to me. But it is intimidating to some people and if you push past that, and just learn it, it is worth it. Especially for the additional tools and the environment it allows you to utilize.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. Not a ten because it could always be cheaper, it could always be faster.

We have a bank customer in Brazil who sells a lot of credit cards.

The solution simplifies infrastructure from edge to core to cloud.

The solution has made our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks that drives our business forward.

The most valuable feature is the one support. Anytime that a customer buys a solution for a server, storage, or network, once they have trouble in their environment, everyone wants to find out who was wrong. With FlexPod, everyone is wrong and there is unified support. The best way to solve the problem is have it be everyone's problem, not just one person's problem. For FlexPod, you can call NetApp or Cisco, and I think it's the best way to solve the problem that the customer has.

The best improvement is the validated designs. Everything has compliance. Sometimes when you have a trouble with a machine, or in your switch or storage, you can just call one place to solve the problem. 

The all-flash with the fabric interconnect, along with the connections between the solution, that is the most important aspect.

It is not easy to implement. 

The networking configurations with UCS need improvement.

The application performance has improved in our organization. The configurations of the networks are very substantive. If the customer has trouble, we just have to make the configuration one time, then everything is okay.

The scalability is good because if you want to grow your environment, then you can do it. It has compliance, stacks, and nodes.

I would rate the technical support as a 10 out of 10.

The solution has decreased the unplanned downtime incidents in our organization because of the high availability of the solution. Sometimes, customers have talked about how good the support is. When they call to open a case, we can solve it in two days. To solve a problem, it use to longer: two weeks. Now, it can be solved in two to three days.

The initial setup is a little complex.

We are the integrator. We have five or six people to implement it. In our company, we are segmented, like networking, server, storage, etc.

Before this solution, the customer had around 15 people managing the environment. After purchasing the solution, they had just one. Their OPEX was better after this solution, and the ROI was very fast. ROI happens in about two years.

I think it has reduced data center cost but we don't have this feedback from the customer.

We would like everything in one piece of hardware. This way we can just sell the product like a silo by putting everything in a stack together.

I would rate it a nine (out of 10). It is the better way for the customer to has less troubles and problems.

You have one configuration and one compliance with two companies, Cisco and NetApp. I think this is the best way to make solutions.

We have a custom-built FlexPod with a Cisco 6332-16FI and an AH-700.

It is being used as our primary network infrastructure.

The solution’s validated designs are pretty important for major enterprise apps in our organization. We follow them to make sure that we're compliant.

This solution runs our VMs. Our SQL databases, for example, are in our VMs, so everything is virtualized.

Implementing this solution has made our staff more efficient because once it is built, it's a matter of provisioning additional VMs. It's pretty simplified.

I think that with the new all-flash array, our application performance has been improved.

We did not have very much unplanned downtime before implementing our current solution, so I can't say that our new solution is much different in that regard.

This solution has probably not reduced our data center costs because our previous solution was relatively small. It was just one rack.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the stability.

I would like to see a more centralized support model.

To this point, stability has been good. We have had no downtime since I built this solution.

In our previous FlexPod, I think that both of the UCS-FIs went down during the firmware upgrade. That caused an outage. I do not know all of the details because that was before I joined the company.

We can expand using additional chassis and additional disk shelves.

The solution's unified support for the entire stack is beneficial. Basically, it's kind of all-in-one.

The technical support for this solution is ok, although we dislike using the online robot. It's caused delays in us reaching out to a real support engineer.

I built the current FlexPod and it was pretty straightforward.

We had another FlexPod that was built by somebody else. It's easy to build and we are in the process of migrating all of the workloads over. We're always refreshed.

I also have experience with Vblock.

We do not use the solution’s storage tiering to the public cloud. We are not using the cloud at all for the moment.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to engage some type of professional services just to set it up if they are unfamiliar with the technology.

This is a solution that I recommend, and if you're already familiar with other similar technologies then it is pretty simple to put it together.

We do not have the license for NDME yet, and we would like to see how much improvement it is over our current setup.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.