FlexPod XCS Reviews

The consolidation of our data center. It helps us migrate. It makes DR easier for us. Our Cisco solution interoperates with it very easily. It makes visibility into those different environments easy for the virtualization guys, the Window admins, and telecom as a whole. Holistically, it is a lot better.

This question doesn't really pertain to me.

I know the virtualization guys love the FlexPod, and we do too. It is the visibility into it is nice, and it interacts with our Cisco data center well.

It is stable. We are migrating our whole data center onto the FlexPod. We have vetted out all of the issues that we could be running with the resiliency and redundancy. So, it is our solution moving forward.

It scales very well. We use this for all of our DR. We just spin it up at our DR location.

I do not have a lot of interaction with them. We have assisted their tech resources, bringing up cores and running cable runs. They seemed sufficient.

This is a little bit out of my environment. They give us what they need on-premise from a telecom's perspective. Then, our virtualization teams and the NetApp teams go in and deploy it. I can't speak on the granular issues.

We are pushing big towards the ACI infrastructure within our data center. Rack space is another, then integrate the storage solutions into that. As a company, we have seen return on investment. Therefore, I think the product is going to work out.

I rate it as a nine and a half out of 10, because of all the additional visibility and the integration with our equipment, and how well it plays. DR has been tremendously easier.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It is a little of everything. Support is key because no network is the same. No protocols running across it are the same. You are going to run into weird issues, and talking to our virtualization guys, they are really happy with support. I see NetApp all the time on our campus.

It is for video solutions. It saves us a lot of money in our environment. My job is to make sure that the government saves money. 

The use case for us is that many users are able to use this when they travel out of the country. With computers right now, all you need to do is log into the website to access the resources, then you can use them in your flexible solution.

Right now, we are trying to deploy on multiple laptops. Using a VDI, which is part of FlexPod solutions, we are able to do this. You can use it on cellphone, iPad, etc.

The flexibility: I used to do the video blog solutions. It is very easy, because with NetApp, a lot of people use NetApp. There is more flexibility to configure with Cisco laser switches.

For the next release, because I know that we are using Pure Storage, what I want to see is the GUI interfaces on this UCS monitor.

The product is robust, stable, and has flexibility. 

It is very scalable.

I would rate technical support as a 10 out of 10. They are good and responsive.

At my previous job, I used to use Vblock, Dell 7000 series (from Dell EMC, Cisco, and BMC).

It was pretty straightforward. I was the main engineer during the initial setup.

• Read the white paper solution online about the product. 
• Engage with the engineers.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Relationship is the key, so they respond better. We may need an onsite engineer to come and do an evaluation for us. 

The ease of use. I like that with all the NetApp products, it's very easy to use. I'm on the storage side of it, but we're still working with the servers and we're using the Cis UCS servers. So there are some tweaks that they're still working on on that side of it.

But the original PoC we did came back with very good numbers and looked like it was going to help a lot of our users locally. And we have remote users that will attach to the FlexPod and do their work from say, Houston, logging into Calgary or other places from outside of Calgary. It centralizes everything into our datacenter and it helps us manage it more easily.

The general manageability of it really is easy and it's taking advantage of all the deduplication, compression. We've got 9.1 P3 in there now so we haven't taken the next step to do compaction or anything like that but I'm sure we're going to go down that road too.

The benefit is the speed, it's the performance. That's what it comes down to is the performance of the solution.

It's the first step of it right now for us. They're still proving some of the server side out from it but we've already pushed out the storage side of it. They're using that storage in their existing, and they are getting better performance, better benefits.

I'm not really sure, to be honest. A lot of what it's doing today is exactly what we need, so I'm focusing on some other things at this point around our database environment and things like that. Everything that I've seen right now from a FlexPod perspective is very good.

I think they can always improve, whether it's dedupe or compression, those algorithms; and flash through better SSDs. I guess faster is not really there with an SSD now, but I think anything that makes it smaller, better cooling, less power, those kinds of things. Help in the datacenter.

We've had FlexPod in our environment for, I would say about six to nine months. We brought it in to help one of our applications called Petrel. It's IO intensive. It's an application that petrophysicists use to look for oil. That's what they're using it for, so they need performance for projects.

In general, just because I've been working with NetApp products for a lot of years, from that perspective, I don't have outages that I worry about. It's very stable in that sense. I have more problems if my network goes down than anything else, and it's not my problem anymore.

Very scalable. We're already planning how we're going to expand and grow it. They're doing a lot of exploration work so we know it's going to expand so we're already planning for it, and it's going to be easy to do.

We've used lots of technical support. I've used it. We've talked to people on the phone, we've done the chats online. All kinds of different things. NetApp's support's always been great for us. They're knowledgeable, absolutely.

I was not involved directly in the initial setup. The other guy that I work with was part of the PoC that we did, and then I got a little bit involved later on. He's actually part of the finishing off of it. But the ongoing support and operational part of it, I'm part of that.

They had to jump through a lot of hoops to get things but I think part of it was our own... What we needed to do was listen to the experts a little more to say, "Okay, we have to do it this way versus trying to push our own infrastructure on it." So that's what hurt us. But in the end, really good.

FlexPod is absolutely uniquely valuable for oil and gas, for some of the more higher-intensive products, the software that engineers will use to look for oil They're always looking to be able to do that faster, better and more efficiently.

I gave it a nine out of 10 because nothing's ever perfect. We did run into some hiccups around some different things. Part of that is us, the other part of that is working with the vendors. We weren't utilizing things with the switch properly. When we were having jobs come in from outside to access the storage, because it wasn't going through the Cisco switch and everything else, it was actually a slower grab for them. Once we changed those things and really implemented more of what you should be doing with the FlexPod, that's when we started seeing the performance gains.

Our solution is an All Flash FlexPod, in conjunction with Cisco UCS. We appreciate the inter-operability and the ease of use of that setup. Basically it was just a Cisco design so we had high value in that. We are currently running a few SQL servers, mostly active directory and Windows servers.

Primarily our storage requirements were basically Windows documents and all the other miscellaneous documents for file storage. The All Flash FlexPod allowed exponential speed increase, so we can get our work done faster

I would like to see a better price point. Otherwise, we are pretty much set with the product and the features.

The All Flash FlexPod was deployed two years ago. We've been using that app with UCS for approximately six years. There was no down time for the All Flash. Maybe there was one day of down time for configuration or transition, but that's about it.

We've had zero stability issues since deployment, so the stability is very good.

In terms of scalability, we haven't really scaled much, as far as our most recent deployment.

Technical support is very good and very responsive. We were sent to the right person, and we found them to be knowledgeable. Once we get an engineer assigned, he resolves our issues very quickly.

We looked at Nimble Storage as well as IBM, EMC, Dell, and HPE. We chose NetApp due to familiarity. We had the six years of the deployments and we're satisfied with performance and ease of transition to All Flash versus another vendor. When selecting a vendor, we look for performance of the end product as well as the benefits for users.

Engage the partner and see what their suggestions would be as to tailor-make or tailor-fit the application and the solution. This app was a good fit for us because we're already the data customer.

Ease of use is a valuable feature. In our case, we had multi-versions of FlexPod. We connected an additional storage app. Connecting to any type of storage would have been pretty challenging with another type of system. However, with this solution, it was fairly easy.

The connection to the server more-or-less updated the firmware version on it, made sure that it worked, rebooted, and then it booted up a second system. It was very simple to add additional storage.

Upgrading the operating system version wasn't as much as a pain as I'd expected. It was a pleasant surprise. With other companies out there, you have to jump through hoops to get your SAN controller or app storage upgraded, or do many types of operations where you potentially have downtime. We had zero downtime.

We didn't have to take down a single server, didn't have to take apart anything, and didn't have to do anything else. It was just a matter of connecting a couple of cables in the back, upgrading the firmware, and then upgrading the SAN controller.

It benefits the organization in that we had no downtime. In almost five years of operation, we have never had a single hour of downtime that was directly related to a storage problem. There weren't things like hard drive failures.

In any other company, it would have legitimately been an issue for us to get a hard drive out. But usually it involves some sort of extreme discussion with customer service agents about how important this is to our business operation, and there was none of that with NetApp. They adhered to the SLA.

I was willing to wait if the guy was willing to reset the hard drive. And that's more-or-less what happened. I had a failure, and within two hours of the notification of the failure, I had a new hard drive in my hands on-site. That's pretty impressive, regardless of how you put it.

I would like to see, perhaps, an interface that's a little more intuitive than the existing one. I think that goes to being more familiarity with other systems. I came from an ICE environment, and it sets you in your ways mentality.

When it comes to NetApp, you have to forget about some of the things you've done in the past, in order to kind of get yourself past it.

I wish that the interface was perhaps a little more cognizant. There are people coming from environments where ease of use isn't quite there. It almost sounds terrible, but I think that they could probably make everything a little bit easier to use, where the interface was maybe just a hair bit easier to understand and comprehend exactly where you are in the steps. But, again, you're talking to somebody who may be coming at it from being brand new to a storage environment.

There has not been any downtime. There's never been a downtime directly related to storage environment issue. Anything else was outside the storage environment, so it was typically another company's issue. It was never directly related to NetApp.

In terms of scalability, we've added/matched two additional shelves of storage with very little fanfare. There were no major problems. It was just a matter of upgrading an old SAN controller software, and that was it.

I haven't had to use the technical support much, but my interaction with them has always been very positive and they definitely know their information.

We evaluated HPE, LeftHand before HPE bought them out, and then they became HPE LeftHand.We've also looked at EMC. We've also recently considered HPE MSA technology, and their EEA technology, as well.

We looked HPE 3PAR, before they were HPE. We've looked at pretty much all the big storage vendors out there, such as Tintri and Nimble, but they are more bundled storage and compute.

We decided to stay with NetApp because I'm familiar with their systems. We're already a NetApp customer. So there's a certain investment in time and knowledge with NetApp that we have. We don't want to go back to reinventing the wheel every time we look at storage. We are happy with the product solution.

It's not all about cost. Overwhelmingly, the issue is that you shouldn't be as concerned with cost as much as you should with the scalability and the ability of a system. Even though you may be looking at a product that's more expensive than other equivalents out there, you're probably getting one of the best customer experiences out there, bar none.

I've had to use HPE support, and I've had to use NetApp support, and 100% of the time, I would wind up referring NetApp support overwhelmingly.

When you're looking at everything, it's not all about cost. It's also about usability, scalability, and performance. With all those applications, I've never once had issues with any type of performance, or had scalability problems with NetApp.

The only times we had downtime with our server/storage environment was because of SAN switching issues. One issue was related to a software upgrade on our SAN switches, the other was misconfigured zoning on the SAN switching environment. In both cases, it was human error and not system-intrinsic error that caused our downtime.

The most valuable features are flexibility, high availability, and redundancy. It's the easiest way to deploy hardware. We use it with VMware. It's the easiest way to deploy solutions quickly and scale out.

In our environment, we are constantly expanding laterally. It allows us to create the capacity and the resources on the fly that we need to get our jobs done.

It provides ease of control and a simplified architecture that allows us to copy a DR, expand, and grow. We have been able to triple our capacity with the same staffing level. We've been able to increase our space and increase our performance without ever increasing the need to hire more people and train them. Training has been our biggest difficulty.

I would like to see an easier implementation, but I think that with newer versions of ONTAP and new versions of FlexPod, it's getting better.

It would be nice to have a single pane to manage all of it, but that's probably a pipe dream.

Every piece has its pluses on high availability and stability. NetApp is exceptional. DCS is perfect. I think it's a perfect marriage. We haven’t had any latency issues.

There haven’t been any issues. Whenever we need to add capacity, we just add another chassis, fill out the chassis and blades, and then add another chassis if needed; or add storage as needed.

They're awesome. I've only had one catastrophic hardware failure. It was resolved within an hour. That was years ago.

We are existing NetApp and Cisco customers. It just seemed like a natural fit. We didn't really consider many other options. We had the basic infrastructure there to begin with, so it was just a very natural, cheap move for us. We already had FC in place. We were already doing many of the things that FlexPod was going towards.
Cost was probably the biggest factor.

Plan for the worst. Hope for the best. Now that there is a clustered ONTAP, I can't see many other solutions being better. I know that everyone's going towards this hyperconvergence, but I think you still need to keep compute and storage separate. You never know where your growth is going to be.

Maybe I'm old school, but depending on your business model. We tend to grow storage more than compute at times; and other times more compute than storage, but it just depends on your particular needs. I like the separation.

We like that the FlexPod is dense; it offers a lot of power in a small package. Specifically, with the Cisco UCS, we like that the hardware and end software is disjointed, so we can apply service profiles and our VMware environment is a little more dynamic that way.

It's brought management into a manageable situation. We came from a data center full of Dell servers and it was getting out of hand. Cisco UCS and NetApp together in one package makes it much easier to manage. Also, as we roll out new sites, it's a very simple build that we know exactly what we need every time.

I'd like to see more modularization with NetApp's management and performance monitoring. I know NetApp has a product called OnCommand Insight that covers everything but we don't necessarily need all those features. That’s made it hard for us to justify the purchase there. So, I’d like to see more modularization of the management and monitoring tools.

For instance, if we could have Insight run management and monitoring for the UCS and NetApp at the same time, that would be great. At the same time, we might not need all of its features; maybe, a broader scope of products with more modularization of features and use cases. What I’m thinking is being able to pick and choose the features, or have a watered-down version of it. I'm reaching for that. It's already pretty good.

We've had no stability problems with FlexPod; no problems with Cisco UCS or the NetApp side at all. The auto support's great. For both, we get notifications and the parts are already on the way before we can even consider calling in an RMA. We're really happy with that.

Of course, with NetApp, you can add expansion shelves. NetApp's very expandable, easily expanded. With the UCS, we can add blades, we can add chassis. We have 18 UCS domains, I think, right now, all with NetApp storage backing it, whether it be E series or FAS; we have both.

We have not used technical support for FlexPod in a long time because, as I’ve mentioned, we've had good experience deploying FlexPod as a whole solution. We haven't had any problems deploying these. For actual day-to-day support, auto support takes care of pretty much everything. Very, very once in a while, we have an issue that we actually have to call in support, but most of the time it's hand off.

When we do call in for support, the Cisco side of it is fairly poor until you get past tier 1. In that situation, we have support and they're supposed to call us back, but a lot of times we don't get call backs. The TAC location that we can call to changes fairly frequently, so we've had some issues there. The NetApp side of things has been flawless, though.

I wasn't involved in the decision process to invest in a FlexPod. They decided on that before I joined the team. I know they evaluated Dell and IBM, and found that FlexPod was the clear choice.

One of the most important criteria for me in selecting a vendor is support; how quick they respond for RMAs and cases is a big one. I like to see how the sausage is made, exactly what the products do and how they do what they do. I like to evaluate on a very, very technical level before we make any decisions.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I've been involved in setting up 10-12 of the 18 FlexPods that we have. Setting them up is very, very easy. There are validated design documents out there; it's very well documented. We've found that there is really no ambiguity at all in the setup and configuration; deployment.

The most valuable feature is that it's an end-to-end solution for which we have a single support structure. We can tag it in the event we have something that crosses between silos.

We like that we've got the validated design that we can use quickly to start it. We have something that we know that will work. We also like the fact that the whole end-to-end design has been tested. And we know that if we have a problem, we're in good company possibly. That's a big help for us.

The benefits to my organization are faster time for deployment, faster time to problem resolution; a stable and reliable environment.

I think it still seems that there is isn’t end-to-end automation. I can't say, "I want to build a host," and say, "Provision the blade. Provision the storage. Provision the SAN." All those things in one swipe would be nice. I think that's what everyone wants: push the button, make it work. The big thing is that we'd like to be able to have it provisioned end to end. The biggest weakness is on the SAN side and the fiber channel side is a mess. It isn't very clear at times. That part is the most complex. If we can avoid it, we don't do it.

It's been a very stable environment for us, absolutely. We've only had very few instances and each of those have been resolved very quickly. It's been a fantastic change for us.

It just works, scalability-wise. We've been able to continue to grow the environment. We've tripled in size since initial deployment. We've not really changed the overall structure of the deployment. Scaling up was very easy.

Technical support has been very good. We haven't had to use it much, which is good too. We've had once incident where we had to really get all three legs involved – the compute, the storage and the network side involved – and it worked well. It was a very good experience to see from end to end. The problem looked like it was storage, but could've been on the SAN side. We worked through that and we also had to go back through the host. We had all three parties involved. They worked well together.

Initial setup was very easy. We looked at the validated design. We tweaked it a little bit to fit our environment specifically. We deployed from there. It was a day or so at best, more because we have our own little processes we have to go through.

ROI is difficult to gauge because things have changed so much in the time since we started. We have moved from a virtual environment of roughly 30, 40, 50 percent to 70, 90 percent now. I want to cut it.

We've been using HP for a long time.

For storage, we were using EMC before. We had been using their platform for a number of years. We were in for a forklift upgrade. The next upgrade would've been a complete forklift upgrade. We evaluated Hitachi, NetApp, and EMC. We talked with Dell as well, but we really narrowed it down to Hitachi, EMC, or NetApp. With EMC, because it was a forklift upgrade, we were really upset that it wasn't something that we could just add on to what we had or change out the parts. We had a major conversion, so that put them at a disadvantage right away. In talking with NetApp, the big thing for us was getting rid of the forklift upgrade; going to a system where we could evolve from year to year to year. We're three or four years in on this now; so far that's been the case. We have done controller replacements and upgrades and everything else, without serious service interruptions, so that's been a big deal for us.

You need a partner that you can trust and a partner you can actually move forward with. You need to understand what the full lifecycle of the product will be. You need to understand where you're going to go next. That was the big thing for us. When we changed, it was a major change. It was a lot of downtime, a lot of frustration for a lot of people. That's why something like NetApp, where I know that I have the ability to take out the controller, grab a new controller with cluster data ONTAP; you've got the scale out ability as well. That's been really great for us as well. As I’ve mentioned, we've tripled the amount of storage, we've tripled the amount of compute, added additional controllers, with little interruption to users. That's huge.