FlexPod XCS Reviews

We use it for our customer's work that we do because we are an IT service provider. We do application development and testing. For this purpose, the data is with us and we work with FlexPod for their data.

It is a very nice solution because, traditionally, we used to spend more time administrating  managing. The developer has to do things differently. Therefore, we put it in a self-service mode for the developer community.

The data is available, compressed, and deduped. Also, when the customer wants, the data can be segregated.

The validate designs do not fail. They give good performance, which provide us with business benefits. Also, before it fails, it has predictive failure features.

Our environment does not always require this solution, so we are not reaping the optimal ROI.

It's quite stable. The days are gone where we had instability and call customer care.

There is a lot of resiliency now. We do not need to configure the product once it is built. This was not the case in the earlier days of the product.

It has amazing power to scale.

The technical support is quite good. We have never faced any problems where the a business has been impacted. We are very happy with it.

We deal directly with NetApp, and our experience has been good. They are productive because we normally discuss our blueprints with them as a partner. We discuss everything and it gets deployed smoothly.

We have seen ROI and saved time and money for new service deployments.

We have been using NetApp products since 2002. We have not found any serious competition.

I would recommend NetApp.

Organizations are going towards cloud environments. However, as we are doing customers' projects, we do not go for external cloud, we do it on our internal private cloud. Our priority is to respect the customer's data in the internal private cloud. We are using FlexPod with Managed Private Cloud. 

We are looking towards more advanced HCI deployments now, and we're looking forward to the AI, which will be in concert with Insight. Analytics with AI will be much more beneficial and we are already trying to adopt HCI.

We are targeting now towards HCI because it is more converged towards compute, network and storage. We hope to gain more benefit using HCI, as well as AFF.

It's used for managing our virtual workload exclusively. It manages our virtual servers and our internal business systems are run on it.

We use FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud. It functions.

It simplifies that you don't have to manage all the additional hardware. It simplifies support, as it is all in one area. You don't have to worry about individual pieces of hardware going end-of-life at different times.

• Ease of use
• Flexibility
• Scalability
• Stability 

The ease in the event that there is hardware failure and having it be stateless. We can swap components out without incurring any significant downtime. 

We would like to have a single pane of glass available for it. It is something that the management in the business would like to have.

It is stable. I can't think of any significant downtime that we've incurred with it.

Unfortunately, we are limited on upgrades. They don't really let us do them. However, upgrades have been stable.

Scalability is simple. It allows you to continue to grow out, compute, or store as necessary.

I have never used FlexPod's technical support.

I was involved in the refresh, and it was relatively straightforward. We had an existing UCS infrastructure that we were replacing, which was being moved over to a secondary sight where it was a new UCS stand up.

At the time of installation, we used Varo. However, they no longer exist. 

Go for it.

It simplifies everything. It gives you a single place to go if you need support or if you need to expand.

We don't have a true FlexPod.

A lot of companies do not want to put the time into designing, then figuring how much compute with storage and networking. With FlexPod, companies can buy solutions that have been pre-tested. They know it will work. They are companies out there backing and supporting it, like ours, with worldwide technologies who can support and make it part of their solution.

The combination of compute and storage networking is pretty complicated to accomplish. The real benefit of this solution is that it is pre-architected with the ability to scale-up and scale-out. You can buy this solution, and it is going to work, because it is a proven solution.

Anything can be improved. As ACI grows and storage grows (and changes), this is how FlexPods can evolve. They can include the new networking and new virtualization of storage and data center interconnectivity with the networking side of it. FlexPods can evolve and grow by connecting pods together.

It is stable because it has been tested. That is one of the reasons that companies use FlexPod. I can combine compute, storage, and networking, but I would have to test it to make sure it is configured and labelled correctly. They are buying a pre-proven solution, and that is one of the big plays for FlexPod quite frankly.

It can scale up and scale out, which is a big advantage.

I have dealt with them quite a few times. I would put them up there with Cisco tech. They are easy to get a hold of, easy to understand, and as partner, easy to work with.

For a lot of customers, when they are setting up data centers or adding onto their data center, it gives them a way to buy a prepackaged solution. A lot of FlexPods that I have sold, they are building a new data center, or adding on. It is an easy purchase or add-on, because they know it will work, and they know it will be scalable and reliable.

Setup is easy. They have already preconfigured things. Things are prelabeled, have colors, and they plugin. That is one of the reasons that you buy FlexPod, because of the ease, proven reliability and performance. 

Large and small companies do not have time to design the compute, the amount of storage, and how it works together. They are buying pre-proven, pretested solutions with reference architectures already in place. So, a lot of FlexPods you can buy with reference architectures and how to install them on top of it solutions.

I would rate it as a nine out of 10, because every product has room for advancement.

• It is a mature solution.
• It has been pretested.
• There is reference architectures for it.
• It is easy to use.
• It uses the best compute.
• It uses the best storage.
• It uses the best networking, which all works together in a proven solution. 

The key features and functionalities of NetApp FlexPod that the company uses run:

1. VMware Horizon View
2. standalone workloads.

The environment is NetApp Controller FAS8040, Cisco Nexus switches (5000/7000/9000) and Cisco UCS Server with fabric interconnect.

A single FlexPod can support a load of 2,000 - 5,000 employees without downtime.

SolidFire all-flash block storage in an existing FlexPod data center environment. This improves the agility and performance, including the additional load of cabling.

• Support for multiple vendors' hardware
• Support for SAN with Cisco 9000 switches
• Automated deployment and configuration with respect to CVD

• It's actually pretty easy to put together.
• It's very easy to keep up and maintain.
• Allows for quick use. I use power show on the system to actually get the infrastructure up and running.
• It runs solid, with no problems.

It's simplified the infrastructure (the backend infrastructure). I went from a 1GB infrastructure to 10GB, and it's been really good and fast.

They could improve on the small stuff, like fixing and replacing broken cables.

I am looking forward to playing around with the hyper-converged infrastructure, but that'll be on the next upgrade.

It is solid. You turn it on, you set it up, and it runs.

It's good. I brought in the older storage as well, so that's let me keep my existing storage. However, it's a small system.

I have had to used Cisco tech support for it, not NetApp. The Cisco support is amazing.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was fairly straightforward. There's enough diagrams and the validated architecture document basically had it all there for me.

I have a partnership with Fujitsu New Zealand, and their consultants there actually sat down with me and talked over what I needed, and came up with this solution.

I did look at the Hitachi Data Systems Hyperconverged Infrastructure, but it used virtualization for storage that I wasn't prepared to use simply because we already do a nested virtualized environment, so I didn't want virtualization on top of virtualization.

I run a very odd system in terms of what we teach our students. We virtualize the hypervisor, then they put virtual machines inside the hypervisor, and we use the NetApp Vsim for them to provision their own storage. We do some of the NetApp curriculum on that as well as and we do the VMware install/configure/manage course on top of it as well. So, I didn't want virtualization on top of virtualization for storage. That's what it amounts to.

It's a pretty smooth solution. For anybody wanting to get a small system to actually teach on as well as learn and use, you can't beat FlexPod.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

Trust relationship, either knowing somebody that actually knows them and has had a good experience, and if I find that then I'm not too worried. However, it's also about the personal relationship. It's about getting to know the people you're dealing with at the vendor. All three of them, Fujitsu, Cisco, and NetApp have just been amazing, particularly NetApp for me. They've done some amazing stuff with me.

I think the most valuable features include it being scalable. We got the product and we have a small environment, but it was able to be scalable to when we started to grow. So I think that was one of the bigger features.

Also, that everything is seamless. And what I mean by that is that you have the components of a Cisco, and you have the components of NetApp; and we have a networking team that is all Cisco certified, and we have a team of NetApp administrators that are also certified. So by not having to reach out and do a whole lot of different training, most of the training had already been done with previous experience. It saved the company a lot more man hours and time to actually get the FlexPod up and running.

That's pretty tricky, because for what we have and for what we use it for, it's actually pretty perfect, to be quite honest. Even when we brought the finished product to our customer, there were really no complaints. They were happy with just having HA, "Hey, if something goes down, we don't lose services." That was their biggest concern. Outside of that they really don't have any complaints at all.

It wouldn't be more FlexPod as a whole, I think for me it would be more NetApp. What I mean by that is, we are a company that likes to do SnapMirrors all over the place, and the customer is always asking when we set up a SnapMirror, "How long does it take or how long do you have left?" And when you've been dealing with NetApp you have to manually do some calculations, make an educated guess. So if there was something like a progress bar for a SnapMirror, so a customer could say, "Hey, what's the percentage?" and I answer, "It's 57%," versus saying, "I think, well, by the size of this volume and the speed of the link..." and that kind of stuff. A progress bar would probably solve all that because they'd like to know, how much more time do we have when we're doing this SnapMirror. I think that would be pretty cool.

For the company it's going on two and a half years. And we're still deploying new ones out.

I think the stability is great. I love the Multipathing for the FlexPlot. You have HA all over the place. You have HA with your storage, you have HA with the blades, you have HA with the Nexus switches as well. You can't ask for more HA than that. So you have time to replace a part, you have time to troubleshoot something without having any downtime. So I think it's excellent.

I have not used tech support yet. All our guys are pretty well versed, especially the knowledge of Cisco and the knowledge of NetApp. And then I forgot to even toss in the knowledge of VMware, because we run VMware on top of four of the blades. Having that group already there at work and having the experience, we all just put our minds together trying to figure it out and it works out pretty well.

It was a little complex but it was because before I started deploying FlexPods I was just in a systems-type realm. But once I completed my initial configuration of one and understood the importance of having HA - once I understood that - I figured out, "Well, cabling, it makes sense." Whatever happens on the A side happens on the B side, and it just started kind of flowing together.

So not too terribly bad. Plus NetApp has real great resources. You can go to their page, you can pull up FlexPod, you can find all the cabling in there for whatever model you have, supported and unsupported, they were really good about that; that was awesome.

The most important criteria when looking at vendors, to me, is honesty about a product. We talked to NetApp folks and they were really good as far as getting us all the information.

It wasn't just that I said I need a solution and they gave me a quote for the biggest solution that I needed to get. They asked, how many people do you have, what kind of expansion do you see yourself going into five years from now, how many services do you want, how is it going to grow. And I thought that was just awesome. Usually they try to sell you the most expensive, like a car salesman. But no, they really looked at our needs, looked at where we were going, picked out a solution.

Even with NetApp, they could've picked a solution that was just NetApp. They looked at it as a whole and said, "For the size of your datacenter, for the users that you're going to have, and to be able to take everybody's unique skill set and put it together, FlexPod will work out for you."

In terms of advice to a colleague, I would definitely tell them to take a look into it. I know most people have their ways with all-in-one systems. In a sense it is that, but in a sense it's not. There are separate components to this system.

If you have a passion for trying to create a better datacenter or if you have a passion for learning new things, FlexPod is the way to go. You're learning about three different technologies, depending on what you use for your hosting, regardless if it's VMware, HyperV, you're learning the stack so you're learning how everything connects.

And, depending on what you do, if you're at a layer-three relationship, you'll be learning about that as well, depending upon how much access you have. But it's definitely an opportunity to satisfy your customer and also increase your knowledge base.

• Resiliency
• Performance

Resiliency: It's extremely fault tolerant so it's highly available. If one component fails, it's got a backup that will take over.

Performance: FlexPod rocks. It's pretty powerful. And it helps when you have a FlexPod, all the workload's inside. There's no external things that can hurt it, except for itself.

Also, it's easy to manage, because you basically have two interfaces that you can use to manage all of the three tiers, storage, computer, networking. So, it's easy to manage.

Once we started using it, people that didn't understand it were skeptical. Once we proved how resilient, and how well it performed, we got more internal customers who wanted to use it.

I'm excited to see the SolidFire FlexPod. I think that's going to bring a lot more business opportunities. I think you're going to be able to scale your workloads inside of it. Just integrated, at a lower cost, I think will be great.

The FlexPod, with the UC chassis and the NetApp storage is perfect for us, we had no trouble. The FlexPod SF, the SolidFire, it's just a newer generation. I'm not sure what they could improve on.

The SolidFire, I don't think it is going to natively support SnapMirror. It uses its own replication, I think, but I know it's in the roadmap. They're talking by the end of this year, that it will come out.

You can have AMP servers, in the FlexPods, you can have it join an ESX cluster. So you have that GUI. I think someday you'll see a single pane of glass for management, that would be the best thing for it.

We've been using FlexPods onsite for four to five years.

Stability is great, never had it go down in the entire four years. Never crashed, never lost anything that was not fault tolerant. So, if we lost a piece of hardware, its HA or failover component took over.

We actually did several upgrades. We've had to upgrade the compute, the UC, chassis. We've added storage, all non-disruptive. So, yeah it's very scalable.

Technical support is great. So the way NetApp set it up is, they're right next door to Cisco in NTP, and they actually have a dedicated team of VMware, Cisco, and NetApp to troubleshoot problems. The beauty is that if any component in it, even if it's a Cisco switch, or the UC chassis, which is Cisco, you call NetApp, and the ticket gets routed to the appropriate group, immediately.

We had specific workloads that needed a converged infrastructure, and it was just the one we picked.

It was new to me. I'm more of a traditional storage guy, replication, backup, recovery guy. But, it was very easy to understand, as we were installing it.

All was upgradable. If you needed to reboot any component, either one of the switchblades or a VM in the chassis, you could just move it over, without any disruption, unless it was CIFS, and then do the upgrade.

We're in the Financial industry but I don't think it's uniquely valuable for just that industry. I think it's valuable for any workload that it's appropriate for. There are many use cases for it.

It's just a great product, it really is.

The valuable features of the product used to be the memory footprint, but technology has come up. Now it's being able to build the profiles so you can move around your firmware, bios revs, your worldwide name, and your Mac addresses from physical planes.

For anyone who needs the flexibility of moving around profiles from physical device to physical device, it really adds an additional layer of virtualization, much like you move a guest from a VMware host to a VMware host. Now, you can move that VMware host from physical box to physical box. It gives you all that flexibility, if your company demands that. It's priceless.

It hasn't. Most of the implementations that I've seen don't take advantage of its features. Where I work now it's been more costly to implement it. That's not because it's a bad product by any means. It's a great product, but we're not using the key features that are exclusive to it. Therefore, we could just have a whole bunch of Dell servers flying around for our implementation for where I work today.

• Stability
• Backward and forward compatibility with bios and firmware

This is one of the key features because I can now associate a firmware REV to a given profile which I may need. I might have to have a particular one because the applications won't work with something different. If I can't float that from piece of hardware to piece of hardware, then it defeats the purpose of use. Thus, it is one of its key and unique features. If it defeats that, then it makes your HPE's just as valuable.

Also, the interface is a little convoluted. There are some additional features, like being able to name devices. Right now, the first one plugged in is Device 1, then Device 2. So, you have to be very particular on how you build out your environment, because with everything floating around, it's very important for you to know where that device is in a rack if you're dealing with remote hands and eyes. I need to tell someone that they need to go to rack J19, this RU, but I can't tell that by looking through the software. I can put notes, but it'd be really nice to kind of go, "This enclosure is ... " Some grid location in datacenter. So when you go to there, you can quickly understand where it is in the datacenter, therefore being able to rely on remote hands and eyes, because an LED light is just not enough when you're talking about rows and rows of these.

My current company has used this solution prior to when I started. I have been working with it for two years.

At a previous company, I used it back in the mid-2000s when Cisco first started coming out with UCS. My previous company evaluated it then and implemented it with EMC along with NetApp to backup storage.

It's pretty good. One of the challenges that we've run into is firmware issues. Which is kind of odd, because this was one of its selling features. Now, I can move my firmware to firmware, in case whatever application, or whatever OS application configuration you're running on it, requires a particular REV. However, they don't float around from physical device to physical device. It's all-in-family. So, if you get a mixed family or generation, you can't float that around. This defeats the purpose and we've run into that a lot of times.

It's great. I've done analysis and I came from a HPE centric mindset. We brought in UCS, and from a scale and price perspective there's a sweet point where UCS definitely has an advantage. Also, I'd add the additional advantage is throughput.

I don't use them, because someone else works with tech support in our organization.

I worked with Tech Support initially when we were evaluating and building out our designs

Where I previously worked, I built about three or four different pods in different configurations converting an EMC FlexPod to a NetApp FlexPod, then to an EMC FlexPod.

The initial setup was straightforward if you do your planning correct. It's pretty easy as far as plug and play goes.