FlexPod XCS Reviews

A couple of the valuable features are the ease of data management and data portability. That would probably be the crux of it. That came into effect with migration from or upgrading an existing cluster to another cluster; it is quite easy to port across using similar technologies, etc.

Obviously, it has the high availability features; you've got storage failover, or takeover, to upgrade a node non-destructively. Those would be the main valuable features.

The main thing is providing high availability to internal business customers, whether it be just day-to-day operations, HA and, again, non-destructive maintenance.

Specifically, with ONTAP, I would like to see it support more snapshots for retention; greater than 255 snapshots. There are competitors out there offering far more than the 255 snapshots per volume; Nimble, actually, being one of them. Their current marketing blurb is 100,000 snapshots. I need to find out some more details on that. I’d like to see very long-term data protection, an increase in the number of snapshots.

I haven’t had any issues in the day-to-day operations. We have had a few stability issues with some major bugs with it, with ONTAP. We had a particularly nasty bug with one of the QLogic CNA cards, which actually took, probably, seven months to resolve. Eventually it was resolved. It was actually a new bug that was still under investigation with NetApp but that was eventually solved. That's been the only really major glitch recently.

Overall, it's been a very stable platform.

I used technical support for that bug, in conjunction with our SAN managing that process.

Technical support was very good. Obviously, we've used on other occasions as well when we've had difficulties and they usually have been resolved quite quickly.

We've been a NetApp customer probably since 2005, not so much in the FlexPod but actually from the initial FAS arrays. Because we already had the FAS arrays or the FAS systems, it was a natural progression, really. We were looking to refresh or move away from HP for our compute. With FlexPod, we already had the NetApp storage and it was sort of a natural progression. The price point was pretty good.

Initial setup was quite straightforward. I guess our first FlexPod implementation was with one of our data centers. It was a sizable deployment but quite straightforward.

At the time, there weren’t any other vendors on our short list. I guess we were looking at EMC in the early days but I don't remember what the reasoning was. We eventually decided on FlexPod.

When I choose a vendor, cost and ROI are the most important criteria that I look for.

Follow the best practice guides and you can't go wrong.

If you've already got a storage compute environment, a good analysis of what your existing environment is like, what your workload's like, will assist where you place data, where you place your volumes on the FAS system. You generally have a good understanding of what your existing workload is, so you can obviously scale and design your storage layout with FlexPod correctly or most efficiently.

I guess I'm a bit biased in my opinion but I've worked with it for probably seven, eight years. I’ve never had an issue with it and everything that I need to do with it, I've been able to do pretty much.

FlexPod allows us to go through and roll out compute, having a converged infrastructure with the same level of simplicity that you would expect of a hyper-converged.

There needs to be a discussion around the management plane of things. The driving message has been tied altogether with UCS Director. 

UCS Director is a great product. It is relatively affordable for what it delivers. However, for a lot of the upper/mid-level market, it is probably a little bit of overkill in terms of the day-to-day administration, and even the initial configuration to get it up and running. If there was more of a condensed version, like offering managed services on top of it, that is how we get around it for some of our more simple-minded customers. If there was some sort of middle of the road approach to management, it would probably be an improvement.

We have not had many issues from an architecture and design perspective. Gear always has quirks from time to time. It has been very reliable and stable for us, and it deploys for customers.

It scales very easily. We are able to go through and add individual components as needed, whether its storage computer networking without being locked into a particular sizing matrix, so it grows and shrinks as needed with relative ease.

The tech support is world-class. We have never had any major issues or complaints. The response times are generally very good. 

There is a lot to do, but the process is very well-documented. The nature of the infrastructure allows us to basically go through and work with a series of templates that we can stamp out very quickly. For the vast majority of the deployments that we do for customers, I have an information gathering sheet that I email them a couple weeks before deployment, and just from the information that we collect, we can get the configuration 98 percent of the way done.

I would rate it about an eight out of 10. We have been very happy with the product. It has been very successful for us. We have a lot of customers who are thrilled with what we have done. As a VAR, it is easy for us to go through, manage, and maintain. That sort of middle of the road management piece would be a big part of it, and I would like to see more CVDs and more published designs around a multi-hypervisor approach within a single pod. This would be an improvement.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We work as a VAR and MSP. The most important thing for us is the trust relationship with a vendor. Support and reliability are important, and not to be a stick-in-the-mud, but for the most part, every major vendor has support and reliability now. However, the relationship, being able to go through and build with a vendor, then the trust that you establish with a vendor for us is the most critical thing.

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

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.

The most valuable feature is the scalability, how the infrastructure can grow. We can grow easily with the infrastructure.

We offer cloud services to our customers in Panama. We can grow when our customers ask for more capacity or more processing. We only add more servers or we only add more storage to the infrastructure.

Maybe the migration tools for all of the environments could be improved. We can change the storage in the infrastructure but when we need to change the switches or other components that we can change easily, I don't know how to migrate that component. I’d like to be able to migrate that much easier.

We have been working with FlexPod for four years, maybe, and we haven’t had any problems.

It’s very scalable.

We have not used technical support yet. We don't have any problems with FlexPod.

Last year, we bought Vblock infrastructure and CloudBurst infrastructure from IBM. We switched because they don't have the scalability and the performance that we have now in FlexPod.

We decided to invest in FlexPod because we have a good relationship with NetApp. We did not only invest in FlexPod; it’s possible that most of our clouds are NetApp.

It's very, very easy to manage and to build.

We evaluated EMC, Hitachi, IBM and Huawei. We chose NetApp because they have more capability with snapshots that the other environments and vendors do not have.
The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are price, performance, scalability, and management.

I recommend buying FlexPod technology.

I think other vendors have more scalability because they use higher-density disks and they can use clusters for storage. When we use a NetApp cluster, we only have a processing cluster. If one controller fails or a pair of controllers fails, all the disks that are connected to those controllers also fail.

We built FlexPod. We didn’t buy it. We bought the Cisco servers, the switches and the NetApp storage. When we built the first FlexPod, we bought infrastructure for the Guatemala and Dominican Republic data centers. We have the same infrastructure for all of the sites.

We use FlexPod XCS to provide primary storage for production data. 

The tool's most valuable features are the flexibility and ability to adapt to redundancy. 

FlexPod XCS' pricing could be cheaper. You need to find the right person for support. 

I have been using the product for ten years. 

The tool's stability is rock solid. 

FlexPod XCS is scalable and flexible. 

FlexPod XCS' support has always been there for us. 

Positive

We evaluated HP, Dell, IBM and Cisco. 

The tool helps to save TCO by consolidating our workloads into smaller footprints. 

FlexPod XCS helps us save money. 

I rate it an eight out of ten. 

One place to go for support. 

We're a team of people working for a hospital and everybody has their own areas of expertise. If you're ever in a bind and there's a NetApp issue, there's practically nobody there with another specialization. They could call up FlexPod and handle the issue.

In some ways, it can be like an insurance policy. We can hold the person selling us FlexPod accountable anytime we're in a bind. As a FlexPod customer, you're fully supported or back supported, whatever the case may be - in theory. 

There are three different areas of specialization, so if somebody who's not familiar with all the technologies isn't there, they can still handle a support issue.

There's no interface I can go and see that it works properly or sometimes it's hard to explain to people. 

Right now you're told to just email or call support and say, "We're a FlexPod customer." It would be nice if there was a number to call or an email address.

I would like to see more involvement with cloud integrating and to be kept more in the loop and up to date. They don't want to take ownership of their bad firmware levels. 

I would also like to feel more support. NetApp has been pretty good, for the most part, but Cisco has more work to do. I've had very good experience with NetApp. Instead of having to call three different areas and saying, "I'm a FlexPod customer." It would be nice if it could be just one that gets routed. I know it would require three large companies to work together, but that's what would make this product a ten. They could definitely use with making it more user-friendly.

I've not had too much use for it. It's fine.

Approachability is an issue. It should be more approachable and easier to feel like you're paying for a service and you're using it. 

It was just a refresh of storage and hardware that got everyone talking. And then this was the solution.

My colleagues mentioned that it was very easy. 

We have absolutely been able to save space. I am comparing it to my previous experience because we did not have a FlexPod solution so we had everything working piecemeal. That's very hard to manage and, if anything would go wrong, I'd always feel like it's me to blame. Here, I feel like I have an insurance policy. 

If you can afford it, I would certainly go for it. I don't think there are very many other options. Now you have HCI, so you could skip the Cisco piece. I'm not an HCI customer but I would assume it would have better, tighter integration than Cisco and NetApp.

It would be so wonderful to incorporate private hybrid and multi-cloud environments. And even rope in some of these cloud providers.