FlexPod XCS Reviews

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.

One of the valuable features is that there is generally one throat to choke, if you will.

If you have any problems you can talk to anybody and they'll understand the technical environment you are in, so it makes it easy to troubleshoot.

Whether it's an implementation or a new feature you want to take advantage of, you're troubleshooting an actual problem.

We run pretty much our entire infrastructure within our VMware FlexPod environment. We have application servers, SQL database servers, network monitoring servers, and all our users' data.

All of this is part of the same NetApp system. So pretty much everything that runs at our company, whether it is comprised of financial databases or football analytics, it all runs on a virtual server which is running within FlexPod.

The benefits of Flexpod are that we have a small IT team and it makes it easy for everybody to run and connect things. It just works. If we ever do need to troubleshoot, or increase a feature set, or things like that, just knowing that we can talk to someone who understands the environment makes it a lot simpler to get things moving forward so the whole process goes quicker.

ACI is coming and we're going be working with that. The ability to get that implemented within the VMware, Net App, and Cisco environments, so we can have a little better mobility between our different sites would be helpful. I think right now, that's probably a little complicated for us. Other than that, we've just recently moved to flash for our VMs and everything is pretty solid for us and it is working well.

I am referring to how can we improve our NetApp/Cisco/VMware Flexpod installation. Cisco’s ACI is something we are looking into to see if we create even more flexibility with the networking and security of our Flexpod between our sites and our virtual server infrastructure.

We've been using NetApp since 2004, and we've evolved to FlexPod in 2009. I've been involved in the steps all the way, and we've had a great relationship with our integrators, NetApp in general, with Cisco, and VMware.

It really is kind of "set it and forget it" solution. In my job, I'm kind of a Jack-of-all-Trades, if you will. We have to do a lot of different things, so I'm doing not only the VMware, the storage, and the networking, but I also do firewalls, email, and all the other application servers.

The simplicity of the FlexPod and how well it all works together with all the different systems really is a time saver. It's also easy to help teach other people in our department how to handle things. The training process isn't too long. We've been in it for a long time and it's pretty straightforward and we haven't really had any problems with the inner workings of the different systems.

In terms of scalability, we are a highly visible company and we have ten to twelve days a year where there are eighty-thousand people in the stadium. You need everything to work.

On the whole, we are a small, to mid-sized company and everything's worked well. We've scaled it up slowly over the last ten to twelve years, and we've been using our NetApp system and our Cisco network. I know it would scale really large for us, but we're generally a smaller scale.

I've always had great technical support when it comes to NetApp, or even calling Cisco, or VMware. NetApp has always been really solid for us, and we've been big fans. You get connected pretty quickly to someone, especially if you have a large problem. We don't have a lot of problems, so it's usually not hard to reach somebody, get answers, and find out what we need to do make things work.

The setup was pretty simple. It works well, it's not too hard to get everything connected, and you can use the most efficient and best practices.

We went through a process recently and we probably looked at six or seven vendors and this solution kept coming back to us. We are a smaller shop, and the flexibility of the FlexPod system, in particular the FAS2650 for us, and all the different protocols that we're running on an all-in-one system, was a no-brainer for us.

When it came back to it, we just stuck with NetApp because it was really the best solution for us. We looked at Pure Storage, Nimble, and Tintri. They all have great feature sets and things like that. However, the assortment of protocols for us was a huge feature set, and not being locked into just doing the block level protocol. We really wanted to keep our systems in place. It's really nice to have just that one pane of glass for our storage system. So, NetApp was really a no-brainer to stick with.

I guess it depends what your roles are. We are a one-stop shop, so we have to do all these different things. So for us it was important to accomplish a lot of different goals with one system. So, I would just ask someone: "How easy do you want things to be? Is support important to you? Is it important to work with different vendors who all know how the whole system works? How much time do you need to save when you're doing support?"

It's an integrated system with a single throat to choke for support. It's one phone call and if we believe it to be a Cisco problem, we call Cisco tech. If it turns out that it becomes a NetApp problem, then Cisco tech will engage the NetApp folks for support. It's a single phone call. We don't have to hang up and call the other and get into a finger pointing game. It is a time saver.

We have a lot of home-baked bank applications. We also use PointShop, so we run a lot of Microsoft boxed applications as well.

We're a VMware shop. We are a 98% plus virtualized in our environment. I appreciate the consistency in which it works. It stores data very efficiently. Those of us on the network side provide the path to get to it. We also provide the accesses, and it saves us a great amount of time because of that single feature of a single phone call.

It's been a very sturdy system. It's been a very reliable system and we've had no really great outages over the last six years related to the FlexPod environment. It saves us a lot of money, time, and resources.

I don't really have a great answer, other than a more scalable switched environment. That is what the Nexus 9K is going to provide for us. Nothing's perfect, so I guess we had some growing pains early on.

Some of it was teaching our staff how to deal with the new technologies, how to use it, and how to troubleshoot it. It wasn't perfect in that sense, but the product itself, it was very good.

It was complex to train people in with it. It was a newer technology for our resources, so it did take some time to get them up to speed.

There has been no downtime in six year, related to the actually filer, UCS compute, or switchback involved in the FlexPod.

It's scaled very well for us. We were able to add filers as we needed more storage. We were able to scale out on the existing 5K Nexus environment that we had.

So over the last six years, it's scaled well enough for us to acquire banks at the rate of about four or five banks per year. Now, in 2017, we continue to acquire banks and we're going to move our FlexPods into core locations. So we're going to buy new FlexPods and continue to scale and buy banks off of those.

We deal mostly with the Cisco technical support, but we make a single phone call, we're directed to FlexPod representatives who help to support the FlexPod environment or the NetApp environment, if you will. That has been very good.

We also have a resource from NetApps, specifically, who is a liaison for us to support and that resource is on call for us 24/7. That's been a great help as well.

The initial setup went very well. We provided the information about configurations that we would have liked to have seen. At the end of the day, after four or five meetings, we provided that information. FlexPod then showed up in a crate, ready to be powered on in the data center and start to switch data.

We did a bake-off between the VCE and the FlexPod. We did look at the Dell solution back then, it did come down to VCE and FlexPod.

FlexPod won out for two reasons.

• Pricing
• The resource that manages my data center was historically a NetApp guy. He liked that app and was comfortable with it, and that's what I think the deciding factor was.

To summarize, the comfort level with NetApp and the price.

I would tell them my story, about six years ago buying the FlexPod and how we purchased banks and scaled through it seamlessly. I have never had any downtime, and I feel like the support has been what has been advertised. I would certainly suggest buying that environment.

The FlexPod technology is really reliable for us. We have no complaints about the reliability and the stability of the product.

We had an older SAN that needed to be improved and the FlexPod technology was chosen for the integration with Cisco and the NetApp storage. We used to have NetApp and Cisco on-site. It was just a natural merge to add the FlexPod technology.

The downside is that the administration is a little bit complex.

Also, don't use the NetApp team to implement it. I did so previously, and it was not the best experience of my life. It is a drawback that you need to use the NetApp team to implement it. It's not easy to work with them and not every technical specialist is a specialist.

We have been using it for two years now.

It is very stable. There has been no down time.

In terms of scalability, we have a project that is ongoing for the next few months. We are going to get into the scalability portion soon.

We did call technical support a couple of times and we had great support from them. They've been responsive to us.

They made the decision before I started working here. I know that they chose it for the reasons I mentioned.

It is complex to set up.

I know that it is really a good product. In the end, it is doing the job.

The ease of configuration and the reliability are the most valuable features.

Every deployment we’ve done has been on FlexPod. The ease of configuration saves us a lot of time and we can stand up in remote offices without highly-trained people.

I think the support has been our pain point, the hardware and setup are pretty good, and solid but the support could be improved. We always tell them about that.

We’ve been using it since 2009.

So far it’s been really good. It was rough for the first year or so on the Cisco side but last couple of years it’s been pretty stable.

It’s really easy to scale out, and I feel like it scales very well.

It's gotten better, as it was rough at the start. On the NetApp side they will open up the case for you with the other vendors. I had experiences where they didn’t know why we were calling or what a FlexPod was, but that was years ago and since then it has gotten far more streamlined.

Very straightforward and easy.

Peer reviews are not as important as user conferences but market research is there for a reason.

Scalability is, to me, the most valuable feature, as it's easily scalable out or up. If we need hardware we buy it, and if we need more storage we can buy that separately. The profile/policy-driven profiles and initial config can take a while, but once it's done deploying, a new server is done very rapidly.

The UCS firmware code upgrade can totally stall- it’s a brick. Cisco support has been able to help us, but this can be better. They've destroyed equipment and I have lost a few days of deployment.

It’s an expensive product for sure. It’s a Ferrari price for a Ferrari. Not perfect but a very good solution.

It’s super stable, especially after the v2.2 release, which has been awesome in terms of bug fixes and feature sets. It’s very reliable.

Outward scalability is incredible. I did a customer site to help expand their development (a university in New York) and I helped them scale. They started with a large deployment, and now they have expanded out within a short time. They are experiencing awesome scalability from the NetApp model.

Technical support is amazing, that’s the reason people buy it. Otherwise you have to buy separate contracts. Cisco and NetApp work so well together, and it's unheard of for hardware vendors to do that.

You have to do due diligence to configure the settings correctly.

Don’t let the price point scare you away because what you’re gaining is not only scalability, but a product that is easily manageable.

You have the functionality that UCS brings, and that NetApp bring, in terms of their replication and backup products. It's got great potential. Don’t set it up by yourself, pay the professionals, as if it's deployed incorrectly, it can create giant headaches.

My primary use case is for private cloud, database servers, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

It allows us to deploy and fly fast quickly.

The feature I have found most valuable is data protection architecture as a whole. Integrating applications like Oracle, SQL, VMWare is a key differentiator. Operations are elementary and consistent. You realize this when you have to scale, and all the management keeps the same way.

Areas for improvement would be the integrated support task force with all vendors, the communication with and recognition program for resellers, at scale documentation I believe it would be more detailed (Graphs and Projections @ latency/IOPs/Throughput). I would like to see more integration with the public cloud in the next release.

I've been using FlexPod for ten+ years.

This solution is surprisingly performative and high available. In addition, all components are fully redundant.

This solution is highly scalable. Because of the nature of flexibility on a solution, we can customize any component, which is great. Still, when we get off the documentation (cause is too flexible), we have to double attention to the limits of individual components.

The technical support for this solution is fine. However, there is some room for improvement, especially when the cases involve the ecosystems. For example, the support team could have a unified war room.

Positive

For the initial customer or engineer, installing for the first time, this product sometimes is challenging to set up. For more senior customers who have automated scripts, it's much easier. Deployment takes a few hours, perhaps around half a day.

When the operations matter, you definitely have to look at FlexPod. I see Flexpod as a singular competitor for two reasons, once you scale the solution as you need and the operations and administrator's effort keep the same. The flexibility allows you to scale just the necessity you need with no waste of investments. I would rate this solution as ten out of ten.

Our primary use case is for virtualization, the VMs.

FlexPod has enabled us to consolidate some of our stuff. 

The validated designs for major enterprise apps are an integral part of our company. We only do validated designs in our thing and then we remove our data center consolidation and move stuff onto that.

It simplifies the infrastructure from edge to core. It simplifies the configuration metrics and saved time. FlexPod simplified and saved time overall for all of the configuration and deployment.

Backup, restore, and ease of deployment are the most valuable features.

It hasn't changed the application performance in our company but obviously the new hardware gives it the performance increase. Overall nothing more changed.

I would like to have the installation of the top virtualization on its own rather than doing it through the admin. For example, if FlexPod is configured after the configuration of the host, the ESXi is installed also, but it should be part of it rather than doing it as a separate system.

It is pretty solid.

It's scalable. 

I don't remember having needed to contact their technical support. 

We knew we needed to invest in a solution like FlexPod because we were growing and we have evaluated different solutions and after that we decided.

The initial setup was straightforward because we did not do it, Cisco did it.

I deployed through Cisco. We had a positive experience with them.

We have seen ROI. 

It actually initially increased our CapEx.

We looked at Red Hat, VMware, HP, Cisco. We chose FlexPod because of the consolidation and reduced footprint.

If configuration, unification, and standardization are the concern and if they are using it with Cisco as a network edge then I think it will be a good solution to go with FlexPod.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. Not a ten because a seven means for me that it is more than a five. A 10 would mean that I don't have to do anything else to improve. Improvements could be ESXi installations at vCenter installation and all of that. I have this to do it. It is a solution, but it has stops at a certain point. It is not a complete solution.