FlexPod XCS Reviews

We use it more to deploy a supportive solution so that a customer can go to one business support number and then have FlexPod for the whole infrastructure.

The streamlining of support has been an improvement for us.

Also, we have found the solution to be innovative when it comes to compute, storage, and networking because each piece is still modular at the end of the day, and if we have to upgrade one area we don't have to upgrade the whole thing.

Finally, we have seen about a 20 percent improvement in application performance. The increase is coming over the legacy hardware we were running before.

• The Cisco Validated Designs
• Industry-leading technology, put together 
• It just works

Also, it's very versatile. We haven't run into any issues with it where we couldn't do something because of it. We have been very happy with it.

It's resilient. We haven't had any issues with it whatsoever and we've had it for four years. It's very stable.

We have had to scale it and it's very easy. You just swap the component that you need to scale. For the storage you just add on a shelf; for the compute you just add another node and you're good to go.

Technical support is very good. We had to open a ticket one time but it was very quick to get it resolved.

We were using a mismatch of different things like Cisco switches, NAT storage, and HPE servers. The reason we switched was the validated, one-vendor support for everything. It's one of those things you set up and you just forget it. It just works.

It was very straightforward, as long as you follow the documentation. It is a well-architected solution so I didn't really run into issues. I set it up and it works.

I just did it myself.

The cost is a little high.

We considered HPE.

You won't regret it in the end, if you invest in FlexPod.

My thoughts on the solution regarding private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environment are that I definitely think hybrid is the future, having a flexible infrastructure. That's where I like the FlexPod, it's more like hyperconverged. It has more layers of flexibility for moving workloads up to and back from the cloud. We currently don't use FlexPod for managed private cloud.

We are a NetApp partner. I, myself, am doing ACI and data center stuff. We have been active for a year and have several customers running on FlexPod SF functionality. We don't do native NetApp stuff, only FlexPod SF.

We are mostly looking at healthcare, and we also in the banking world. We have one customer to whom we sold this as a storage product.

It's a new architecture, really scalable and programmable. When you look at SDN propositions it fits very well in a next-gen data center.

I can't really say anything about improvements right now because we are relatively new to this product. It is implemented for the functionality and it delivers the functionality. Right now, it does everything we want.

It's a really good, stable product. It has good resilience.

You can scale it. You can add more boxes and you can have more IOPS available if you want. It's very easy to add new hardware to the cluster.

I'm not directly involved in support cases right now so I can't say what the support is like from my own experience, but what I have heard from my colleagues is that the support is good.

The setup is really straightforward. What I heard was you plug it in, you bring it up, and it's easy to install.

It's good, it's a very nice product. Very scalable.

Primary use case is for virtualization of our phone systems and our domain.

Being able to contact one place to get support, e.g., if it is the virtualization end of it, hardware, or storage. There is just one place to get support.

It has simplified our support.

• Reference design
• Ease of use
• Ease of support

They could improve their technical support team.

Unified management would be really nice, having one a single pane of glass to manage everything do with the solution.

It has been very stable. There has been no downtime.

Over the last six years, it has scaled very well.

On scale of one to 10, I would rate them about a seven. They need to have a specific phone number for you to call in for the FlexPod solution. Some of the partner support knows if it is for FlexPod, they will get you to the right department. 

Overall, I do reach the right person when I call them and they do offer the proper guidance.

We were previously using very individual systems, then our vendor suggested this. Also, because our phone systems, we were also using reference design.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We had a managed project team which did the installation.

We evaluated one other vendor.

We chose FlexPod because we were previous customers and know their support structure.

When considering a solution, look at it in total from purchase. Then, look at what is going on five years down the road. Do a comparison of expansion, ease of expansion, and everything else.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: reliability. We receive this now from the FlexPod solution.

• 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.

Number one is the ease of deployment and number two is reliability of the solution. We are running electronic medical records applications and also document scanning, in addition to standard infrastructure type servers.

We are using Epic, OnBase, 3M, Nuance Transcription, and then infrastructure servers, BNS, Active Directory, SharePoint, and SQL Server. The performance is excellent.

Benefits for your organization are probably the reliability and the cost. We feel like it's a very cost-effective product, and the fact that it doesn't take a lot of people to support. We're very thinly staffed, so just those two things are really reliability and then cost.

I would like to see more scalability and possible cost reductions with the all-flash solution. I would like to see a focus on database optimization on the Intel platform. This could be with Windows, or HANA, or even cache, down the line, something with the Linux cache. I would like to get something that is optimized for those databases.

We have two camps now. We have to have a AIX camp and then we have an Intel camp. If we could just have it on the Intel platform, have FlexPod take it all, it would be easier to support.

We have been using this going on four years.

It is a very stable platform. I've had minimal downtime in the entire time we've used it.

Scalability has been very good. There really has not been an application, with the exception of the Epic Cache Database, that we haven't been able to use with this solution. Anything that we run on the Intel platform, on the UCS platform, we've been able to use in order to scale.

Technical support is excellent. They've been really good to work with. I think they work well with Cisco. We've never gone into like a finger pointing situation at all. We also use Cisco ONE, in which they'll take on the whole stack. It is very cohesive. We haven't always used that and we just started using it. That's an even better solution, in that it is only one call. Before, we would make two calls: One to NetApp and one to Cisco, and they would then work together. It wasn't a problem, but this just makes it easier from an escalation standpoint.

I was involved in the initial selection process, purchasing, setup, and the whole thing. The setup was very simplistic, which is one of the reasons we went for it. We try to strive for simplicity in our shop because of our staffing situation and because we are non-profit organization. So reliability, efficiency, all those things really come into play. We're a 7/24/365 facility, so things just have to work.

We evaluated EMC, Pure Storage, Tintri, and Nimble. We decided to go with NetApp over the competitors because we did an executive briefing with them in San Jose.

We were really impressed with their road map and their direction. We developed more than just a vendor-customer relationship. It was more of a partnership. We felt we had a good relationship and that we could trust NetApp, and that the solution would work. It was really, in the end, the technology, the price, and the people.

I would definitely recommend FlexPod. The first thing I would say is just the simplicity and the standardization that you can put in place. You can do more with less. This packaged solution already works, so you don't have to figure it out and be your own integrator. This is the way to go.

It has simplified our server farm. We were able to consolidate down to one rack from the three or four server racks we had before. We were running a lot of SCADA servers, which is a supervisory control and data acquisition system for power systems. We also run a lot with OSIsoft's PI solution.

It definitely gave us a more robust system than our original, old, individual servers. It also simplified management, both on the network side and on the server side. It saved us a lot of time. It probably cut our management time of server-network troubleshooting, or just normal management, by 40%.

I can't think of any improvements, because we're so specialized in our environment. I think maybe going to a full solid state would be beneficial. I don't know how beneficial it would be for us in the power industry, because a lot of our equipment in the field is maybe 20-30 years old.

We're interfacing with a lot of older devices. We're using the Fabric Interconnect back to our Nexus chassis, so I don't know if we can go up to 40GB. It's probably just having more speed, but we're limited by our connections out to the field anyway. Speed would be the area where we would like to see room for improvement.

It's been very stable. We've had one or two issues with a spinning disk, but there was no impact to the network as a whole.

Scalability has also been great. We have been able to spin up new virtual machines as needed. We haven't run into any bottlenecks.

We have used the technical support. I know my server-side technical lead has done it more than I have. I haven’t heard him complaining. I think he's been very impressed and the responsiveness has been very good.

We needed to migrate away from our older servers. When we did the cost analysis through the FlexPod, and the cost of replacing each individual server, it just made more financial sense going with FlexPod in the long term. Previously to this solution, we were using individual Dell and HP servers. It was kind of a mishmash.

I was involved in the initial setup. I was the network engineer at the time. That went very smoothly. The most surprising thing, was when I connected Cisco Prime and I had it search for a new Cisco device, it pulled in that app, the UCS part, the fabric, and the connects, automatically.

We had looked at the EMC VNX series at the time. And that point, I wasn't too involved. I only got pulled in when it came to interfacing it with the network. They chose FlexPod over EMC, due to the Cisco commonality to it. That was one of the major reasons why we went with the FlexPod. We knew Cisco, and we worked with Cisco already. I had some experience at a previous job with the VNX, and that was a very good solution as well. But, for our environment, we were trying to standardize on Cisco, and that was a big selling point.

Go for the solution with the Cisco UCS. It definitely will cut your management time down, and it's a very reliable solution.

The most valuable feature are probably the inter-app ability that it offers; knowing that everything is compatible; and the validated designs that we get with that.

Ease of set up and administration; knowing everything that we have is going to be working optimally. Getting that kind of support, too, when we call in. We can open up a FlexPod case if we have an issue and then we have vendor support across everything that's in our virtual environment.

It might be improved with some refinements to tools, such as the virtual storage console and similar items. We've had a few issues with that. The same thing applies, as far as the Cisco side; the UCS manager is kind of bulky and slow; a Java-based kind of thing. Maybe they could just refine the tools that we use to manage it.

It's really good, it's worked well, but we've had a few issues with various parts of the hardware, with our fabric interconnects from Cisco. We actually had to replace two of them because of some sort of corruption that was on them. We did an upgrade on it. Apparently, the specific version we upgraded from to the specific version that we upgraded to, there was a known bug that would cause corruption on our partitions on there. We had to replace those like three times because of issues we had. That was a big pain point, but besides small things like that, it's been pretty rock solid. That would be why my rating is not higher than it is.

I think it was just one of those things that's just so under the radar that it took them a while to even dig up that it was an issue. I referred to it as a known issue, not being that it happens a lot but known that there was some documentation that had pertained to it. It was one of those things, tough to catch until afterwards; already done.

It's pretty stable; as good as anything else that I've used.

Scalability is good, I guess. I'm not sure I can comment too much on that because we haven't grown our environment too much since we set it up.

Technical support has been pretty good.

It was already implemented when I started at my company, and then I just setup another new environment after I had gotten there.

I was involved in setting up one of our FlexPods. It was pretty straightforward. The most complex part was probably the fiber channel setup. If I would do it again, maybe I would look into more of an NFS-type setup; make that a little bit easier. Otherwise, you had the FlexPod, and as far as from the Cisco side and everything, it was pretty straightforward.

We were just kind of sticking with it for now, because of the validated design; knowing that there are lots of other users that are using the same product; the tried and true results. Our environment requires having a very stable environment. Otherwise, our company loses a lot of money. We wanted to get into something that was well reviewed and know that lots of other people are working with it.

Give it a look. See if it fits your environment. That's kind of it, for anything you purchase, because it's got to fit your environment; it works for us. It works for what we're trying to do.

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.