FlexPod XCS Reviews

Our primary use case is to integrate the compute, networking and storage in our data center.

FlexPod simplifies our deployments and the automation. It enables us to handle mission-critical workloads and applications.

The best feature of the product is not exactly a feature. It is the ease of deployment and use.

As a solution, it isn't really very innovative. It could have better support for portals.

The solution is very stable. Any outage can be brought back up quickly.

The solution is easily scaled. It is possible to integrate new capabilities and technologies which we have successfully done with no issues. It's a valid, viable model.

Customer service is above average.

The product was adopted as a solution before I came to the company. 

The installation was straightforward.

We used a consultant for the implementation. That was Bedrock and they are okay at what they do.

The reduction in data center costs is the obvious return on investment.

The solution has reduced data center operating costs by about five percent.

Other options were considered. That included IBM and HP solutions.

The product is an eight out of ten. It's stable and we've had no issues. It is definitely worth considering as a solution depending on your particular needs.

We sell FlexPod. We have different versions of the software people like. Because we are the main seller of the product, we have quite a few customers.

In the old days, when VMware was not so acceptable in large enterprises, the company offered customers pre-use coupons to replace their machines. 

For many large customers, they may or may not trust FlexPod in a sophisticated ecosystem. They still rely on the hardware to provide stability for large enterprises.

The best feature of FlexPod is the set scope array. It is produced by set options on the DHCP server using the Cisco UCS Manager with VMware.

FlexPod is a very mature product. It's a CI product with converged Netapp FAS storage and Stateless UCS compute for modern-day infrastructure. In terms of stability, FlexPod is the best in the industry. Installation with FlexPod is a bit complex, but it can be upgraded easily. I think Flexpod is phasing out, but it is still the right solution.

Installation with FlexPod is a bit complex, but it can be upgraded easily. I think Flexpod is phasing out, but it is still the right solution.

The stability of FlexPod is best in the industry (at least in Hong Kong).

Scalability is quite good. You can simply use APT at the surface. There are no required dependencies. 

Usually, FlexPod is good enough in terms of Cisco's product line support.

We have been using FlexPod here for about 10 years.

For the initial setup, you have to follow the guide, step-by-step and version-specific for the installation. If you follow the guide step-by-step it is fairly simple, not that complex. 

We deploy for customers firsthand, usually within one week. Our last deployment of FlexPod took one to two months. It depends on the requirements.

For FlexPod, it is always trustworthy. I had previously never seen flex machines from other brands or associated with other products.

FlexPod is a large investment and they are good enough to support it. That is where we fully recognize long-term gains in ROI.

The FlexPod licensing can adjust to your purse, i.e. there are different levels available for businesses of all sizes.

If you want to have stability, then FlexPod is the easy way to go. Newer products may not be rated highly enough for large enterprise corporations to procure, i.e. it depends largely on the internal regulations in use for data center management.

I would rate FlexPod with a 9/10 because this software successfully carried out its mission.

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.

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.

The consistent delivery that we receive from the products. We deliver it to different customers, and we know it will be a consistent end-to-end solution as well. So, this helps us from a delivery side of things.

According to the product managers, there are some new products coming which will address some of our concerns around portability and compliance.

With the design guides that we go through, it has obviously been vetted and validated. It is very stable in our eyes.

Generally, our deployments are on the smaller side. We have been able to leverage the FlexPod express side for smaller deployments. I haven't hit any larger scale ones, but from everything that I have read, it would scale relevantly.

With the support side, we deal directly with Cisco, not directly with NetApp. We do have support from all of the vendors, even if it is or isn't a FlexPod solution. The support that we get from NetApp is second to none.

I wouldn't say it is more complex. It is different, because there are a lot more components than if you were just going to buy a traditional compute only or storage only solution. So, there is an added complexity given the size of the deployment and the number of components. However, it is not difficult from a deployment perspective by any stretch. If you were deploying those components individually, it would be the same amount of effort.

I would rate it close to a nine or 10, because of what the product looks like, the validated designs which are out there, and the support behind it. It's a great product. That is why we sell it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

A combination of everything from best of breed, support, and if other customers who have used it have had good experiences with it.

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.

We use FlexPod to simplify support, to accelerate troubleshooting by using the FlexPod in integrating. Whether it's a VMware or a UCS Cisco problem, or a Nexus problem, it makes support a lot simpler.

It keeps us on track. You have to stay FlexPod-certified, you have to really stay on track with your updates, but the troubleshooting and support aspects are really where it's the biggest bang for the buck.

Unified support. Being able to get a vendor from one company or another company on the line without having to go back through the call queue.

It's been very stable. I have no issues with it.

It scales fine, all three components are able to scale. If I need to throw on another chassis, I throw on another chassis. If I need more storage, I expand my NetApp portion of it. It's been easy.

Although it's really hard to automatically get the correct person the first time, what you can do is get someone from one stack, say VMware, and if they say, "Hey, it's not a VMware problem, it's a networking problem," they can loop in the Cisco person, give them all the information, and we can troubleshoot the Cisco or the networking portion of it. They might say, "Hey, you know what, it's storage latency. Let's loop in the NetApp partner." They can all talk in the backend and compare logs, versus me having to open three tickets and wait.

It allows me to loop in support from three different companies and not have to open a ticket with each company, and then have them say, "Send me the logs." Then have them say a couple hours later, "Well, we looked at the logs. It's not us. Go to the next guy." And then you go to the next guy and the next guy says, "Well, send me the logs, describe the problem." He takes a couple of hours, looks at the logs and says, "Hey, it's not us, it's the other guy."

We used physical servers, different storage, older legacy equipment.

The most important criteria when selecting with a vendor are 

• reliability
• technical expertise
• speed in response time.

The setup was pretty straightforward. We obviously engaged a reseller to help us with it. But putting the different components together is pretty straightforward.

We didn't evaluate others. We decided to go with NetApp and that drove the decision every place else. We went with the Cisco UCS chassis because that fit our solution.

Do your research. It's good for our business case but maybe it doesn't fit your particular business needs, or maybe there's a better solution out there. In our circumstance, it fit our needs and has performed as advertised.

My favorite part is the storage side, allocating the storage, it's very easy. The WWNs, you got the virtual WWNs. It's a little different from physical servers. I like that it's pretty easy to provision storage.

From a user perspective, they have no issues.

As far as my role and what I do (my duties), it's easy. They are able to see their storage immediately, they don't have any problems with connectivity issues like you'll see on a physical server compared to a blade implementation.

Usability: It's a little bit convoluted. It'd be nice if they had it pretty straightforward. If it was a straightforward out-of-the-box configuration and could operate out of the box, that would be nice.

Ease to work with.

It's been six months, since it was implemented. Currently, we provide the back-end storage to the FlexPod.

So far, very stable. So far, it is okay.

Scalability is pretty good. You can extend it out, extend out storage as well your guest systems. Yes, it is not a problem.

I have not used technical support for either FlexPod or Cisco.

I was involved in the initial setup for the storage piece and it was complex. As far as the design, FlexPod is a complex piece of equipment. You just can't read a book and be ready to get it operational. You have to go through professional services that have some experience with it.

Do a little research, find out if the business case applies to them, how they could leverage it, and if it's something they could leverage in their environment. Get a PoC, that's another thing. Definitely get a POC for the product to determine if it's good for them.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Stability, after the product is implemented into an environment.
• Scalability
• Responsiveness to certain type of issues.