FlexPod XCS Reviews

The most valuable feature is the mirroring and FlexClone capabilities on the storage side and with the Oracle database. It quickly creates a new database and copies the original, but it doesn’t need to disturb the original if you don’t want it to.

Probably decreased working time, as we now have a faster deployment of development and test databases.

We switched to the new NetApp clustered environment and discovered that the monitoring and reporting features are a little behind the older versions.

We have been using NetApp for over 10 years, almost 15 years at this point.

It's been really stable, and I don't think we've had any issue or outages since we've been using it.

Scalability has not been an issue for us in this environment, but in other environments it scales very easily by adding more storage.

Overall, the support from the NetApp side has been very good, and is quick to respond if there are hardware issues, etc. They are usually very good, although they don’t have their own field technicians, and a quick response time as well. This is true on the server side as well, quick response and it shows up in the expected time.

Deployment was not overly complex, it takes time but not overly complex. For our use, and the Oracle database, it’s more complex on the Oracle side of things (E-business suite).

We always speak to other vendors, whether EMC, Oracle for Exadata, those are the main ones.

We went with NetApp in the end because it's established in the environment already, and we just had to upgrade the hardware. It was something we knew worked and would do the job.

Customer references are important and peer reviews are very important. Sometimes we do a test or POC, but that’s hard to do.

We use it for my private cloud. We are providing a service.

FlexPod has helped us reduce our time of deployment because we are really only missing integration with different applications.

It has also allowed us to streamline our IT administration.

The integration is something else.

The core cloud is a good feature. If we had a login that extended from the private cloud to the public cloud that would be the best, but it's up there.

The solution has granular scalability.

I would be interested to see more integration with other applications.

FlexPod is very resilient. So far, it has been stable. Keep in mind we are still deploying it, so the real use case has yet to be seen.

Scalability looks okay because it’s based on the capacity of the device, so I wouldn’t normally assume any scalability issue.

Their technical support has been okay.

The initial setup was straightforward, but the migration has taken some time.

We used a reseller for the integration. 

FlexPod saves us money. There is definitely a return on our investment.

I would rate FlexPod as seven or eight out of ten. It's too early to say anything, but for now, my only concern is the limited integration with applications.

The biggest lesson I learned was that from the automation point of view, this should be saving us time. When you’re doing it for the first time it’s not going to be very easy.

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.

• Ease of use
• Safety
• Total cost of ownership
• Return on investment
• Cutting your sysadmin's time in half
• The single pane of glass: Where you can configure your compute and manage your storage, all from a single pane of glass, and it makes it easier on management.

Also, the 1-800 number to call for support across the multiple parts of the FlexPod. So, FlexPod is basically a joint venture between Cisco, VMware and NetApp. You call the 1-800 number and you get supported throughout the stacks.

Total cost of ownership (TCO) is key. The other things are the sysadmin's time is approximately cut in half: managing servers, building servers, deployment, and automation.

It is uniquely valuable for a company in the financial services industry. It is critical for us to use the latest and greatest in technology to have that edge against competitors in our marketplace.

Add more automation into the Cisco UCS firmware upgrade process to make it more streamlined than it is today.

I have been using FlexPod since 2012.

We have had a few deployments of FlexPod, one for production and one for the disaster recovery (DR) sites, and we have been happy with it so far.

If you do not take the time to learn the technology before deploying it, you are not going to be able to deploy it as smooth and as fast.

It is very stable. We have had it since 2012, and we have not had major issues with it. As long as you know what you do and you schedule your patching, following the processes that you have in place. You will have minor issues with it.

It scales out really well. If you need compute, all you need to do, just add more blades into your chassis. If you run out of chassis, you can just add more chassis, then you can add more blades. Same thing with the storage on the back-end, you can add more storage shelves, whether it is SSD, SAS, or All Flash.

We have definitely used the tech support on multiple occasions, like with firmware upgrades, to get their opinion, and regarding interoperability matrices for the different products. If you upgrade the firmware for the CISCO UCS, you need to ensure the firmware version that you are upgrading to is going to work with your VMware vSphere and with the NetApp ONTAP software OS.

They are knowledgeable and we get through to the right people.

I was involved in the initial setup. It is straightforward if you understand the technology and how it works. If you are new to the technology, you will require some training for your people and your team.

• 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.

That it works. That it does exactly what it says on the tin. That once it's set up, it does exactly what's its supposed to do. There are no "gotchas," there are no "oopsies." Not in this particular use case. There is no hidden BS that has to be satisfied, this, that, or the other. It just does exactly what it's supposed to do.

Up time, cost, predictability.

With the old Dell EqualLogic, EMC, up-time was always an issue. There was always something that created a problem here and there. We have, in four years, not had a single system-down issue. That's hard to beat.

The predictability of our system utilization: I can predict fairly easily when I need to go out and buy new shelves because I can trend it all. I can fairly easily predict where I need to open more aisles. I can fairly easily predict where I need more space. It just works.

The CLI part of it is still evolving enough that commands that you expect to do something become deprecated and you want to take their place and you have to keep up with the code base. In this code base you do this, and in this code base you do this, and in this code base you do that. But for the most part its good and, let's be honest, everything changes.

Automatic tiering would be good to have.

My biggest thing is I would love to see a native SMB or NFS front end to an optic store on the AFF and FAS platforms. Right now you want me to go out and buy a front end for it that creates an optic store on it and gives me the SMB interface. I would love to see that as a native part of the SBM. It doesn't have to be the end all be all; it doesn't have to be this hyper-scale thing but just the fact that I have it, so I can dip my toe in it, and I can get something that kind of works, that would be epic; that is my main thing.

The other big annoyance I have with Net App is the fragmentation of all the software. I have SnapManager, I have this, I have that, and they're all slightly different. They all look slightly different. They all come in different VMs. Some are OBAs, some are installed on Windows, some have weird requirements like, "No, no, no, it has to run on this version of Windows." It would be nice to just have all of that in one giant application and then just turn on and off different features based on license keys. That would make things easier.

About four years.

Great. It's been perfect for four years. You can't beat that.

So far I have not had any issues at all. The only couple of things I would like to see would be something, as I said, like internal tiering where you could automatically set up an aggregate spread across a 10K disc and have the controller automatically tier it. But now we're going all flash anyway so who cares? We've kind of brute forced our way out of the problems.

They're good. They're knowledgeable, absolutely. I have no complaints with the tech support that we have had to deal with.

We switched because EMC and Dell, and EqualLogic sucked and it was driving me nuts and it never worked.

It was a paradigm shift because every stack has its own set of unique ways of doing things and getting used to that and getting into that mindset took a little bit of effort but once you get it, it's clear sailing.

Upgrades are not complex.

We're a law firm. I think this product is valuable for pretty much anybody who has a large amount of data that they need to manage. I don't think that this product is uniquely valuable for a law firm.

I am a very happy customer.

It 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 servers, which are supervisory control and data acquisition systems 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 the server side. It saved us a lot of time. It probably cut our management time into server-network troubleshooting, or just normal management, by 40%.

Right now I can't think of any, 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 are 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 yet. It's probably just added more speed, but we're limited by our connections out to the field anyway.

It's been very stable. We had one or two issues with a spinning disk, but there has been 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.

My server side technical lead worked with technical support more than I did. I think he's been very impressed with how good and responsive they are.

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

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

We had looked at the EMC VNX series. I wasn't too involved in that, I only got pulled in when it came in to interfacing with the network.

We chose Flexpod over EMC because FlexPod had the Cisco commonality to it. That was one of the major reasons we went with the FlexPod. 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.

I'd say, go for the NetApp with the Cisco UCS. It definitely will cut your management time down and it's a very reliable solution.

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?"