FlexPod XCS Reviews

Valuable features include the ease of use. The training was pretty good for our junior Marines.

The implementation was relatively easy and the OS supports resiliency.

Right now, we have our Enterprise Services on it, Sharepoint, our print server, and our VDI construct.

We also have some in-house, homegrown applications, and a whole bunch of admin servers and information insurance servers.

With the FlexPod solution we've been able to employ VDI, the first in the Marine Corps. It seems to be working very well.

We have our whole staff, from a three star executive down to the lowest person on it, and now we're extending those services across the United States. Our whole team supporting the whole FlexPod is eight people. That is relatively small in my eyes.

I don't think we've embraced the current solution fully, so we're I think two OSs behind right now.

I probably don't have an answer for that yet until we start getting the new solutions, the new OSs out.

I think they're going in the right direction. They have a virtual OS, they have different ways that we could maybe embrace different storage, but they're still maintaining the front-end. They are going forward with it and we just have to start looking at it with a little more detail.

Due to the FlexPod, there were no scalability issues. Due to our human error, I would say there were issues. But in terms of the equipment, it is built-in. As long as we're configured correctly, it has built-in fail over. It is highly available at all times.

We currently have eight servers, and we just got another FlexPod with additional servers so we can scale up to another 11. We're looking at establishing a co-op that will allow us to have an off-site presence. We are working on that now, but it is scalable. We just haven't employed it fully yet.

In terms of technical support, we have it from NetApp and Cisco. We called external people in. FCN came on site.

NetApp is always supporting us for technical support services. They have great quality. NetApp even provided support for networking stuff for us, so they were great. We’ve been happy.

I was involved in the initial setup. For the second one setup, for the one we have now, it was pretty easy. We tied into some of the existing hardware, i.e., the Nexus. Most of it was pretty easy. It had a slightly different OS, but it was relatively straightforward.

We looked at a lot of different vendors. We were just happy with the vendors that were in the original FlexPod.

The support was there and it actually serviced us perfectly. We looked at Dell. Dell's always has a solution there. They always want to try to get where we are.

The biggest competitor, looking at their solution, is the EMC solution set.

We decided to stay with NetApp because, of the disc. We like how it tracks the disc and we can move the disc around.

We have to pull out our discs regularly for accountability of our drives. NetApp allows us to do that a little easier for maintenance cycles.

We can actually put it back in with very negligible downtime. We like the service that we get and the name recognition. We're just used to NetApp.

Identify your requirements, make sure you know what they are, and don't fall short in doing so. If you do, that may drive you to a different solution. It's not all about cost. Rather, it is the value that it brings to you.

We redid our data center, which involved taking out the 6509 and some other things. We bought the complete solution and it went in relatively easy. We were up and running very quickly. We've had it for about six years now and had very little problems with it. We've just been building upon it over the years. We're a financial institution, so we run our core web servers, all of our applications for all our different departments, data warehouse, and lots of SQL servers. You name it; we have probably run it.

I would like to be able to get everything in at one time. I like the ability to spin it up and have it working relatively quickly. It's a time saver, and there is nothing missing, because everything came in at one time. There was no "this is missing" and "that is missing".

I was looking at the SF, because we were looking at doing some of the SolidFire stuff. Now, with FlexPod, I know we're at the point where it's about time for us to upgrade, so we are looking into that. NetApp is solid.

On the storage side of things, of course, it can always be a little simpler, but that's why we were looking at SolidFire, just to take it a little bit more out of needing a storage engineer to be able to do anything. We would like to just make things a little bit easier for our administrators.

We've had no issues with stability. I know on the Nexus and some other things out there, we look at the time and sometimes it's been up for three or four years, in which time it hasn't been rebooted. There is very little downtime.

We've really just scaled up the storage aspect of it. Each year, we add more storage.

Their tech support is great. Whenever we have a drive go out, the next morning it's already downstairs. We put it in and send the old one back. The can help with all the features, and that just make it easy for us. It's good.

We've just been adding upon this solution year after year. We started looking at some of the hyper-converged stuff, such as Nutanix and Cisco HyperFlex. Then, I started looking at the SolidFire stuff as well. We decided to stay with NetApp because we've already been using it. It's been successful, so it takes a lot to want to move to something else.

If they were going to upgrade their storage, I would tell them NetApp has been really solid for us. I can't think of any reason not to use it. That's a good thing with IT people, because usually if something's bad, we're ready to tell you.

The two big draws for us are the form factor and the converged infrastructure. We'd been using Dell blade centers and HPE blade centers before that. The density and the full integration between NetApp and the compute side, we really enjoyed.

The time to deployment is definitely a lot faster. It enabled us to replace really antiquated equipment. That was the big thing for us. Going with the converged infrastructure, as opposed to the non-converged that we were using before, really enables us to spin up the storage and the network side that much quicker.

Just continuing to improve upon speed would be my biggest area with room for improvement, the 10-gig backbone. I'd like to see that increase eventually.

We have been using it for two years all over the place. We haven't had one UCS or NetApp hardware problem on any of the FlexPods the whole time.

The stability has been top notch. We haven't had any outages at all.

It is absolutely scalable. We haven't scaled yet because we bought very large, but I'm sure it's going to be easy when we do it.

We used NetApp support for one of the problems we were having, and we solved it relatively quickly. I'm a big fan of NetApp support.

We previously used Dell blade centers and HPE blade centers.

We had vendors do it. I was kind of there peripherally with my team, but I was not overly involved.

The process was great. Our vendors really knew what they were doing, so even though it was our first FlexPod, they helped us power right through it.

We evaluated HPE, Dell, and FlexPods all at the same time. We went with the FlexPods. We thought that the price and converged infrastructure offering was more powerful than those offerings from HPE and Dell.

I don't remember what the HPE one was, but the Dell was like an EqualLogic SAN. The Dell just wasn't impressive in terms of features and management more than performance. We were a NetApp shop historically. This enabled us to get the converged infrastructure with NetApp as the back end. This was probably the most compelling reason for us.

Don't design it yourself. Use the certified designs, especially for FlexPod. The one time we went with our own design, we ended up going back and reengineering it so we could put in a certified design later on.

We like that the FlexPod is dense; it offers a lot of power in a small package. Specifically, with the Cisco UCS, we like that the hardware and end software is disjointed, so we can apply service profiles and our VMware environment is a little more dynamic that way.

It's brought management into a manageable situation. We came from a data center full of Dell servers and it was getting out of hand. Cisco UCS and NetApp together in one package makes it much easier to manage. Also, as we roll out new sites, it's a very simple build that we know exactly what we need every time.

I'd like to see more modularization with NetApp's management and performance monitoring. I know NetApp has a product called OnCommand Insight that covers everything but we don't necessarily need all those features. That’s made it hard for us to justify the purchase there. So, I’d like to see more modularization of the management and monitoring tools.

For instance, if we could have Insight run management and monitoring for the UCS and NetApp at the same time, that would be great. At the same time, we might not need all of its features; maybe, a broader scope of products with more modularization of features and use cases. What I’m thinking is being able to pick and choose the features, or have a watered-down version of it. I'm reaching for that. It's already pretty good.

We've had no stability problems with FlexPod; no problems with Cisco UCS or the NetApp side at all. The auto support's great. For both, we get notifications and the parts are already on the way before we can even consider calling in an RMA. We're really happy with that.

Of course, with NetApp, you can add expansion shelves. NetApp's very expandable, easily expanded. With the UCS, we can add blades, we can add chassis. We have 18 UCS domains, I think, right now, all with NetApp storage backing it, whether it be E series or FAS; we have both.

We have not used technical support for FlexPod in a long time because, as I’ve mentioned, we've had good experience deploying FlexPod as a whole solution. We haven't had any problems deploying these. For actual day-to-day support, auto support takes care of pretty much everything. Very, very once in a while, we have an issue that we actually have to call in support, but most of the time it's hand off.

When we do call in for support, the Cisco side of it is fairly poor until you get past tier 1. In that situation, we have support and they're supposed to call us back, but a lot of times we don't get call backs. The TAC location that we can call to changes fairly frequently, so we've had some issues there. The NetApp side of things has been flawless, though.

I wasn't involved in the decision process to invest in a FlexPod. They decided on that before I joined the team. I know they evaluated Dell and IBM, and found that FlexPod was the clear choice.

One of the most important criteria for me in selecting a vendor is support; how quick they respond for RMAs and cases is a big one. I like to see how the sausage is made, exactly what the products do and how they do what they do. I like to evaluate on a very, very technical level before we make any decisions.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I've been involved in setting up 10-12 of the 18 FlexPods that we have. Setting them up is very, very easy. There are validated design documents out there; it's very well documented. We've found that there is really no ambiguity at all in the setup and configuration; deployment.

The single line of support is valuable.

It's a validated design, so there's not a lot of questioning to it. Storage and server compute comes in and it's ready to go. When we needed the storage and compute to run our apps, the FlexPod seemed like the right choice because it was a validated design and setup. There wasn't any question to the config. It came in a rack; plug it in, ready to go.

The biggest thing is, it just gave us a standardized platform for our virtualization, so it was consistent across the board. Storage was NetApp, compute was UCS and we had VMware on top of that, and it was just plug and play. Everyone knew how that worked.

I'd say the biggest area with room for improvement would be some enhancements to the management tools, but from what we saw at a recent NetApp conference, that's coming. I think NetApp's already heard the change and I think that's what's coming. For us, it would've been just some of the management tool changes they've shown us that that's in the works or already coming out with 9.1.

Other than that, I don't have anything else from our use cases. We just refreshed our FlexPods with AFF-based FlexPods. That was pretty much all you could've asked for really.

Stability is great; we haven’t had any issues.

Scalability is great; we haven’t had any issues.

We have not needed to use technical support.

The existing solution was a decade old; we had to invest in a new solution.

Initial setup was straightforward; it took a day.

We've got a good team I guess and some good PS partners. We sat down, we went through the design so we knew what we were getting. The equipment showed up, they implemented it and because it's a validated design and everything's already there, it's just, power it up and go. Then we just move our workload on to it and off we went. We had no issues.

The pricing was competitive against what else was out there. We were already a NetApp shop, so it made it more of a sell for us because we already had the knowledge in-house for NetApp and ONTAP. Going to the FlexPod was easy in that sense.

The only other one we looked at was EMC. We weren't really thrilled with what they had to offer.

In general, when I’m looking for a vendor, pre- and post-sale support is important: the actual tech support that they provide; the ONTAP support guys, from once it's installed; implementation resource support from the vendor. When it comes to the pre-sales and the design and then the concepts, we've always found that NetApp’s engineers and SCs are always there. They walk us through everything. They validate it all. We get a lot of support out of them and that's a big requirement for us.

For us, the big incentive would be the support that you get out of NetApp and the partners that we have in our town. There are a lot of strong NetApp FlexPod people. Thereare a lot of FlexPods out where we are. If you're looking for a solution that you know is going to work and that you're going to get some solid support and backing from the vendor throughout your process from start to finish, it's going to be the NetApp guys.

I’ve given it a perfect rating based on our experiences. We've rolled out multiple racks of FlexPod and we've never had an issue. We've got two data centers full of it and we've not actually had to call NetApp support. We've never contacted support even when we had a couple of drive failures. They're proactive on that, so the drive shows up and gets swapped out. We never actually opened a ticket for anything other than those two automated ones.

The most valuable feature is that it's an end-to-end solution for which we have a single support structure. We can tag it in the event we have something that crosses between silos.

We like that we've got the validated design that we can use quickly to start it. We have something that we know that will work. We also like the fact that the whole end-to-end design has been tested. And we know that if we have a problem, we're in good company possibly. That's a big help for us.

The benefits to my organization are faster time for deployment, faster time to problem resolution; a stable and reliable environment.

I think it still seems that there is isn’t end-to-end automation. I can't say, "I want to build a host," and say, "Provision the blade. Provision the storage. Provision the SAN." All those things in one swipe would be nice. I think that's what everyone wants: push the button, make it work. The big thing is that we'd like to be able to have it provisioned end to end. The biggest weakness is on the SAN side and the fiber channel side is a mess. It isn't very clear at times. That part is the most complex. If we can avoid it, we don't do it.

It's been a very stable environment for us, absolutely. We've only had very few instances and each of those have been resolved very quickly. It's been a fantastic change for us.

It just works, scalability-wise. We've been able to continue to grow the environment. We've tripled in size since initial deployment. We've not really changed the overall structure of the deployment. Scaling up was very easy.

Technical support has been very good. We haven't had to use it much, which is good too. We've had once incident where we had to really get all three legs involved – the compute, the storage and the network side involved – and it worked well. It was a very good experience to see from end to end. The problem looked like it was storage, but could've been on the SAN side. We worked through that and we also had to go back through the host. We had all three parties involved. They worked well together.

Initial setup was very easy. We looked at the validated design. We tweaked it a little bit to fit our environment specifically. We deployed from there. It was a day or so at best, more because we have our own little processes we have to go through.

ROI is difficult to gauge because things have changed so much in the time since we started. We have moved from a virtual environment of roughly 30, 40, 50 percent to 70, 90 percent now. I want to cut it.

We've been using HP for a long time.

For storage, we were using EMC before. We had been using their platform for a number of years. We were in for a forklift upgrade. The next upgrade would've been a complete forklift upgrade. We evaluated Hitachi, NetApp, and EMC. We talked with Dell as well, but we really narrowed it down to Hitachi, EMC, or NetApp. With EMC, because it was a forklift upgrade, we were really upset that it wasn't something that we could just add on to what we had or change out the parts. We had a major conversion, so that put them at a disadvantage right away. In talking with NetApp, the big thing for us was getting rid of the forklift upgrade; going to a system where we could evolve from year to year to year. We're three or four years in on this now; so far that's been the case. We have done controller replacements and upgrades and everything else, without serious service interruptions, so that's been a big deal for us.

You need a partner that you can trust and a partner you can actually move forward with. You need to understand what the full lifecycle of the product will be. You need to understand where you're going to go next. That was the big thing for us. When we changed, it was a major change. It was a lot of downtime, a lot of frustration for a lot of people. That's why something like NetApp, where I know that I have the ability to take out the controller, grab a new controller with cluster data ONTAP; you've got the scale out ability as well. That's been really great for us as well. As I’ve mentioned, we've tripled the amount of storage, we've tripled the amount of compute, added additional controllers, with little interruption to users. That's huge.

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.

The fact that it’s a validated design, that’s the most valuable feature, plus it has a single point of contact for support.

It’s the single point of support, so you don’t get handed off. If you have a problem with a piece of it, you don’t get one of the vendors saying “it's their problem.”

I really don’t have anything. It's what we use, we have four in our main site, and two in our disaster recovery site.

It's hyper stable.

It’s as scalable as you want to make it. We have not had an issue yet where we couldn’t grow to scale.

It’s top notch because of that single point of contact. Our provider will escalate the call for us.

Initial setup is complex as it’s a complex solution, but it’s a validated design so it all comes ready to assemble.

We bring in support to set up, so we used a vendor team to help deploy.

I’d advise them to get one that’s bigger than you need obviously, the nature of the sheer growth that the industry is seeing is logarithmic not linear.