FlexPod XCS Reviews

• It is a converged platform.

• It is a support model. I can call directly into NetApp and our customers can call directly into NetApp. And when they're troubleshooting an issue, whether it's on virtualization, their compute, the storage side, they have that one level of support. This is big thing for our customers.
• The simplicity of the model itself.
• The overall management aspect of it.
• Being able to manage using tools like OCI from NetApp.
• Being able to manage the entire pod, create things, provisioning, automation, and orchestration. Those are built in to converged stack. That's a big help for our customers.

One of the biggest benefits is the workloads that it can manage. It's not tied to a specific workload and is very diversified. You can do backups on it, you can do production data, you can run virtuals, you can run bare metal, and it will support almost every workload that you can have.

For me, it's the integration with things that are not part of an ONTAP solution. It is simple management platform that I can manage my NetApp from an ONTAP perspective to the E-Series, to a StorageGRID, to a SolidFire environment in one management layout. That would be the one thing I would want the ability to do.

Deployment is a whole lot better now than it was five years ago. It's very simple. We can stand up a standard FlexPod usually in a matter of a half a day. That involves racking, stacking, and starting the configuration of the aggregates, or the Cisco platform, that goes with it.

Stability is built on the redundancy of the platform itself. So you have redundancy throughout the system. The storage platforms have redundant controllers. Customers are very very comfortable with a model, knowing that it is going to be up 24/7/365.

In terms of scalability we can scale to a cluster in CDOT, but we had issues. The cluster CDOT and the evolution of that platform ensures that we had the right mixing rules, because there challenges around that piece of it. So scalability is a big selling point for our customers, and knowing that it's not "rip and replace" is a big thing.

Technical support, from a NetApp perspective, is a model of having an eco-system of Cisco,NetApp, and VMware, or 1800 number that I could call into. In our case, we actually have a network operation center. We place first call for our customers, and then we call directly into a service line. It makes our life much easier and it streamlines the process just for customers.

We get the Level-3 guys and we've had a great relationship with NetApp, and that really helps as well. I can't speak for new partners, who are just coming on, but for us, it's been fantastic.

I was involved in the initial setup. I do all the architecting, I do the set up and configurations for some of our customers. In my previous company, we sold 194 FlexPods to the Department of Veterans Affairs. We architected that entire solution and we helped with the deployment process. We've been very involved in that.

Really in a converged stack, not a hyper-converged, because NetApp doesn't have hyper-converged, now with SolidFire. From a converged stack on a FlexPod, we do work with VCE on the Vblock aspect. We work with HPE on their platform as well. Those are usually the three that we have been competing against. The advantages of NetApp over competitors is honestly the price. There are aspects of VCE and Vblock that have a better overall management stack, than what we have on the FlexPod side. But from the perspective of cost, we always win with NetApp on pricing.

So the first thing is you have to know your workload. A lot of customers go in, and what they do is they push on infrastructure without understanding the applications. So to any customer, I always tell them, you have to do an assessment of the application, understand the characteristics of the application. That will drive the solution, whether it's all-flash, whether it's a hybrid model, or whether it's just spinning disc. So until we know the application stack, I don't even talk infrastructure.

I like the consolidation in one rack. You have everything coming together, you just assemble it, and you're ready to go. You don't have to purchase different pieces of the hardware to have one solution. This is one of the best features.

We use it mainly for storage. We are just at the beginning, just deployed one in Asia-Pacific. So far, everything works fine and I assume that the colleagues from the datacenter will consider it for other regions, if everything goes well.

Previously, we used NetApp. The big advantage is that the connectivity is in one rack. As I mentioned before, everything is still segmented, but it comes with everything in one box. It is like buying a computer and everything is there already. You just have to turn it on.

The price is something that we are still working on. At some point, it's a bit more expensive than the solution that we had before, as far as I know.

We have no stability problems so far. I haven't heard about any major issues.

Scalability depends on the result that we will have from the one that we already purchased. I think the future will tell if we will scale well or not. I will definitely have this in mind as we move forward.

I didn’t use technical support for FlexPod, but only for NetApp. I know that we are using NetApp support. This is the case for the installation phase or forNetApp itself. I cannot comment on FlexPod support. I assume it was good. I can tell on you, through the eyes of my colleagues from the network part, that everything is fine. My colleagues from the datacenter have used support and they have had no complaints so far.

This is a tricky question. I don't think there was one major reason. It was a combination of the stability of NetApp, the integration with our environment, and that everything comes in one box.

I was involved in the initial setup from the network side of FlexPod and NetApp. I was not involved in the configuration of NetApp itself. In terms of the network side, as long all the information is provided completely, which has happened so far, I have not had any problem setting it up on our network infrastructure.

I would definitely recommend NetApp. Based on our results with NetApp, the stability, and what I know from my datacenter colleagues, it's a really reliable company.

I love the ability to migrate my profiles if I have a problem with one. It's worked out great for us: system dies, have it back up on 20 minutes, no problem. Unfortunately, that has happened once.

It just gave us everything in one box. There isn’t any, run over here and configure this, run over here and configure this; it's all in one, nice, neat little rack. It's just one interface, which is always nice.

I would love to see the single interface for managing everything end to end. That would be ideal.

Also, simply the interface a little bit. There are a lot of places to go to get things configured and it's easy to get lost: Did I remember to do this piece over here before I did this piece? Then there's this piece on the other side. There are just a lot of moving parts that I think could be simplified, or wizard-driven; to say, you have all of these together.

Stability and scalability are fantastic. I’ve never had any issues with stability or scalability.

I've had lots of issues with firmware upgrades. I'm locked on an unsupported firmware because I have three production servers that, if I upgrade the firmware on them, I lose those servers. The solution from Microsoft, NetApp, and Cisco is to rebuild those servers on updated firmware. That's not an option.

I’m locked where I’m at. I can't go to 2016. I just barely squeaked into 2012 R2, I'm locked where I'm at now until we refresh our SQL environment. Then, it's however fast I can get my dev team to get off that old SQL environment. The last SQL refresh took me 10 years. We had the new environment in there but they say something like, "Well, we’ve got this legacy app, we can't move it just yet."

To get a perfect rating, they would need to fix these issues, without rebuilding my environment.

Generally, technical support is good. When you call in, as long as you give them a clear issue, you're going to get a good answer. Don't call in and just say it's broken.

We needed faster networking. We use it primarily for our virtual servers, for migrations. To get 10 Gig into our data center, we had to run cables all the way across the building to our networking area. The more cables you're running, that pipe's only so big. We ran a couple of cables to the FlexPod, plugged it in, and all of a sudden, I've got 40 Gig to move data back and forth in the rack. I don't ever have to leave it, so that was our primary reason for bringing it in.

It’s pricey, but provides a high return on investment.

It was a little spendy, but you get what you pay for, though. It's rock solid, other than my firmware issue. Other than that, I plugged it in, and other than checking on it once a month to make sure that there are no alerts, I leave it alone. That's fantastic.

We did not look at any other vendors; we are a Cisco/NetApp/Microsoft shop. It was clear-cut for us.

In general, when we do look for a vendor, the important criteria are reputation, stability and price, obviously. Also, how easily can I talk to them? We've had vendors come in and they've completely bombed on their initial interviews. It's like, "Sorry, guys. You had that one shot to make that first impression and you did it poorly."

Check the interop matrix and check it carefully. Make sure that everything's going to work across the line.

Another thing: Once I've got my FlexPod in place and NetApp knows I've got a NetApp 8040 – they know I have these models – have it pull the interop matrix for me. You know all my parts. Why do I have to hunt it down?

For other customers: Just make sure you do your homework on it. Make sure it's actually going to give you what you need and have fun with it.

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.

We run our VDI system on FlexPod, so I like the fact that it's easy to make changes to it. It was really easy to install, setup and get users involved. The user experience is really cool because you can bring up desktops on Apple, Windows and Linux systems. It really solved a lot of problems.

It solved a big problem for us; it solved a big user contention issue that we had with file stores and user data all over the place. Now, it's all centralized.

The only thing that comes to mind is more hooks in the Citrix side for working with Citrix more interactively. Speaking from the storage side, it is very straight forward and it's just like allocating storage for any other device in your environment, which is really cool.

Improving integration between the different interfaces would possibly help us. The thing about FlexPod is that you don't have to do any architecture to it; it solves the problem. You plug it in, and it solves the problem for you. It's hard to comment on where to take it to the next level. If we’re going to take it to the next level, being an engineer, I'd redesign the whole thing. :)

It's really good; it's very good the way it is. It's a great solution to an existing problem.

It’s been stable; it's been great. We've got great up time with the NetApp storage. The UCS servers are rock solid.

We have not had any scalability issues yet. We're probably six, seven or eight months into it, and we don't really have an expansion plan for it at this point.

I have not used technical support for this product in particular.

The previous solution was just a standard desktop Windows laptops and desktops platform and we just moved our users to FlexPod. We had user, data and file shares all over the place; now they're in a central location. The user experience for desktops was haphazard and they were getting a lot of different calls to the help desk on different issues with individual work stations. Now, if there's a problem, it's going to be a generic problem for everyone but it's a lot easier to troubleshoot a desktop issue or roll out another application for a user. It's very easy to add an application. I think it's a great productivity and time-saving tool.

From the outside, initial setup looked very, very complex but with FlexPod and everything being together in one unit, it actually makes it very easy, very simple to implement. I think that it was a little complex but it went very smoothly in the implementation and installation.

We have a relationship with NetApp and EMC, and it was kind of a pure play to go with NetApp. We have a Cisco relationship, also, and we have some in-house Citrix talent or skill sets, so it was easy to make that choice.

As far as some of the important criteria I look for in a vendor, we've got a relationship with our NetApp vendor. I can only really address the storage side because my interaction is only from the storage side. I usually don't deal with the UCS server side, the VMware side, or the Citrix side. I really can't comment on those but we've got a really good relationship with NetApp itself. They help to drive the purchase and make it easy for us in purchasing.

Work closely with your vendor. From the storage side – I always start with storage – you need to build a team that includes VMware, the storage people, the Citrix guys and someone who knows UCS. Once you have that team in place, your things are going to go very, very smoothly.

We haven't really had to look at expanding it but, I can see that it'll be an interesting experience doing expansion on the storage side, so I think four stars would be accurate for usability and implementation.

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.

Unified management is valuable, and it has a smaller footprint than non-unified solutions.

Leveraging the expertise of NetApp, and getting a lot of third-party support for it. We’ve been able to transition to a hands-on approach, which is good thing. We were thinly staffed, but now we can properly staff to be more hands-on with our system using FlexPod.

Make sure there’s current centralized virtual desktops. I get caught in the upgrade matrix quite a bit, which is an indication that it hasn’t been tested. Need more currency in IMT.

It's solid, but it’s difficult to integrate newer hardware because it's kind of locked down. It can be disruptive sometimes, because it’s something that you don’t want to have to make a lot of changes to. It makes it difficult to consolidate when you're adding stuff on, and wanting to be consistent for software and hardware sets. 3240 limited to four SAN nodes in a cluster was problematic for us.

It's scalable, but it takes someone to make the right decisions in terms of planning and sizing.

It was already in place when I got there. From the inside-out, it can be complex because its biggest problem is that if you stray from centralized virtual desktops, it can be difficult to work with.

Must have a sense of how everything operationally will be going into FlexPod. Must plan scaling up and out. The problem I run into the most is unanticipated growth, so keep track of growth factors and do not overextend FlexPod. It is usually a performance vs. capacity issue.

Our primary use case for FlexPod is for better storage.

The FlexPod solution increased back-end productivity and streamlined our IT admin.

The most valuable features of FlexPod are high availability and scalability.

In the digital future, I would like to see included more code compatibility. The storage should be more mobile. We should be able to move it from place to place.

FlexPod needs more support on ML/AI networks.

FlexPod is very stable.

We're still working on scalability. We have to keep low price versions of the high-end equipment. I would like to see a little more data compression on the solution.

The FlexPod technical support has been fairly good. I cannot complain.

We knew that we needed to invest by talking with consultants.

The initial setup of FlexPod was complex in the way that we had to manage the data.

We did not use a consultant. We do it all by ourselves.

On a scale from 1 to 10, I would rate this product an 8. Consolidation is possible. 

FlexPod doesn't compare to other products. Do many tryouts first. Try to just mimic different environments to get a different view of the platform.