FlexPod XCS Reviews

I would say that the interoperability matrix tool (IMT) is the most valuable feature as it helps us define versions and components we use in our configurations.

This allows us to know what versions everything needs to be at, and we have one pane of glass to view that at.

I think a little bit about some of the other models, especially in the hyper-converged space where you add storage and compute at the same time, but on the converged side of things you add each as needed and not both.

Mixed – we’ve had a couple different issues with upgrading. Upgrading one vendor without the other has been difficult, e.g. to upgrade Cisco you need to upgrade NetApp etc.

I would say medium – it’s hard to move between one FlexPod to another, you fill one up its hard to move off of it.

Historically it’s been bad, but recently it got better. Previously, opening a FlexPod case was difficult you had to go from one vendor to another, now its better and they are using FlexPod back channels more, but it was difficult.

I would say setup was complex – most of the people who set up the first FlexPod have left and the upgrades have been modular and there are independent teams with that and that issue goes back to the scalability because were adding storage and compute at different times.

I think it depends on how you are organized. If you have hardware and storage in the same leadership chain its great. I think one of the reasons that we have pain, is that it doesn’t fit our business organization very well because we have two separate managers and therefore, there is stepping on toes.

I would say that the most valuable feature is the single-vendor support model. NetApp and Cisco are partnering in the support so you don’t have the finger pointing.

Also, the fact that the hardware and software is pre-qualified to work together and supported by each vendor is good.

I think that it could be improved in terms of the reporting, but really that is pretty good as well, so I cannot think of anything that can be improved.

We have zero stability problems.

The scalability on paper is great. We know that it's scalable, but we have not scaled since we bought it.

Technical support is excellent.

The setup was complex, but mostly because of our environment. It wasn’t difficult but it was complex.

I would say that it’s a great solution for customers who want to guarantee out-of-the-box compatibility and performance.

We can already see that the most valuable features is that everything is tested and certified to work together.

The package price is also something we like about it.

I don’t think we have enough experience at this point to see the weak points.

We have been using it for three to five months.

We're migrating to it now and so far, compared to HP and our Dell chassis which was an old environment, it has taken care of the performance and reliability issues we were having.

The scalability seems to be a valuable feature to me; it's easy to roll out, as we just order another pod they install it.

I'm only involved with the storage aspect so we work with NetApp, whose service is excellent.

I'm not involved much in setup, but we architected it and we had CDW and engineers help us who did the physical installation.

It all depends on your specific needs and what you're looking for, which depends on your environment.

It is for video solutions. It saves us a lot of money in our environment. My job is to make sure that the government saves money. 

The use case for us is that many users are able to use this when they travel out of the country. With computers right now, all you need to do is log into the website to access the resources, then you can use them in your flexible solution.

Right now, we are trying to deploy on multiple laptops. Using a VDI, which is part of FlexPod solutions, we are able to do this. You can use it on cellphone, iPad, etc.

The flexibility: I used to do the video blog solutions. It is very easy, because with NetApp, a lot of people use NetApp. There is more flexibility to configure with Cisco laser switches.

For the next release, because I know that we are using Pure Storage, what I want to see is the GUI interfaces on this UCS monitor.

The product is robust, stable, and has flexibility. 

It is very scalable.

I would rate technical support as a 10 out of 10. They are good and responsive.

At my previous job, I used to use Vblock, Dell 7000 series (from Dell EMC, Cisco, and BMC).

It was pretty straightforward. I was the main engineer during the initial setup.

• Read the white paper solution online about the product. 
• Engage with the engineers.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Relationship is the key, so they respond better. We may need an onsite engineer to come and do an evaluation for us. 

We have had two FlexPods for five years now. We're currently purchasing a third one. We have never had any problems with them in that time. We are using it for hosting COREmanager and Unity Connection. So far, so good. Its performance is great.

We purchased them when we changed from physical to virtual. We really didn't have a choice but to go virtual. So, I would not be able to tell you how it improved things because it was a different environment entirely. But it definitely streamlines things.

For me, the most valuable feature is the stability. It's one less worry.

The new one that we are purchasing is going to have solid state drives. So, obviously, more speed is always a good thing.

We have had no stability issues at all. We had a power failure in our data center. They went down. As soon as we restored the power they came up and everything was good.

For us, we were looking strictly at three different data centers. So as far as scalability is concerned, we didn't build one on top of another one. We went for stability more than scalability.

It has never gone down. I think we had one drive go down once, and we opened a tech case. They sent us a new drive.

We were using physical servers, Cisco physical servers. We switched because it was mandatory for updating COREmanager to 8.x, it was mandatory to go VMware.

For us, the most important criteria in a vendor is that they need to pick up when we call.

I coordinated the initial setup, but I wasn't necessarily hands-on. But it was pretty straightforward.

We had other vendors, but we had NetApp in the house as part of our storage, we also had Cisco in the house. It made sense to combine those two and go with FlexPod.

In terms of advice, I can only tell you about FlexPod, I don't have any other solution. I would say definitely go for it.

Our primary use case is company back-end servers and services. The performance is great. 

We deployed this for our server environment in our company. Therefore, all the typical systems you would see in a commercial company are what we are running it on. It was not built for a specific use case. It was built instead for using hard servers or network-attached storage. Just putting it all together makes it simple to use.

As a whole, it is inexpensive, and it uses the least amount of parts. You do not need a lot of things to make it work. It ships in a rack, so it is very easy to deploy.

• We call it one-man management; I do not have a whole team. 
• It runs very well lights out. Set it and forget it.

Performance management: NetApp has some tools that you can purchase to do performance management, or you can go with another vendor and buy a product which does the same thing. It would be nice if there was more of these features with the product, not add-ons.

The scalability is awesome. With UCS and NetApp, it is very scalable. You cannot get more scalable than that.

We have used technical support mainly for performing a function, not for repair. They have provided us guidance on how to do this.

Before we went FlexPod, we had hard physical servers with networking. Then depending on the networking and a virtual environment, we had several networking environment stacks which required us to have larger servers with more than one cable, maybe even more than one media type. Now, we have a whole rack full of media-type connectors, even media converters doing the same thing.

With this particular setup, you have one 10 gig or 140 gig cable, and that is all you need. Instead of having eight cables, you only have one. We had a physical server to NetApp storage. With the components that come in FlexPod, it has enabled us to reduce connectivity down to one wire, whereas before, we had eight, 12, or 20 wires going to one server.

For design and initial setup, it was very simple.

We had technical support help us with the implementation.

I have seen value from FlexPod. The connectivity is simple. There is less to break. There is less tinkering or lost time that you do not really notice. Also, we run our capital for three to five years, so we size it for that type of environment.

I have run four FlexPod environments, and they have all been phenomenal. They have all worked until you had to turn them off. That is why I like them.

I can't imagine anybody not doing this today. But if nobody was doing this today, I would definitely push them to do it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Reputability. They have to have a good name. That is the big.
• Speed to deploy and getting the purchasing paperwork correct the first time: These are important things in our environment, because they just add to delays.

• The ease of deployment: You don't have to worry about dealing with all three components from three different vendors.
• The support structure: Now when you can open cases, you call either vendor and tell them it's a FlexPod case, they'll hook up with all the rest of the resources from different domains, if needed. That's the best part.

It's less resource-intensive, given that it comes in a package. You don't have to deal with all the companies yourself.

• The whole packaging
• Deployment
• Support structure

The above all help to increase the productivity by reducing the deployment and configuration time, and also adhere to best practices as well.

Compared with other converged solutions, there are better support systems, but you pay for the premium. But outside the support systems, they know what they're doing, and the resolution time is much better, because I've dealt with the other systems as well.

Maybe in the future, they could include the HCI solution into the mix. Maybe the newer solutions, like the ONTAP Fabric Pool or ONTAP Select, as well down the line could be added. That would be nice.

It's straightforward. It has gotten better. I'm not in touch with the newer deployment methods, but I haven't seen issues, so I think we are good on this.

It would be nice if we can allow config management tools like maybe SaltStack or Puppet. We are comfortable with SaltStack. It would be nice to not only use it for deployment as well as to manage the configs, top to bottom, because that is something we need to have a better handle on, to make sure we are consistent across the board.

It's good. We know that all the different companies, Cisco, NetApp and VMware, they all are pretty stable in their own markets. Therefore, as long as we adhere to the best practices, and make sure we don't oversize or undersize, we should be good.

Scalability is sometimes a challenge for us. The way we are growing, sometimes we don't know what the demand is going to look like. It's hard to expect what demand is going to come by forecasting through purchase, going through the cycle. I feel that there is a scope for improvement here.

Make it more like On Demand. Make FlexPod On Demand, maybe the compute piece or storage piece. Also it would be nice if they could know our datacenter footprint, so they know how much we can grow. That would help minimize the time for scaling, because those were some of the challenges we faced frequency around datacenter space and to figure out where things to plugin.

It's good. Sometimes, we find ourself waiting for the right engineer to be available. It takes time to escalate to the right person. We had these meetings with the support organization a couple of times, and we told them that we'd rather wait for the right engineer than to spend time going over the same stuff and going nowhere.

It was there before I came.

In some aspects, they are pretty good, and in other aspects, they need improvement.

For someone looking at FlexPod and similar solutions: I tell them to go with whatever works for them, as it's organization-specific and resource-specific, because the in-house knowledge-base also weighs in, and it's a big deal because you don't want to spend time working on your learning curve.

If it was just a suggestion, you can make any product work as well, as long as you design it properly, you don't over utilize it, and you make sure you follow up with the vendors and do the recommendations. At the same time, the vendors follow up with us and keep us up-to-date and know our pain points and work towards them. Therefore, I would recommend FlexPod.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Response.
• Make sure the product delivers what they advertise. That's primary, because we don't have enough time to PoC all the different aspects.
• Give more flexibility in terms of purchasing, the roadmap, and involve us when they come out with new products and/or get our feedback.

The ease of use. I like that with all the NetApp products, it's very easy to use. I'm on the storage side of it, but we're still working with the servers and we're using the Cis UCS servers. So there are some tweaks that they're still working on on that side of it.

But the original PoC we did came back with very good numbers and looked like it was going to help a lot of our users locally. And we have remote users that will attach to the FlexPod and do their work from say, Houston, logging into Calgary or other places from outside of Calgary. It centralizes everything into our datacenter and it helps us manage it more easily.

The general manageability of it really is easy and it's taking advantage of all the deduplication, compression. We've got 9.1 P3 in there now so we haven't taken the next step to do compaction or anything like that but I'm sure we're going to go down that road too.

The benefit is the speed, it's the performance. That's what it comes down to is the performance of the solution.

It's the first step of it right now for us. They're still proving some of the server side out from it but we've already pushed out the storage side of it. They're using that storage in their existing, and they are getting better performance, better benefits.

I'm not really sure, to be honest. A lot of what it's doing today is exactly what we need, so I'm focusing on some other things at this point around our database environment and things like that. Everything that I've seen right now from a FlexPod perspective is very good.

I think they can always improve, whether it's dedupe or compression, those algorithms; and flash through better SSDs. I guess faster is not really there with an SSD now, but I think anything that makes it smaller, better cooling, less power, those kinds of things. Help in the datacenter.

We've had FlexPod in our environment for, I would say about six to nine months. We brought it in to help one of our applications called Petrel. It's IO intensive. It's an application that petrophysicists use to look for oil. That's what they're using it for, so they need performance for projects.

In general, just because I've been working with NetApp products for a lot of years, from that perspective, I don't have outages that I worry about. It's very stable in that sense. I have more problems if my network goes down than anything else, and it's not my problem anymore.

Very scalable. We're already planning how we're going to expand and grow it. They're doing a lot of exploration work so we know it's going to expand so we're already planning for it, and it's going to be easy to do.

We've used lots of technical support. I've used it. We've talked to people on the phone, we've done the chats online. All kinds of different things. NetApp's support's always been great for us. They're knowledgeable, absolutely.

I was not involved directly in the initial setup. The other guy that I work with was part of the PoC that we did, and then I got a little bit involved later on. He's actually part of the finishing off of it. But the ongoing support and operational part of it, I'm part of that.

They had to jump through a lot of hoops to get things but I think part of it was our own... What we needed to do was listen to the experts a little more to say, "Okay, we have to do it this way versus trying to push our own infrastructure on it." So that's what hurt us. But in the end, really good.

FlexPod is absolutely uniquely valuable for oil and gas, for some of the more higher-intensive products, the software that engineers will use to look for oil They're always looking to be able to do that faster, better and more efficiently.

I gave it a nine out of 10 because nothing's ever perfect. We did run into some hiccups around some different things. Part of that is us, the other part of that is working with the vendors. We weren't utilizing things with the switch properly. When we were having jobs come in from outside to access the storage, because it wasn't going through the Cisco switch and everything else, it was actually a slower grab for them. Once we changed those things and really implemented more of what you should be doing with the FlexPod, that's when we started seeing the performance gains.