FlexPod XCS Reviews

It is the first phase of the hyperconverged systems. 

It simplifies the management of the entire system. 

• Some of the define features could use improvement. 
• It needs more power.

We could not tell with the infrastructure entirely. We had some performance issues, but as soon as we opened the FlexPod, the technical support fixed them.

It is scalable. If you want to scale up merely with capacity, it is easy.

Regarding technical support, if you have any questions with the new configuration, just open a ticket to tech support and they will fix everything.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

I was also in the installation phase, which was easy.

It is a complete solution.

We have our primary and backup data centers as our primary storage, not only for Windows Servers on NFS, but also as part of our users' data stores.

It has been a great product, primarily because of a lot of its deduplication features, and the out-of-the-box thinking on block level storage from NetApp, in particular. For the solution as a whole, it is great that all the different products work so well together.

Everyone's willingness to work together to solve problems. We have had a few minor issues where we have been able to get Cisco, NetApp, and VMware all on the phone to solve a problem together. No one points fingers and everyone understands each others' products.

We have had some technical issues around the Java UI, but nothing major.

It has been incredibly stable. As with any technology solutions, there are issues, but we were able to get those resolved very quickly. No one takes, "No," for an answer. We get it handled.

We have had to add some disk shelves to the system over the last couple years. We have never had issues here.

We get a lot of domestic support. We are in Kansas City, and the support office is in Wichita, Kansas. They are three hours away from us. They have never come, but it is great to have that local connection. They do a very good job of taking care of their stuff. They got a lot of pride in their equipment.

We had EMC storage before we got to the NetApp storage. We had a lot of supportability issues. It was an older system, so it was better just to upgrade the system or replace it.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution when we were replacing four hard drives a day.

The initial setup was very straightforward. They provided a lot of documentation. They provided a lot of drawings as to how to cable it properly, along with a lot of tools, making sure it was set up properly.

I set it up myself.

We purchased from CDW•G. They are great partners on the government side.

I have been a happy NetApp/FlexPod customer for years.

Go through all the training, and make sure you understand all the systems. It is very different than a lot of the other systems. There are intricacies which are important to understand, especially with the duplication providers. Therefore, understanding all the challenges around it is important for long-term support.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: A vendor who cares about us as a customer. A vendor who is able to work through every issue, regardless of who is at fault, and solve the problem.

I am working on a FlexPod environment, though it is not the exact FlexPod box from NetApp. Our environment is custom made, resembling FlexPod with UCS chassis, NetApp storage, and Cisco MDS. We have five HA pairs and a MetroCluster, along with Cisco MDS in front and Brocade as back-end switches (for MetroCluster).

It is a very well-thought-out solution with great virtualization. A good option we have is mapping a storage LUN onto an ESX cluster. That way, in case a particular ESX is down, it can migrate (using vMotion) to another host in the cluster, resulting in high-availability.

The ability to create vDisks on NFS exports is an added advantage. This is very helpful when we reach RDM limit.

Currently, the only issue we have is with our backup solution. We have SnapProtect from NetApp as our backup tool. While taking VM backups, SnapProtect’s requirements say that all VMDKs should be on the same datastore, but from the VMware perspective, all VMDKs should be spread out. This is an ambiguity that we have in our environment.

The solution is really good but with 7-Mode I would rate it at seven out of 10. With NetApp  Cluster Mode the rating is higher.

• 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.

There's one number to call if you have a problem, they can get it fixed.

Also, it's good to have everything set up the right where you know; all this works together if you do the config right. There's no performance issues.

The simplicity means I don't have to spend all day troubleshooting gremlins.

It helped make things easier so we don't have the tracking down gremlins. Before we used this it was, "Oh, this server's not working right. Why?" And then we have to dig through; and we haven't had any of those since we started with FlexPod.

I know there are other versions of FlexPods beyond what we use. I've only dealt with basically the Cisco NetApp VMware version. I can't think of any other features that I would need.

It's always nice if it's cheaper. We've been locked into all this. We could save money and go with HyperV but then you have other issues. There are always things you can do to save money but you have to ask yourself if it's worth it.

About three years.

No issues. Very stable.

We haven't had any issues with that either. If we have to add, we add, and it all works together.

Honestly, FlexPod-related, we haven't had any. Very rarely do you have problems that are related to the FlexPod. If anything, we'll have issues with VMware that are not related to anything else, then we have to go to them. They are responsive and knowledgeable.

No. We've used bits and pieces of it; the three different pieces, we have always used VMware. We're always using that app but then kind of brought UCS into it and then built the FlexPod.

We switched for the simplicity of having one number to call.

I came in after it was already setup. I do firmware upgrades and some things like that. It is not complex.

I think it's valuable to anyone. I don't think it's related to industry, rather it's for anyone who runs a datacenter.

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.

It is very powerful. It can support much more than just one FlexPod. One NetApp can support more than just one FlexPod. That's about it. It's powerful.

It’s a standard; it's a spec; so, it's very easy to assemble and use. It's the same across all environments. Our production guys can work on this FlexPod and know that it's the same over here, and it’s is the same over there.

It's saved lots of manpower. It's easy to set up. It's good.

We have about a dozen people administrating our storage.

I would like to see easier day-zero setup. We're having to get other tools to try and set up everything. It's not complex, but it could be faster. It's just time consuming.

It’s very stable; haven't had any issues with stability.

It is very scalable. We are expanding a little bit. We're using one NetApp across multiple FlexPods. We're doing multiple domains off of one NetApp now. It is very scalable and very easy to do.

I've been at my current company for a year. They were already using FlexPod.
I have previous experience with EMC and Pure Storage. Compared to those, I love FlexPod. I like the scalability, because it has the storage virtual machines. It's very easy to build upon that.

For people comparing NetApp vs Pure, or NetApp vs EMC, I'd tell them to seriously look at NetApp because of the scalability and because of the ease of use.

Initial setup was very good. The RESTful API is easy to set up.

Beat them up on pricing, because they’re not cheap.

Buy it. It's a good product.

The ease of configuration and the reliability are the most valuable features.

Every deployment we’ve done has been on FlexPod. The ease of configuration saves us a lot of time and we can stand up in remote offices without highly-trained people.

I think the support has been our pain point, the hardware and setup are pretty good, and solid but the support could be improved. We always tell them about that.

We’ve been using it since 2009.

So far it’s been really good. It was rough for the first year or so on the Cisco side but last couple of years it’s been pretty stable.

It’s really easy to scale out, and I feel like it scales very well.

It's gotten better, as it was rough at the start. On the NetApp side they will open up the case for you with the other vendors. I had experiences where they didn’t know why we were calling or what a FlexPod was, but that was years ago and since then it has gotten far more streamlined.

Very straightforward and easy.

Peer reviews are not as important as user conferences but market research is there for a reason.