FlexPod XCS Reviews

Converged Infrastructure and tight integration with Cisco.

The solution has allowed us to reduce the overall operational overhead – once you deploy the system, you run everything as policy based so everything is very simple. You now have network, hardware, and storage in one place.

The vision is not clear with NetApp as to how they want FlexPod to be, as they want it to be for everything but it's not. It needs a specific vision and agenda, what purpose is this solution for, etc.

I would say that the stability is semi-enterprise ready, but not fully from our use case. It has its own limitations, it’s supposed to be extremely flexible because of the architecture, but there are a lot of challenges in terms of supporting multiple hypervisors. But there are no tight integrations, and this leads to stability issues. If workload analysis is not done beforehand, then you may encounter problems.

It should be able to be full scale architecture, you cannot limit it to between eight and 14 nodes (approximately), and it’s a scale up architecture not a scale out.

6/10 due to mostly skill-set issues. There are not many experts in the converged infrastructure space, and it has taken us a long time.

It was complicated. You need to have professionals engaged, as it's not plug-n-play. It requires professional services help to get it up and running, and even then there is a huge learning curve.

The infrastructure should be de-coupled from the workload, there should not be any dependency. It should be abstracted, do not look to FlexPod as the solution, but as one of many solutions. You need to understand your environment and what you need.

We use FlexPod to simplify support, to accelerate troubleshooting by using the FlexPod in integrating. Whether it's a VMware or a UCS Cisco problem, or a Nexus problem, it makes support a lot simpler.

It keeps us on track. You have to stay FlexPod-certified, you have to really stay on track with your updates, but the troubleshooting and support aspects are really where it's the biggest bang for the buck.

Unified support. Being able to get a vendor from one company or another company on the line without having to go back through the call queue.

It's been very stable. I have no issues with it.

It scales fine, all three components are able to scale. If I need to throw on another chassis, I throw on another chassis. If I need more storage, I expand my NetApp portion of it. It's been easy.

Although it's really hard to automatically get the correct person the first time, what you can do is get someone from one stack, say VMware, and if they say, "Hey, it's not a VMware problem, it's a networking problem," they can loop in the Cisco person, give them all the information, and we can troubleshoot the Cisco or the networking portion of it. They might say, "Hey, you know what, it's storage latency. Let's loop in the NetApp partner." They can all talk in the backend and compare logs, versus me having to open three tickets and wait.

It allows me to loop in support from three different companies and not have to open a ticket with each company, and then have them say, "Send me the logs." Then have them say a couple hours later, "Well, we looked at the logs. It's not us. Go to the next guy." And then you go to the next guy and the next guy says, "Well, send me the logs, describe the problem." He takes a couple of hours, looks at the logs and says, "Hey, it's not us, it's the other guy."

We used physical servers, different storage, older legacy equipment.

The most important criteria when selecting with a vendor are 

• reliability
• technical expertise
• speed in response time.

The setup was pretty straightforward. We obviously engaged a reseller to help us with it. But putting the different components together is pretty straightforward.

We didn't evaluate others. We decided to go with NetApp and that drove the decision every place else. We went with the Cisco UCS chassis because that fit our solution.

Do your research. It's good for our business case but maybe it doesn't fit your particular business needs, or maybe there's a better solution out there. In our circumstance, it fit our needs and has performed as advertised.

Our primary use case for NetApp has been as part of a Cisco UCS chassis. We have seven or eight different instances of it now, spread around the world. So far, it has been very reliable, other than a few hard drive failures here and there, but those are expected.

We run a lot of the same OS's so it really saves us a lot on infrastructure cost.

It helped us really jump into the private cloud infrastructure instead of just trying to jump straight into public, which is way more expensive in the long run. That is what most businesses will be looking for in the end. It really is a cost saving when you can keep it in-house.

The flexibility and data deduplication have been the biggest practical applications.

More flash is going to be the biggest thing for us. We use a lot of SaaS currently, but flash is the way to go.

It has been very stable. We've had UCS with NetApp for about six years now and I would venture to say it's "five nines" so far.

We typically add a new chassis about every six months, so it's very scalable.

I haven't personally used the technical support, but we do have a few people who worked for NetApp who have come to work for us. Their interactions with NetApp have been great.

FlexPod was really our first major endeavor in large converged hardware.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are the availability of support, to get it when we need it, and to upgrade as fast as possible when we need to.

I was involved in the Initial design and configuration. It was as straightforward as it gets.

We were looking at EMC as well. At the time, Cisco was partnered with both, but we went for the data deduplication from NetApp. EMC wasn't quite the same.

It doesn't really get simpler than the setup that we had, and the maintenance that we have had. I would tell colleagues that NetApp is the way to go.

We primarily use it to provide compute resources for customers. It is basically a data center in a box, and it performs very well for us.

The biggest benefit for us, as a partner, is the ease of implementing it. Because the configuration tends to be relatively consistent, we have a series of configuration templates that we can just pretty much stamp out on demand. I can do an entire data to center deployment in under a day now.

It scales well. It allows us to have very flexible architecture but to have the same level of simplicity that we'd normally expect in hyper-converged environments.

I'd like to see a little bit simpler management pane. Using UCS Director to front everything is good and UCS Director is a good product and it's priced well for what it does, but for a lot of that upper mid-market, it's probably a little bit of overkill for what they need. They just want a nice, simply portal to go through and see what's going on. So if there was something that was middle of the road, it would be well received.

The stability has been awesome.

Technical support is very good. We've been very happy with the response we've received. I feel they guide us through the entire process. I don't necessarily get the right person the first time when calling, but I don't think you ever get that with a Support Desk.

We were just building stacks by hand. We were strongly encouraged by Cisco - we partner with them - and when the platform began to get some traction, we looked into it and got on board.

For me, the most important thing when working with a vendor is the flexibility. We have great partner relationships with Cisco and NetApp, but it's the flexibility of the platform and the product, the way we can sell and implement it, that makes it really easy for us.

The setup is not complex but there are a lot of moving pieces. There are a lot of components to go through and touch and configure the very first time, but once you get a couple under your belt it's very easy to go through and stamp it out from there. If you follow the standardized templates and the design guides, it takes a lot of the work out of it.

My advice is to read the design guides, that is the most important thing. Also, work with an integrator wherever possible.

I rate FlexPod an eight out of 10. If there was a simpler management pane, maybe a little bit more flexibility in terms of multiple hypervisors in a single deployment, I would rate it higher. But aside from those issues, we're very happy.

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 FlexPod technology is really reliable for us. We have no complaints about the reliability and the stability of the product.

We had an older SAN that needed to be improved and the FlexPod technology was chosen for the integration with Cisco and the NetApp storage. We used to have NetApp and Cisco on-site. It was just a natural merge to add the FlexPod technology.

The downside is that the administration is a little bit complex.

Also, don't use the NetApp team to implement it. I did so previously, and it was not the best experience of my life. It is a drawback that you need to use the NetApp team to implement it. It's not easy to work with them and not every technical specialist is a specialist.

We have been using it for two years now.

It is very stable. There has been no down time.

In terms of scalability, we have a project that is ongoing for the next few months. We are going to get into the scalability portion soon.

We did call technical support a couple of times and we had great support from them. They've been responsive to us.

They made the decision before I started working here. I know that they chose it for the reasons I mentioned.

It is complex to set up.

I know that it is really a good product. In the end, it is doing the job.

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.

NetApp’s scalability and high fault tolerance are features that we, in our organization, like about deploying NetApp’s NAS solutions.

We designed and installed NetApps FAS8040 dual controllers with FAS4246 and FAS2246 Storage Disk to provide NAS for the Cisco UCS 5100 system and has provided our client the ability to easily provision virtual machines and storage to those virtual machines.

Product price is always a concern.

I've used it for one year.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

10/10

10/10 - NetApp’s service support personnel were excellent in getting us the help we needed.

No previous solution was used.

NetApp’s documentation helped us with the initial setup and configuration. Great documentation always leads to better designs and better operations and maintenance experience.

We worked with a vendor and had a successful implementation.

No other options were looked at.

NetApp’s FAS system is an excellent line of product. In today’s world the need for virtualization is continuingly increasing. Therefore having a storage platform that can be flexible in terms of configuration and scalability it’s important to the successful deployment of virtualization in the datacenter.