FlexPod XCS Reviews

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.

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.

Ease of deployment is the most valuable feature.

I think that there are lots of benefits to using FlexPod. It goes back to the ease of deployment, especially with the projects I’ve been involved in. If you need a refresh on the whole infrastructure, it helps immensely.

I think that there is always room for improvement in any product. I guess the training availability and infinite scalability could be better, and it’s getting there.

It’s great – no issues with stability.

I didn’t run into any issues with scalability, and although I haven’t looked at the specs recently, but I believe it scales to most environments needs, and I’m still considering it for my new environment. We have a 30-petabyte environment, and we're looking to FlexPod for our database infrastructure.

I would say that I haven’t had to contact FlexPod specific support but Netapp overall I would give them an 8-9/10.

My initial setup was a partner, I didn’t know there were walk-through guides, but once I found those it was immensely better. It was cumbersome, but then eventually the installs were much simpler.

I would say that you should seriously consider it. It’s very worthwhile.

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 in our primary data centers and almost on all of our sites. Therefore, we use both FlexPod and FlexPod Express.

We enjoy the standardization and having things consistent across the whole data center sphere. 

Simplicity and integration with NetApp are its most valuable features.

They already have some products or interfaces that leverage APIs, like Cisco UCS Director, and this is a good starting point. However, I would like to have something for smaller organizations where they could just plugin configurations, and everything is done for them.

They should have an easier user interface to get it up and running.

It is stable. 

It is very scalable.

I've never had any issues, so tech support is good.

We brought our IT in-house and needed a solution to host it on, and FlexPod was the solution that we decided on. That was for a smaller subset of the company. 

The larger parent company used what the contracting IT provided at the time. When we released that contract, we moved to have all in-house employees and an in-house IT. We also decided to use FlexPod because we had seen the value with the smaller companies. It has scaled out well.

It was straightforward because I was working with an experienced partner. I have more than six years of experience, so when I work with a partner that has experience, it makes it easier.

In the United States, we use IRONBRICK. Internationally, EMEA and Asia PAC, we use Computacenter. Our experience with both of them so far has been good.

We have seen ROI.

We evaluated HPE, Cisco, and NetApp for storage. We chose NetApp because of its storage efficiencies and integration.

The FlexPod solution is one of the easiest solutions to implement, maintain, and scale.

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 for it is in the healthcare market. We have a lot of customers using it because they want to have some flexibility with storage and compute. That is the reason we are selling it in the healthcare market.

It's much cheaper than the old legacy stuff, especially the storage. It means that our customers don't have to take care of separate storage, separate compute, but can combine them. It streamlines things, especially for development.

The flexibility of using it for compute as well as the flexibility of the storage itself.

When it's running, it's running. It's fine. We are impressed with the product. At the beginning, because it was new for us, there were some issues, but now, after some implementations, it has been okay.

It's scalable.

Technical support has been very helpful, and also very polite. They guided us through the process, followed up with us. I've had a good experience with them.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We also looked at HyperFlex. HyperFlex is also compatible but I think NetApp SolidFire is more robust.

Our primary criteria when selecting a vendor are to get support, a good solution, one that our customers are happy with.

My advice would be, try it, buy it, see what you can do with it and get some experience with it. With that experience, you can better sell it to the customer.

My favorite part is the storage side, allocating the storage, it's very easy. The WWNs, you got the virtual WWNs. It's a little different from physical servers. I like that it's pretty easy to provision storage.

From a user perspective, they have no issues.

As far as my role and what I do (my duties), it's easy. They are able to see their storage immediately, they don't have any problems with connectivity issues like you'll see on a physical server compared to a blade implementation.

Usability: It's a little bit convoluted. It'd be nice if they had it pretty straightforward. If it was a straightforward out-of-the-box configuration and could operate out of the box, that would be nice.

Ease to work with.

It's been six months, since it was implemented. Currently, we provide the back-end storage to the FlexPod.

So far, very stable. So far, it is okay.

Scalability is pretty good. You can extend it out, extend out storage as well your guest systems. Yes, it is not a problem.

I have not used technical support for either FlexPod or Cisco.

I was involved in the initial setup for the storage piece and it was complex. As far as the design, FlexPod is a complex piece of equipment. You just can't read a book and be ready to get it operational. You have to go through professional services that have some experience with it.

Do a little research, find out if the business case applies to them, how they could leverage it, and if it's something they could leverage in their environment. Get a PoC, that's another thing. Definitely get a POC for the product to determine if it's good for them.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Stability, after the product is implemented into an environment.
• Scalability
• Responsiveness to certain type of issues.