FlexPod XCS Reviews

The validated design is a huge bit. It means that it's supportable by both NetApp and Cisco, and that means that we're doing it the industry best-practice way.

The benefit is certainly that it's compartmental. You can build a FlexPod for a small installation, you can build it for a big one. You can build a small one and grow it. It's flexible in that regard. It gives you the design and the structure to be able to expand as you need.

As a point solution, it does absolutely what it should. I'm not sure it needs any more.

Make it cheaper.

About three years.

It's great. Very stable. Nothing to complain about, so that's good.

We've engaged technical support somewhat, mainly during the configuration stage.

As I said, you've got the FlexPod system, gives you access to Cisco and NetApp support, and they'll run it through; so whichever one you're more comfortable with. My networking guys will log stuff with Cisco, and the storage guys will log stuff with NetApp, and they're happy using that support.

FlexPod is more about the way that the pod is build. We've probably used all the individual components before but never put it together. The validated design was the big thing for us.

It's fairly straightforward. It's listed out for you, so you just follow the bouncing ball around, essentially.

We're a data analyst company, looking after property data. I'm not sure this product is uniquely valuable for our industry. It certainly has some value, especially in the mergers and acquisitions space where we need to stand up some infrastructure that matches ours in a newer environment, and be able to have that standard.

• Ease of use
• Safety
• Total cost of ownership
• Return on investment
• Cutting your sysadmin's time in half
• The single pane of glass: Where you can configure your compute and manage your storage, all from a single pane of glass, and it makes it easier on management.

Also, the 1-800 number to call for support across the multiple parts of the FlexPod. So, FlexPod is basically a joint venture between Cisco, VMware and NetApp. You call the 1-800 number and you get supported throughout the stacks.

Total cost of ownership (TCO) is key. The other things are the sysadmin's time is approximately cut in half: managing servers, building servers, deployment, and automation.

It is uniquely valuable for a company in the financial services industry. It is critical for us to use the latest and greatest in technology to have that edge against competitors in our marketplace.

Add more automation into the Cisco UCS firmware upgrade process to make it more streamlined than it is today.

I have been using FlexPod since 2012.

We have had a few deployments of FlexPod, one for production and one for the disaster recovery (DR) sites, and we have been happy with it so far.

If you do not take the time to learn the technology before deploying it, you are not going to be able to deploy it as smooth and as fast.

It is very stable. We have had it since 2012, and we have not had major issues with it. As long as you know what you do and you schedule your patching, following the processes that you have in place. You will have minor issues with it.

It scales out really well. If you need compute, all you need to do, just add more blades into your chassis. If you run out of chassis, you can just add more chassis, then you can add more blades. Same thing with the storage on the back-end, you can add more storage shelves, whether it is SSD, SAS, or All Flash.

We have definitely used the tech support on multiple occasions, like with firmware upgrades, to get their opinion, and regarding interoperability matrices for the different products. If you upgrade the firmware for the CISCO UCS, you need to ensure the firmware version that you are upgrading to is going to work with your VMware vSphere and with the NetApp ONTAP software OS.

They are knowledgeable and we get through to the right people.

I was involved in the initial setup. It is straightforward if you understand the technology and how it works. If you are new to the technology, you will require some training for your people and your team.

It is versatile, and the profiles and things that you can create with it are good to work with and make it easy to replace the hardware.

It has made it easier to deploy new virtual machines. We use it for our virtual machine environment. Before, it was a lot just having to get the hardware ready. Now that the FlexPod solutions are built up, they make it a lot easier as far as networking.

Easier integration from the beginning, which they have put improvements in as far as setting it up. It was just a large learning curve for us at first.

Probably two to three years.

Once we got implemented, it was very stable.

It should scale out based on what I've seen.

We haven't had to scale out yet. We have fairly small environments, but many of them and they are all separated. But based on the solution, I think we could scale it more if we needed to easily.

I have used it from the storage site, from the NetApp side, and also from the Cisco side. I contacted either vendor.

At times it's difficult to get to the right person, but eventually, depending on how far you push, you can get to the right person. Once I reach the right person, they are knowledgeable. Generally, my experience working with tech support is fine.

We were on a platform, which we thought didn't have a long life from another vendor.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was pretty complex.

There is a steep learning curve on the Cisco side to set up profiles.

I had pricing from separate vendors. I got storage from NetApp and Cisco Blade Servers, so I don't know. I didn't buy it as a package, so it's hard to say.

We bought the Cisco and the NetApp separately and integrated them ourselves, so that probably made it a little more difficult. But we followed all the guidelines that were published from both Cisco and NetApp regarding how to put them together. Now, it is sold as an already built together package, which probably would make it easier.

Fully-supported end-to-end architecture using the compatibility matrices around it.

It makes our configurations more consistent and easier to troubleshoot.

The product is uniquely valuable for the industry because we've had some experience with a competing solution from another storage vending solution, and it was not nearly as stable.

Better integration with other vendors that are involved in the FlexPod solution, like Cisco.

About five years now.

It is very stable.

Five years ago, it was very scalable. Now, the technology has changed so much in the last five years, it's not the most scalable solution out there.

I have used technical support. It's very good. They were knowledgeable.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward.

We invested in this solution because we were trying to lower our costs and improve the time to implement and upgrade.

It's an all-in-one validated design. We don't have to worry about making sure that thing A supports thing B. It's all top-down, integrated, and validated, which means for us, it's going to just work.

It let us not worry about the minutiae of the configuration, and instead worry about how we put systems and applications online and the maintenance to build a new environment.

It uniquely valuable because it's leveraging first-party products and services. Systems, which we already would use, now they are all integrated with each other, so we don't have to worry about going out into the market and finding those components separately, then making sure that they work together the way we need.

Surprise me with something I haven't thought of.

Maybe it's out-of-the-box and can configure itself. Something that's beyond the simplicity that I already think is there. Abstract away some of the technical details of setting it up, so you don't need the experience of an engineer to come in and do the work.

About four months.

The stability is fine so far. It's solid. It's a rock.

The scalability is fine.

Technical support is a non-issue. That's another advantage with FlexPod, in particular, is it's one single endpoint for support. We don't have to call around and there's no finger-pointing between organizations.

Our old solution was outdated, old, and out of support. We were at our hardware refresh point of three to five years.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was straightforward.

The way everything works together. It is all built to do what it's supposed to do. The performance we get out of it is incredible. We just went through a refresh of basically a whole new FlexPod. We decided to stay with that just because of how well everything works and how great the support is.

The benefit at this point is that we understand it. We know how everything works. If we don't, there's one place where they know how everything works. Support is streamlined. It is absolutely easy to manage. Up until a couple years ago, there was only one person that it took to manage the whole infrastructure.

I really like what it does now. I don't really have any complaints. They plan to give it the ability to add more flash storage in a hybrid shelf. We don't have the need or the capital for an all-flash cache, so we got a hybrid one that's limited to how many flash caches you can have on there.

I haven't had any stability issues with it. I ran into a bug with the software, probably three or four years ago, and this caused deduplication to stop working. However, they resolved that right away and we put the patch on and got back to running it normally.

Scalability is great. We added a new shelf to it last year. There wasn't much down time to add the shelf to it and it was actually very simple. The directions that came with it were straightforward.

Technical support is great. They're always there whenever we need them. They're willing to jump on, spend as much time with us as we need. It is great that Cisco, NetApp, and VMware can all work together on an issue. If you don't know an answer, just call FlexPod support and they are able to help.

It was set up before I got there. I remember how to put in the seven node cluster plus the transition that we are doing now. The setup was simple. It came with a single start-up script. They sent us an Excel sheet ahead of time to fill everything out that we needed. We ran through the script, it asked us for everything, we were together, and it was quick.

We evaluated EMC and HPE for new storage. We decided to stay with NetApp over HPE and EMC because of our experience with it. We didn't have any bad experiences with it, so we didn't want to change it to go down a new learning path. We knew it, it worked, and we had no issues.

They should definitely look into NetApp, especially now with the SolidFire acquisition. They have almost everything you would need for storage. I've used HPE SANs before and EMC, and NetApp just blows them out of the water with manageability and the price point.

I'm on the network side, so I don't have to deal with the NetApp side too much. However, I am on the network side and I really love the fact that I can just swap out blades as fast as I can. We have the M4s in our FlexPod. I personally love it. We are running VMware. We are running a standard data center with domain controllers, Exchange, and primarily Microsoft products.

The main improvement is speed. If you need to troubleshoot or if anything goes wrong, you can swap it out extremely fast. It will rebuild itself and you are up and running in hours at most.

I know that there's a lot of features that area already out. We are the DOD, and we are two steps behind. We know of a lot of features that we're excited to move to, but we can't yet. In terms of improvement, I would focus on cost. It can be a little bit expensive.

The features are great. We know of things that are in the newer releases, and they will be great once we get access to them. This includes solid state drives that will speed up our connectivity.

We've had very few stability problems with it. It's been a very great product for us. Maybe one of these days we can move over to the new and improved SF.

We had to grow and we've added blades. We upgraded our NetApp appliances in it. So we have grown as the organization required. It has been simple to scale up.

We have NetApp support that covers us for anything that we need. We do have a very talented engineer that runs it on our side, so he doesn't have too many challenges. On the Cisco side, the UCF side, which is my domain, we go directly to Cisco and they help us with any issues we ever have. They are knowledgeable and helpful.

We evaluated IBM, they had a blade solution. We evaluated Dell and looked at the FX2s and their VRTX for some of our smaller sites. We decided to go with NetApp over Dell, because it all worked together so easily. Dell had a pretty good product and there is no denying that. However, FlexPod is just all-in-one. It has got a best-practice design built around it so there's no "Hey, does this NIC work in this scenario?" You don't have to worry about that with FlexPod.

Give it a shot. Call your vendors and just get it. They'll demo it for you, so use that. It is important to demo everything first, because there is a lot of money on the line just for a "I guess this might work out for us.”

One of the most valuable features is that I have one vendor that I have to contact to go to all my vendors. I don’t have to call Cisco, NetApp, VMware. I just make one call to one of them, they bridge all of that for me; that's nice.

Also, with the documented architecture, it's not something that we're testing right off the bat; it's been proven and it works.

It allowed us to streamline support tickets that come in. We don't have to call three different vendors. I just call one and they take care of all of that for us. It's been very helpful.

Each individual solution has its own cost benefit. It really fit within our organization. We had a lot of the existing technology there. We were just missing a couple pieces of it. So, once we got those pieces, we were able to certify it with FlexPod. We didn't need to buy too many new pieces. It fit into our original architecture.

We have cut down on the management team running FlexPod compared to our previous system. We've reallocated one FTE so far because of it. We can do more things with fewer people on the team.

I know there's some new Cisco stuff coming down the road that we might be looking at. UCS Minis: I know that they're going to be supported right off the bat.

Nothing's perfect. There's always room to increase: more hyper-conversions; smaller form factor is always on our mind; better ways to align disk up for us; how can we split off our disk correctly for each HA pair that we have, from a cluster standpoint.

There was a little mixup with, at least NetApp, coming to the market with flash. They've slowly gained ground in that marketplace; I’m waiting to see how that plays out. I know Mars was trying to be a big hit for them and then when they dissolved, that kind of set me back a little bit from a time standpoint. Mars was their all-flash platform; something separate from WAFL that we're doing with ONTAP. That had me looking at that infrastructure. That's the only reason why they lost a few points in my rating.

I have been using it for about three-and-a-half years.

It is a stable infrastructure. We've haven't had any major outages in the past three-and-a-half years since implementing it. There's been no downtime from a hardware standpoint that we weren't able to address quickly.

It is very easy to scale out the infrastructure, add more pieces to it as we needed; just kind of plug and go. That’s very easy.

That depends on when I call. Cisco is a little bit more difficult than some of the other ones, but calling it up has been great. They've bridged that gap a couple times at VMware as well.

We were using a mixture of Dell and HP solutions. We were using Dell 910s for a lot of our ESX environment. We were using old Cisco MDS switchers for fiber channel. We were able to consolidate all that infrastructure down and use one standard platform coming off the Nexus.

My engineers worked with one of our strategic partners to help implement the solution. It has been, from a design standpoint, much easier to get set up and running, and much faster than doing it outside of FlexPod.

We haven’t had any technical issues with getting it set up or with running it; none at all. I'm very happy.

It's a little more expensive to go down the FlexPod route, but I think the ease of management in having all the vendors aligned really helps us in the long run. There is more upfront cost, but less down the road that we have to pay; maintenance and support, man-hours, actually managing the system.

We already had NetApp in-house. It was very easy for us to use at least that as a storage platform, so it was just finalizing on the Cisco UCS part. We needed to come up with a hardware platform that we could use and UCS was the hardware platform.
HP’s BL series blade was the other one we were looking at from a blade standpoint.

We decided to go with FlexPod instead of HP because we were already a leveraged Cisco partner, a Cisco shop, with all of our route switch and all of our data center core switching. It was very easy for us, then, to assimilate the UCS chassis within our existing infrastructure without any other type of complexity.

Make sure you get all your requirements up front. Make sure that the protocols that you want to use are supported by your vendor. There are a lot of niche players out there that will say they will do something. When you get them onsite, they don't or they don't perform as well. We were looking at a couple of other flash providers, including Nutanix and Tintri.

Bringing them onsite for a demo works great, but when you start talking to people who actually use the solution... We found that in the demos, they couldn't live up to the promises they were making, or it didn't make sense to add more infrastructure in. I can't get rid of my core NetApp infrastructure, so it didn’t really make any sense to add another storage vendor in, and increase the complexity. Using FlexPod has been simpler than adding in another vendor.

NetApp might be a little more expensive but in the long run, it pays off for itself.
I’ve been very happy with their technical ability, their technical delivery, and the usability; it’s very easy.