FlexPod XCS Reviews

One of the valuable features is the simplicity of how all the different technologies actually join together. The perk for us was very straightforward. We came in and said, "This is where we're at, this is where we want to go to." Working with our vendors in Australia – Telstra especially and a couple of companies such as The Versus Group – they've made the transition from classic physical hardware, going to that virtualized platform for us. Now, we're looking to move into a hybrid cloud solution, using the cloud ONTAP, as our next phase to start doing that. It's been quite good.

It provided simplicity for managing the environment, once we had it full stood up. We saw that simplicity with just going around with all the service profiles and things like that; just being able to, on the fly, run up VMs, different machines, and so on as I require.

I'm not sure where that's going to go now. Obviously, we're looking to be into that hybrid cloud solution. Where that leads us to? I'm not really sure.

I have not yet seen any features in other different solutions that I'd like to see in FlexPod. From a business-driver perspective, I don't have that need at the moment.

Competitive pricing's always good. It's hit the mark for the most part. I can't complain.

The initial setup should be a little bit more intuitive. It's counterintuitive to start with. It completely changes the idea of where you had come from. That setup process changes all of your thoughts regarding policy and makes sure that you knew what they were doing to start with, and why you were going to do it.

It’s extremely stable.

Early on, we had scalability issues. Scaling size was an issue at the start. After that, it's been quite good.

In the early days, during the implementation phase, we definitely had a few issues around SMB and similar items; that's all been resolved.

Technical support is really good. I've never had any issues dealing with them directly.

I just thought that the way that the trend of technology was going, aging hardware; there was just a requirement that we needed something like it.

With the initial set up, there was a really steep learning curve to start with. Once you got past that, it was really easy. That learning curve had to do with making sure that due diligence had been completed, the right training had been completed and understanding what the solution was going to be, end to end.

We looked at other solutions besides NetApp, everything that came in at the right price point.

We moved away from EMC to start with. Obviously, they were right up there at the start, but they just couldn't come to the party with our requirements.

I find the support with NetApp, moving forward with it, being so much better.

When I’m looking at a vendor in general, once their business is able to meet our requirements, I look for having someone who can actually explain how they're going to meet those requirements and how we're going to get there on the journey.

Perform due diligence. Understand your business requirement.

Flexibility of the platform. It allows you to grow whenever you want, and to build the data center as you want. It can get associates to change their work because they don’t have to do grunt work as it has automation, network, and datacenter design. The job is done, and you don’t need to worry about it. The team can be freed up to do more interesting IT, such as building datacenters.

It’s an important tech, and should be a part of IT admin. It’s a one-stop shop that keeps the lights running. It’s not a matter of money, but a matter of staffing.

The capacity to grow at a very rapid pace at a quarter of the cost in terms of physical hardware and staffing -- just put up rack, deploy FlexPod, and it’s up and running.

It compares well with Vblock to provide centralized datastores to all locations that are all linked together with a datacenter fabric.

It needs to go down the Vblock way, because in an integrated system, you need a big block of technology between the reference architecture and the lego-type system.

No issues encountered.

It's very scalable, and able to grow with the business.

You can add more disks, and computer power, which is very simple to do. It takes care of adding blocks back into your data center and any upgrades to storage, hardware, or network.

We often work with our TAM who are always around to help us work better as an interface between our engineers and NetApp’s, so we’re escalated to Tier 1.

We don’t even need to talk to Cisco because their tech support is unified with NetApp.

It loses points because they’re a little behind the competition in the hyper-converged infrastructure pace. When you get to see what the other environment sees, you know they need to catch up to others.

It’s a good solution to implement, and easy to get to work, it’ll provide flexibility and agility you need for a datacenter, but it’s a start of the journey. You need to be on top of it.

Having VMware, Cisco and NetApp on the call when there is an issue is very valuable to us.

When we had a VMware issue that NetApp was saying was a VMware issue and vice versa – getting them all on the conference call at the same time was priceless.

A single place to initiate support to get them all at once – being able to call one place would be great instead of having to initiate with each vendor first and then ultimately finding out you need everyone on the phone. So, a specific FlexPod support instead of having to go through NetApp, Cisco and VMware separately would be something they can improve on.

Extremely stable – everybody has outages, but we've been satisfied with stability.

For our needs, it meets them.

Getting everyone on the phone together, they have all been responsive and helpful.

Initially complex, but that had to do with our environment.

I have been working with FlexPod for a while now. I recently shifted my job and have been working with a solution included in FlexPod. Most customer use cases that I have seen are either using it as a database management system or for a VDI solution.

There are a lot of points for configuration.

We are using a private cloud with Azure, but the newer versions integrate with Cisco Intersight.

You get data privacy with it. 

The solution helps to optimize our operations with insight gained from Intersight Active IQ or CSA.

The integration part of things is the most valuable feature. You are getting a whole set of things under one roof and rack. There is support for everything, which is one of the cool things.

The designs are pretty good. Cisco, NetApp, or the OS vendor keep on updating them, which is one of the good points. They will send out a new document about a design refreshment. Everything integrates perfectly with Cisco's new chassis and NetApp version 9.9.

The different modules perfectly integrate with each other because of the Cisco UCS part. For a single chassis, you might have eight plates powering up. Then, there is Nexus, which integrates with your FIS pretty smoothly. For the storage part of it, some solutions have MDSS, and some don't. However, getting them configured is pretty much a few clicks.

I like the continuous CI/CD upgrade cycle with this solution.

They just announced that they are going to move it along with Intersight from Cisco. That can be a private or public cloud, which is one of the areas where it can grow more and has a lot of potential.

I have been using it for somewhere around three to four years.

The solution is resilient.

It has become easier to monitor and automate processes using the solution.

We get everything under one roof instead of just modulating parts.

It is scalable. I have seen the solution used on multi-site environments. I have also seen somewhere around 2,000 to 2,500 people using it on a single site. In other use cases, I have seen it being used in smaller environments, where the data capacity is assigned. Something that I discovered myself, the data relevancy needs to be really good.

If the network or site is down, you just need to go to a single vendor. You don't have to open up multiple cases with each vendor to get things done. That is one of the financial benefits of this solution.

The technical support is pretty good. Rather than running to different vendors, you can open up a case with any of the vendors, who will then communicate with each other to get things resolved. So, customers can go to different vendors for a single issue. From my perspective, if a case is being opened with Cisco, I have seen their people working with VMware to get things resolved. 

I would rate the customer support somewhere between 7.5 and 8 out of 10.

Positive

I have not previously used another solution.

If you use the design document, everything is pretty straightforward. The racking and stacking are pretty easy, in regards to the physical stuff. Cisco and ONTAP are pretty simple to configure if you follow the proper design.

You just need to do a couple of clicks for your UCS. The same goes for Nexus. It depends upon the configuration, but it is pretty easy to deploy. Once that is done, it is just how you want to use your storage, which is the only contribution that you need to do because everything else is taken care of. 

It takes a maximum of two or three people to deploy the solution, e.g., someone to do the physical work and another person to configure everything. 

Once the physical work is done, the configuration part comes in. That is when your switches and UCS integrate with each other. I have done the configuration on Nexus and UCS parts, where I definitely needed help.

We have seen ROI through IOPS and network latency. 

I did not really evaluate other options before choosing Flexpod because it is a leading product in the market for converged use cases.

The private cloud environment is one of the major selling points for it.

Usually, people move to a different solution when it comes to getting a hybrid cloud solution, e.g., a CA solution or HyperFlex. This is where I have seen it get a bit distorted.

I would highly recommend it for core and multi-cloud solutions.

The way that they are making the progress, it will still be a relevant solution going forward. Where there is a need for big data, this solution can be considered.

I would rate this solution around 7.6 out of 10.

We use it for my private cloud. We are providing a service.

FlexPod has helped us reduce our time of deployment because we are really only missing integration with different applications.

It has also allowed us to streamline our IT administration.

The integration is something else.

The core cloud is a good feature. If we had a login that extended from the private cloud to the public cloud that would be the best, but it's up there.

The solution has granular scalability.

I would be interested to see more integration with other applications.

FlexPod is very resilient. So far, it has been stable. Keep in mind we are still deploying it, so the real use case has yet to be seen.

Scalability looks okay because it’s based on the capacity of the device, so I wouldn’t normally assume any scalability issue.

Their technical support has been okay.

The initial setup was straightforward, but the migration has taken some time.

We used a reseller for the integration. 

FlexPod saves us money. There is definitely a return on our investment.

I would rate FlexPod as seven or eight out of ten. It's too early to say anything, but for now, my only concern is the limited integration with applications.

The biggest lesson I learned was that from the automation point of view, this should be saving us time. When you’re doing it for the first time it’s not going to be very easy.

Our primary use case for this solution is for educational content.

This solution has improved our organization in the way that we now require fewer employees. It has reduced the complexity of our network monitoring. 

It has reduced the workload on our network admins and our network availability has been reduced. 

The most valuable features of this solution are instant scalability and reliability. The solution has good granularity in terms of network visibility.

The main area that this solution has room for improvement is in Cisco support.

The stability of the solution is very good. 

The scalability is good.

FlexPod's technical support is bad, as with everything regarding Cisco support.

The initial setup for FlexPod is complex.

We used a consultancy company for the implementation. 

The solution forces us to ACI to make quotas and we will do that.

FlexPod supports both traditional and SCN reduced costs.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate this product a seven. It's not perfect.

I believe that FlexPod is the best solution. 

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.

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.