FlexPod XCS Reviews

It is performing well. It is the data center of devices, e.g., when we are using the call locations in San Francisco and Sacramento.

If we go to different vendors, this solution looks good. Though, it is mainly manufactured to a particular size.

As per the implements, we need to bring more devices for this type of situation. It will be helpful for us to get more infrastructure export, etc.

• Its existing space
• Its design

We would like more security features.

Once it is in place, we do not touch it, so it is more stable than other solutions.

Scalability is good. 

Once our current issue is fixed, it will be good. Then, we will not have any issues on it.

Technical support has been good when we have contacted them in the past. They have been helpful. However, we have the technical experts, so we do not use their services often.

We used it for the remote setup, not the physical setup.

We upgrade it normally during downtime.

We do it ourselves when it is straightforward. When it is a complex installation, we bring their technical person onboard. 

We purchased the solution through CDW. They are a partner and knowledgeable. 

We are good and comfortable with CDW.

It is a good solution compared to other products. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It depends on the device - How much it carries, what the security is, etc.

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.

I think the valuable features of FlexPod are the integration with several products, especially when it comes to the support model.

If I have any issues, whether it is with be VMware, NetApp, or Cisco, I can call one place and I can get support. It doesn't matter which one I call. I think it's one of the most valuable pieces of it.

Its architecture has been proven, it works together, and it is trusted.

We are using a Citrix VDI implementation. We are about 99% virtualized, so pretty much everything that we do, from the desktop to the servers, is virtualized.

I like how everything just kind of works together. It's been one of those things that have been proven. There are White Papers, a trusted design, and support models. Those are the kinds of things that companies look for. We know there is going to be backing and help when something goes wrong.

We can reduce our team and it has saved us money because it works quickly. In the past, we've gone with other third-party vendors and other products. We ended up having to pay more money in the long run. Going with the FlexPod solution means that we have all the pieces. Having a proven solution and knowing that it works gives us peace of mind and ease of management.

It could always be better.

We have been using this solution for three years.

It is a stable solution. I can't remember the last time we had any kind of major outage.

Up to the point where we needed to replace our controllers on our storage, it had been pretty scalable. I think there is a time when we have to refresh some of the products.

When we needed to, we used the technical support. They were very helpful. It was easy to contact somebody. If one team didn't know the answers, they would be in touch with the other team. That's nice about having a FlexPod team that knows each other's products a little bit, so they can help you resolve your issues.

We worked with CDW consulting to do the setup and the configuration. It went pretty smoothly.

We looked at HPE and that was four years ago. We've worked with CDW. They brought in a number of other vendors with other storage systems. The one we chose fit in with what we wanted to do. We previously used a smaller vendor's storage solution. It didn't quite work with what we wanted to do. We weren't able to fit it in with our model.

Do your research. They all have their own niches. Don't go cheap. That's one thing we've learned: Just because you might see another vendor who offers something a little cheaper, it is not necessarily the best. It might not have the White Papers or the proven technology that works together. That's what is nice about FlexPod, that you do have those elements. This has been working together for many years. They had this relationship with these other companies and you know you'll have the support behind it.

The most valuable features are its modularity, scalability, and the ability to scale down the infrastructure and remove some of the physical hardware that was required previously. It gives us the flexibility to build upon it, whether we do one new service or we do the blade service. With the FlexPod, in general, with the UCS chassis and with NetApp, the way they can intermingle and work together seamlessly was a big benefit to us.

As I’ve mentioned, it allowed us to remove some of the redundant hardware aspects of our infrastructure. At the same time, it allowed us to upgrade our top-of-the-rack switches. We were using some of the legacy MDS fiber switches. The Nexus 5Ks gave us the ability to do fiber channel native and FCOE, as well as giving us that fast speed backbone bandwidth that we know we need for FlexPod.

We have greater flexibility than what we've had in the past. Most of our systems were legacy. We're starting to go through a process of upgrading the infrastructure. FlexPod gives us that flexibility to choose between remote sites or the headquarter site; and basically choose between FlexPod Mini, FlexPod Express or full blown FlexPod with 5Ks, UCS chassis and so on. I think the flexibility in the FlexPod designs is what really attracted our organization to it.

We really like the all-flash arrays and the solid-state drives. We’d really like to see, not so much from NetApp but from our perspective, going more towards the SolidFire and doing some metro clusters with NetApp.

So far, we have not had any issues with stability. We just started implementing or migrating some of the services, building some of the new services onto it. We're pretty young into the FlexPod but the future for FlexPod and for our organization looks bright.

As I’ve mentioned, we have a NetApp representative on site. He does most of the storage stuff for us. We rely on them quite a bit. They're fantastic. We get great support with them.

We were on legacy equipment already. We basically said, "What's the next big thing?" Obviously, being a partner with NetApp, they try to promote FlexPod as much as possible.

Initial setup was pretty straight forward. At first, it can be sort of daunting, with all of the components that are brought together, but once you actually start developing the service profiles and the servers, that's pretty much all it is. You've basically got a chassis that serves servers. Once you have the grand scheme of the design, the configurations after that were pretty simple.

I don't deal with the pricing too much but, from what I understand, we got a pretty good deal on some of the FlexPod equipment that we have.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

If you don't have a reseller that you can talk to, talk to some industry experts. Get a demo. Basically, get an idea of what the FlexPod can do for you and which deployment model fits best for your company.

As I’ve mentioned, given what we were dealing with before, integrating with Cisco and NetApp storage, the marriage between those two companies, they came up with a perfect solution that is pretty modular and flexible. We can scale it however we like it, to whatever site we're going to deploy it at.

I'm not too concerned about more integration between the Cisco and NetApp systems. Obviously, you're going to have some separation there, because they are two different companies. Obviously, the interoperability of the different components, being able to work together, is great enough as it is. Being able to have one user interface that controls everything, I don't think you ever get that but, who knows? Cisco could buy out NetApp; who knows? They might just absorb into one interface. For me, that’s not so important, but I can see where some customers, some users, might look at that as a benefit.

When I look at a vendor, the most important criteria for us is what type of premier support they have. If something breaks, do we have 24-hour support? Obviously, pricing comes along with those but I think support is most important to us.

The integration with Cisco is the most valuable feature.

Because we are a big virtualization shop, this tool has benefited our organization. I don't see the benefit from a management perspective, because we still have to manage each and every device separately.

The integration with Cisco is pretty valuable. It has definitely helped us to build our solutions as per the requirements.

I look forward to testing features in ONTAP 9 next-generation data management software during the pilot release. Let's see how that goes.

Stability is a big question mark. We having been using NetApp since 2014 and in the last two years, we have grown quite a bit across the globe. We are now using the FAS system.

We had one data loss incident happen in our organization. The other incident happened due to some known bugs. We suffered with lengthy downtime, so stability has not been fantastic.

It's not a scalable solution. I don't see any scalability occurring. We have 30-40 controllers. Controllers are not there so we can just sit there. I don't see that they are enough to scale out a solution. We have essentially bought AT&T, so we will see how it goes.

On the support side, we had to run to other vendors. If we required specification support, there were plenty of times where we got stuck in the middle of getting a solution. The technical support from NetApp and Cisco often say different things. I'm looking for better, centralized support.

We didn’t have a previous solution. It was relevant for us to get FlexPod from NetApp.

I was involved in the initial setup of FlexPod. When we first set it up, we did receive the help of a NetApp partner. We had an initial issue in which Cisco could not identify the NetApp filer. Cisco and NetApp took almost two months to get this resolved. The setup was very problematic.

There so many options now. It solely depends on your requirements. Some tools have good features, but I don't see any specifics of this tool that I could recommend to someone else.

The most valuable feature is the defined architecture, so you know you're going to be using best practices. That's key and important to us. We use the segmented layer 2 architecture that we got from a design on FlexPod, and that's helped a lot.

As opposed to just applying something like a NAS with systems, I don't know that this product necessarily does improve the way I work. We haven't changed a lot of our practices. We follow best practices, generally, anyway. We haven't engaged; we haven't had an issue where we've needed to engage Cisco and NetApp together. I think that would be a benefit if we had an issue or we needed to get everybody involved.

I’d like to see cloud features, for sure, and auto-scaling type things would be good. Automation is important, and that will be more important going forward.

I don't know what they would need to do to earn a better rating from me. I know that, when we do block workloads on NetApp, fiber channels specifically, it hits the filer pretty heavy. I don't know why that is. We're going away from fiber channel anyway.

It’s stable.

It is very flexible and very scalable. We've grown our cluster, so we haven't had a problem.

For tier 1 cases and system down type of issues, NetApp support is very good; for OFFTAP, not good. I've provided that information to them many times. Their OFFTAP support is not the best.

We were doing a technical refresh of our systems and of our storage. That's where we combined that to use a FlexPod-type architecture, to do both of those things and make sure that we're aligned with best practices.

Determining the architecture was complex, because you need to make sure that you know what your requirements are. Then, once you've designed it, initial setup was straightforward.

We looked at other vendors. We keep our eyes open all the time.

The replication was why we chose NetApp, SnapVault. Not a lot of storage vendors do block-based replication with being able to maintain a different set of snapshots on the secondary and the primary. Everybody does SnapMirror, or does a mirror of some type, but SnapMirror XDP or SnapVault is something that NetApp has that most storage vendors don't have.

In general, global- and enterprise-level support is the most important criteria when I’m looking to work with a vendor.

Spend the time up front to architect it, get the details, and make sure your plan is solid.

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.

The usability and the functionality of the solution as it integrates with the UCS system and Cisco devices makes it absolutely great for our environment. Our only difficulties ever using the system is that we are a closed environment, meaning we have no outside internet connection. It makes support just a little bit difficult. But for everything else, it’s absolutely great.

Because we're a small group of admins and engineers that deal with the functionality, it allows for cross-training and for one person or more to be able to actually function and use the device with very little training needed to handle the device. If they're strong in Cisco, we can easily implement them on to the FlexPod with ease; the same with our system administrators that deal with the application side of things.

I'd like to be able to use the distributed FlexPod system with a mobile FlexPod and a stable FlexPod. That way, when we put up a new site, we can easily launch a mobile FlexPod to them and say, "Hey, welcome into our environment," without having to worry about what they have on the disc, and then support it.

We are a closed classified environment system and expand our system by providing a networking stack that allows access to our environment. One of the considerations is reducing utilization of bandwidth on the wide area network for file sharing and access. Having the ability to install a mobile FlexPod for two weeks (timeframe example), then remove that FlexPod to utilize in a new location while maintaining connection to the primary FlexPod would be beneficial. This would allow us to setup a site, without regard to it being temporary, across the WAN for file access.

I have been using it for about a year and a half.

If we had more of them, stability would probably be great. We're kind of stuck to just one FlexPod, so for us it's a little difficult.

For what we wish we could do, the scalability would be absolutely great. The limitation there is actually on the company itself.

We decided to move over to streamline the equipment and standardize the equipment that's across every site and every place that we deal with.

We considered EMC storage solutions but when it comes to usability, scalability, and the storage capacity we need, they couldn't supply what we were looking for.

If you’re limited to the number of admins you have, like we are, FlexPod is a good solution to look into, especially if the distant end lacks the skill level that you might have in house. FlexPod is good if you have limited management capacity.