FlexPod XCS Reviews

We use this primarily for robosites, which means remote offices.

Honestly, we've standardized on it, so FlexPod has improved our company as far as ease of management, stability, and redundancy.

The solution's infrastructure enables us to run demanding and mission-critical workloads. With manufacturing, for example, we need to be up pretty much 24/7.

We've also seen an improvement in application performance with FlexPod, as well as increased staff productivity. Just the fact everything is up when we need it to be, and we're not waiting on downtime.

FlexPod also simplifies our support experience. With every site being on the same standard, we support it the same way everywhere, so it's easy to train new folks or offshore staff. In addition, it streamlines our IT administration.

Redundancy and stability are the most valuable attributes for us.

The validated designs are good to have. We do use them.

I have found the solution to be innovative when it comes to compute storage and networking. It really gives me the ability to scale to the site's requirements and size.

FlexPod also reduces the time required to deploy our application.

It would be nice to have a simpler setup, and we could achieve that with UCS Central, but just the licensing for that is out of our scope from a cost perspective.

The initial learning curve is pretty steep.

Stability has been solid. Using Cisco-validated design, everything has been rock solid and redundant, and when there is an issue, obviously that redundancy comes into play.

It's been reliable, and it's nice that we can perform upgrades without downtime.

I like the fact that we can add compute as needed, without downtime. From the storage side, I guess that's easy to expand as well, by just throwing down another shelf to the FlexPod.

Their technical support is good.

Our older solutions were not as reliable.

The initial setup was somewhat complex, but once you do it thirty, forty, or fifty times, you kind of know your standards.

We used a vendor and had a very good experience with them.

Overall, the solution saves us money. We have seen an ROI, although I don't know the exact amount.

Dell, Vertex, Lenovo, and Nutanix were all under consideration. We chose FlexPod because that's what we kind of based our standard on. The redundancy and ease of upgrades not taking any downtime were also major factors.

I would say that it is a rock solid platform, the redundancy is awesome, and ease of management and the upgrade process is smooth and non-disruptive.

Data center costs are a little bit more expensive with FlexPod, but you're paying for the redundancy and flexibility.

I would rate this as a ten out of ten. It's been a solid solution for us.

The primary use case that we have is we like the support model of the FlexPod. We like it being converged with NetApp storage, Cisco, UCS, and VMware. We like having a single point of contact phone number for all support inquiries. These are some of the main selling features that we enjoy about FlexPod.

The validated design is really important for us because it gives us a model on which to base our architecture and continued support for all firmware upgrades. It also provides consistency throughout the environment.

FlexPod is making our staff more efficient. They don't have to spend as much time validating infrastructures and designs because that has been already taken care of out-of-the-box. The support model makes it a lot more efficient in the case of incidents.

The unified support is the most valuable feature. What I really enjoy about FlexPod is the support model. You have a single point of contact number for all troubleshooting issues and the vendor that you call takes ownership of the case. It goes with the NetApp validated designs, which are based on Cisco, which is really interesting.

The features of FlexPod that have had an impact on us are the new additions that we have made with the all-flash arrays: added performance, and flexibility management. These are very nice features. 

If they could reduce some of the complexity at the system manager level for ONTAP. I find it gives a lot of flexibility. You can do as much or as little as you want. But to be able to do as little as you want, you do have to do a lot. So, if they could bring that down to a more manageable effort level, that would be nice and simplify it a bit.

Stability has been awesome. No outages to report throughout the whole stack since we implemented the whole Flexspot solution. So, it's been really stable, which is nice. 

FlexPod has reduced the downtime in our environment because of the fact that we have a validated design and all the firmware is up-to-date, validated, and matched up across the entire platform.

We will see if it can scale, because it's still fairly new.

FlexPod is improving our business by giving us rapid support and rapid response to incidents.

The FlexPod unified support was really important for us in a case where we contacted one of the associated vendors. They redirected the case, taking charge of it, and really speeding up the process of troubleshooting with the other associated vendors, who are included with FlexPod

The initial setup was was very well coordinated between NetApp and us. It was very smooth and very painless. 

We leveraged NetApp services to come and install the solution in this case. It went very well.

FlexPod has saved data center costs, due to the fact that we reduced our footprint for storage in a big way. We went from three complete racks down to a 2U storage array for more than 300 terabytes of storage. 

We immediately saw a return on investment due to the fact that replacing our legacy storage arrays with the new AFFs reduced the footprint and maintenance costs. Overall, we saw an almost immediate ROI.

The short list was a essentially Dell EMC and NetApp. We chose NetApp because of this FlexPod support model.

Look at the end-to-end solution. Examine what the needs are. The solution is so flexible, and there are so many options. If you plan it well, you can plan a very cost effective cost-effective solution throughout the whole gamut of storage arrays available through NetApp.

I would rate it a nine (out of 10) because there is always room for improvement. I can't be perfect.

We don't use tiering to public cloud.

We have a customer who is looking for a converged infrastructure to deploy multi-cloud solutions for on-premise solutions.

Our customers use FlexPod today. Our impressions of it are great. It fits our customer's demands. We like the way that it integrates into their environments. Being that Netapp and Cisco have partnered together on it, along with VMware, and Microsoft, there is a good relationship with all of those companies working together.

We can get designs built quickly and into the customer's doors; essentially, our time from customer interest to time of deployment has shrunk a lot. Not only that, FlexPod does a stellar job being able to run workloads.

• Its flexibility
• The continuous innovation
• All the thought that goes into the product.
• The backing teams who are behind it.

It's all converged into one consolidated platform, which works well together.

The validate designs are great. They are a reference point that you can provide to the customer base to convey what the designs look like as a whole. You can go in, reference how components work together as a whole, what firmware versions you need to run, and what those configurations need to look like. They are helpful in time to deliver to customers.

I would like to see programmability into a SaaS-based offering, as I know Cisco's going in a lot of directions with their Intersight application. I would like to know how that will integrate into converged infrastructure onsite, where it can either be the Intersight application running on the FlexPod or a SaaS-based offering on the cloud. Then, how would they maybe integrate some of the NetApp features into Intersight? This is the next step that I want to see taken with the product.

It is a stable environment. The solution is resilient. There is a redundancy that is built inside of the platform, even down to the power. 

You can grow within the environment or you can scale to a different pod architecture. It allows for easy scaling. You can scale within or outside of it. So, it's resilient and scalable, which makes it a great platform.

Technical support is great. 

1. The technical support will do handoff support between the multiple vendors which the customer is working with that. 
2. They have a support level which takes the Level 1 calls. The customer calls into it, and it's a single reach number. The customer has the capability to call in and have the solution or trouble ticket worked on or look into.
3. For partners, they have a support model which allows us to take a Level 1 support call and help the customers out as well. 

There are three support levels that FlexPod works within, which is great.

Once you have a plan, it's around 80 percent planning and 20 percent execution. As long as you follow the CVDs and understand what information is going into them, collecting all the information upfront. 

We are the integrator and do the deployments of the solution.

It has saved us hundreds of man-hours by using this converged infrastructure.

From our customer's perspective, they're not spending much time on troubleshooting, resolutions, etc. They have a solid platform which allows them to run applications, workloads, and have their business running at a top level.

Because of the way they slice things up, you have FlexPod Express, FlexPod Datacenter, and FlexPod Select, which allows you to go small, medium, and large with multiple locations.

• If you have ROBO locations, you can go to Express.
• If you're looking at a converged infrastructure, you can use FlexPod Datacenter.
• You can use FlexPod Select if you need to have that pocketed application which needs top-notch performance.

We work with multiple vendors being a channel partner. We work with all different types: HPE, Dell EMC, and Cisco. We love working with them. Their teams are awesome to work with, and it only makes sense since Cisco's partnered with Netapp. There's not a big stretch in an alliance thing. They have a great partnership together, so there are not competing in the same space, especially when it comes to converged infrastructure.

It is innovative when it comes to compute storage and networking because they are continuously updating the UCS infrastructure and continuously adding new FAS and AFF units into it. They're continuously updating the Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs), so there's definitely innovation which goes into it, almost on a daily basis. They continue to update the number of CVDs available, so it makes our life a lot easier on the sales delivery side. 

For on-premise solutions, it allows our customers to be able to move workloads in and out of the cloud. This allows for the hybrid model. It gives on-premise security, but if they have workloads that require cloud-based applications or containerized applications, then they can the capability of moving their workloads into the cloud. So, it's all about application overloading.

There is a lot of information on www.flexpod.com. I recommend using that as a starting point. There are CVD links there too.

Our primary use case for this solution is for VDI.

We have offices across the globe in some 20 to 22 countries and there was a time when people from Singapore needed access because they experience similar issues as we do. When we implemented this solution, all 250 VDI sessions seamlessly were accessed over the internet. That's the benchmark.

It simplifies infrastructure from edge to port to cloud. It proves that deployment is easy and straightforward. There isn't any need to do extra work. 

We are definitely getting good progress and good improvement from them. It has decreased our data center costs by around 8 to 10 percent. 

FlexPod has improved our application performance by 40%.

With FlexPod, Cisco UCS compute-wise accessing is much faster.

FlexPod's validated designs for major enterprise apps are really important because we can go with our SAP HANA solution, our Hadoop solutions, our HP solutions, and our Media solutions. A vendor-specific solution is always preferred.

In terms of unified support for the entire stack, UCS hardware-wise is much faster. The storage and NetApp are good. We use Cisco switches and the connectivity and other aspects have improved. 

The GPU based VDA solutions could use improvement.

We don't have any issues with stability. 

We can scale up whenever we want.

Their technical support is good. I would give them a ten out of ten. 

We used to do it by ourselves but we got a really good intro and demo for this product. We got a strong marketing push from NetApp. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It's all built at the factory and it came put together as a rack. Everything was straightforward. 

We used an integrator and the process was seamless. They took all of our requirements and from there it was straightforward. 90% of the process was done at the factory. We only had 10% to do and it was done within hours. 

We haven't seen ROI yet. 

My advice to someone considering this solution is to go for it. 

I would rate FlexPod a nine out of ten because this is definitely a huge improvement based on what we saw. 

On-premises

For both data centers, everything that we use IT-wise is run on both of them.

We currently use versions 4.1 and 3.2.

The solution simplifies infrastructure from edge to core to cloud. It makes supporting it, troubleshooting it, and documentation a lot easier. Time to resolving a problem goes down quite a bit as well.

The most valuable feature is the one call number for support and the fact that all the documentation comes with it. They have all of the preprepared plans for the deployment model and we can just choose which one we want for VMware, etc. The hardware is all listed. We buy that and away we go. It's called validated design.

The validated design is nice if we have issues with anything. We can call the vendor, or if anyone says anything, we can say, "Well, we're already running by the certified design to the verify design. We're not doing anything out of the ordinary." It makes support a lot easier.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization is very important because of the whole troubleshooting problem, or if we run into any supportability problems. We say, "We've done what was asked of the company. It is all verified. We shouldn't have any funny things happening." As for management, if they come down and ask questions, we can say, "We're following best practices."

Mainly, the interface needs improvement. I'm not a big fan of UCS Manager, sometimes. I believe they released the new one, and it seems like in every version something changes and something else doesn't work. When they switched to HTML5, I believe we had issues in version 3.2. They fixed it in the next version. The amount of work to upgrade a system for change control is tedious to have issues every time. I would recommend more regression testing, then testing the different browsers in that.

I have been using it at my current company for years. I also used it for about two years at another company before where I am now.

The solution decreased the unplanned downtime incidents in our company because it's newer, more supported. HPE had a lot of bugs in the system. Our guys would go to make a change, then all of a sudden, they would run into a bug. Next thing, we are down. There is a lot better documentation and support behind the FlexPods.

We haven't had any issues yet. Anytime that we've ever had to scale, we just add another blade chassis, and away we go. We throw in more blades. It is very easy. We reuse all of our templates for that. So, it is very quick to deploy new hardware.

The technical support is the best out of all the ones that I'm responsible for calling, e.g., compared to Dell EMC. We've had issues with Dell EMC in the past, HPE as well. 

Anytime that I have called NetApp, they have an answer right away. Before with Dell EMC and HPE, we've been bounced around in their Tier 1 and 2 before you get to talk to someone who knows what is going on. That doesn't seem to happen with NetApp, or if it happens behind the scenes, we don't see it.

The solution’s unified support for the entire stack is very important to us. When we have trouble with Fibre Channel or networking, it's just one number to call. You get someone who knows the whole stack versus having to chase down Brocade, Cisco, or NetApp.

Before, we used to run on HPE Blade Centers, so we had a networking guy, an HPE Blade Center guy, and a VMware guy. Using UCS and FlexPod, we now have two people at the company who run that whole stack, so there is no finger-pointing. It eases a lot of troubleshooting, because it's just two people versus multiple teams.

It has improved the application performance in our company. For us, it was about replacing old hardware with new hardware. The application performance was slow before, and it is better now.

It was straightforward because I have done it multiple times before. I've had to do it probably four times now. Now, I just know what I need to do versus the first time I had to it. We worked with a reseller and basically read all the documentation the first time.

The process for deployment is rack and stack, then upgrade to the latest firmware. We go through all our templates and gather what we're currently using compared to what the latest version of UCS offers. We make any updates, as necessary,  then reconfigure, redeploy, and away we go.

We did it ourselves.

We went from two racks down to one at one location. We stayed the same at another location. Power-wise, we never really paid attention to it. With cooling, there is less hardware.

The solution has saved our company time.

We decided on NetApp mainly cost because of cost and the fact that we already have the in-house knowledge and expertise. Therefore, it just made sense to stay within the ecosystem we were in.

Usually, we have a look at other vendors, like Dell EMC and HPE. However, currently, it was based on the time cycle of the hardware refresh. It made sense to just go with what we already had.

We are looking at going down the next refresh with NVMe, and NetApp is the only one who offers that end-to-end solution.

I would rate the solution as an eight (out of 10). There is always room for improvement, but it's the best technology that I have used so far.

Genuinely have an understanding of where you want to go. We've had issues before at other companies where people like a hardware. Don't look at the hardware. Instead, look at what you want to do, then work backwards.

Right now, all of our needs are currently being met. I know we're going to move towards NVMe with the one data center once we update. However, that is pretty much the newest thing on the radar for me.

On-premises

Our primary use case is healthcare for billing applications. With FlexPod, we use it mostly on some databases and billing applications. We are also using it now for containers, mostly with VMware.

We have the Cisco UCS M4 Blade Server, 6300 Series Fabric Interconnect, and NetApp AFF A800.

The number one feature is easily support. It is all converged. If it something breaks, it is easy to fix. It is easy to upgrade. These are some of the key reasons why we deployed it.

The majority of the time, if we need more storage, then we need to work with customizing the NetApp deployment. Right now, we just do a generic deployment, then wherever we have a need for storage, we have to move some application out of the next FlexPod deployment. One thing is to customize based on the requirements, but the requirements change so frequently, they are absolutely obsolete in six months.

I would like to see more artificial intelligence and machine language baked into the environment on the healthcare side. Right now, a lot of people are not leveraging AI, but we are in the insurance business and would like more flexibility by offering AI as a feature set into the healthcare environment.

The stability is pretty good.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization are very important. With upgrades and fixes, we can't afford downtime. That is number one. When you have multiple systems coming together there is always a chance of something not being compatible or something goes wrong. With this converge infrastructure, we know it has been tested by the companies. We know the issues beforehand, which is critical.

The firmware is all pretested and published. So, we do not have to go through the same process. That is how it impacts downtime.

The scalability from the computer is pretty good. On the storage, they need to do something. They have to come up with some other options to scale both on the computer and also on the storage layer. An idea to fix this is possibly connecting the NetApp high availability model with a FlexPod by having them sit right next to each other. 

We have used technical support a few times. I'm mostly on the architecture side. The engineering team uses it. I hardly use the technical support, though I've used it in the past. It's good depending on the support level you get. We have enterprise level support. We have the highest level support from Cisco and have never had an issue.

The solution’s unified support for the entire stack is critically important because we cannot afford downtime.

Before, it was on a Cisco UCS C240 M5 Rack Server, and we moved some of the applications on a very limited use case. With the innovation of the AFF A800, its ease of management, and supportability, we have seen some performance improvement with the solution. The performance has improved by two or three times.

The setup was fairly complex because of the sheer number of servers, more than 30,000 servers.

Once deployed, it is set up and forget it. We do not have a dedicated FTE to manage this solution all day long. That's a good thing.

I highly recommend if you're deploying this, do not deploy this on your own. Definitely work with partners. That is my number one recommendation.

We don't have a TCO model right now.

We have a very strong Cisco partnership. All our networking stack and some of security stack is all Cisco.

VxBlock was also on our shortlist.

We chose FlexPod because we already had NetApp deployment onsite (on-prem).

The history of this product's innovations affects private hybrid cloud, mostly. We have a VMware cloud foundation running on FlexPod and want to take this to the next level, either VxRail or on HyperFlex. Those are the solutions that we are looking at right now. I think they are working on SEEBURGER as the next step, but maybe we might introduce NetApp HCI.

I would rate the solution as an eight out of 10. I would suggest or recommend FlexPod for deployment if you are moving from a predefined converged infrastructure or validated design architecture. Though, you have to customize it based on your requirements. Right now, do not just jump in. Work with a partner to build out your requirements, then deploy it properly.

Our data center is huge, so it has let us reduce some cost, but nothing significant.

On-premises

The primary use case for FlexPod is for our websites, intranet, internet, internet facing sites, compute storage, and processing power. We have a NetApp storage device, we have FlexPod, and we have flash storage which is part of the app. It's mostly for internal storage and compute needs.

We are more than likely going to be moving to the cloud. We'll probably do some sort of hybrid cloud solution. We're looking at AWS. Cisco has FlexPods that work with AWS. More than likely we'll do something like that at the end of the year. We'll probably integrate with AWS or whatever cloud provider we go with. We have thought about it. They have an excellent platform idea.

FlexPod is perfectly capable of supporting what we have. Our needs are mostly clients that are based off an internet website. All the computer requirements that we have are more than sufficient. For now, this is all the solution we need.

The solution can be innovative when it comes to compute storage and networking. FlexPod is very flexible and innovative. We can design it as we like. We can do just a single tenant, multi-tenant, whatever we need. It's very helpful. 

FlexPod is exactly what we're looking for as far as performance is concerned. For our use cases, this is more than ample. It has all the flexibility and the performance capabilities that we're looking for right now. FlexPod helps us meet the needs of diverse workloads.  

We have seen a major improvement in application performance by around 30%, even though we're running in a hypervisor and we don't have a dedicated service for it.

The solution reduced the time we required to deploy an application. It's almost instantaneous. It's not as fast as the cloud, but it's close enough. It's very good. It has been reduced by at least 50%. 

FlexPod reduced our data center costs by around 20%.

For staff productivity, FlexPod helped with some of the manual tasks that we had to monitor within the infrastructure. We don't have to do it now because FlexPod is very reliable. Even replacing basic disks is automated. FlexPod seems to be very quick and reliable. It's been running well.

FlexPod also simplifies our support experience. It's mostly internal in our own company. We know exactly what we're looking for. We know what to monitor. We have alerts set up for that. FlexPod helps.

The most valuable feature is that it's flexible and best of breed. We can add and subtract as we want. It takes care of all our needs. FlexPod is exactly what we're looking for. 

We don't have any plans for AI right now, but I'm sure when we do, it'll probably be more than helpful.

We have found it to be resilient because of the flexibility and redundancy built into it. 

I would like to see more cloud-centric modules that are specific to applications and more software-based solutions. That's all that is missing.

Our impressions are very good. It's the best upgrade hardware. We have had no issues so far. 

We had a couple of outages with FlexPod, but they were mostly software based. They weren't hardware based. So far, so good.

In terms of scalability, that's exactly what we have with FlexPod. We're trying to expand into the cloud. Anytime we need to add some servers or take some down, it's very scalable. FlexPod is very fast.

We have a support contract with Cisco. It is very quick. We are on the phone with them immediately. Out of 10, I would give them an eight.

We had a reseller for the setup. I'm fairly new at the company. I wasn't there for the setup. From what I have heard, the experience was very good. They have dedicated account managers that work with us directly. It was a good experience.

We have a single tenant application. The compute engine power and the cloud resources that we need for the application are more than sufficient with FlexPod. We don't have any issues with performance using the application. For now, it's exactly what we are looking for. Performance is one of the reasons that we went with FlexPod. 

From CSA, we have some product requirements. FlexPod has been more than enough for us to secure our sites and pass the audits. It's been very helpful.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate this product a 10. There are some good products out there. FlexPod is in the top five for sure.

Go with the best of breed product, it will make your life easier. I would highly recommend FlexPod.

We use this solution for our development workloads.

The private hybrid multi-cloud environment works for us. We're using it as a private cloud.

There's a lot less overhead management. It's a lot easier for developers, in particular, to get the compute and storage they need. They don't have to go through a bunch of change requests. They just do it on demand.

The solution's infrastructure enables us to run demanding, mission-critical workloads. Our entire development organization runs on FlexPod. Their full development environment is on it. So, application development is pretty mission critical to us.

I like FlexPod's granular scalability and broad application support. Our workload isn't that diverse, but I could see other use cases for it.

Flexpod helped us reduce the time required to deploy new applications by about 60%. It's a very dramatic change.

It has also reduced data centered costs. It's hard to quantify, but there's a lot less bare metal that we need. It's all in FlexPod, so maybe a 40% saving. That's a guess, but it's significant.

The solution has also increased static productivity, mainly in that the developers are able to self-serve. They're less dependent on infrastructure resources to stage an environment for them to then start developing on. They can stage their own environments now.

Support is probably the same. It's one area that we didn't see a lot of improvement in and it's actually supporting FlexPod. It's new technology to a lot of our staff, so they're a little uneasy when they're in there messing with UCS's. It's not something a lot of them do all the time. When we do have to, we kind of fumble around the UCS a little bit to figure our way around.

FlexPod does help streamline our IT admin.

Agility is probably the most valuable feature for us. It's very easy to send out resources.

I would assess it as very easy to manage from edge to core cloud. It's a central point of management. We've automated the majority of it and service delivery is fine.

I find FlexPod to be innovative in how automated it is and how it provides a unified ecosystem. I don't have to worry about compatibility or things not working well with each other. It all just works. That's the easiest thing. It's kind of a turnkey solution: we just start spinning up the resources as needed.

I'd like to see some more Ansible integration for automation purposes. We automate everything else with Ansible, so it would be great if we could automate our FlexPod with Ansible as well.

We could probably see a little bit more training as well.

The solution is very resilient. We haven't lost our FlexPod once, it's been up to, even power outages and things that happened at the data center. It's remained very stable.

I think it can scale highly.

We really like the technical support. We were able to get up and running in day one of the FlexPod. Like I said, supporting it is a little more challenging only because of the familiarity with the GUIs. A lot of people aren't in there very often though, and when we have to troubleshoot it's a little challenging for us.

We used VMware Private Cloud primarily, but we wanted to get into a more tangible private cloud experience as opposed to building our own with individual components that didn't fit together very well. We like that this is designed for network compute storage all in one rack. That's mainly what drilled us to invest in the FlexPod.

The initial setup was straightforward. We followed the validated design and we had external partners come in and help us build it, and then we were up and running. I wouldn't say it was complex.

We've seen return on investment for sure. The solution saves us money overall.

We only evaluated Cisco. I don't believe that we even looked at Dell or HCI. It's pure Cisco for us.

Know what you're getting into upfront, and make sure to train your staff appropriately before diving in and setting something up and then backfilling on your training. Go in with your eyes open and really understand the solution before you start turning the keys over to users and access.

The CBD was very easy to follow. The validated design we followed to the letter, and we haven't had any problems with further integration. It's all gone well.

I would give this solution an eight or nine out of ten: a very high score. It's been very stable. We've been running our dev environment off of it for three years now without any real hiccups or outages. The developers are certainly much more empowered and there's a lot less overhead on the networking people. It just works.

The biggest lesson for me is probably that there is value in some of the larger marketing items. Not just marketing bullet points, but there are actual truth and experience that can back up what the marketing slides have sold us. It delivered to our expectations, I would say.