FlexPod XCS Reviews

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

It is mostly for small remote sites. The WAN link isn't good enough for them to come to the enterprise site at this time. So, we do a lot of file shares, VMs, etc. It's to run the local business.

Our FlexPods are NetApp FASs, Cisco UCS, and Cisco switches. That's our version of a FlexPod. We call them ROBOs (remote office/branch office). We have about a hundred throughout the world that we deploy in different regions. For us personally, I do the NetApp side of it. We're running NetApp version 9.5P6. That is the lowest version that we run in our ROBO environment. 

While the deployment model is on-prem, we are moving to a backup model in the cloud for them for DR. In the next month or two, we are going to start that.

It's done really good things. A lot of it for us is being able to have that storage with the whole solution onsite at a small site, which may not have the WAN capabilities to use the corporate servers for their applications. So, that does help.

A lot of what we've done with the FlexPod is to replace hardware that was failing. We had a lot of UCS solutions go into replace IBM Blade Servers which were majorly failing. We had all types of problems with those. 

We've also had challenges in the beginning where we didn't size sites right. We just totally blew it. We took their monthly closing down to a crawl, then ended up replacing it with an AFF solution, which was great. It really helped us out a lot.

It's just been a little bit here and a little bit there. The biggest thing is being able to have that remote site, and that they can keep running. If they lose the WAN, they can keep running. It's helped not having P1s and P2s at sites because they're dependent on corporate to be able to get something and they lose network connectivity. E.g., we had a site where the roof went. The site is in Fargo, North Dakota. They had a roof collapse at their site, but they kept going because, while they had other problems, they weren't reliant on going to a corporate data center to run their apps in the factory. They were sitting there able to keep continuously running even though they had a roof collapse.

We have done the all-flash at some sites. The one site where we totally blew the configuration, we came in with an All Flash FAS, and it went from them not knowing if they were going to be able to do year-end closing to year-end closing happening because they're an Oracle site. They had been on SAN previously, and all our ROBOs are NAS. We don't have any SAN in our ROBO environment, which is our FlexPod environment. So, they went from a SAN environment to a small FAS that didn't meet their needs, then with that AFF, we've had no problems since then. We installed it right before Christmas, literally two days before Christmas by pulling out the old and putting in the new.

For the entire stack, we have what we call a ROBO team in each of the regions. I'm part of the U.S. team. We have the same team work on this stack for every installation in the Americas, which includes places like North America, Mexico, and Brazil. It's really helped us because we've done documentation that we can push off to our separate teams that do the support, like server support, UCS support, and our storage support. This helps us out. Everything is the same. We've tried to keep everything the same and keep them as common as we can, so it helps with our operations team, which actually is in India. They know that if they can go to any one of those sites and there should be very similar setup.

For the longest time, with all the failures that they had with the IBM Blade Servers, our server staff was rushing to bring in storage and servers because of all the failures. Because of this solution, we now don't have very many problems. The only problems that we do have is sometimes storage gets a little out of control. They need more than they thought they needed. Other than that, it's been very smooth. We rarely have major problems at that size.

We've gotten it down to a science to install. So, it's been very easy to install. It has been very flexible for us because some sites don't need as much storage as other sites. Instead of going for a regular four terabyte, 12-drive solution, we can take it down to a two terabyte SaaS solution if the site doesn't need that much storage. Because we're trying not to have storage just sitting there, doing nothing, it's very flexible for us. We do have sites that have over a 100 terabytes. So, it's been a very flexible solution for us.

We do a little bit of Oracle at some of the sites, so the validated designs have been very good. We've had very good results. We have no complaints about latency or anything like that. Most of it is a lot of just file shares and stuff like that. But we do have Oracle and SQL at some sites.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. It does depend on what model you get. For example, we don't try to put a small model in a site that we think would be growing.

The technical support has been very good. I have had a few calls with them. I had one problem at the site where I had an aggregate that would not shrink after I had deleted some stuff. It took a few tries to get the right guy on the call. We do have a NetApp SAM with our company, and it really took getting to him to get the solution fixed. 

They were trying to replace all the older hardware with new hardware, getting some new sites as well. At some of the sites, they used the IBM Blade Servers, which were having high failure rates. That was a big wreck. We were going to a UCS solution, so they were trying to integrate into the UCS solution as well.

Three or four years ago, our management decided they were going to put in EMC VNX at a site that had a lot of Oracle in it. It was one of our bigger sites. They do big trucks there, and for the three years that VNX sat there, they had all types of Oracle problems in terms of latency issues, but could never get that latency issue fixed. We brought in a ROBO solution, and I didn't do any tweaking on it. I just put it in and put the Oracle on SAS drives, then separated them out by themselves. We've had no complaints in two years.

We did not use WWT for the initial setup, and we did have problems. A lot of it had to do with the gentleman who worked on the program left. From our perspective, it was a lot of trial and error. It took a couple deployments to get a rhythm to it. After that, since the first two to three deployments, it's been very smooth. With the same team, we know what we're doing. We have the same project leader.

We did the deployment, but we did use our WWT. With WWT, we have them set up the basic configurations on everything. For the storage solution, they set up by the IPs and made sure everything is connected correctly. They don't get into the deep dive into the software or deployment. That is something we do.

They get it so when it's at the site, it gets plugged in. The network guy gets the ports plugged in and gets support set up. Then, we can get onto the storage and UCS, provision VMs, etc. Once that's setup, we can start working.

We have seen ROI.

The solution has decreased the unplanned downtime incidents in our organization by 25 to 30 percent.

Everything is purchased, so we do not do any leasing with this product.

I would rate the solution a solid nine (out of 10). The solution has been good for us. Nothing is perfect. That is why I wouldn't give it a ten. However, everything that we have done with it has been spot on. We've had very little problems with it. We're able to integrate it really well.

I would recommend going for this solution.

On-premises

Our primary use case for this solution is virtualization with Hyper-V.

We are using Cisco UCS and NetApp together in our FlexPod solution.

The validated designs for major enterprise applications are very important for our organization because we are part of the local government, and this solution is a critical platform for a broad array of applications and services that we provide to the public.

The history of innovations, in particular, the inclusion of all-flash, has had a positive effect on our database performance.

We are using the solution's tiering to AWS as a backup target for all of our data. It is essentially our DR and it is being sent out to AWS using SnapMirror.

In terms of making our staff more efficient, we have had a mixed experience. It isn't necessarily FlexPod, per se. Rather, we chose the wrong hypervisor. Hyper-V is not well supported. NetApp and Cisco don't know as much about running Hyper-V as they do VMware on top of the platform. It was really our choice of hypervisor that is the negative point.

We have been able to reduce our data center costs since implementing this solution. Three or four years ago, we were able to shrink our data center by fifty percent. This was a co-location leased space that we were able to reduce.

Our capital expenditures have been reduced, I would say, although I do not have exact figures.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the integration between NetApp and Cisco products. 

From the Cisco side, the most valuable features of this solution are the data center density, the deployment, and the management of the servers and the networking.

Hyper-V is not as well supported by NetApp and Cisco as VMware is, which is something that should be improved.

We have been using this solution for about eight years.

Across the board, this solution is very stable. We're very happy. It is very resilient and fault-tolerant. Downtime would usually be due to human error.

On both the storage and the compute side, this solution is very scalable.

The solution's unified support for the entire stack is significant. In my experience, I've had situations where we built an architecture that did not have that model. It was difficult because as a customer, we ended up coordinating the support of the multiple vendors.

Our experience with them has been positive. We do have a technical account manager on the Cisco side, and the coordinated support is available if necessary.

Prior to this solution, we were using a multi-vendor storage solution that included HP Blade servers with equipment from EMC. We switched to Cisco, which was a strategic management decision.

The initial setup of this solution was complex because we were doing it for the first time. We have some very experienced Cisco engineers on staff, which was key to implementing Cisco UCS because it was familiar to them.

We had a reseller assist us with the deployment, eight years ago. Because this was new for us, NetApp was involved to make sure that it was successful.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing FlexPod.

There have been some improvements on the Cisco UCS side since we began using this solution. In the earlier days, it was more difficult to upgrade, and there was pain involved during the process. That has gotten a lot better over time.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of product is to consider their requirements. If their need is for a dense data center that is scalable, then this would be the choice because it scales easier than any other product I'm aware of.

This is a good solution, but our experience hasn't been perfect.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

We use this system for the performance, cost of ownership, agility, expandability of it, and the automation.

I manage this solution, but I don't think of the FlexPod solution on a whole. I manage all of the individual components including Cisco UCS Manager, UCS Director, and UCS Central. I work with all of the storage devices including the flash arrays and the filers. I work with the switches via Flex channel or on the ethernet side.

We use the solution's tiering to a public cloud for archival purposes. We have everything in-house for the most part, but there is some data that is not that critical but needs to be archived because of government regulations. We have to keep it for quite some time.

With respect to the history of innovation, it has affected our ease of use, cost of ownership, we use less manpower to manage it, and we have better uptime. As far as disaster recovery, that's been a really big plus because we have the two fabrics. 

This solution has definitely simplified our infrastructure from edge to core to cloud. It's a simple process, for example, the way you create the cloud pools. It's not complicated and very transparent.

Our staff has been made more efficient by using this solution, enabling them to spend time on other tasks. Basically, they have time to do things other than managing FlexPod. It includes day-to-day operations, working on and closing support tickets, and other mundane activities.

Our application performance has increased since we implemented this solution. One a scale of one to ten we were probably at five, and now we're at a nine.

The number of unplanned downtime incidents has absolutely decreased since we started using this solution. We went from having maybe a hundred tickets a month down to perhaps ten.

This solution has helped reduce our data center costs because everything is centralized now and we don't have to have multiple data centers, with equipment from different vendors, different support contracts, and so on.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the automation point because it's a lot less staff to have to manage it.

We would like to see the automation improved because there has been a learning curve having to create the workflows. They're looking at other automation tools, including one from Red Hat called Ansible. 

This solution is very stable. It has never gone down. We've had issues that were attributed to user error, but if everything is done correctly on it then you're not going to have to worry about any downtime.

This solution is very scalable. UCS, itself, will scale up to twenty chassis and you have eight slots in each one. That's scalability. The same thing with storage. If you need to add more disk shelves then you just add them. As far as bandwidth goes, we have seven Ks up into the core, which is over a terabyte worth of bandwidth right there.

The solution's unified support is very important to us. It's just one number to call and then we get supported on all of the different components.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate their technical support a nine.

Prior to this solution, I had experience with Vblocks. It is basically the same product, but on the storage side it uses all EMC and the compute is all UCS. All of the networking is still Cisco, VMware is still VMware.

The initial setup of this solution requires some training. Once you learn it then everything is simple, but in getting to that point, there is a bit of learning curve. The complexity comes from having so many different components.

The need to have skills from several different backgrounds. You need to have experience as a network administrator, a network engineer, a storage administrator, and a virtualization expert. It is a four-technology domain that includes network, compute, storage, and virtualization. Then you have a server administrator, and you have to combine all of these roles into one person. That is where the learning curve comes from.

On the Vblock side, they use VCE, but I don't know who they use on the FlexPod side.

We use Cisco validated designs but we don't do our own designs.

Our decision to implement this solution was not influenced by the fact that it integrates with all of the major public clouds.

FlexPod gives you the ability to manage the system in a simplified way. It gives you automation capability, which means a lot less manpower to manage it. Power and cooling requirements are lower. The total cost of ownership is lower. Finally, it just gives staff more freedom to do some of the other mundane day-to-day operations.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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

Our organization relies on it as the backbone of our infrastructure, which we use to provide services to multiple clients in a multi-client environment.

While I don't have exact figures, there are definite savings in terms of capacity, particularly when using an all-flash storage solution. We may be achieving around a twenty to thirty percent reduction in capacity usage. The familiarity with the architecture has improved troubleshooting, as we now know precisely where to focus our efforts, particularly when dealing with performance-related issues.

Managing the system is straightforward, and we find it easy to handle overall infrastructure upgrades. The main advantage is consolidating everything into a single rack, which helps optimize power consumption, especially in CRM.

Perhaps having a unified interface for managing the entire company could lead to improved efficiency and performance.

I have been using it for eight years.

Once it's installed, it remains stable. Hardware failures are infrequent, aside from the occasional need to replace components.

It is scalable, allowing us to expand our workload capacity.

I'm quite impressed with the support provided by NetApp. They are incredibly responsive, and you can expect immediate assistance. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We used NetApp in combination with HP products at my previous company. This combination worked well, but FlexPod offers more in terms of operational simplicity, making it easier to manage and operate.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Regarding the architecture, the connectivity involving switches, servers, and other components is quite straightforward

Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

Our primary use case for the solution is running critical infrastructure, and we deploy it on-premises

The storage efficiency and performance are valuable.

The solution could be improved by including automation for user updates.

We have been using the solution for nine years.

The solution is scalable. I rate it a nine out of ten.

The solution is scalable. I rate it a nine out of ten.

We have had a good experience with customer service and support, but it takes a while for them to attend to critical issues. I rate them a six out of ten.

Neutral

I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

My primary use case is for private cloud, database servers, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

It allows us to deploy and fly fast quickly.

The feature I have found most valuable is data protection architecture as a whole. Integrating applications like Oracle, SQL, VMWare is a key differentiator. Operations are elementary and consistent. You realize this when you have to scale, and all the management keeps the same way.

Areas for improvement would be the integrated support task force with all vendors, the communication with and recognition program for resellers, at scale documentation I believe it would be more detailed (Graphs and Projections @ latency/IOPs/Throughput). I would like to see more integration with the public cloud in the next release.

I've been using FlexPod for ten+ years.

This solution is surprisingly performative and high available. In addition, all components are fully redundant.

This solution is highly scalable. Because of the nature of flexibility on a solution, we can customize any component, which is great. Still, when we get off the documentation (cause is too flexible), we have to double attention to the limits of individual components.

The technical support for this solution is fine. However, there is some room for improvement, especially when the cases involve the ecosystems. For example, the support team could have a unified war room.

Positive

For the initial customer or engineer, installing for the first time, this product sometimes is challenging to set up. For more senior customers who have automated scripts, it's much easier. Deployment takes a few hours, perhaps around half a day.

When the operations matter, you definitely have to look at FlexPod. I see Flexpod as a singular competitor for two reasons, once you scale the solution as you need and the operations and administrator's effort keep the same. The flexibility allows you to scale just the necessity you need with no waste of investments. I would rate this solution as ten out of ten.

On-premises

We've deployed a couple of projects for universities. They have been using FlexPod for a VDI solution as well as their file systems and servers. We usually use cheaper firewalls to secure the solution. We mostly use Cisco, which is higher power as well. 

FlexPod is the primary solution we recommend for clients with high-availability server requirements. Our clients find FlexPod's management helpful. You can manage everything via plugins. 

As the technology grows, we're looking to upgrade our storage systems to something faster, and we're hoping to improve our servers with next-generation technology. So we want to enhance our server infrastructure and explore server virtualization with VMware. That's the improvement that our clients are demanding. 

We have been in this business for a few years, but I joined this company five years ago. I've been working with FlexPod since I started at the company. My first task was implementing a storage system using FlexPod for some university clients.

FlexPod is highly scalable. The advantage FlexPod has over some other solutions is that you can scale independently using multi-servers. If you want the scale up the storage, you can create a number of disks.

We usually provide frontline support for our clients. But if something is beyond our knowledge, we get support from the vendors.

Installing FlexPod isn't complex if you follow the implementation guide that the vendor provides. We partner with major vendors like Cisco, NetApp, and VMware, so we have extensive implementation support to help us with migrating the solution. Our first deployment took about nine weeks. Implementation requires only two or three engineers, and we use a third-party provider for the security part. In total, it's a maximum of five people. 

The return on investment is very high for FlexPod implementations.

I rate FlexPod eight out of 10. 

On-premises

Our primary use is mostly for footprint consolidation — reducing the number of cables and easing the management model compared to just working with monolithic servers. Having access to the UCSM (Unified Computing System Manager) and managing that way seems to be a lot easier.

Going from the old monolithic server and silo storage that they used to use is an improvement. With the FlexPod solution, just being able to manage and monitor the overall environment helps. It saves a lot of money on all the various tools that are required to manage a traditional solution. Most of the necessary management and monitoring tools are included with the FlexPod solution. So, that's nice.

Potentially through the use of NetApp technologies on the back end — like the FlexCloning and the Snapshots — we have changed the way we do our development workflows and actually the way we do DR (Disaster Recovery) as well. So, we are using UCS (Unified Computing System) on service profiles and leveraging all their servers for test development in normal operating conditions. In the case of DR, you just have to switch service profiles. You boot to a different line off of that and you are able to turn the development test into the DR environment. That's nice.

For me, the most valuable feature is probably just the orchestration and automation that can be done around the whole solution from top to bottom, from servers to storage, networking, and using UCS Director. With the FlexPod solution, you are able to quickly provision all your hosts and all the resources that you need for the environment.

In the next generation, I'd just like to see bigger, faster, and better. I think that's partly there. Just shove more memory in them, throw a faster proxy in them, use 100 gig infrastructure. Having more hundred gig ports and AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup/Modeling Language) workloads would be very nice.

Scalability is nice. With this product, you can just add more compute, buy another chassis, and it might be fairly inexpensive, but you plug it in and away you go. There is no more dedicating ILO (Integrated Lights-Out) ports or track ports or whatever, out-of-band management, et cetera. So, that makes the opportunities for scaling nice.

I give both Cisco and NetApp a ten for their efforts in technical support. I have used a lot of other vendors' support services, and pretty often it is an absolute joke. If there is an issue, the FlexPod support team is there to fix it.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. Once you get the understanding of how the system works, it is fairly easy to set it up. 

We do the consultations, so I set it up myself.

There are a lot of hyper-converged solutions out on the market these days, a couple of our customers have tried those and they felt a little constrained within those environments. The FlexPod is nice because it is still made up of separate components but it is centrally managed. 

I actually used to manage the FlexPod at one company I was with. It was great there because it was all Cisco UCS. We leveraged Cisco UCS director to provision and add capacity when we needed to. Another company I was at used a Blade infrastructure along with fabric switches so that was the same sort of model. It is just easier when compared to other solutions. Fewer points of entry make it more manageable.

I used the Gen4 FlexPod at a previous company and we are reselling Gen5 to a couple of other companies. All using 40 gigs. It would be tough to quantify how much is actually saved, but I know it is a significant reduction in the number of cables, number of switches, and number of servers that they have to use. On $1 million billing for materials, I'm guessing they're probably saving at least $25,000 to $30,000. Overall they see a bit of return on investment.

We have talked about getting a hundred gig infrastructure so we can incorporate AI or machine learning, but they are not there yet.

The efficiency of data protection and data management goes back to leveraging UCS director and UCSM. Just the ability to provision the environments quickly is significant. I would say that FlexPod simplifies IT operations for unifying data management. Our customer is not currently using any cloud right now. I personally have not used any cloud, but I know there are opportunities for some integrations. 

They are leveraging SnapMirror to replicate all their source data and their production data center over to DR, as well as test development. It is easier than a host-based copy. Keeping all the switching within the FlexPod environment instead of having to go up to the core all the time probably helps out.

In terms of switches, cabling, the chassis — being able to fit eight servers in 6U obviously, helps out in terms of data center savings.

The advice I would give to people considering this solution is to certainly leverage all the tools and applications that Cisco and NetApp have developed around the FlexPod solution. You could certainly buy things separately and piecemeal it together, but things like the CSA and the solutions support becomes a nightmare. When you get a nice certified FlexPod solution, all the tools come with it. It makes a big difference in the environment and usability.

On a scale of one to ten where ten is the best, I would rate FlexPod as a nine or a ten. I love it. Again, there are obviously a lot of new HCI products that are coming out. But in terms of being able to manage it, I think that FlexPod is pretty solid as is.

On-premises