FlexPod XCS Reviews

We really like the validated design, just being able to reach out to one number and get support from the whole staff. For us, with FlexPod, just the support is really our biggest key. It's just virtualized servers of various sorts: active directory and exchange servers.

Just the biggest benefit has been performance, not having to worry about is this component going to be able to work with another component, since it is all validated. When we've had problems, just being able to call one number to get it fixed. that saved us lots of time.

It would be nice to have more of a single pane of glass from a management standpoint. As it is now, we can manage the virtual machines and the storage from one, but then we start getting it, okay, now we have to manage another component, we have to go to another area.

The third component, we have to go to another one. It would be nice just to have one central management component for the whole FlexPod solution.

We also had some issues with some performance initially, under our first system; then once we did an upgrade, we haven't had any issues since. New model would have higher rating.

We've had FlexPod for five to six years and we have not had any downtime.

Stability has been rock solid. We haven't had any issues from a stability standpoint.

The scalability has been pretty good. We tend to just upgrade components when needed, and just never had any issues with that upgrade process. We are the world's largest tire distributor, so it's been a big deal for us to be able to scale out.

We have used technical support. I would give them a rating of 7/10. Our initial problem is that I think we got an engineer who wasn't quite aware of the whole FlexPod solution, so they were directing us incorrectly. And then we got someone who knew how to do it, and they handled it correctly.

We knew we needed a new solution because we ran out of capacity and performance. On top of the NetApp, we also evaluated EMC. They were the main ones, and we just ended up still staying with the NetApp. We decided to stay with NetApp partially because the support model we had for it, we liked better.

The initial setup was great. We had a partner do the installation and just everything went very smoothly.

• It is a converged platform.

• It is a support model. I can call directly into NetApp and our customers can call directly into NetApp. And when they're troubleshooting an issue, whether it's on virtualization, their compute, the storage side, they have that one level of support. This is big thing for our customers.
• The simplicity of the model itself.
• The overall management aspect of it.
• Being able to manage using tools like OCI from NetApp.
• Being able to manage the entire pod, create things, provisioning, automation, and orchestration. Those are built in to converged stack. That's a big help for our customers.

One of the biggest benefits is the workloads that it can manage. It's not tied to a specific workload and is very diversified. You can do backups on it, you can do production data, you can run virtuals, you can run bare metal, and it will support almost every workload that you can have.

For me, it's the integration with things that are not part of an ONTAP solution. It is simple management platform that I can manage my NetApp from an ONTAP perspective to the E-Series, to a StorageGRID, to a SolidFire environment in one management layout. That would be the one thing I would want the ability to do.

Deployment is a whole lot better now than it was five years ago. It's very simple. We can stand up a standard FlexPod usually in a matter of a half a day. That involves racking, stacking, and starting the configuration of the aggregates, or the Cisco platform, that goes with it.

Stability is built on the redundancy of the platform itself. So you have redundancy throughout the system. The storage platforms have redundant controllers. Customers are very very comfortable with a model, knowing that it is going to be up 24/7/365.

In terms of scalability we can scale to a cluster in CDOT, but we had issues. The cluster CDOT and the evolution of that platform ensures that we had the right mixing rules, because there challenges around that piece of it. So scalability is a big selling point for our customers, and knowing that it's not "rip and replace" is a big thing.

Technical support, from a NetApp perspective, is a model of having an eco-system of Cisco,NetApp, and VMware, or 1800 number that I could call into. In our case, we actually have a network operation center. We place first call for our customers, and then we call directly into a service line. It makes our life much easier and it streamlines the process just for customers.

We get the Level-3 guys and we've had a great relationship with NetApp, and that really helps as well. I can't speak for new partners, who are just coming on, but for us, it's been fantastic.

I was involved in the initial setup. I do all the architecting, I do the set up and configurations for some of our customers. In my previous company, we sold 194 FlexPods to the Department of Veterans Affairs. We architected that entire solution and we helped with the deployment process. We've been very involved in that.

Really in a converged stack, not a hyper-converged, because NetApp doesn't have hyper-converged, now with SolidFire. From a converged stack on a FlexPod, we do work with VCE on the Vblock aspect. We work with HPE on their platform as well. Those are usually the three that we have been competing against. The advantages of NetApp over competitors is honestly the price. There are aspects of VCE and Vblock that have a better overall management stack, than what we have on the FlexPod side. But from the perspective of cost, we always win with NetApp on pricing.

So the first thing is you have to know your workload. A lot of customers go in, and what they do is they push on infrastructure without understanding the applications. So to any customer, I always tell them, you have to do an assessment of the application, understand the characteristics of the application. That will drive the solution, whether it's all-flash, whether it's a hybrid model, or whether it's just spinning disc. So until we know the application stack, I don't even talk infrastructure.

The initial reason why we got it is because it's a one-stop shop for your compute, and the networking aspect of it. We wanted a sort of one-throat-to-choke approach; if we ever had any problems, we would get the teams onboard instead of finger-pointing back and forth. That's probably the biggest draw of FlexPod for us.

It simplifies the whole stack, and allows us to worry about other IT problems and not have to struggle with stack issues, basically.

We used to have HP C-series and kind of a hodgepodge network. We had, probably, four different vendors. Because of that, we were having a lot of problems with networking and the blades. Once we got FlexPod, all that stuff went away. It was nice.

The user interface isn't as friendly as I would like it to be. I would like to see UCS ditch Java and go with HTML5, just to make that a little simpler. Other than that, NetApp is making good changes. The tools have gotten dramatically better over the past two years, which has helped a lot. Cisco – I generally don't do too much of the networking stuff – but it's still kind of best to use the command line, so I guess they could improve the command line interface.

If there could be an integration between Cisco and NetApp, the single pane of glass works well if you can get it all to actually work and get the data that you need easily and quickly. That could definitely help.

I have not encountered any stability or scalability issues. This thing has been running great. We actually really like it. It works well for us, we run about 400 VMs off of it, split between two data centers but it's a good performer.

NetApp’s technical support is probably one of the best, in my experience. I've dealt with, probably, Microsoft being the lowest, because they suck, or sometimes, if you’re in Unix land, you have to just find your own solutions. I think NetApp’s good. They're right up there with Cisco, as far as support goes; very good experience overall.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because we were at capacity on our blades and we needed to move to something else. Cisco UCS at the time was just kind of up and coming. I think we really made the right decision, because their one-profile approach of propagating all the configuration data down to the blades was really nice.

I was involved in the initial setup and we had a consultant too. I was just getting into it so, for me, it was kind of complex but looking back on it, it really wasn't that bad.

We looked at HP and we looked at Dell, but we ended up going with Cisco and I'm really happy with it.

We've already had businesses come to us and say, "What do you use?" We just tell them about the whole FlexPod idea and what kind of benefits it brings: the scalability, the one-throat-to-choke kind of support. We've had a couple of companies take our advice and they were happy with it too.

In terms of homework to do before implementation, you have to look at your workloads and see how you're going to use it. In our experience, we have thrown everything but the kitchen sink at it and it actually performs really well. We've had very little problems, very little problems.

When I look at working with a vendor, I like one that takes an approach of making decisions in your interest. You can usually sort out pretty quickly whether they're there to just push gear or raw services, or if they're actually there to be a partner to help you succeed in the landscape. You can shake that out usually within a few meetings to see how they're really going to be. I’ve found that in NetApp.

I think that the most valuable feature is the pre-validated design, the reference configuration, as all the integrations have been done, and you don’t need to go through a teething phase.

I think that the time to deploy is quicker. Support is more straightforward with less finger pointing between the vendors so the time to resolution if you do have a problem should be quicker.

The thing that stops up from jumping in more is that we are resource constrained, I have to piecemeal what we have, and I can’t stop using something because it’s old. I can’t just say “here is a reference architecture” create a clean environment, I have to use my legacy components. We can get a lot of the benefits, but the FlexPod needs you to do it all at once.

Ir's very good, no outages to report so far. You can mess anything up but nothing that is the fault of the product.

It’s not a concern, it can scale to larger than my organization would ever need. We're not a huge organization.

All of the vendors involved are pretty good – Cisco, VMware and NetApp, and we have good support from them all.

That’s the selling feature – configuration is essentially done for you. It’s good. Less of a puzzle and more of a procedure.

That’s the selling feature, the configuration is essentially done for you. It’s good, and less of a puzzle, and more of a procedure.

Ease of deployment is the most valuable feature.

I think that there are lots of benefits to using FlexPod. It goes back to the ease of deployment, especially with the projects I’ve been involved in. If you need a refresh on the whole infrastructure, it helps immensely.

I think that there is always room for improvement in any product. I guess the training availability and infinite scalability could be better, and it’s getting there.

It’s great – no issues with stability.

I didn’t run into any issues with scalability, and although I haven’t looked at the specs recently, but I believe it scales to most environments needs, and I’m still considering it for my new environment. We have a 30-petabyte environment, and we're looking to FlexPod for our database infrastructure.

I would say that I haven’t had to contact FlexPod specific support but Netapp overall I would give them an 8-9/10.

My initial setup was a partner, I didn’t know there were walk-through guides, but once I found those it was immensely better. It was cumbersome, but then eventually the installs were much simpler.

I would say that you should seriously consider it. It’s very worthwhile.

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. 

Our primary use case for FlexPod is for better storage.

The FlexPod solution increased back-end productivity and streamlined our IT admin.

The most valuable features of FlexPod are high availability and scalability.

In the digital future, I would like to see included more code compatibility. The storage should be more mobile. We should be able to move it from place to place.

FlexPod needs more support on ML/AI networks.

FlexPod is very stable.

We're still working on scalability. We have to keep low price versions of the high-end equipment. I would like to see a little more data compression on the solution.

The FlexPod technical support has been fairly good. I cannot complain.

We knew that we needed to invest by talking with consultants.

The initial setup of FlexPod was complex in the way that we had to manage the data.

We did not use a consultant. We do it all by ourselves.

On a scale from 1 to 10, I would rate this product an 8. Consolidation is possible. 

FlexPod doesn't compare to other products. Do many tryouts first. Try to just mimic different environments to get a different view of the platform.

We use it more to deploy a supportive solution so that a customer can go to one business support number and then have FlexPod for the whole infrastructure.

The streamlining of support has been an improvement for us.

Also, we have found the solution to be innovative when it comes to compute, storage, and networking because each piece is still modular at the end of the day, and if we have to upgrade one area we don't have to upgrade the whole thing.

Finally, we have seen about a 20 percent improvement in application performance. The increase is coming over the legacy hardware we were running before.

• The Cisco Validated Designs
• Industry-leading technology, put together 
• It just works

Also, it's very versatile. We haven't run into any issues with it where we couldn't do something because of it. We have been very happy with it.

It's resilient. We haven't had any issues with it whatsoever and we've had it for four years. It's very stable.

We have had to scale it and it's very easy. You just swap the component that you need to scale. For the storage you just add on a shelf; for the compute you just add another node and you're good to go.

Technical support is very good. We had to open a ticket one time but it was very quick to get it resolved.

We were using a mismatch of different things like Cisco switches, NAT storage, and HPE servers. The reason we switched was the validated, one-vendor support for everything. It's one of those things you set up and you just forget it. It just works.

It was very straightforward, as long as you follow the documentation. It is a well-architected solution so I didn't really run into issues. I set it up and it works.

I just did it myself.

The cost is a little high.

We considered HPE.

You won't regret it in the end, if you invest in FlexPod.

My thoughts on the solution regarding private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environment are that I definitely think hybrid is the future, having a flexible infrastructure. That's where I like the FlexPod, it's more like hyperconverged. It has more layers of flexibility for moving workloads up to and back from the cloud. We currently don't use FlexPod for managed private cloud.