FlexPod XCS Reviews

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.

It’s basically very scalable and reliable. Also, the total cost of ownership is low. It’s an effective solution for any company, and it fits for our needs.

It's easy to deploy, and efficient. The efficiency in thin provisioning and deduplication has suited all sorts of applications in our business.

Awareness amongst the customers could be better. Also, the customer base, enhanced blogs and discussions are needed, as there's a small user base right now.

Stability is 100% or 99.99999%, 24/7/365.

It's very scalable, and its horizontal scalability is great.

Excellent whenever you call you can speak to either NetApp, Cisco or VMware and they are all great.

Straightforward, very systematic and streamlined. A lot of centralized virtual desktops.

We looked at a lot of vendors, but we selected this because it seems to be a strong business going forward.

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

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

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

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

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

No issues encountered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For our needs, it meets them.

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

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

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.

The validated design is a huge bit. It means that it's supportable by both NetApp and Cisco, and that means that we're doing it the industry best-practice way.

The benefit is certainly that it's compartmental. You can build a FlexPod for a small installation, you can build it for a big one. You can build a small one and grow it. It's flexible in that regard. It gives you the design and the structure to be able to expand as you need.

As a point solution, it does absolutely what it should. I'm not sure it needs any more.

Make it cheaper.

About three years.

It's great. Very stable. Nothing to complain about, so that's good.

We've engaged technical support somewhat, mainly during the configuration stage.

As I said, you've got the FlexPod system, gives you access to Cisco and NetApp support, and they'll run it through; so whichever one you're more comfortable with. My networking guys will log stuff with Cisco, and the storage guys will log stuff with NetApp, and they're happy using that support.

FlexPod is more about the way that the pod is build. We've probably used all the individual components before but never put it together. The validated design was the big thing for us.

It's fairly straightforward. It's listed out for you, so you just follow the bouncing ball around, essentially.

We're a data analyst company, looking after property data. I'm not sure this product is uniquely valuable for our industry. It certainly has some value, especially in the mergers and acquisitions space where we need to stand up some infrastructure that matches ours in a newer environment, and be able to have that standard.

It is versatile, and the profiles and things that you can create with it are good to work with and make it easy to replace the hardware.

It has made it easier to deploy new virtual machines. We use it for our virtual machine environment. Before, it was a lot just having to get the hardware ready. Now that the FlexPod solutions are built up, they make it a lot easier as far as networking.

Easier integration from the beginning, which they have put improvements in as far as setting it up. It was just a large learning curve for us at first.

Probably two to three years.

Once we got implemented, it was very stable.

It should scale out based on what I've seen.

We haven't had to scale out yet. We have fairly small environments, but many of them and they are all separated. But based on the solution, I think we could scale it more if we needed to easily.

I have used it from the storage site, from the NetApp side, and also from the Cisco side. I contacted either vendor.

At times it's difficult to get to the right person, but eventually, depending on how far you push, you can get to the right person. Once I reach the right person, they are knowledgeable. Generally, my experience working with tech support is fine.

We were on a platform, which we thought didn't have a long life from another vendor.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was pretty complex.

There is a steep learning curve on the Cisco side to set up profiles.

I had pricing from separate vendors. I got storage from NetApp and Cisco Blade Servers, so I don't know. I didn't buy it as a package, so it's hard to say.

We bought the Cisco and the NetApp separately and integrated them ourselves, so that probably made it a little more difficult. But we followed all the guidelines that were published from both Cisco and NetApp regarding how to put them together. Now, it is sold as an already built together package, which probably would make it easier.

It's an all-in-one validated design. We don't have to worry about making sure that thing A supports thing B. It's all top-down, integrated, and validated, which means for us, it's going to just work.

It let us not worry about the minutiae of the configuration, and instead worry about how we put systems and applications online and the maintenance to build a new environment.

It uniquely valuable because it's leveraging first-party products and services. Systems, which we already would use, now they are all integrated with each other, so we don't have to worry about going out into the market and finding those components separately, then making sure that they work together the way we need.

Surprise me with something I haven't thought of.

Maybe it's out-of-the-box and can configure itself. Something that's beyond the simplicity that I already think is there. Abstract away some of the technical details of setting it up, so you don't need the experience of an engineer to come in and do the work.

About four months.

The stability is fine so far. It's solid. It's a rock.

The scalability is fine.

Technical support is a non-issue. That's another advantage with FlexPod, in particular, is it's one single endpoint for support. We don't have to call around and there's no finger-pointing between organizations.

Our old solution was outdated, old, and out of support. We were at our hardware refresh point of three to five years.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was straightforward.