FlexPod XCS Reviews

From the integration standpoint, it is a lot easier to integrate than a lot of people initially felt. Being able to leverage either block or file capabilities of the storage is something that has been beneficial.

Most customers had to look at doing that in a couple different approaches. Being able to have a truly consolidated system that provides all the different types of storage protocol has been a benefit.

Our customers are using this for virtualization. This includes doing something with an open stack style of implementation, running Hyper-V, or VMware.

A lot of VMware tools with VDI NFS capabilities are very key from the VDI standpoint. There are a lot of people who utilize VDI around it.

It has helped my organization in terms of ease of deployment. The approach of utilizing NFS and some of the key features that have been put in for VDI help us limit boot storm and other similar issues.

I see is a lot of those things that existed in the NetApp portfolio on its own. Now we are able to leverage FlexPod as an overall solution for both compute and storage, which is a normal progression.

I usually give everything a nine, because there's potentially something better out there that I haven't come across yet. Nine says there isn't anything better, and I hesitate to give anybody top marks across the board on anything.

In terms of the feature set, I can't really think of anything right now. I am looking for changes in architectural and reference designs, which makes more information available to make sure deployments go well.

I would like to see improvements in the documentation. I understanding how things are coming together and a lot of that is from the UCS side.

I have been working with NetApp and working with fast devices for a while. I have been getting up to speed on the UCS pieces on the FlexPod.

Some of those elements were a little bit different than the standard approach and with a new product line for Cisco. It is not just about networking, but also revolves around the compute. Most of that just requires additional documentation and a better explanation of how the management interfaces work.

The UCS director is nice, now that we've got an overlying umbrella that can manage multiple pod environments. Other than that, most of the benefits are really more customer driven. I do architecture design and deployments, and I hand off the infrastructure. It goes from there to the customer.

The stability has been fine. I haven't seen any real issues with any of the products across the board from either the UCS or the NetApp side with regards to the FlexPods. There has been no downtime related to components or system issues. Most of the downtime is due to customers not understanding the environment and not doing things correctly.

Assuming that they had things configured correctly for networking and things didn't fail over the way they expected, the same things would happen outside of a FlexPod environment.

It is a lack of understanding and making sure that the customer did things correctly. This falls under proper testing after the initial implementation and before the full production deployment.

Most of the issues tend to be typical customer types of situation where they didn't plan correctly or they didn't implement fully. They didn't fully do the testing before they got into production.

Scalability, obviously, is phenomenal. Once you have your base system in place, and you've got your architecture the way you want it, being able to add additional compute or storage is about as simple as it gets.

Technical support has been awesome. The overwhelming majority of technical support calls that I've made centered around FlexPod solutions that have been focused on the initial implementations where there have been certain code provisions about little bug issues.

I had one bad power supply show up in a device. Other than that, I haven't had any specific issues related to the environment.

We’ve worked with IBM, HPE, and Pure Storage. The only storage vendor that isn't an actual partner with Key Information is EMC.

I've been doing storage since Viber channel was invented and I've implemented Versa stacks and FlexPods. I don't think I've had an issue incorporating any other storage product in with the environment as well.

The advantage of FlexPod over the competition is ease of use. A lot of that is because NetApp already has a lot of customers who are familiar with the product. It wasn't a barrier of getting in with the FlexPod.

A lot of that was the reason we were allowed to come in and have a conversation. They were already buying NetApp storage. FlexPod added to that solution and that story.

We just really needed to come in and talk about the compute side of it and how that tied in. Most of our FlexPod work has been discussions around UCS and the Cisco side of things, and not around the NetApp side. I don't think I've run into a customer who isn't happy with NetApp.

I started using NetApp back when all they did was NFS and the waffle file system in the entertainment industry for SGI systems to store data.

I've been using them for years and years. I am now able to have block level access, as opposed to NFS. These are things that came out years and years ago, but these are the benefits that I see with this solution.

There is a common platform with both file level protocols, as well as block level protocols for a common storage infrastructure.

Instead of having to add your ICE storage and your fiber channel storage, or having an NFS gateway into those kinds of things, you can have everything incorporated.

Obviously, having all the protection capabilities of the snap features, snap vault, snap ears, and snap cleans have added value to it as well.

Selecting this solution really depends on the architects. The first thing I ask is why they think they need to upgrade and what it is that is driving it.

A lot of times, unfortunately, a lot of upgrades aren't really upgrades. They are just product refreshes. They are just making sure that customers understand that just doing a product refresh may, or may not, meet their future growth needs.

On my side, I try to help people understanding what they want to do, and why they are going about it.

We want to help them understand if there are any other future things coming into play that may, or may not, determine whether they are better off sticking with what they have. That could be a hybrid array, going with all-flash, or sticking with the spinning disc array with some flash cache for their environment. We want to make sure they're not getting too little or too much for what they really need.

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.

The way everything works together. It is all built to do what it's supposed to do. The performance we get out of it is incredible. We just went through a refresh of basically a whole new FlexPod. We decided to stay with that just because of how well everything works and how great the support is.

The benefit at this point is that we understand it. We know how everything works. If we don't, there's one place where they know how everything works. Support is streamlined. It is absolutely easy to manage. Up until a couple years ago, there was only one person that it took to manage the whole infrastructure.

I really like what it does now. I don't really have any complaints. They plan to give it the ability to add more flash storage in a hybrid shelf. We don't have the need or the capital for an all-flash cache, so we got a hybrid one that's limited to how many flash caches you can have on there.

I haven't had any stability issues with it. I ran into a bug with the software, probably three or four years ago, and this caused deduplication to stop working. However, they resolved that right away and we put the patch on and got back to running it normally.

Scalability is great. We added a new shelf to it last year. There wasn't much down time to add the shelf to it and it was actually very simple. The directions that came with it were straightforward.

Technical support is great. They're always there whenever we need them. They're willing to jump on, spend as much time with us as we need. It is great that Cisco, NetApp, and VMware can all work together on an issue. If you don't know an answer, just call FlexPod support and they are able to help.

It was set up before I got there. I remember how to put in the seven node cluster plus the transition that we are doing now. The setup was simple. It came with a single start-up script. They sent us an Excel sheet ahead of time to fill everything out that we needed. We ran through the script, it asked us for everything, we were together, and it was quick.

We evaluated EMC and HPE for new storage. We decided to stay with NetApp over HPE and EMC because of our experience with it. We didn't have any bad experiences with it, so we didn't want to change it to go down a new learning path. We knew it, it worked, and we had no issues.

They should definitely look into NetApp, especially now with the SolidFire acquisition. They have almost everything you would need for storage. I've used HPE SANs before and EMC, and NetApp just blows them out of the water with manageability and the price point.

I like the fact that it is all integrated. That is the biggest thing. You get everything, all in one shot. A good example of that is when you are doing a rip-and-replace of your storage. It allows you to bring UCS and NetApp in at the same time, at the five- or six-year mark, when your storage starts to get some age on it and you are looking to get into new technology. It is really handy to grab something like that to get everything taken care of. I like the fact that it is all one big, solid unit.

It really didn't change much in the implementation that I had because we already had an existing UCS installation. The good thing about it was that it just fell in and integrated with what we already had.

Seeing some integration to cloud would be important, for sure. That was what I was hoping to see with some of the new data ONTAP features that we were going to learn about at a recent conference I attended. I'd like to see, for example, a namespace that you can extend to a cloud provider, so that you can just do a straight vol move from on-prem out to cloud.

The support aspect was something that was lacking a little bit. NetApp has improved a little bit there, but we have struggled with some support issues, even here recently. I'm hoping that NetApp can get the support piece figured out.

We have had no issues stability-wise.

We didn't need to scale ours.

Technical support is not fantastic. Especially when I was supporting the FlexPod at a previous employer, we had some issues. We were one of the early adopters of cluster mode. Calling up some NetApp engineers to get some support had some issues, where the senior-level engineers were still the 7-mode people, I would get a list of commands saying, "Here is what you would do if you were running 7-mode." It wasn't super helpful.

I did not previously use a different solution; not to the level of storage that NetApp is going to provide for sure. It was kind of a homegrown system that they had.

I didn't set it up, but I oversaw the initial setup of it by a third-party company. It seemed pretty straightforward.

I think we compared three different vendors at the time.

We chose NetApp because of our familiarity with it, for one; two, the price was right.
As far as bringing in vendors for storage, it is important that they have experience with whatever storage that we are looking at; what level their engineers are at. The partner that we went with, we knew that they had experience with NetApp in the past, and so we trusted bringing them in to help get the FlexPod set up.

Definitely leverage NFS datastores if you are going to be running VMware. Don't just treat it as any old storage. Think about the fact that NetApp is invested heavily into the WAFL file system and the whole bit.

There is a ton of preparations that you would need to do before implementation. That could be a months-long process. Make sure that you have the right equipment that is going to connect into it; your top-of-rack switches and the whole bit.

We use it for our inner data center and with our UCS to handle all our server data, and it's doing pretty well.

It was in place when I got to this job. Since I've been here, it has just worked, it functions fine. We haven't had any issues with it.

Ease of use: Get it set up and it just works.

If there were going to be any improvements, they should probably be UI improvements, overall. It can get a little kludgy sometimes when trying to figure out what to do. But, other than that, from what I'm using right now, it seems to be okay.

There's a learning curve associated with it.

The stability is pretty good. For us, it just works. It's something we don't have to deal with every day, and that's a plus for us.

Whenever it was initially set up, they had a small goal. Now we're using a lot of the storage in it, so we're looking into some expansion, whether we need to do additional pods. We're in the initial stages, we're still trying to figure out how much data we're going to retain and how big we need to scale it. That's the question that we're trying to answer right now.

We have used technical support once or twice, to try to add some functionality into it that we didn't use, and they were pretty good.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup but I'm involved in the upgrading process. It's okay. I haven't worked with it in the past. I'm trying to get in with it, it's a little confusing and different from what I was doing before. But, so far, it's been okay, just minor bumps in the road.

My top criteria when selecting a vendor are that they are easy to work with and have knowledgeable engineers on the other side. When I have questions, I want to be able to get them answered easily.

Make sure to have FlexPod on the list. If you're looking at HPE or Dell EMC, put NetApp in there and take a look at them.

• It's a validated architecture, so it's fairly simple to implement.
• The support is unified, so troubleshooting becomes less complicated. 
• It's very easy to expand the solution for performance and capacity growth.

Turnkey. When we put the solution in place, they're able to use the platform within a day of us being complete. It's very quick to implement.

From its prime competitor, seeing some sort of an architecture around cloud built into the solution would be great, whether that's UCS Director or vRealize Automation, something that's got a validated architecture that's ready to go for that solution would be useful.

Because it's all based off of mature hardware with UCS and NetApp and Cisco across the board, it's a very stable platform, it's very quick. There are always little things that we can improve here and there, and configuration changes depending on what the customer is doing. But for the most part, it's a very fast solution and simple to work with.

There are configuration maximums of each platform. I've yet to see an environment that we've hit those numbers on yet, but with the technologies that NetApp is releasing with All Flash, and the new blades from Cisco, we keep getting ahead of any kind of limits with technology advances.

Most technical support issues that we have with the solution as a whole are usually around specific components, a failed drive or a bad blade; generally equipment that hasn't been burned in yet so it's dead-on-arrival, and we don't know it until we get it set up. Generally, we've had pretty good luck with such equipment getting turned around pretty quickly, so we can leave the site with everything fully functional.

I'm involved in most processes from scoping the solution and design through implementation and sometimes support.

Setup for Flexpod is pretty much cut and dry. Our methodology leverages the configuration worksheets that Cisco and NetApp have put together. We have those pre-filled and vetted by the client before we arrive on site. When we get on site it's a very procedural-based implementation. The unknowns are generally limited to a handful of items and we can work through those pretty quickly. The setup is very simple, and very scripted.

The major competitors are probably EMC with Vblock, and Nutanix is bringing up competition pretty quickly, and their solution is less expensive to get in on entry-wise, so that's a real competition point.

The advantage of FlexPod, specifically against Nutanix, is that we we can expand any single component of the solution without having to expand the entire solution. So if we want to add disk or add blades, compute nodes, we don't have to add everything at once. Incremental expansion is less costly. Additionally, NetApp is a more mature company in general - as are Cisco and VMware - than Nutanix is, so their future is fairly well set, where Nutanix's future is still relatively uncertain. That's not due to product reliability issues, but just due to market acceptance and maturity as a company.

Over EMC, EMC's products are generally more complicated to use and less robust overall. With their ever-changing landscape of ownership and acquisitions and leadership challenges, it's tough to say where their products are going to land the next few years.

Don't just buy the solution that your sales guy is trying to sell you. Understand what your needs are, understand what your I/O requirements and capacity requirements are, and leverage the sales team's engineers to truly devise the solution that you're going to actually take advantage of. 

Don't get caught up in price, initially. The sales teams can always work on price. Focus on what the solution is going to do for you, and is it actually going to meet your needs. Then deal with price after that.

• Ease of use
• Easy expandability
• They're quick to respond.

We haven't had a single problem with it yet.

It has improved the way our organization functions tenfold. We can deploy servers, storage, and everything else quickly. When we need to expand, we can do that quickly as well. It's just easier all around.

It has helped us grow. As our casinos grow, it has helped us expand and add the storage and everything which we need. It has given us the performance and stability that we need for applications, and it has allowed us to expand our Disaster Recovery (DR) and backup strategies.

I would like to see a little bit more monitoring. OnCommand Unified Manager is great. It just kind of gives you a really good high-level overview. So, I would like to see a little more detail.

We have had it for six years.

Extremely stable. We haven't had a single problem. It has never gone down. Our upgrades are within an hour, so our uptime is incredible.

Scalability is also extremely easy. In fact, right now, we're looking at HCI for its scalability as well. I don't see another product out there that's as scalable as NetApp.

We've just started adding additional heads for clusters. We went to cluster mode last year. So, we've added in some cluster switches, and we've started scaling out.

We have used them, but very rarely. When we do use them, they have always been really quick to respond. Getting knowledgeable people on the phone pretty quickly. It doesn't seem like you ever have to go through so many hoops just to trying to diagnose a problem. It's been extremely valuable.

We didn't have any centralized storage at all. When we purchased it originally, it was all to expand and growth, and everything else. NetApp was our vendor of choice.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was pretty straightforward. Since then, we've swapped our controllers, and all that has been pretty straightforward. We have not had any problems with it being too complex.

The price point is pretty competitive. I'm pretty happy with where the price is right now, but it can always be cheaper!

I'd say the ease of how we can manage it. That is something I personally like. It means I have to do less work. I manage storage, so with the ease with which we can understand, and then share it to the VMware. We create datastores and we share and all that is easy. Not very difficult.

Sharing over internet. We don't need too many FC connections for that. We just need ethernet connections and we can export it to the virtual machines and to the ESX actually.

We have both the solutions actually. The part where we are right now, yes, it is better. And we are looking forward to going for the hyper-converged one as well.

We're not exactly with FlexPod, but we have NFS shares and all. Somehow, if we can dig into the end user who is using that share, and who is populating how much data into that. I don't know, maybe it's already there, but to all the people I've talked with, I haven't heard about it.

So if that can be included, that would be good. We have some tools like OCI's and all. So if we can find from there, who is the end person who's using the share - and sometimes they over utilize it - and if you can find out who, to that level, if we can dig down, that'll be good for the administration point of view.

The performance could be improved. Because it's over network, I don't know if they have to improve something on the NetApp end, because over the network it slows down when it's compared to the fiber channel network. If they can, that would be wonderful.

In our environment FlexPod has been used for, I think, more than three years now.

It's stable. We don't face a lot of issues often, but sometimes we do face them, performance wise. If the load is increased, sometimes that way. We do get issues, but we are able to resolve them and they are manageable.

Yes, we can scale. We are actually now scaling our environment, including FlexPod on our roadmap, and it does scalability.

For the cases we have, sometimes the issues which we get, we do raise NetApp cases with the team. We use it.

They're good. They're helpful. They're spot on time, that's one good thing. We like it. NetApp is way, way better than some others that we've had really bad times with.

I'm new to my new project, so probably yes, there would have been something, which they have replaced with FlexPod. But I don't know what was replaced, to be honest.

They switched because they wanted better performance and we are especially using FlexPod for datastores over the network. It's more feasible, I'd say. Performance wouldn't be as good as SAN. But still, it is a better solution.

I wasn't involved. I just joined, like a year back. So I wasn't involved when this was procured and all.

I am involved in an upgrade right now. The process is not very complex. Actually, NetApp is helping us, so I wouldn't say they're very complex. They're non-disruptive. That's something which matters to our customer. No down-time so that's what we like about it.

I think I could, maybe, do the upgrade without NetApp's help.

Our industry is management services, Tarragon Consultancy, one of the biggest groups for management services. I think across the industry, FlexPod is a good one, to get convergence of everything in one place; we can get the computer storage and then we can export everything. It's good.