FlexPod XCS Reviews

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 infrastructure, meaning that they're pre-validated. Cisco and NetApp have come together to essentially pre-validate against certain use cases. So a lot of the legwork and design have been eliminated.

Because all the testing and all the validation has been pre-done, a lot of that legwork does not need to be done at the user level. You can deploy faster. A lot of the solution is pre-validated, meaning that it just works out of the box.

They've just recently announced the SolidFire integration, which I think is pretty cool. We don't have any experience with that yet, but I'd like to see more details come out of that.

I don't think any solution is perfect, there are always little squeaky wheels that can be tuned, but the product works very well. It's not a perfect solution because, obviously, it doesn't always fit everybody, there are unique requirements that people have.

We've been using it more than five years.

Stability, I think it works really well.

We've had some issues where, the customer didn't necessarily know what their workload was, so they didn't necessarily know what kind of FlexPod solution they needed. But, for the most part, it works well.

It scales well. Obviously, with cluster-mode and ONTAP, you can scale nodes pretty much to what you need it to be.

I've used the FlexPod support. Cisco will take ownership of that and run with it. I can get through to the right person and they're knowledgeable, absolutely.

My industry is IT consulting, so my company has a lot of clients that are in various verticals. It can be healthcare, it can be education, so depending on what vertical they're in, they'll have a requirement to have a certain converged solution that they know that will work.

You've got flexibility within it. It's all profile driven.

And the personalities of the blades within the solution. One could fail, you just pop a new one in and you have SAN booter, you have SD cards that you can just pop right in and it's back up and running. I like the redundancy that you get with that.

It's usually a great fit for most customers, depending on the size obviously. I just feel like it's one of those golden bullets in a lot of cases, to just get something on the ground with them and to have something that they're happy with long term.

About five years now.

It's great. Haven't had any problems with it. I mean, sure there are bugs like anything else, but it's always been solid.

With any software release you're going to have false alarms and you're going to have some failures that you have to upgrade to resolve, but they're usually few and far between, which is great.

It's really scalable. UCS domains, you can just continue adding more if you need to. It's all based on how many you can plug into a set of fabric interconnects, so it's very scalable.

I've had to use tech a lot but it's always been really great. Sometimes there are some language barriers but it's always good.

It's solid compared to everything else I see out there. All these other server manufacturers don't quite have the same level of integration that the Cisco has with this product. I really do like how Cisco has pulled it all together compared to, say, Dell or any of the other manufacturers. It's just much more simple for me to work with, and eventually to customers, it's a great hand-off when it's time to leave.

• The central point of management
• The centralized management of the storage and the compute

• Improved functionality
• Speeds up deployment time.

The product is uniquely valuable because we were able to get everything up and running very quickly without having to consult with multiple teams across the IT infrastructure.

When we initially installed it, the automation piece really wasn't available. Maybe in a future release, if automation was built into the product that would be good.

Three years.

The stability is very good.

The scalability is very good.

We used technical support for the initial install. They were good, knowledgeable, and helped us get answers quickly. We were able to reach the right person quickly.

The original project was no longer needed, so we took it apart, and repurposed the components.

I was involved in the initial setup. I found it to be very easy.

The automatic revisioning via the ability to provision through a single interface and touch all the components along with it. That really helps us to spin up things like test apps, DevOps, and all that stuff in one interface.

It cuts down on the time needed to provision anything. So if a business unit says, "Hey, I need this, because I need to do analysis on this portfolio that I'm going to buy", or "Are these customers going to pay?" We can provision things very quickly and they can get to work on making money.

It's uniquely valuable because the hyper-converge (buzzword) has taken over right now, but our converged infrastructure, even though it's three or four years old, is still doing everything we need it to do.

Maybe some of the graphical interfaces could be a little more user-friendly from the Cisco side of things.

I'm interested to see how the Converged System Manager comes out. It allows you to see all the components in a single graphical interface. Right now, we have to go to a couple different ones to see everything. We can execute scripts in the background against everything, but it would be nice to see a picture. That way we can give that to the executives, and say "Here, check out this cool thing we have." They probably don't understand it all.

The company was using it before I got there. I have been there for about four years, so at least four years.

I started working on NetApp products in 2008.

We haven't had any downtime in four years. I don't have any problems at all with the stability.

There are some upper limits that we're never gonna reach. I don't have any concerns about scalability or increasing it.

We have used it that much. Of course we have used some of it, but most of it is for a failed hardware or something like. We haven't had any major bugs.

We've never had any issues with tech support. So I would say we're very well-supported and satisfied with the way they do things.

The previous solution was physical servers with a storage so everything was separate, administered separately, and they decided "Hey, let's go with this FlexPod to size everything together with unified support and unified products." So that's why they chose it, to slim things down, but at the same time, to gain some functionality that maybe they didn't have before.

The initial setup predates me.

The integration between Cisco and NetApp was quite key for us, and the VMware as well. The whole FlexPod stack is pretty key to that.

We are using FlexClone to clone our production environments into Dev and UAT. We used to take a week per environment to do this, now we can get it done in a couple of days per environment.

It is uniquely valuable, because we haven't seen any other vendors in the market who are doing something similar to what the FlexClone technology is doing.

We've had a few technical problems, if those weren't present, then it would probably be perfect.

Two and a half years.

It is very stable. We've been running it for the last two and a half years in our production and DR sites, and we haven't had any issues whatsoever.

It is very scalable. We've had to expand the storage infrastructure a few times, and have had no problems with scaling it out.

I have used NetApp technical support. The first level is probably pretty average. As soon as you escalate above the first level and you start speaking to the second and the third levels, then the support becomes very good.

We spoke to NetApp, because one of our biggest concerns that we had was cloning our environments. We had to have identical replicas of our production environments in Dev and UAT, and the flexible solution was the best option for us at that point.

We contracted through a third party to do the initial setup.

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.

The most valuable features are its modularity, scalability, and the ability to scale down the infrastructure and remove some of the physical hardware that was required previously. It gives us the flexibility to build upon it, whether we do one new service or we do the blade service. With the FlexPod, in general, with the UCS chassis and with NetApp, the way they can intermingle and work together seamlessly was a big benefit to us.

As I’ve mentioned, it allowed us to remove some of the redundant hardware aspects of our infrastructure. At the same time, it allowed us to upgrade our top-of-the-rack switches. We were using some of the legacy MDS fiber switches. The Nexus 5Ks gave us the ability to do fiber channel native and FCOE, as well as giving us that fast speed backbone bandwidth that we know we need for FlexPod.

We have greater flexibility than what we've had in the past. Most of our systems were legacy. We're starting to go through a process of upgrading the infrastructure. FlexPod gives us that flexibility to choose between remote sites or the headquarter site; and basically choose between FlexPod Mini, FlexPod Express or full blown FlexPod with 5Ks, UCS chassis and so on. I think the flexibility in the FlexPod designs is what really attracted our organization to it.

We really like the all-flash arrays and the solid-state drives. We’d really like to see, not so much from NetApp but from our perspective, going more towards the SolidFire and doing some metro clusters with NetApp.

So far, we have not had any issues with stability. We just started implementing or migrating some of the services, building some of the new services onto it. We're pretty young into the FlexPod but the future for FlexPod and for our organization looks bright.

As I’ve mentioned, we have a NetApp representative on site. He does most of the storage stuff for us. We rely on them quite a bit. They're fantastic. We get great support with them.

We were on legacy equipment already. We basically said, "What's the next big thing?" Obviously, being a partner with NetApp, they try to promote FlexPod as much as possible.

Initial setup was pretty straight forward. At first, it can be sort of daunting, with all of the components that are brought together, but once you actually start developing the service profiles and the servers, that's pretty much all it is. You've basically got a chassis that serves servers. Once you have the grand scheme of the design, the configurations after that were pretty simple.

I don't deal with the pricing too much but, from what I understand, we got a pretty good deal on some of the FlexPod equipment that we have.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

If you don't have a reseller that you can talk to, talk to some industry experts. Get a demo. Basically, get an idea of what the FlexPod can do for you and which deployment model fits best for your company.

As I’ve mentioned, given what we were dealing with before, integrating with Cisco and NetApp storage, the marriage between those two companies, they came up with a perfect solution that is pretty modular and flexible. We can scale it however we like it, to whatever site we're going to deploy it at.

I'm not too concerned about more integration between the Cisco and NetApp systems. Obviously, you're going to have some separation there, because they are two different companies. Obviously, the interoperability of the different components, being able to work together, is great enough as it is. Being able to have one user interface that controls everything, I don't think you ever get that but, who knows? Cisco could buy out NetApp; who knows? They might just absorb into one interface. For me, that’s not so important, but I can see where some customers, some users, might look at that as a benefit.

When I look at a vendor, the most important criteria for us is what type of premier support they have. If something breaks, do we have 24-hour support? Obviously, pricing comes along with those but I think support is most important to us.