FlexPod XCS Reviews

The most valuable features are reliability and the ability to give our end-users a reliable system with the performance, the IOPS, and the latency that they want. It just solved all our issues.

We're using all-flash FlexPod, and that's drastically increased the performance of our applications. Our gaming floor and our applications are more reliable.

I would like to see if it could come down in price a little bit. You get what you pay for, and it is good. It's a valuable appliance, but if it could come down in price, it would be great.

We've never had an issue. It's been stable from day one.

We've actually grown it. We've added more nodes to it and the scalability was awesome. It was piece of cake to scale.

We have used technical support and it was great. We opened a ticket, they worked it out on the back-end, and they gave us the solution.

Previous to this solution, we were using NetApp without FlexPod. We had a lot of issues, so this actually fixed those issues.

I was part of the decision to switch. I like the reliability and the all-flash performance.

I was involved in the setup. It was pretty simple actually. We had a form we filled out with all the information, and it was just taking one step after another. It was just a matter of populating the information.

We evaluated EMC. We were already invested in NetApp very heavily, so that swayed our decision in that direction.

When selecting a vendor, I want to know that they are tech-savvy. I want them to know our environment, our system, and how it functions on the back-end. I want them to help us out if we have any problems.

If you are really trying to find a solution to your problems, FlexPod will do it for you and fix it them.

The integration with Cisco is the most valuable feature.

Because we are a big virtualization shop, this tool has benefited our organization. I don't see the benefit from a management perspective, because we still have to manage each and every device separately.

The integration with Cisco is pretty valuable. It has definitely helped us to build our solutions as per the requirements.

I look forward to testing features in ONTAP 9 next-generation data management software during the pilot release. Let's see how that goes.

Stability is a big question mark. We having been using NetApp since 2014 and in the last two years, we have grown quite a bit across the globe. We are now using the FAS system.

We had one data loss incident happen in our organization. The other incident happened due to some known bugs. We suffered with lengthy downtime, so stability has not been fantastic.

It's not a scalable solution. I don't see any scalability occurring. We have 30-40 controllers. Controllers are not there so we can just sit there. I don't see that they are enough to scale out a solution. We have essentially bought AT&T, so we will see how it goes.

On the support side, we had to run to other vendors. If we required specification support, there were plenty of times where we got stuck in the middle of getting a solution. The technical support from NetApp and Cisco often say different things. I'm looking for better, centralized support.

We didn’t have a previous solution. It was relevant for us to get FlexPod from NetApp.

I was involved in the initial setup of FlexPod. When we first set it up, we did receive the help of a NetApp partner. We had an initial issue in which Cisco could not identify the NetApp filer. Cisco and NetApp took almost two months to get this resolved. The setup was very problematic.

There so many options now. It solely depends on your requirements. Some tools have good features, but I don't see any specifics of this tool that I could recommend to someone else.

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.

It's easily integrated. We have WFA and Cisco UCSD; that integration works quite seamlessly. So far, for self-provisioning and for our internal cloud, for the private cloud, that integration works nicely. That's a cool thing.

The integration and all of the levels of automation, everything is there. The support is the first thing that needs to be improved. The second thing is that because there are so many products out there, they need a common management tool. I don't think they have that particular management tool, a centralized tool. I can see into WFA and so on, but that is still in the initial phases. I would like to see more on that automation.

I have been using for the past year.

It is stable; it's semi-stable. Because cloud IT itself is new, standards and procedures are likely not universally defined. It is semi-stable.

That's the challenge. Scalability is the challenge; running out of network ports, running out of storage. If you have very unpredictable workloads, then scaling is a big challenge.

Support is something that has gone a little bit downhill in the past two years. They don’t have a complete devops model. Looking over the past eight years I have been using NetApp, over the past two years, it's not been that great, compared what is used to be. Response time is the challenge.

The company has been using FlexPod for a while, actually; three years.

For the customer, upgrades are very straightforward; nothing to worry about. You just click a few things; it's easy. The upgrades are not that much of an issue.

Go for it. One thing to be aware of is the support, but the rest is good.

When I’m selecting a vendor such as NetApp, in the business that we are in, I look for stability. When it comes to stability, reputation will matter; how long have they been in business and for how long they have proved themselves. The reputation is one of the things. Stability is the key thing.

It allows us to run a very lean infrastructure department. It doesn't require a whole lot of administration, so I'm able to have two sys admins for our entire organization.

The user interface could be a little bit more intuitive but overall, once you get used to the way it works, it works great.

We use SnapMirror to back everything up, so I’m pretty happy with it right now.

It has been rock solid. It has delivered everything that we've asked of it and we've had no performance issues.

I have not really needed technical support. Once we got it all set up and configured, we've only had to reach out to NetApp to replace failed drives.

We were using the IBM-branded X series, so we had NetApp storage in the past. It was reliable, it was great. We really didn't a see reason to move away from NetApp. At that time, we were building a brand new data center and got the opportunity to do a full build out. That was when we selected the FlexPod.

Initial setup seemed a little complex, and I think a lot of that came from the UCS side of the FlexPod. Obviously, it is very powerful; it’s very customizable. Once we got through all of that, once we get past that, it doesn't require a lot of messing with it or hand holding.

The UCS side was complex with the levels of all of the settings that needed to be applied in setting up your port groups, and similar items.

We selected FlexPod because, as we're building our new data center, we were looking for something that would be able to scale easily with the business, without locking us into having to do huge forklift upgrades. We just had the opportunity to have a full greenfield build. We looked at other solutions such as Vblock. FlexPod was able to meet all our needs without too many problems.

Do it. Once you get it set up and configured, it's rock solid. It scales with your business easily. It will make your life so much easier once it's in place.

It's so reliable; I have had no problems with it. It's delivered everything that we've asked of it and we haven't even moved to flash yet. I'm pretty happy with it.

As far as anything that you need to prepare beforehand, I'm not entirely sure. We got to do a full greenfield upgrade. We weren’t trying to do a rip-and-replace of our current environment.

The most important criteria when I’m looking for a vendor is reliability, both with the product and the vendor relationship; not a lot of turnover in account managers. Things like that.

I think that the most valuable features are the integration of the components and the support model.

I think the integrated support where, if I call NetApp support and it’s a problem with UCS, the fact that I have a one-stop shop will provide a cohesive support structure for me, and that’s huge.

And it’s not very costly. We acquired the parts of the FlexPod individually.

I’m sure there is room for improvement, there always is, but I’m hard-pressed to tell you what could be improved.

It's rock solid.

We haven’t had the need to grow it, but based on how scalable I know the three vendors are, I don’t see any issues.

It’s been excellent – they are very responsive. Traditionally, when you have multiple vendors, before FlexPod, everyone does a lot of finger pointing, and the fact that all these companies work together is invaluable. This makes my life as a customer much easier.

We did it piecemeal, but it was very easy.

I would say, what are you waiting for?

I think the most valuable features are the architecture and the support from Cisco and NetApp. The fact that everything is certified together means we don’t have to do much.

At this point, it's doing everything we’ve asked.

We’re still implementing it.

It seems to be very stable. We’re kind of early on, just started the integration, but so far so good as it's more stable than our old platform, IBM.

We’re a fairly small shop so it will scale beyond what we need for it.

The solution is verified so there is less explaining that needs to be done. Depends on what the issue is, but they will be more versed to handle those questions.

Our old platform was IBM.

The initial setup seems like it will be kind of complex because we have the UCS in place, and are adding a NetApp cluster. It would have been simpler if we were doing a full refresh instead of piecemeal.

It's worth evaluating. Having the certified architecture certainly helps when it comes to design and testing.

It is our primary on-premise infrastructure.

It runs our VMs. Our SQL databases are all on VMs, so everything is virtualized.

Once the FlexPod is built, managers provision additional VMs. So, it's pretty simplified.

With the all-flash array, I think it did improve application performance in our organization.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization are very important. We just followed them to make sure the CVD was compliant or matched to what they designed.

The solution’s unified support for the entire stack is beneficial. It is all in one.

I would like to see more of a centralized support model because we have all the FlexPod components and we hand build them. So, if we have issues with one particular stack, we're talking to individual vendors, e.g., for UCS, I have to call Cisco, and for storage, I have to call NetApp.

So far, the stability has been good. We haven't had downtime or issues since I built it. 

The old one did have some outages. The old UCS FIs went down during the firmware upgrade.

Our stuff usually doesn't go down, so the unplanned downtime isn't worse or better than before.

Our department is pretty small.

Our models are pretty small. So, we'll be able to expand additional chassis in place, then additional disk shelves.

We have had to file tech support cases. Our experience with them is okay. We dislike going online with the robot stuff. Many times, it has delayed our reaching out to a real support engineer.

When I came onboard, they had already purchased it. I just put everything together.

The setup is pretty straightforward. 

My recommendation: If you are not familiar with the technology, you probably should engage some type of professional services to set it up.

We hand built our FlexPod environment. It is composed of a Cisco UCS 6332-16UP FI, NetApp AFF A700, and an NDS.

It was easy to build. We had an old FlexPod built by someone else and I built the new one. We're in the process of migrating all the workloads over.

It hasn't decreased our data center cost by much. It just one rack replaced by another.

I heard the NVMe stuff is coming around. We don't have that license or that feature yet. So, we probably will try it out and see how much improvement that's over our current setup.

Give it a shot. If you are experienced with other types of technologies already, it's pretty simple to put it together.

I would rate the solution as an eight (out of 10).