FlexPod XCS Reviews

• 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.

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 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.

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.

The primary use case is for customers that want to replicate infrastructure over and over again and have a consistent architecture for their workloads. It's appropriate for larger enterprises that want the pod design in their data centers.

The most valuable feature is the ability to integrate different products into one validated design. That allows customers to understand and get the value out of the hardware, as it was designed.

I would like to see better operations, a single pane of glass to manage and monitor the entire design across VMware, Cisco, etc. I would also like the upgrade process to be a little smoother.

From my experience, it is a consistently stable, reliable product.

The benefit of it being a pod is you have a lot of flexibility in terms of the hardware and platforms that you choose to have in that validated design, depending on your particular needs.

I personally haven't experienced the tech support from NetApp, but I have heard good things about it from customers.

I think the setup is straightforward, with the designs that I've seen in terms of the physical topology. "This link needs to go to this link. You've got to configure it in this way." The validated designs do a good job in terms of the layer 1 and all of the configuration.

I rate FlexPod a seven out of 10. The reason behind that is, there is a lot of value in FlexPod, and FlexPod is incorporating a lot of the newer technologies, like ACI, into the design, rather than just keeping it an xOS, as an example.

Our use case is for a life sciences cloud offering.

It makes us more lateral and faster to production.

Quick deployment.

I have not really heard any complaints from our storage engineers.

It is pretty flexible. We are able to deploy faster.

I have not personally used support. 

We were using a different solution between Hitachi and other NetApp solutions. 

We switched to FlexPod for its flexibility and quicker deployment. Also, we use other NetApp products.

I was involved in the networking side of the initial setup. It was pretty straightforward.

We did the installation with a core internal team. We had some NetApp help for the storage guys, but for the network portion, it was more self-explanatory.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: flexibility and licensing costs.

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.