FlexPod XCS Reviews

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.

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.

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.

The most valuable feature is the flexibility and the ability to use the various components nicely together.

It's very good as we've had very few outages.

I think its pretty good. We have been able to grow our environment without any major reconfigurations.

NetApp support is great.

We had an issue with one of our UCS plates and we thought it was an issue with NetApp, but then ultimately it was an issue with Cisco and we would have had to open multiple tickets.

However, with FlexPod being a joint solution of NetApp and Cisco, having to get support only through NetApp solved our issue quicker.

I personally only worked with NetApp support, which has been very good.

Initial setup was straightforward.

It's well worth looking into.

We've deployed a couple of projects for universities. They have been using FlexPod for a VDI solution as well as their file systems and servers. We usually use cheaper firewalls to secure the solution. We mostly use Cisco, which is higher power as well. 

FlexPod is the primary solution we recommend for clients with high-availability server requirements. Our clients find FlexPod's management helpful. You can manage everything via plugins. 

As the technology grows, we're looking to upgrade our storage systems to something faster, and we're hoping to improve our servers with next-generation technology. So we want to enhance our server infrastructure and explore server virtualization with VMware. That's the improvement that our clients are demanding. 

We have been in this business for a few years, but I joined this company five years ago. I've been working with FlexPod since I started at the company. My first task was implementing a storage system using FlexPod for some university clients.

FlexPod is highly scalable. The advantage FlexPod has over some other solutions is that you can scale independently using multi-servers. If you want the scale up the storage, you can create a number of disks.

We usually provide frontline support for our clients. But if something is beyond our knowledge, we get support from the vendors.

Installing FlexPod isn't complex if you follow the implementation guide that the vendor provides. We partner with major vendors like Cisco, NetApp, and VMware, so we have extensive implementation support to help us with migrating the solution. Our first deployment took about nine weeks. Implementation requires only two or three engineers, and we use a third-party provider for the security part. In total, it's a maximum of five people. 

The return on investment is very high for FlexPod implementations.

I rate FlexPod eight out of 10. 

We have everything on our FlexPod.

Because we use it everywhere, it is standard to set up. Therefore, if you can manage the set up in one place, then you can manage the whole infrastructure.

• The ease of use
• The ease of administration
• It is easy to manage.

I would like to see synchronous replication and easier automation in the next release.

I love the stability. It is stable.

I love the scalability. It is scalable.

The technical support is slightly above average. I would like them to have quicker escalation.

We were previously using Dell EMC and HPE servers. I prefer NetApp over Dell EMC.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used World Wide Technology and DataBank for the deployment.

We have seen ROI.

It is a good proof of concept.