FlexPod XCS Reviews

It is performing well. It is the data center of devices, e.g., when we are using the call locations in San Francisco and Sacramento.

If we go to different vendors, this solution looks good. Though, it is mainly manufactured to a particular size.

As per the implements, we need to bring more devices for this type of situation. It will be helpful for us to get more infrastructure export, etc.

• Its existing space
• Its design

We would like more security features.

Once it is in place, we do not touch it, so it is more stable than other solutions.

Scalability is good. 

Once our current issue is fixed, it will be good. Then, we will not have any issues on it.

Technical support has been good when we have contacted them in the past. They have been helpful. However, we have the technical experts, so we do not use their services often.

We used it for the remote setup, not the physical setup.

We upgrade it normally during downtime.

We do it ourselves when it is straightforward. When it is a complex installation, we bring their technical person onboard. 

We purchased the solution through CDW. They are a partner and knowledgeable. 

We are good and comfortable with CDW.

It is a good solution compared to other products. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It depends on the device - How much it carries, what the security is, etc.

We currently have FlexPods and we are going to buy SolidFire to upgrade the FlexPods that we have. Peer organizations have recently purchased SolidFire and have seen a tremendous increase in their performance, not only just with speed, but with reliability. We don't have a choice, because it's that good.

It is always better to have faster, more reliable storage than unreliable and slow storage. Requirements are not getting smaller. We're not seeing a diminishing need for, or a plateauing of requirements.

The organization is growing. The storage requirements are growing. The move to big data that we're seeing is requiring faster storage and faster throughput. The common business applications we use this solution for are the Exchange Server, Outlook, and VMs.

I'm happy with the solution as it is.

I've only been here for a year, and we've had it the entire year I've been here. In the last year, there's been no downtime due to the equipment.

I have not seen anything that would indicate that it's not stable. It hasn't gone down on us, so that's a good thing. There has been no downtime that was the fault of the equipment.

In terms of technical support, we pay them and they do what we pay them to do. Sometimes we pay them, and they don't have to do anything.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Don't buy magnetic media, but rather buy all-flash storage, solid state drives, or other types of flash media. I can't imagine that magnetic media is going to be around for much longer. Eventually, the old stuff is going to go away. Spinning platters are going to go away. I suggest investing in all-flash. Don't buy magnetic media, but rather put them in your garage.

I love the ability to migrate my profiles if I have a problem with one. It's worked out great for us: system dies, have it back up on 20 minutes, no problem. Unfortunately, that has happened once.

It just gave us everything in one box. There isn’t any, run over here and configure this, run over here and configure this; it's all in one, nice, neat little rack. It's just one interface, which is always nice.

I would love to see the single interface for managing everything end to end. That would be ideal.

Also, simply the interface a little bit. There are a lot of places to go to get things configured and it's easy to get lost: Did I remember to do this piece over here before I did this piece? Then there's this piece on the other side. There are just a lot of moving parts that I think could be simplified, or wizard-driven; to say, you have all of these together.

Stability and scalability are fantastic. I’ve never had any issues with stability or scalability.

I've had lots of issues with firmware upgrades. I'm locked on an unsupported firmware because I have three production servers that, if I upgrade the firmware on them, I lose those servers. The solution from Microsoft, NetApp, and Cisco is to rebuild those servers on updated firmware. That's not an option.

I’m locked where I’m at. I can't go to 2016. I just barely squeaked into 2012 R2, I'm locked where I'm at now until we refresh our SQL environment. Then, it's however fast I can get my dev team to get off that old SQL environment. The last SQL refresh took me 10 years. We had the new environment in there but they say something like, "Well, we’ve got this legacy app, we can't move it just yet."

To get a perfect rating, they would need to fix these issues, without rebuilding my environment.

Generally, technical support is good. When you call in, as long as you give them a clear issue, you're going to get a good answer. Don't call in and just say it's broken.

We needed faster networking. We use it primarily for our virtual servers, for migrations. To get 10 Gig into our data center, we had to run cables all the way across the building to our networking area. The more cables you're running, that pipe's only so big. We ran a couple of cables to the FlexPod, plugged it in, and all of a sudden, I've got 40 Gig to move data back and forth in the rack. I don't ever have to leave it, so that was our primary reason for bringing it in.

It’s pricey, but provides a high return on investment.

It was a little spendy, but you get what you pay for, though. It's rock solid, other than my firmware issue. Other than that, I plugged it in, and other than checking on it once a month to make sure that there are no alerts, I leave it alone. That's fantastic.

We did not look at any other vendors; we are a Cisco/NetApp/Microsoft shop. It was clear-cut for us.

In general, when we do look for a vendor, the important criteria are reputation, stability and price, obviously. Also, how easily can I talk to them? We've had vendors come in and they've completely bombed on their initial interviews. It's like, "Sorry, guys. You had that one shot to make that first impression and you did it poorly."

Check the interop matrix and check it carefully. Make sure that everything's going to work across the line.

Another thing: Once I've got my FlexPod in place and NetApp knows I've got a NetApp 8040 – they know I have these models – have it pull the interop matrix for me. You know all my parts. Why do I have to hunt it down?

For other customers: Just make sure you do your homework on it. Make sure it's actually going to give you what you need and have fun with it.

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.

My use case was a small FlexPod architecture (seven Cisco B-Series Blades, a FAS8200 in CDOT, two Cisco Nexus switches). One rack. We used Cisco 3xxx switches. Six profiles were defined so six blades were running and one was a spare.

On top of the infrastructure we used Oracle Hypervisor (OVM); the VMs were based on Oracle Linux. On top the virtual machines we hosted Oracle Database (pinned, to reduce license costs) or applications.

So two levels of flexibility per DR were activated: one based on profiles and one based on the hypervisor.

The customer added the FlexPod-based solution to a real-time system to improve their overall system with a new analytics environment.

• Software flexibility. Everything is fully configurable. 
• The reliability results from the design. Elements are well projected (disks, blade, network, etc.).
• No single point of failure is identifiable.

FlexPod was born to be used like building-block elements, to create large EDP premises. If used to create a single FlexPod CED, optional operational collaterals (backup, management, etc.) are missing, both in docs and in design.

The valuable features are scalability and all-flash. We are using it with Cisco UCS Blade Servers, so the Cisco switches work very well as a unit. It provides us with the performance we need for our customers to get data on time. Our top customers are very happy with this solution.

The main benefits are scalability, modularity, and fast data transfer. I think the business benefit is a faster response time.

I would like to see the data fabric of the entire system because. The government is looking to deploy a government cloud solution. We want a data fabric which needs to be managed, for the entire cloud environment.

In this regard, if we use storage on our premises for our cloud infrastructure, along with some other vendor like Azure or AWS. We are wondering how all this data will be synchronized and if we can get a common solution and common input. That is the next challenge, not only for me, but for all of the members of the team.

I have been very happy with the scalability.

In terms of technical support team, the support is being provided by a partner of NetApp. However, NetApp people from India do visit us and they ask us if we are facing any problems. We hope to receive very good service from NetApp in the coming days.

I was as consultant for the initial implementation. The team was happy with the implementation.

We looked at other solutions like EMC, but NetApp was the most cost-effective solution.

I would highly recommend NetApp as a storage solution. I am impressed with all types of storage. In terms of choosing NetApp, FlexPod has a very good hyper-converged infrastructure and flash storage. It is a very good way of being cost effective. There are a lot of vendors, but not that many of them are as cost effective as NetApp.

The fact that it’s a validated design, so you are not running into any gotchas.

By having a FlexPod we're able to call a vendor and they can use back channels and reach out to other two vendors to get us a solution, instead of each vendor passing the blame from one to another. It's one stop shopping.

The price.

It's very stable, and just runs and runs and runs until you upgrade something.

It's very easy to grow and very simple. There's nothing major to add more chassis and blades, or storage if you need to.

Their support is dynamite, and it's a lot easier to escalate with NetApp than with VMware. VMware has taken us a lot longer than with NetApp.

It’s very complex if you’re new to it, but once you’ve done it its pretty easy.

I would like it to be cheaper but other than that nothing to add. As much as I can try to get the price lower, why should I have to negotiate in the first place?

I would say do it, do it now. Spend the money and buy it, it makes it easy.

I would say that it gives us more flexibility than an entire VM or bare metal solution. Its sole purpose where it mixes everything together allows compatibility to the SnapDrive manager.

Nothing I have seen can be improved, but I think we're still early in the usage.

We designed it about a year ago and have had it about six months.

It seems great so far.

So far we have not had to expand it, but are expanding shortly so we will find out.

I haven’t had to use them so far, but my colleagues who have used support have been happy so far.

It was straightforward.

Our vendor did it for us.

I would say that it seems to be the way to go in our environment. We're looking into it for new aspects as well but well see.