FlexPod XCS Reviews

The most valuable feature of the solution is the pre-design. I don’t have to think – it’s a proven and pre-certified architecture that just works.

From my perspective there is not much to improve on and NetApp has gone through great strides to make it a great product with great top-notch support.

I’ve been dealing with them for three to four years and its just sound equipment.

It's rock solid.

It’s extremely scalable. We’ve gone through growth cycles, especially with clustered on tap, and it’s a very easy process.

I think support is fantastic, without a doubt. Anytime I have an issue via email or phone its squared away.

It’s pretty straightforward, there are tons of deployment guides out there which for the most part are spot on.

I think the validated design and architectures, and being able to call one of the parties for support and they can fix your problem is great.

We are installing our first NetApp component, and we are doing FlexPod certification as well. I think VDI will improve and the new storage system we are currently installing will help that as well.

I think that at this point I don’t know yet – it all sounds good.

We have been using the components (VMware, Cisco and IBM) since 2001.

I think it’s very stable.

Scalability is even better – you can expand it very easily with the clusters.

I would say that I don’t have much experience yet, but I look forward to being able to call one place instead of moving from vendor to vendor when there is an issue.

It's pretty straightforward.

We're using a vendor team.

I’d say its worth looking into – the community using it is a great resource.

Peer reviews are very important, as you're not getting a sales pitch, but real information.

The guaranteed compatibility is our most valuable feature.

I would say we’ve seen a speed increase – faster backup times as a result of using the Cisco UCS. We can now do HP failover better, and we can also have bigger clusters.

I would say that since I haven’t seen SnapManager, I don’t know yet.

The integration with VMware could be a bit smoother.

It’s been rock solid so far. We’ve been using FlexPod for almost a year.

We started out with one chassis and have now increased because the first one worked out so well. Even though we bought a brand new NetApp head, we were able to use our old disc shelves, which helped us.

It’s been really good so far – we haven’t had any calls to say this or that isn't working since our installation. We have had calls to grow things and change things, but that’s been pretty easy.

It was pretty straightforward – we got it done in like a week.

If you’re looking for a mixture of companies and you’ve played the point-the-finger blame-game – it removes all that. FlexPod helps to minimize that kind of blame-the-other-vendors. When you have an issue, it gets resolved faster.

Standardization, so there's no question about how something is or how something should be set up.

Variety is the spice of life, but in what we do, variety kills you. We were an HP shop and we used different SAN vendors, but since going with Flexpod, we only deal with NetApp and Cisco.

Drives out variation. It’s easy to have someone at NetApp and Cisco to come in the door and know what they’re doing.

There’s a lot of talk about security, but very little action. I’d like to see something from NetApp/Cisco that’s beyond simple encryption so that data is not useable or visible when breach occurs.

No issues other than human error.

Very scalable, and we’ve been very pleased. We had a hard time planning for the future because of projects that we get. But, it scales very well and we can plan with it, impressively so. We often do things in emergency situations, which means adding storage or additional shelves, and we can do that with FlexPod.

It's very, very good.

Very smooth and quick setup. We got it and knew exactly what to do with it. So complex, but we knew what to do, and still, very smooth.

We’ve looked at everything and did footwork, so just go with Flexpod to save yourself time and effort.

• It's simple as the software is in the fabric instead of having to install the software
• Management is easy through the UI
• You can see all the data
• Integrated networking

It’s two vendors who have a good track records, so it’s a safe bet, and it’s innovative in that it's planned and being planned. It’s reliable, but has an enterprise cost; however, from an IT perspective it’s worth it.

Storage and compute could be better managed. Right now, there are two separate consoles for NetApp and Cisco components. There's no unified management available, and an add-on for that should be a standard option. Also, the cost.

Very stable as an enterprise-level product.

The fabric interconnecters with our older version is fine.

Haven’t had to use tech support because it hasn’t given us trouble.

Not around for initial setup, it would have been complex four years ago, but now it's straightforward

It’s a good product, and I wouldn’t say not to go with it. If you are heavily invested with another vendor, for example HP, don’t change.

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.

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.

Company-wide production and development of private cloud infrastructure.

• Scale up/down
• CD/CI pipeline
• Development environments scale up/down

• Converged infrastructure
• Engineered Reference Architecture
• Continued evolution of the architecture
• Manpower savings
• Ease of automation

Newer platform reference architectures take a long time to harden and be publicly available.