FlexPod XCS Reviews

Valuable features include scalability, flexibility, speed, and security.

It has helped us in terms of less overhead and less downtime. It simplifies the administration.

Perhaps a unified management for all of the elements within the infrastructure, like a console. I would like to see something that is open-source that can be used to manage or compute networking storage in a single panel.

I'm sure that something like that exists right now, so that would be a plus. Something that consolidated the deployment of firmware or software, in other words, more of an orchestration tool and that would take care of it all.

It has been consistently stable.

It is very scalable.

When looking for a solution, I look for brand recognition. In this case, Cisco and NetApp both have very good reputations. We look for value, total cost of ownership, and return on investment.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was very easy to deploy.

We’ve worked with Wedlock and third-party integrations.

Give it a try and work with your partner or reseller to see if there is a demo available to try out the product. A lot of partners have that capability. Let people log in and try it. You should try out a solution before you buy.

The simplicity of having an all-in-one solution.

Simplicity.

Make it cheaper.

About six to eight months.

It's very good.

It's very good as well.

We haven't used it.

I wasn't involved in it.

We went out to tender.

We're in finance. I don't know if this solution is uniquely valuable in our industry but it works for us. It's not perfect but it does what we expected. We haven't had any problems at all.

Honestly, it's making sure that you only have one upgrade path when various patches are released.

There's only one throat to choke when something goes wrong.

I'm currently drowning in features. So maybe a simplification would be better. Fewer features.

Several months.

At the moment, I have had very few problems with the FlexPod system. However, the alerting is so much chattier than what I had previously, that I spent several months thinking that the world was ending. And it turns out, it was just a bug.

Frontline support was atrocious, but once you bludgeon them properly, you get through to somebody who knows what they're doing, and it's very quick, easy, and clean.

It was overly complicated, but that was our own doing. It's not necessarily the fault of the product.

Again, only had it several months, so I'm rating it a seven because I'm pessimistic. But that way, it also has room to grow.

• Certified architecture
• Unified support

• Unified support
• Reference architecture

The service catalogue and gallery. I find it difficult to go through documentation, and I would like to see user cases we can refer to. Would like to follow a specific work flow.

There's been no issues, and it's been great.

With cDOT, it's very easy to scale out, and that's the reason we went with it in the first place.

It's been great, and any issues have been taken care of right away.

It's complex because we didn’t buy FlexPod out-of-box, we put it together ourselves and went through lots of changes in our environment, so it's complex because of our own doing.

Pick your partner wisely, as they have a lot in your success. Go with someone with a history in FlexPod.

In our facilities we use FlexPod to host business applications: bpm'online (our tool for the help desk), SugarCRM, Microsoft Exchange Server, Cisco CallManager, some applications related to telephony and collaboration, and for demonstrations of our solution.

On some occasions, when we have needed virtual machines to install new applications, the administrator has provided them in a matter of minutes. Similarly, we have created virtual desktops for environments of 50-100 users in minutes. Finally, the integration with VMware NSX has allowed us to recover from a failure of the main site in a matter of minutes.

• Centralized administration with Cisco UCS Director allows you to perform all administrative functions from a single interface, as well as automate tasks.
• UCS Profiles enable recovering a physical server in less than 15 minutes.
• FlexClone allows you to create copies of volumes in seconds, and without occupying physical space.

At the moment I do not find any functionality that could improve, other than perhaps the automation interface.

I consider this solution a 10 out of 10. It is a very complete solution and easy to administer.

• Ease of configuration 
• Ease of training for whoever is going to be using it

Deployment time is probably one of the biggest ones. You can get it set up and start using it in a quick manner.

I think it could be a little bit more flexible and if they found a way to implement more of a supported cloud solution to it, I think that could help a lot. 

Then there's things like AltaVault which, if there was a way to have that as a shipped feature with it, could be useful as well.

Six or seven years.

Solid. Very good.

Pretty good. I think there is some room for improvement. It depends on how big of a company you're at, but we outgrew some of the solutions that we had installed and then we ended up having to custom-build a different solution.

I used the solution as disaster recovery (DR) for backing up the IBM Power series infrastructure. The primary site is running our core application, which is based on Java and Oracle databases installed on a SUSE Linux environment.

The solution was simple to deploy, but we faced challenges with replication between the primary site and secondary site.

The fact that all the components were integrated, and its simplicity to deploy. The deployment took less than a week since there was no networking and/or storage integration.

Compatibility issues with replication. The Oracle table formats were not working and storage replications did not work as well, until we had to introduce other components to make it work. This is a good solution, but only if its on both the DR and DC for replication compatibility.