FlexPod XCS Reviews

Our primary use case is for VMs in our virtual environment.

It has reduced costs because we are not buying a lot of infrastructure or physical servers. Also, deployment and confirmation times have reduced significantly with our use of this solution. We can speed up by VMs at the rate of ten to 15 minutes, then give it to our customers.

• Deduplication
• Compression

Validate designs are a good. They work in the background to combine all the infrastructure and storage. They create automation which can create volumes and attach VMs directly to massive CIFS. This is now easily done.

With the next solution, if there is a virtual Flex part where we can deploy it to private clouds or in public clouds rather tying up the hardware, it would reduce costs and complexity. Then, we could do a lot more automation.

It is pretty stable. We haven't had any issues, so it's pretty resilient.

We can easily scale up or down, and add more storage instead of VMs.

We haven't done lot of scaling at this time because we have around 2000 to 3000 VMs. Initially, we bought the whole storage of compute needed for our VMs, so we haven't scaled up. Currently, we are looking at scaling up a little more. It seem pretty easy to add more nodes.

NetApp technical support is very good. We have our own dedicated TAMs and SAMs assigned, and support has a nice dashboard where log into support and see all our systems. We can see the performance, data, etc. 

The previous solution required us to buy a server or node for the cabling, deployment, configuration, which meant a lot of time and resources every time we had to buy more nodes or servers and add them. We don't have this with FlexPod.

Take a look at FlexPod and do a PoC. Compare it to other products and you will see the huge savings.

It provides all the network information needed, such as how to create pools and set up servers. It is pretty easy.

When we install, it is an innovative, because we have all of the products in one box and one frame. This reduces all the cabling and all IPs needed as they are already there.

NetApp helped us with the setup.

We have saved money using FlexPod. We have saved time and money for new service deployments. 

Private cloud is good as long as it justifies the cost of putting your data in public clouds. If you're a financial client, you can't put all your financial data in a public cloud, as per government policies. However, if it's not critical data nor personal data of the customer, then it should be okay to put it on a public cloud as long as it justifies the price.

It's pretty much our infrastructure.

We can scale it out quickly, if needed.

We have also seen an improvement in our application performance. Our VM and database environments are able to go as fast as we need them to now.

• Scalability
• Flexibility
• Overall time saved.
• The compatibility of all the products together.

The validate designs and the overall versatility allows us to do what we need to do, so it's definitely a very flexible solution. If we have an issue, we can get all three vendors on the phone at the same time because of the collaboration between all three parties.

We would like to have faster components.

We have no downtime. It's resilient because there is very little downtime, if any.

We can scale it as needed. So, it's definitely a very flexible solution to scale out.

Once we get to the right people, we get the issues fixed. Sometimes, it can take awhile for support cases to get to the right people, especially if it's not a P1 case. P1 cases are usually quicker.

Parts of the initial setup were complex, especially on the networking side. The other two components were pretty straightforward.

We used a consultant, but did the deployment ourselves.

We can just swap in new equipment or hardware as we need, which has probably saved us several weeks.

We looked at Dell EMC and Brocade, but the knowledge was all there for NetApp and Cisco. VMware was always in-house.

We have been on FlexPod for a while now. It was the way the industry was going, so we followed.

It is definitely worth looking into, especially if you have lower-end components that do the exact same thing.

It is innovative when it comes to compute, storage, and networking, because there are a lot of the storage efficiencies which allow us to keep a smaller footprint.

We are not using FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud. While we don't do cloud yet, we might consider it in the future.

We started to move from rack-mounted servers and we needed to make a virtualized environment. One of the requirements for virtualizing all our bare metal infrastructure was to move to a solution with components such as VMware and central storage. We started to look for the environments and were seeking out which was the best version with the possible solution that was in the market and we found NetApp FlexPod, one of the most flexible and easy to use, ready-to-market solutions. We chose NetApp FlexPod due to its flexibility and ease.

The solution is flexible. It's very easy to implement together with the Cisco UTF firewall. We have a computing environment based on the Cisco UTF firewall for computing. The storage we have is the NetApp 3200 series. The virtualized technology is VMware. Together, these three components are very easy and flexible to implement.

I am not familiar with the new technology from NetApp, and therefore am unsure of the latest in terms of FlexPod's native integration with hyper-scalers. Most of the solutions that run now, run on top of the FAS drive or FAC drive. This will improve more and will gain a new level of performance for the new kinds of solutions and technology that are coming out.

We still use FlexPod as a parallel environment. It is a very nice technology. We don't have any pains with this environment yet. That's why we still run this in parallel as we didn't finish the switchover to the new technology.

We use FlexPod's pre-validated architectures. At the time that we designed the solution, it was based on pre-validated architecture, and we had support from the company that we worked with in order to re-validate the solution. With this integration, we needed some support from a specialized technician. Since we used pre-validated architecture, it was simple to improve. We were able to download and implement this solution with no effort. We did this ourselves.

We feel confident that we did something that is custom. The time to market is also fast with pre-validated architecture. We know that if we follow the rules we will get business as soon as possible.

The flexibility, operational efficiency, and scalability of the solution altogether are good. We have two main sites. With this user-friendly environment, we can make both sites replicate each other. When we talk about business continuity, it's easy. We can take the key indicators and our implementation is ready and works as we need it to. There’s also flexibility to scale in. We ran out of capacity after five years and we could scale it in within one or two months and get back to business with confidence.

The solution has helped shift capital and resources to other IT initiatives or projects that had previously taken a backseat due to budget constraints. This is not due to the supplier. Rather, it's due to the kind of organization that we are. We are a nonprofit organization. What can we do is create a government license that provides us with designated suppliers, in this case, NetApp. A special government license can be created with a low price or some other agreement in order to reduce the budget.

The solution helped reduce troubleshooting time on architecture configurations. It's very easy to understand that we follow a pre-validated design when we have good implementation. It's very easy to solve any issues that may arise. We only have to compare what happened before to what happens now and what has changed during that period. Of course, if this is beyond our skills, it's very easy to ask for support to help.

It is difficult to say how much time was saved as we didn't face any outage problems. We didn't face any downtime problems throughout the years. Compared to what we had before, it was not a centralized storage environment. Centralizing changed a lot as we came from a decentralized storage environment to a centralized storage environment and we used a converged technology in this environment. On one technology, it can run on a schedule, it can run cyber channels and it can run any kind of block operation protocols or even file operation protocols for storing the files or the data.

When you are in this kind of environment, you reduce a lot. It's one environment where you can do three or four connections to the storage. Then, you can use any kind of environment with the same solution.

We also reduced our total cost of ownership and simplified operations with the solution's flexible consumption. This is a bundle which is made of three environments, the virtualization and the computing nodes we used with Cisco and the centralized storage with the NetApp, this reduced a lot of space.

It reduced the total cost of ownership. It comes from a different platform and different architecture, and one needs to have more than three or four skills to support their environment. With the bundled environment, we only need one. It's very easy to support this kind of situation.

It would be quite difficult to understand the amount of money saved. As a government organization, we use our partners. Most of the time, when we implement change for new technology, we need to coordinate as people are not adept to change easily. They need to be trained. This is another cost we have to account for and pay for.

With this product, however, we had no difficulty in maintaining the same team. They transferred over from the old environment to the new one. We saved right there.

I ran two data centers. Each data center had no less than one hundred rack-mounted servers. When we consolidated, we reduced our support costs, space costs, and energy consumption costs. Money is saved across all those variables.

The big problem now is that all of the technology is reaching its end of life and we didn't refresh anything at the right moment. Now, we are moving to a new solution. During these 10 years, it was very nice to work with NetApp, Cisco, and VMware together, especially with NetApp storage. We didn't have any problems during this time. I could count only three or four times that we asked for support and this was only to change hard drives that were blocking something. It's been issue-free.

NetApp needs to improve the user interface to make it easier to work in this environment. The older version is poor. However, I'm not sure what they are doing to upgrade the look and feel of the newer version.

NetApp needs to talk to the clients and see what the clients want out of the cloud solutions in order to move more effectively into the cloud environment. It would be ideal if customers could go to a dashboard. They need to sell not only the infrastructure but also the service and both need to be impressive. That's why NetApp should talk to clients as much as possible. The closer they are to them, the more understanding they will have in terms of what a customer wants. 

If the solution offered more workshops and presentations, it could be helpful to lure clients.

I've been using the solution since 2010.

It's quite difficult to understand the tech support in this kind of environment. The three components that make up this bundle that we created in 2010, composed of VMware, Cisco, and NetApp, make it quite difficult. I cannot understand what kind of error it is if I don't understand where it comes from. I need to figure out if this is a VMware, Cisco, or NetApp problem.

I suggest creating a team inside NetApp, Cisco, or maybe VMware, and this team should have the skills to support the companies that support this kind of solution. This will be good as you will reduce the amount of time that you need to solve the problems. Right now, when we call NetApp, NetApp support does not understand what the solution needs and calls Cisco to ask for support. There needs to be some sort of contract or strategy that is better for the client, where the three are integrated together.

That being said, I've never had problems with NetApp, even in these situations. I know a tech professional who was able to guide me through the support process. The contact that I had with NetApp had information that can be found in the web guide. I never had any issues when I needed to get support from NetApp during this period. I've been mostly very happy with them.

Positive

We're transitioning to another solution right now. The main problem is that we don't have support anymore from NetApp due to the fact that the solutions we designed are end-of-life. We need to design a new solution.

The solution is very easy to implement. 

We started with ONTAP, version 7.0. We have NetApp’s 3200 storage series and that is what we use now. It's still version 7.0, with the live firmware.

We are a government company. When we design a new solution, we cannot point to the technology that we want to use. It's against the government's rules. We need to design a general solution with the main points that we want to cover, and the main points that we want to remain. We will sometimes have to choose between several technologies and several offers that we find on the market. That's why most of the time it's difficult to keep the same technology for long.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. It is a very flexible solution. Its support, usability, and even the scalability of it has been great.

Our primary use case for this solution is for custom applications. 

FlexPod has improved my organization in the way that it has given us much greater flexibility for getting our apps rolled out.

It simplified infrastructure from edge to core to cloud. We aren't doing anything to the cloud but within the infrastructure, it's much simpler because anytime we roll out dedicated applications, we are essentially deploying dedicated FlexPods for each application.

The solution's IT support has been key for it because we're able to size appropriately depending on the application and the flexibility to grow out each FlexPod depending on the application requirements.

It has also enabled our staff to be more efficient. Previous to this, the infrastructure was all outsourced and so when we were bringing everything insourcing, it enabled us to essentially start fresh. We were moving off of the legacy block storage from a specific vendor and this allowed much easier siloing of our applications so that we didn't have resource contention between the applications.

The application performance has also been improved. I don't have exact metrics but we're moving from legacy hardware to essentially new hardware, so there's a big jump in the actual overall hardware quality that we've been doing.

Unplanned downtime incidents have decreased. We haven't had any unplanned outages that I'm aware of since we went to the FlexPod model.

The ease of expansion is the most valuable feature. 

The solution's validated designs for major enterprise apps are very important.

In terms of what needs improvement, nothing jumps out at me. It is meeting our requirements and so I'm pretty happy with the way it is right now.

It would be helpful if they sold a pre-boxed option so that you can buy a rack and everything's already there, everything's connected.

FlexPod seems very stable so far. We haven't had any unplanned outages so far.

I am very impressed with scalability because, given the applications that we're running on it, it's much easier to ensure that the resources are dedicated for each application and we can scale each application's own pod as we need to.

We went from an outsourcing model to an insourcing model. It was a good time to make a conversion from legacy, just standard blocks, a lot of physical servers and convert over to a virtual environment and have everything integrated into a nice little box.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We've got all our reference documentation and we had everything planned out. Our VAR did do a good job of saying, here are the components that we're using and here's how everything goes together.

We used a VAR for some of it and then just for the purchasing. After the first couple of rollouts, we just use them for the purchasing piece and we started doing all our own integration. 

They were a bit slow. They were taking two to three weeks to roll out a pod and we were doing it in a couple of days.

We have not seen ROI yet. 

FlexPod was pretty much the way they wanted to go from the start.

I would rate it a solid eight out of ten. It's not perfect. Everything's already plugged in when you get it out of the box. Obviously there is a bit more configuration involved than a VCE where everything comes in and you're buying a box, essentially. But that's a pretty minor knock on it.

It is a really solid solution. The pod flexibility along with the containerization of each pod is very nice.

Our primary use case for this solution is virtualization. We run both VMware and Hyper-V.

We currently have an AFF8040 that is running with Cisco UCS in our FlexPod solution. We have a four-node cluster, where we have the AFF but we also have a second cluster with spinning disks. It's nice to have them clustered because I can move my high-performance workloads over onto the SSD, easily. If we have things that we determine aren't taking advantage of the SSD, I can volume migrate it back to the spinning disk and not waste high-performance capacity on workloads that aren't utilizing the speed of the SSD.

The solution's validated designed for major enterprise apps are very important to us because we would prefer not to open support calls, and with the validated configuration, it just works.

We are not yet using this solution for tiering to a public cloud, but it is something that we're looking into.

This solution has improved our organization in that we have reduced administration time and reduced troubleshooting time. We know that the performance is there when we need it.

The history of innovations has had a positive effect on our organization. NetApp is always coming up with features that I want before I know that I want them. For example, it was helpful when we no longer had to dedicate a certain number of disks to our root volume.

In terms of application performance, bringing the AFF in has made a huge difference in some of our manufacturing and labeling applications.

With the Cisco UCS, having the profiles and being able to swap hardware in and out is super valuable.

This solution is easy to set up and maintain.

I like the fact that NetApp has fully embraced the cloud and the SaaS backup is available. I always hear from my other cloud engineers that Microsoft backs it up, but I don't trust that. I want my snapshots.

The only support call that we have had in six years was related to an ONTAP upgrade, where one of the controllers didn't patch properly.

This solution is incredibly stable. In the past six or seven years that we have been using NetApp, aside from the disk replacement calls that we get occasionally, I have only had one other support call. We see disk failures once or twice per year.

The other support call was related to an ONTAP upgrade where one of the controllers just did not patch properly. The other clusters were still working fine on the other controller, and we got support involved. It was a known bug and they took care of it. The cluster was back up and running with full stability in under an hour.

We have not had to scale this solution much, although our CAO has tasked us with being fully cloud by 2025. 

I haven't had to open up any support cases recently. That said, the unified support for the entire stack is very important to us. If we ever did need to open a support call, we know that NetApp and Cisco are going to work together for a solution. When you get solutions that aren't paired like that, a lot of the time you get vendors pointing the finger back and forth at each other and bounce the support tickets back and forth. Knowing that NetApp and Cisco have worked together to verify this solution and are committed to working together to solve problems is very important for our organization.

On the occasion where we needed to use technical support, it was excellent.

We were using IBM SAN and HP servers before this solution, and our uptime has increased from about ninety-five percent uptime to five-nines or six-nines.

Our IBM SVC SAN was over-engineered. The person that brought it in didn't want to take the time to properly size the solution, so they just overbought. We switched to this solution because management wanted us to look for ways to cost-save.

I had a very small amount of experience with NetApp while I was with a previous employer, but the storage people at the company spoke very highly of NetApp. We brought them in to compare cost, features, and performance, and NetApp was brought into the environment after that.

This solution is super easy and straightforward to set up. It is almost "set and forget", and everything works really well. It actually took longer than it should have, simply because I stopped the engineer and had him walk me through every single step so that I understood what he was doing and why he was doing it.

Without my interruption, he could have spun it up himself in a couple of hours. However, it was important for me to understand how the system was deployed and why things were set up the way that they were so that I was able to support it going forward.

We brought in a company called MCPc to help us deploy initially. Interestingly, the technician from MCPc who helped us with the deployment ended up becoming our NetApp sales engineer, so I still work with him to this day. I knew nothing about NetApp at the time, so he got me up to speed initially. Then I went to a couple of NetApp Insights and took a couple of certification courses, and I am very comfortable with it now.

The total cost of ownership with this solution is good.

Prior to choosing this option, we looked at a smaller IBM solution, as well as solutions from EMC. The big winning factor for NetApp was cost. At the same time, since we've brought NetApp in, I've found that NetApp's storage efficiency is unparalleled.

I recently had a discussion with a business unit in one of our remote sites that needed some more performance out of their 2650 and they were telling my bosses that they could get an IBM SSD solution for $10,000 USD. Their cost of adding a NetApp shelf would be $26,000 USD. I have no idea where they got those numbers, but never in my entire career have I experienced IBM being cheaper than anybody else.

When we factored in storage efficiency and cost savings that we get from using Commvault IntelliSnap for backups, it makes absolutely no sense to use anything other than NetApp.

When we originally looked at bringing Commvault into our environment for backup, using Commvault streaming technology, we were looking at several million dollars for backup. When we went through this with the NetApp rep and actually looked at how much streaming backup we needed for Commvault, and how much could be done natively with IntelliSnap, that cost went from several mission dollars down to a quarter of a million dollars. That was huge.

We are a very lean organization, so this solution has not necessarily made our staff more efficient. If we were not already that way then we wouldn't get anything done.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is to make sure that you include FlexPod and be sure to consider the costs in the evaluation. I cannot imagine a situation where the total cost of ownership is not comparable. 

This is a solution that makes my life easier and I can always count on it being up. For me, that is the most important thing.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Over the last year, we've implemented several solutions with FlexPod. We implemented whatever the latest version is. I know we just put one in that was the latest version in a New Jersey school.

Our customers are using on-premise. It's all on premise, but we have implemented solutions that are more hybrid where they are deploying a model where they want their app dev groups to be able to deploy resources much easier to an on-premise infrastructure, as compared to an AWS subscription.

Generally, it's a mix between Azure and AWS. That's what we're seeing from customers overall. 

For a large food distributor using FlexPod, we were able to move them away from traditional server storage, networking, etc. This allowed them to have the ability in both data centers to have hybridity where the FlexPod infrastructure was local and wasn't hosted, then using cloud automation (mainly AWS) and being able to deploy company resources for their teams.

This really opened up a lot of doors for them. Their CIO's mantra was sort of cloud first. Well, here's a way to start on that journey and keep some of your stuff local. I think everybody knows you can't just forklift everything to the cloud. You need cloud readiness assessments: What are your application dependencies and tools that are you using? This is how we came up with the FlexPod approach.

The solution has decreased unplanned downtime incidents at our customers' organizations, specifically in the database and SQL realms. We are talking to some of our customers about containerization as well.

The most valuable features is its ability to be able to have multiple options. It can be fully on-premise, it can be hosted, or it can be the hybrid model. For customers, this is the biggest windfall. 

Having the combined Cisco/NetApp platforms. Having the configuration options to tailor it a certain way. This Is a windfall as well, having options for configuration: small, medium, large, etc. Because every customer is different, and there's no cookie cutter.

It is very important that the solution validates the design for major enterprises. We rely on the validated design, specifically for the customer. When you look at the designs and what you have in mind, the prerequisites have already been done for you. So, it was easy to make the fit a little easier for each customer. Each customer being different.

The solution simplifies infrastructure from edge to core to cloud. It definitely simplifies it and aids in going to that journey. Cloud is the last piece of that route and this gives a seamless way to do this.

The solution’s unified support for the entire stack provides one stop shopping.

Data centers are shrinking. These solutions are part of that. Being able to have these solutions which will shrink your footprint in the data center and allow for easy cloud interaction, migration, and deployment.

I would like more support for different platforms, possibly different database platforms. I don't know if it supports Oracle today, but that would be a big improvement.

As the product matures, being able to support the things that customers are really looking at. FlexPod is supporting more containerizations, and that's a step in the right direction.

I just started working with it. I have only been with my company for about six weeks.

It's increased exponentially over time. I'm hearing a lot of this from my peers, as FlexPod has been out for a while now. With the improvements to the different versions, the stability has improved quite a bit.

It is very scalable. Though, I don't had any case examples of where we've had to scale it in terms of customer experience.

This is my understanding, since I don't deploy it. The initial setup is very straightforward compared to its competitors. Compared to an HPE solution, it is exponentially easier to set up. I know that as a fact.

It's sort of the one throat to choke philosophy. The customers in particular don't have to call here. If it's easy to get support, it isolates the problem on whatever stack you're running on. So, FlexPod supports multiple stacks. It doesn't just support one hypervisor or site.

The solution has saved our customers' organization in terms of CapEx. E.g., with the cloud availability, it's turned into sort of a hybrid CapEx/OpEx model.

I'm only delving into this solution over the last six weeks or so. I don't have the same level of expertise with FlexPod as I do with other solutions. I'm getting there slowly; trial by fire.

I came from a much larger integrated reseller. I worked more with FlexPods competitors where they really want to have these connectors and bolt-ons in place to be able to deploy something to Azure. As easy as it is to do it to an on-prem infrastructure, that's really where it's going for a lot of the commercial space.

For my current organization, it's opened up a whole new door for us as a NetApp partner to be able to have a competitive product against Dell EMC, HPE, etc., and to what I think to a degree is a better product in most cases, to go after that business. We go after the different verticals as well because we are in both the public sector and commercial space. So, these are much different verticals. Thus, you need to be able to the scalable solution. You need a solution that can meet the needs of these customers. When you're dealing with a healthcare versus a hedge fund, it is very different. Certain other companies they didn't have the same, they weren't able to scale or fit in these verticals.

Put them side by side. Do your diligence. There are other vendors out there. There are three other big players in this field: Dell EMC, Nutanix, and HPE. Obviously, each customer is different. But, if you're really looking at a true solution for hybridity with the ability to deploy to the cloud, take a real good hard look at the FlexPod CI solution.

We sell other products, and there are times because of the customer's relationship with another vendor that we might go with a different solution. However, we certainly look at putting them side by side.

The product improves over time, it's definitely helped in all-flash CI, private and hybrid cloud deployment, secure-multi-tenancy, end-to-end NVMW, and cloud storage tiering.

We are talking to customers about the solution’s storage tiering to public cloud, but we haven't implemented anything yet.

I would rate them a nine (out of 10). I don't think anybody rates a 10, but FlexPod is close.

Our primary use for this product is for virtual desktop infrastructure and for virtual server storage.

Since going to all Flash, employees are much happier working remotely in our VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure).

The most valuable asset of the product is the use of all-flash storage, low latency I/O (quicker Input / Output).

No really good opportunities for product improvement come to mind. For our organization, it does what we need it to do.

The product is very stable. I don't think it's failed once since I have worked with it within the organization.

We have a pretty stable workload, so we have not had to consider the scalability of the solution.

We did an upgrade during my time but that was just moving to a newer version of the same product.

The initial installation was straightforward.

We implemented through Paramount.

Return on investment is not always tangible. The workload for individuals is faster and our employees are happier for being able to accomplish their responsibilities in less time.

Before this solution, the organization used some Synology products that were more appropriate for small businesses. The organization had many remote sites and it was not centralized. We also considered VMware vSAN as a solution.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate this product as an eight. That is mostly because the cost is comparatively high for what it does.

Storage I/O is pretty important for enhancing user experience and utility.

We use this solution in our data center. It runs all of our ESX environment with SQL and Exchange servers on it.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that there is one call for support.

It is good to have validated designs, so at least supposedly it will work.

It would be helpful to have more flexibility for adding other components. It is always better to have more possibilities.

This is a resilient solution that keeps running, and we haven’t had any problems.

We haven't had to really increase its capacity, so I don't really know how scalable this solution is.

Technical support has helped us out when we needed. When you call for support, at least you don't have a finger pointing session of one vendor product versus the other.

We had to upgrade because our previous equipment was hitting the end of its lifespan. We went to an integrated solution.

The setup of this solution is a little bit complex at first. After you understand the major components, it gets easier.

We purchased our system through a reseller, CDW. However, there wasn't any special value added. They created a bill of materials.

We have a lease for approximately $10,000 USD per month.

This is a stable solution with good technical support. However, there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.