FlexPod XCS Reviews

We use it for some 90 servers and systems. It runs our primary student information system, we have our phone systems through it, our email. Everything is running on it, all critical functions, all critical servers.

Because it's virtual, I don't have issues. All the hardware that's tied into it, whether it's memory, disk, etc., it's all seamless. It's not a big deal to make changes, it's not a big deal to upgrade. I've had drives that have failed. It's not a big deal, you just pop it out and pop the new one in and everything's fine.

I really like the architecture and I like the fact that on the storage side I can swap it out. Right now I'm on NetApp, I might go to Pure Storage. I have the flexibility. But as far as the equipment itself, the way it's all bundled together, from the UCS perspective, its rock solid.

I run all the critical applications for the university on my FlexPod solution. It needs to be up 24/7, 365. I don't need "five nines," I need "eight nines" - and it stays up.

I'd like to see a little more on the provisioning and the replication piece. I've defaulted to Veeam as our vehicle for backup. I'd like to see more insight and more analytics.

I'm going to pick on Cisco: Their products are great and they do a great job. But, especially in this day and age with the college dealing with the EU and GDPR and a lot of other issues, I really need the analytics; that's what really helps me to sell me the solution. It's a cost. Whatever I can do from an analytics side that helps me deal with different things, will only help. GDPR and the EU's requirements are more security based, but there are also some data components buried in there regarding how you are handling the data. How are you storing it? For some of those pieces, I really need a good solution. I don't want to say analytics is lacking, I just want more analytics.

Scalability is fine, I'm on my third or fourth iteration with it. As far as I can see, I'm probably going to stick with it.

For the most part, technical support has been on the software side with VMware. As far as going through TAC, we have not had to use it too much. I've been on FlexPod now for about seven, or eight years, and the number of times I have called TAC on issues is very very small. Most of the time, if there is something, I deal with my VAR and they have been great to deal with. I've never had any major issues.

TAC has been really good. The other thing that I do is I work very closely with my account manager, he's a great guy, Tyrone. He has been great to work with and the nice thing for me is that he has brought in the right people. From a data center standpoint, Jamie has been up to see me I don't know how many times. I say, "Here's what I'm trying to do," and they say, "Here are the different options you have," and they try to help us figure out the right way to go, from their perspective. I bring in my guys and we try to put it all together.

I really like the team approach, for me, it's an advantage. I do have other options but it's just so easy to work with them. I get what I need, I get the scalability, I get the future-proofing. I don't have issues. I have too many other things to worry about. If I can eliminate one I'll take it.

Before FlexPod it was all physical servers. Believe me, the time savings, the issue reduction, I can't say enough about the solution over physical servers, to do it justice. It's night and day.

When I'm looking at a vendor, cost is always a component but that's not number one. My number one is their professionalism in getting me through from soup to nuts: from the start of the project all the way to the end, to make sure that it's running right. And on "Day Two", support. If they cover that whole project, I'm good.

The setup is pretty straightforward. The biggest thing I would say to you if you were looking at doing one is, really look at your VAR. Find one that has done it before and that will help you to make sure you don't have any major pitfalls.

I've recommended Flexpod a few times. Every one of them has been extremely happy with it. It's a solid workhorse, especially in shops like mine where we're in the small to mid-range and I don't have the people to sit there and just babysit something. I have too many things for them to do. This product is really good. I don't want to say it's a set-it-and-forget-it, but the daily, hands-on is so light. The visibility - even though I pick on the analytics - is decent. I can get my guys to manage it, but it also frees them up so I can get them working on other things, which is critical in this day and age.

We use it for VMware. Most of what we do runs on it. Our business runs on it. Probably 60 percent of our environment runs on UCS and 100 percent on NetApp storage, with Cisco switching everywhere.

The nice thing about NetApp is the ease of administration. We have a new storage admin who did not do storage at all, and he has fallen right in with it. There are no real issues. 

From a Cisco standpoint, we moved away from HPE Blade hardware into Cisco UCS hardware, and it is awesome. We like it a lot. They work well together. 

Both products are easy to use. Together, they are harmonious.

It is easy to set up and maintain. It has not had any problems. We like support from Cisco and NetApp, though not so much from VMware.

There is support for configurations and ways to do things. We just follow them. Knock on wood, we do not have any issues with it.

They should cram more space in there and find a way to compress things more; dedupe better.

No stability issues.

It should meet our needs. It is easy to add on to the tool. If we need to add a new switch, a new server, or a new chassis for Blades, it is easy. It is not disruptive. You just do it.

When we have to call for support, NetApp's people are great and their support is great - I like them as a company. Cisco support is fantastic. 

Although we have never really called in for a ticket under the FlexPod umbrella, it is nice to know that we have that option. If we have a VMware issue, a Cisco issue, or a NetApp issue, this is just a nice thing to have.

We had issues with our old storage provider: quirky stuff, weird outages, almost-outages, and performance issues. We had some IBM hardware and NetApp. Our good luck with NetApp made the decision for us when it was time for a refresh. We got rid of IBM and went all-in on NetApp.

We did a head swap upgrade about a week ago, which mostly went well for VMware systems. Everything inside the FlexPlod upgraded fine. We had an AIX system with an issue during the upgrade, but that is not my area.

Relax, as it will not be that hard to implement.

No downtime, which is a good thing.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Ease of use.
• Support: Getting support from a gigantic organization that is ancient, like IBM, was a real challenge. We had some weird bugs that cropped up with IBM and their software which is developed for array replication, in conjunction with VMware. We do not have these issues with NetApp. It just works. Support and supportability are very high.

Flexibility and speed.

I like that we can do anything we want to with the networking part of it, without having to add cables and cards, and we can add extra networks, extra VLANs, and extend the environment without having to buy new stuff.

We oftentimes will get a new product, a new server solution that requires a separate network, or even a proof of concept, sometimes development servers that need separated networks. We can spin those up without having to do new cables, new network ports. Any cost or any change requests, we can just do them on the fly.

We like it because everything is 10 Gig all the way through, from the storage to the switches to everything else, which is more than we need, and that's great.

It seems very cost effective once it's in place, and it's easy to expand and easy to add capacity without a lot of extra money.

It honestly does everything I need it to do at this point. So for me, for my organization, what we do, I don't need anything else other than for them to keep making it so I can keep buying the newer blades and the newer parts as they come out.

The management interface of the UCS part of it is a little bit clunky. It uses Java, so when we're managing it, if I have a computer that doesn't have Java on it or has the wrong version of Java on it, there's some iterations that have to happen to get into the manager of it.

That is annoying, albeit really not impactful to the service, it's just my annoyance getting into managing it. But once I'm there it's OK. So if anything, maybe the management is a little bit clunky.

Five and a half years.

It's good. We've had it for about five or six years now and we've had no outages. It's been great, it's easy to work on, it's easy to upgrade.

No crashes. The only time we've had to turn it off is when we had a building power outage, we had to shut everything in the building off.

Very good so far. We haven't taken it to any extreme level, but anything we've needed to do, we've been able to scale out easily, and we've been able to extend it out to our disaster recovery sites and include that in the same architectures. We have a little mini FlexPod down there too.

When we first had it installed, we did have a Cisco partner and a NetApp partner come out and help us deploy it, initially. Going forward, we haven't really had to rely on any support outside of our organization, which is good.

We brought it in as a proof of concept. We were trying to bring virtual desktops to our organization and it was pitched as an all-in-one package deal we could deploy easily.

I thought it was very straightforward, we accomplished it in about a day and a half. We were up and running and everything was on it.

Our field is federal government. I don't think this product is uniquely valuable for our industry, but I think it's a very good value to the government. We pushed it a lot, but there are lots of ways to accomplish this. We, in our part of the government, think it's the best way to do it, but I don't know that it's uniquely suited to government.

I'm a happy customer of FlexPod.

The compute team that supports our NetApps does not have to call the network team. This means that everything is running properly and correctly. The users don't have problems with latency and there here are no problems in any of the backups, or in the systems that are tied into the NetApps. That tells me that it is a well-built and well-designed system. If it stays up and running and the network team doesn't get involved, then I will give it the highest rating.

Just the ability to have diversity in the backups, and that it follows our financial regulations in having multiple layers of backup. That app is a helpful tool for all of this.

I guess in time, you could probably use larger processors, and reduce the footprint of the system and increase throughput on it, so we can have higher-end models. I believe we do have the highest-end models. I know we have Enterprise. I think it actually has Enterprise written on the stamp itself. We have a lot of them, which means that they can probably compete with better processors.

From a physical aspect, I know they are stable. When we walk on our floor with our facilities teams, I never see red or yellow lights on them. They always seem to be performing properly. From a visual perspective, as well as from our monitoring team perspective, if there's a problem, they let the network team know about it. No news is good news.

It appears to scale well. We have racks and racks of them and there are no problems. We keep building and adding as needed.

I have not used technical support and that's an excellent thing.

When choosing a solution, stability is absolutely what I am looking for. It has to stay running. The software is fine. It's the hardware that we want to make sure runs, runs, and runs.

I was involved in the initial setup at one point. I was involved in verifying our infrastructure and there were no problems. The network assessment was clean. NetApps came in, they got plugged into the network, and everybody was happy. We closed down the project successfully, and nobody had to follow up. This means that it is running well.

I did not evaluate other solutions. I was just told this is what we have built, accommodate it, given these requirements, and it worked.

From a network perspective, it is very stable. We don't have any issues with this. I would recommend it, just because of its uptime and the fact that you can sleep through the night, and not get called at 3 AM. I have peace of mind from the stability. Peace of mind and stability are by far the biggest factors.

Our primary use case for this solution is virtualization with Hyper-V.

We are using Cisco UCS and NetApp together in our FlexPod solution.

The validated designs for major enterprise applications are very important for our organization because we are part of the local government, and this solution is a critical platform for a broad array of applications and services that we provide to the public.

The history of innovations, in particular, the inclusion of all-flash, has had a positive effect on our database performance.

We are using the solution's tiering to AWS as a backup target for all of our data. It is essentially our DR and it is being sent out to AWS using SnapMirror.

In terms of making our staff more efficient, we have had a mixed experience. It isn't necessarily FlexPod, per se. Rather, we chose the wrong hypervisor. Hyper-V is not well supported. NetApp and Cisco don't know as much about running Hyper-V as they do VMware on top of the platform. It was really our choice of hypervisor that is the negative point.

We have been able to reduce our data center costs since implementing this solution. Three or four years ago, we were able to shrink our data center by fifty percent. This was a co-location leased space that we were able to reduce.

Our capital expenditures have been reduced, I would say, although I do not have exact figures.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the integration between NetApp and Cisco products. 

From the Cisco side, the most valuable features of this solution are the data center density, the deployment, and the management of the servers and the networking.

Hyper-V is not as well supported by NetApp and Cisco as VMware is, which is something that should be improved.

Across the board, this solution is very stable. We're very happy. It is very resilient and fault-tolerant. Downtime would usually be due to human error.

On both the storage and the compute side, this solution is very scalable.

The solution's unified support for the entire stack is significant. In my experience, I've had situations where we built an architecture that did not have that model. It was difficult because as a customer, we ended up coordinating the support of the multiple vendors.

Our experience with them has been positive. We do have a technical account manager on the Cisco side, and the coordinated support is available if necessary.

Prior to this solution, we were using a multi-vendor storage solution that included HP Blade servers with equipment from EMC. We switched to Cisco, which was a strategic management decision.

The initial setup of this solution was complex because we were doing it for the first time. We have some very experienced Cisco engineers on staff, which was key to implementing Cisco UCS because it was familiar to them.

We had a reseller assist us with the deployment, eight years ago. Because this was new for us, NetApp was involved to make sure that it was successful.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing FlexPod.

There have been some improvements on the Cisco UCS side since we began using this solution. In the earlier days, it was more difficult to upgrade, and there was pain involved during the process. That has gotten a lot better over time.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of product is to consider their requirements. If their need is for a dense data center that is scalable, then this would be the choice because it scales easier than any other product I'm aware of.

This is a good solution, but our experience hasn't been perfect.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We would probably use FlexPod in an Edge type of scenario for our COs to get closer to the customers, because our data center is already Cisco UCS with NetApp. This scenario with FlexPod would probably work well for our Edge deployments to get closer to customers.

We are NetApp/Cisco customers. We do have a similar implementation to FlexPod. Our main use case for its use is the virtual data center

The speed of scalability within the product and ease of integration are two factors which will play well with our environment.

We have seen a ten to 15 percent improvement in application performance.

The scale out allows us, in a small form factor, to scale out and get more compute and storage, as needed. This would be appreciated in our business.

It is innovative because it's bare metal and you can customize it easily. This brings a lot of benefits to the solution.

They could improve the Cisco technical support.

Stability is rock solid. With all the built in redundancy within the product, I find it very resilient.

It is very scalable. Since it's based off of Cisco UCS and all NetApp products, it has huge scalability.

I haven't called technical support for FlexPod. 

NetApp support is fantastic. The times that I've had to contact them, it was awesome. I was able to get to an engineer right away and the service was excellent. I even received more than what we asked for, additional information. So, it was very good. 

Cisco support is much slower. Opening cases with Cisco tech is sometimes a bit tedious. The return time for less important calls can be slower. Even Priority 1 calls can sometimes be a bit long and they will have to call me back.

We aren't investing in a new solution because we're currently using Cisco and NetApp products. We're most investing in a new configuration, which is FlexPod, since it aligns well with our current product lineup. 

The initial setup is straightforward. It is all interface-based, so point and click. 

At the moment, we used it to expand, so we're actually spending money to get it.

We see the most ROI on ease of deployment and time spent. Since the addition of nodes, it is all automated now. What would normally take us around three to five hours in the past, has come down to 15 minutes to half an hour, creating a significant gain in time.

We didn't have a lot of vendors on the short list. We work with Nutanix in the past, which was a complete and utter failure. 

Seeing as we're a Cisco and NetApp shop, it was natural to go with FlexPod.

Go for it. Just buy it. It's simple and out-of-the-box. Set it and forget it.

I haven't had time to look over the validated designs, but I have seen some in the past. I think that they are very helpful in getting a general idea and configuration guide to different products.

Bundled with the right products, multi-cloud environments could be a good asset. With its flexibility, it would allow for movement of workloads into multiple environments, which would be a great benefit.

We use it for our internal cloud infrastructure.

I currently host 2500 VMs for our engineering group and a couple hundred production VMs for corporate. It allowed us to scale out as our business grew without any issues.

It takes all of the homework out of building the solution. The prearchitected design simplifies your deployment, gets you a quicker time to market, and a single point of support. If there is ever any type of issue, you call one number. Whether the issue is in networking, storage, or the hypervisor layer, you get rapid resolution to any problems that you might encounter.

• Dynamic elasticity
• Scalability
• Reliability
• Uptime

I would like to see drag and drop connectivity to Azure and Amazon.

The stability is flawless.

The solution is resilient. It has been running for five years without a problem.

The scalability is very good. I wish it was a more cost-effective, but you get what you pay for.

Technical support used to be excellent, but now, it is just okay. The last two calls that I have made to NetApp support have been handled too casually. People are too lax, not quite as professional as I would have liked. Basically saying, "I don't know, dude." When I call tech support, I want a professional

We had multiple siloed solutions with various hypervisors and storage platforms. These solutions couldn't scale, so I consolidated all of them into a single platform solution, which is more scalable.

The initial setup was straightforward. InterVision laid down the framework, then handed me an environment where I could go into a vSphere and deploy VMs from day one.

We used InterVision, who is a VAR, for the deployment. They were excellent.

We have seen ROI.

We saved a few weeks of time for new service deployments.

It is expensive. My company is small. When you look at the price point, this is a big thing for us to invest in.

I evaluated Dell EMC, HPE, and NetApp Cisco. I chose this solution because I knew it and there was no learning curve.

It's reliable and scalable. I can sleep well at night and not have to get woken up at three in the morning because something went bump. The solution works. You can't go wrong with the platform.

The validate designs and overall versatility are excellent. The people who did them, they did a good job. They were very thorough. The whole entire environment was well thought out, so it could scale up or out. Every component was selected properly. All the configurations for the environment are detailed, so you don't have to do any homework. You just plug it in and run it.

We use FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud, and it is excellent. I haven't had any problems with it at all since I've deployed it, and I have continued to scale it out. I don't see it going anywhere.

Hybrid cloud is where it is at, and I don't believe everybody can go into public cloud or multi-cloud entirely. I am looking forward to connecting hybrid cloud to my FlexPod environment.

We have four different use cases that we bought it for:

1. Our production VM or infrastructure is on a FlexPod with a metro cluster.
2. We have a CCTV system, which is a FlexPod using E-Series as a back end.
3. We have another E-Series FlexPod for backup infrastructure, with our combo products.
4. We have a test end environment, which is a mini replica of our production, VMware assistance.

We have been using FlexPod for seven to eight years now. It has evolved a lot over time, primarily in ease of connectivity. It has been built around all the same platforms. It is just what storage back-end that we decide to tie it into it. Will we be using blades, a chassis server, or rack mount servers? This makes it easy for us, because everything is consistent. 

It does not matter whether I bought one five years ago or if I bought it today. All of my connectivity will be the same. When I put it in the data center, it takes a few hours, then I can have a base system up and going.

I work at a state agency. With FlexPod, I can contact to NetApp. I can contact our rep and I can get the building materials from him which includes all of my switching, servers, and storage in one place. It saves me a lot of time when I have to go out and send out a bid, especially the bids for larger dollar amounts and longer terms. The more efficiently I can get those bids out and processed, the better it is, and the faster I can deliver solutions to our customers (our users).

There are a few nuances. There is always something which bug you. It always seems like we run into the bugs. It is usually just a simple code update or something like that. 

There is always room for little tweaks and little improvements to make life easier. A few things, the E-Series is stupidly, simple. However, the FAS in it, with all its flexibility and scalability, it is much more complex and could be simplified.

We had not upgraded to the most recent release of ONTAP (and some of the other newer tools). The newer version that we are in right now went from an Clustered ONTAP 8.2 to an 8.3. In the 8.3, some of the stuff disappeared. It is there, but it is not intuitive to navigate to, like the IO Statistics, etc. I hear this will be fixed in the next versions, but we have yet to see it. 

It would be great to see some form of interoperability between the FAS units and the E-Series, specifically for replication, even if it is just one more replication from a FAS to an E-Series. That would be amazing. 

Considering we are on our second generation of FlexPods. We are fairly happy with them. For the most part, the system is a rock. Whenever we have needed it, it has always been there. That is the key

It has never fallen out from under us when we were trying to do a critical push.

We haven't hit any limits as of yet. Our most recent purchase is actually a 3.6 petabyte raw system. It is a 360, 10TB drive, which, at the time, is the largest they could do. It is an E-Series, it is more storage then we know what to do with right now.

We are only using about half of it right now, so the scale out to the future allows us to get where we want to go. We use it for a CCTV solution, so video never gets smaller, it only gets bigger because there are more cameras. More cameras with a higher resolution and higher frame rates. We made sure that we purchased a system which would will grow with us and scale with us as we need it to.

Unfortunately, we had had to use technical support a few times, but for nothing major. We have not had any major failures, usually it is just your typical drive. We have 1500 spinning disks, so we have a drive die here and there. Most of the time, we do not have to do a whole lot. Usually a drive shows up, we slap it into the system, and it is good to go. 

They have been good working with our newer administrators, who are not as familiar with the storage platforms. They over take them, do the upgrades, or walk them through the deduplication processes. 

We can call them with anything. We also have a TAM who helps and facilitates a lot. Once we get to the back-end texts, we never have a hassle, even if they determine that it is a VMware or Cisco issue. It does not matter. They are always willing to stay on the phone, all we have to do is open a case with the other provider, and everybody works together and says,“Here is what we found.” 

Environments that I worked with have always been hodgepodge. We are not huge right, but HBMSUs were even older than when EVAs were popular, but those were limited to block storage only. Yet, in the organization I am in, they were limited to Fibre Channel, therefore going to a FlexPod and having the flexibility to do NFS, CIS to do Fibre Channel, ISCSI, etc., it doesn't matter. We can do it all in one array for whatever vendor solution that we pick, whatever storage they say we need, whatever hardware they say we need, we have it. We have the flexibility to put it all away.

It was very straightforward. Each solution is a little bit different: Everything from the E-Series being the simplest to MetroCuster being the most complicated, but they have all been relatively straightforward to setup. We have been using NetApp services for most startups, so this has been a big benefit, especially with technology that we did not necessarily understand right off the bat. 

Occasionally, we utilize support for upgrades. They do the prechecks, make sure the firmware is up-to-date, and run our baselines through to ensure everything is good. 

One of the NetApp consultants, Patrick Rodrigue, has always come out and helped us.

It is a little more difficult in government because we do not track that much on the soft dollar side. They look at it more as a capital investment. However, I can tell you from when I started there, when I started with the organization and we put our first FlexPod in our downtime has significantly been reduced.

From that prospective, if we look at our return on investment, we had have more productivity uptime. Our end users are obviously happier and IT is not constantly getting a black mark from the business because tech has not been worked.

Make sure you understand the technology that you need, and anytime that you are buying any storage make sure you understand storage. Do not just buy storage based on what somebody sells you in terms of IO or throughput. Buy storage based on the solutions you need, the technologies you need, and what will make your life a lot easier down the road.

It is not so much that we need to invest in FlexPod. I work pretty closely with all of our vendors, and a lot of times, we look and we evaluate. We evaluate all the available solutions out there. It does not matter whether it is a FlexPod or if it is one of the illegal EMC counterparts. We evaluate them all. We look at everything from Nimble Suite and the big brands, like FlexPod. Every time we go out and we evaluate solutions with their flexibility. The flexibility of a FlexPod wins out every time.

Having an extremely cost effective solution which is a pain in the butt to manage, a pain in the butt to support, or overly complex does not really do us any good. It ends up just costing us, even though we do not track money. It ends up costing us time, which in turn, costs us money, and management does look at that. 

We look at performance. We look at the available options and how they unified a platform, especially when it comes to storage. Recently, we were comparing FAS units to a VNX from EMC. The big difference and big selling point for a FAS unit was the data filer with virtualized block put right on top of it. We do not have to maintain separate controllers. The VNX had to have a Solera and a clearing head in it in order to do block and file based storage. We had to separate discs at a point in time. This is a few years ago, so some of it has changed since then. However, when I talk about simplicity to manage, it also goes into cost. 

On the EMC side, I would have had to have dedicated disc per file and dedicated discs for block-based storage. On the FAS side, I could do whatever I wanted. I just had a big disk pool and I could divide it up however I wanted.

We purchased through CDW. They were knowledgeable about the solution. They won the bid. It was very simple with us. We sent it out for a bid and they came back with the lowest cost on the response.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Cost is always important, but it is not our base. We look at performance, availability, overall usability, and simplicity.