FlexPod XCS Reviews

We use FlexPod XCS to provide primary storage for production data. 

The tool's most valuable features are the flexibility and ability to adapt to redundancy. 

FlexPod XCS' pricing could be cheaper. You need to find the right person for support. 

I have been using the product for ten years. 

The tool's stability is rock solid. 

FlexPod XCS is scalable and flexible. 

FlexPod XCS' support has always been there for us. 

Positive

We evaluated HP, Dell, IBM and Cisco. 

The tool helps to save TCO by consolidating our workloads into smaller footprints. 

FlexPod XCS helps us save money. 

I rate it an eight out of ten. 

The solution suits converged infrastructures, where the customer gets a complete system with Cisco servers, NetApp Storage, and Cisco switches.

FlexPod XCS needs to improve its pricing. 

I have been working with the product since September. 

The tool's pricing is fair. 

The tool is recommended for companies with an employee count between 50-500. Bigger companies look for individualized solutions. You must look for a different solution if you have a complicated or bigger infrastructure. I rate the product a seven out of ten. 

Our primary use case for the solution is running critical infrastructure, and we deploy it on-premises

The storage efficiency and performance are valuable.

The solution could be improved by including automation for user updates.

We have been using the solution for nine years.

The solution is scalable. I rate it a nine out of ten.

The solution is scalable. I rate it a nine out of ten.

We have had a good experience with customer service and support, but it takes a while for them to attend to critical issues. I rate them a six out of ten.

Neutral

I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

My primary use case is for private cloud, database servers, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

It allows us to deploy and fly fast quickly.

The feature I have found most valuable is data protection architecture as a whole. Integrating applications like Oracle, SQL, VMWare is a key differentiator. Operations are elementary and consistent. You realize this when you have to scale, and all the management keeps the same way.

Areas for improvement would be the integrated support task force with all vendors, the communication with and recognition program for resellers, at scale documentation I believe it would be more detailed (Graphs and Projections @ latency/IOPs/Throughput). I would like to see more integration with the public cloud in the next release.

I've been using FlexPod for ten+ years.

This solution is surprisingly performative and high available. In addition, all components are fully redundant.

This solution is highly scalable. Because of the nature of flexibility on a solution, we can customize any component, which is great. Still, when we get off the documentation (cause is too flexible), we have to double attention to the limits of individual components.

The technical support for this solution is fine. However, there is some room for improvement, especially when the cases involve the ecosystems. For example, the support team could have a unified war room.

Positive

For the initial customer or engineer, installing for the first time, this product sometimes is challenging to set up. For more senior customers who have automated scripts, it's much easier. Deployment takes a few hours, perhaps around half a day.

When the operations matter, you definitely have to look at FlexPod. I see Flexpod as a singular competitor for two reasons, once you scale the solution as you need and the operations and administrator's effort keep the same. The flexibility allows you to scale just the necessity you need with no waste of investments. I would rate this solution as ten out of ten.

We've deployed a couple of projects for universities. They have been using FlexPod for a VDI solution as well as their file systems and servers. We usually use cheaper firewalls to secure the solution. We mostly use Cisco, which is higher power as well. 

FlexPod is the primary solution we recommend for clients with high-availability server requirements. Our clients find FlexPod's management helpful. You can manage everything via plugins. 

As the technology grows, we're looking to upgrade our storage systems to something faster, and we're hoping to improve our servers with next-generation technology. So we want to enhance our server infrastructure and explore server virtualization with VMware. That's the improvement that our clients are demanding. 

We have been in this business for a few years, but I joined this company five years ago. I've been working with FlexPod since I started at the company. My first task was implementing a storage system using FlexPod for some university clients.

FlexPod is highly scalable. The advantage FlexPod has over some other solutions is that you can scale independently using multi-servers. If you want the scale up the storage, you can create a number of disks.

We usually provide frontline support for our clients. But if something is beyond our knowledge, we get support from the vendors.

Installing FlexPod isn't complex if you follow the implementation guide that the vendor provides. We partner with major vendors like Cisco, NetApp, and VMware, so we have extensive implementation support to help us with migrating the solution. Our first deployment took about nine weeks. Implementation requires only two or three engineers, and we use a third-party provider for the security part. In total, it's a maximum of five people. 

The return on investment is very high for FlexPod implementations.

I rate FlexPod eight out of 10. 

Our primary use is mostly for footprint consolidation — reducing the number of cables and easing the management model compared to just working with monolithic servers. Having access to the UCSM (Unified Computing System Manager) and managing that way seems to be a lot easier.

Going from the old monolithic server and silo storage that they used to use is an improvement. With the FlexPod solution, just being able to manage and monitor the overall environment helps. It saves a lot of money on all the various tools that are required to manage a traditional solution. Most of the necessary management and monitoring tools are included with the FlexPod solution. So, that's nice.

Potentially through the use of NetApp technologies on the back end — like the FlexCloning and the Snapshots — we have changed the way we do our development workflows and actually the way we do DR (Disaster Recovery) as well. So, we are using UCS (Unified Computing System) on service profiles and leveraging all their servers for test development in normal operating conditions. In the case of DR, you just have to switch service profiles. You boot to a different line off of that and you are able to turn the development test into the DR environment. That's nice.

For me, the most valuable feature is probably just the orchestration and automation that can be done around the whole solution from top to bottom, from servers to storage, networking, and using UCS Director. With the FlexPod solution, you are able to quickly provision all your hosts and all the resources that you need for the environment.

In the next generation, I'd just like to see bigger, faster, and better. I think that's partly there. Just shove more memory in them, throw a faster proxy in them, use 100 gig infrastructure. Having more hundred gig ports and AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup/Modeling Language) workloads would be very nice.

Scalability is nice. With this product, you can just add more compute, buy another chassis, and it might be fairly inexpensive, but you plug it in and away you go. There is no more dedicating ILO (Integrated Lights-Out) ports or track ports or whatever, out-of-band management, et cetera. So, that makes the opportunities for scaling nice.

I give both Cisco and NetApp a ten for their efforts in technical support. I have used a lot of other vendors' support services, and pretty often it is an absolute joke. If there is an issue, the FlexPod support team is there to fix it.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. Once you get the understanding of how the system works, it is fairly easy to set it up. 

We do the consultations, so I set it up myself.

There are a lot of hyper-converged solutions out on the market these days, a couple of our customers have tried those and they felt a little constrained within those environments. The FlexPod is nice because it is still made up of separate components but it is centrally managed. 

I actually used to manage the FlexPod at one company I was with. It was great there because it was all Cisco UCS. We leveraged Cisco UCS director to provision and add capacity when we needed to. Another company I was at used a Blade infrastructure along with fabric switches so that was the same sort of model. It is just easier when compared to other solutions. Fewer points of entry make it more manageable.

I used the Gen4 FlexPod at a previous company and we are reselling Gen5 to a couple of other companies. All using 40 gigs. It would be tough to quantify how much is actually saved, but I know it is a significant reduction in the number of cables, number of switches, and number of servers that they have to use. On $1 million billing for materials, I'm guessing they're probably saving at least $25,000 to $30,000. Overall they see a bit of return on investment.

We have talked about getting a hundred gig infrastructure so we can incorporate AI or machine learning, but they are not there yet.

The efficiency of data protection and data management goes back to leveraging UCS director and UCSM. Just the ability to provision the environments quickly is significant. I would say that FlexPod simplifies IT operations for unifying data management. Our customer is not currently using any cloud right now. I personally have not used any cloud, but I know there are opportunities for some integrations. 

They are leveraging SnapMirror to replicate all their source data and their production data center over to DR, as well as test development. It is easier than a host-based copy. Keeping all the switching within the FlexPod environment instead of having to go up to the core all the time probably helps out.

In terms of switches, cabling, the chassis — being able to fit eight servers in 6U obviously, helps out in terms of data center savings.

The advice I would give to people considering this solution is to certainly leverage all the tools and applications that Cisco and NetApp have developed around the FlexPod solution. You could certainly buy things separately and piecemeal it together, but things like the CSA and the solutions support becomes a nightmare. When you get a nice certified FlexPod solution, all the tools come with it. It makes a big difference in the environment and usability.

On a scale of one to ten where ten is the best, I would rate FlexPod as a nine or a ten. I love it. Again, there are obviously a lot of new HCI products that are coming out. But in terms of being able to manage it, I think that FlexPod is pretty solid as is.

Things got a lot faster. We can pull and test in DEV systems much more rapidly and are clearing up a lot of DBA time. In the past, every time we tested it, we needed to be refreshed. In the past, it would take a day of our DBA's time, and now it's just point, click, and ten minutes later it's done.

FlexPod has improved our application's performance. It is now ten times as fast. 

Unplanned downtime incidents have decreased. We've had two and a half years with zero downtime. 

The most valuable features are the reliability and tools such as SnapCenter and SnapManager. We use them a lot. They make life easier.

On the surface, validated designs for enterprise apps are not that important but it's knowing that they work, and if they don't work, I can get support for them. We did have some pretty nasty bugs early on, around four years ago, but we haven't had problems.

It is 100% stable.

I don't have any problems with scalability. 

Support is able to fix our problems but we don't use them much. 

I haven't had many problems, so FlexPod's unified support hasn't been that important. But if I did have a lot of problems, it would be important. I'd rather just not have problems, so that's a good thing.

It worked for me at my last company so we went with FlexPod. It's what I know. It's what I trust, it's comfortable, and it's worked well for me in the past.

It was more expensive than others but the reliability in the tools has saved us money in that regard, so it's worth it.

It is more complex than just basic storage systems. That's intimidating to some people but it works well for me because I've learned it, I know it, I've been using it for ten years and it's not a big deal to me. But it is intimidating to some people and if you push past that, and just learn it, it is worth it. Especially for the additional tools and the environment it allows you to utilize.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. Not a ten because it could always be cheaper, it could always be faster.

Our customers use this solution. It's a validated design and there's one solution for compute and storage. The validated design is an advantage when you take all of the separate parts.

The flexibility between Cisco and NetApp is valuable. When there are new parts of new devices like the new AFF 400, then the speed is not fast enough to implement what the customer asks for, but the design is not validated. It's faster to validate the design for new equipment.

FlexPod's unified support for the entire stack is very important. Before, the customers would log a ticket by Cisco and a ticket by NetApp. It's better when vendors can partner and look for a solution together. 

It improves application performance for our customers. Before FlexPod, you could make a design and that design was not strong enough for some applications and now there is a good validated design. The validated design gives space for the applications to run or not. Performance has been improved by 50%. Before we had to make separate designs, now, we are more confident that a design is good to work for the type of application. 

It has decreased unplanned downtime incidents. 

It's easier to sell to a customer because it is a validated design but sometimes the customer wants another feature and then it's a problem. You must build each block separately, that's a disadvantage sometimes.

The stability is good. 

It's very scalable. 

Sometimes we reach out to the NetApp support from the NetApp part or the Cisco part but the engineers by us are also certified to install FlexPod. We have had good experiences with them. They speak the same language as us which is an advantage. 

Our customers choose this solution because of the validated design and for the one-stop solution where it's one contract. It's one building block which is an advantage for the customer instead of buying separate items.

Our customers also look at Dell EMC. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten.