FlexPod XCS Reviews

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.

We use this solution in our data center. We use a hybrid environment. It connects our on-premise system with the cloud.

We are a partner with Cisco, and we assist our customers based on their business requirements. 

We have definitely seen an improvement in application performance. They have high availability, and this is what we are looking for. I would say that it is a ninety percent improvement.

Staff productivity has increased because they have more time. The solution provides centralized management, and less time is required for troubleshooting and research. The documentation is in the GUI, embedded within the software. I would say that there is a thirty percent improvement.

Datacenter costs are reduced by means of less power, cooling, and space. I would say it is a fifty percent reduction.

This solution helps our IT administrator to troubleshoot and understand problems.

The most valuable features are the Fabric Interconnect Manager and the UCS Manager. It connects the virtualization, the network, and the storage all in one cage.

Our data center costs have been reduced by means of less power, cooling, and space.

It is very helpful for our customers to have everything centralized. Most of our customers are moving to the cloud, and they need help to migrate their data. The majority of cases that I see are hybrid cloud and on-premise solutions.

There are too many drivers and software combined all together, and we need to have compatibility between all of them.

At this beginning, the FlexPod solution had too many bugs. Today, however, it is more resilient. It has high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery.

This solution is very scalable. You can increase the number of parts horizontally without affecting the production environment.

Cisco's support is very good, all the time. I love them. You have one number to call, and this call will cover the compute, storage, and networking.

This solution is easy to deploy. This solution reduces application deployment time because we have integrated automation with it. The simple integration makes it easy. We have an eighty percent reduction in time.

Using this product makes our life easy.

I have learned a lot from this solution. When you touch a new technology, there is another new technology coming in.

This resiliency of this solution helps. There is high availability, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, and it is easy to deploy.

One of the solutions that we implemented was the joining of two data centers together. We used EVPN-VXLAN, and this was a great solution for them.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use this solution for our development workloads.

The private hybrid multi-cloud environment works for us. We're using it as a private cloud.

There's a lot less overhead management. It's a lot easier for developers, in particular, to get the compute and storage they need. They don't have to go through a bunch of change requests. They just do it on demand.

The solution's infrastructure enables us to run demanding, mission-critical workloads. Our entire development organization runs on FlexPod. Their full development environment is on it. So, application development is pretty mission critical to us.

I like FlexPod's granular scalability and broad application support. Our workload isn't that diverse, but I could see other use cases for it.

Flexpod helped us reduce the time required to deploy new applications by about 60%. It's a very dramatic change.

It has also reduced data centered costs. It's hard to quantify, but there's a lot less bare metal that we need. It's all in FlexPod, so maybe a 40% saving. That's a guess, but it's significant.

The solution has also increased static productivity, mainly in that the developers are able to self-serve. They're less dependent on infrastructure resources to stage an environment for them to then start developing on. They can stage their own environments now.

Support is probably the same. It's one area that we didn't see a lot of improvement in and it's actually supporting FlexPod. It's new technology to a lot of our staff, so they're a little uneasy when they're in there messing with UCS's. It's not something a lot of them do all the time. When we do have to, we kind of fumble around the UCS a little bit to figure our way around.

FlexPod does help streamline our IT admin.

Agility is probably the most valuable feature for us. It's very easy to send out resources.

I would assess it as very easy to manage from edge to core cloud. It's a central point of management. We've automated the majority of it and service delivery is fine.

I find FlexPod to be innovative in how automated it is and how it provides a unified ecosystem. I don't have to worry about compatibility or things not working well with each other. It all just works. That's the easiest thing. It's kind of a turnkey solution: we just start spinning up the resources as needed.

I'd like to see some more Ansible integration for automation purposes. We automate everything else with Ansible, so it would be great if we could automate our FlexPod with Ansible as well.

We could probably see a little bit more training as well.

The solution is very resilient. We haven't lost our FlexPod once, it's been up to, even power outages and things that happened at the data center. It's remained very stable.

I think it can scale highly.

We really like the technical support. We were able to get up and running in day one of the FlexPod. Like I said, supporting it is a little more challenging only because of the familiarity with the GUIs. A lot of people aren't in there very often though, and when we have to troubleshoot it's a little challenging for us.

We used VMware Private Cloud primarily, but we wanted to get into a more tangible private cloud experience as opposed to building our own with individual components that didn't fit together very well. We like that this is designed for network compute storage all in one rack. That's mainly what drilled us to invest in the FlexPod.

The initial setup was straightforward. We followed the validated design and we had external partners come in and help us build it, and then we were up and running. I wouldn't say it was complex.

We've seen return on investment for sure. The solution saves us money overall.

We only evaluated Cisco. I don't believe that we even looked at Dell or HCI. It's pure Cisco for us.

Know what you're getting into upfront, and make sure to train your staff appropriately before diving in and setting something up and then backfilling on your training. Go in with your eyes open and really understand the solution before you start turning the keys over to users and access.

The CBD was very easy to follow. The validated design we followed to the letter, and we haven't had any problems with further integration. It's all gone well.

I would give this solution an eight or nine out of ten: a very high score. It's been very stable. We've been running our dev environment off of it for three years now without any real hiccups or outages. The developers are certainly much more empowered and there's a lot less overhead on the networking people. It just works.

The biggest lesson for me is probably that there is value in some of the larger marketing items. Not just marketing bullet points, but there are actual truth and experience that can back up what the marketing slides have sold us. It delivered to our expectations, I would say.

We are using it to have production workloads running on it.

Our performance increase has been about 15 percent from what we previously used.

It is the integration between the Cisco, VMware, and NetApp as a combined internal solution. The data access rate is much faster than if we were doing it by ourselves.

It has boosted performance.

There have been issues upgrading the firmware.

It is stable. I haven't seen any issues. It is working fine.

We have found the solution to be resilient. 

It is scalable. We can expand it whenever we want.

The technical support is good. When we want something, they can do it or will redirect to the correct team. It's how we get the right solution with a single click.

We need to invest in a new solution because of our end users' compliance.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We used a consultant for the deployment. They walked us through it very nicely.

We have seen a five to ten percent savings on new service deployments.

We are already using NetApp storage products, and we are using the competition, like VxBlock. In addition, we are using Cisco hardware and VMware. So, we have already done our internal research.

Go for it as a solution.

I like the validated designs because we don't have to do more research on it. Research has already been done by trustworthy companies, like Cisco, NetApp, and VMware. They have provided us with the properly designed ones, which is less headache for us.

We do not use FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud, but maybe in the future.

One of the valuable features is ease of use. Getting any environment set up is probably the easiest thing to do. You can set up the entire solution in about a day or so. When we have a requirement for a specific project, we don't need to worry about getting into different gears. FlexPod is a converged infrastructure, so when you get it, you have reference architecture. You just install it and start using it. Those kinds of features are really good.

The storage scales out and you can keep on adding your UCSs. Adding the whole scale-out technology is great. You can grow as you need to and that's a really good feature.

I don't think there's much to be improved with the tool since you can now scale out storage. Before that, this was a shortcoming in that you had to upgrade the head every time.

I would like to see the ability to combine a couple of FlexPods into a cluster. You cannot do that now. You cannot combine two FlexPods into a single entity, into a larger FlexPod. To the best of my knowledge, FlexPods are meant to be in silos and you cannot create clusters at all. If there is a way to do that, that would be interesting.

If there could be a FlexPod management piece, then you could manage all your FlexPods from a single console. That piece is missing even though there are some NetApp tools where you can manage. However, those management tools are specific for the storage.

I would like to be able to manage FlexPod as a single entity for all the different components. If there could be a single tool which can monitor all of them together, that would definitely give a big edge. It would be great if you could manage all of your FlexPods from a single location.

The tool is pretty stable. Stability-wise, I would give it the highest rating. If you follow the reference document, in terms of how to set up FlexPod, it's a very stable environment upon which to work.

I have used technical support, but not exclusively for FlexPod; maybe questions here and there related to the FlexPod environment. I don't think we have ever used FlexPod tech support which is there in NetApp. We have pretty competent resources in-house, so we never feel the need to use FlexPod support.

I was involved in the decision to switch to this product. We were looking for a tool that was designed for the way our organization works. We wanted a silo environment for different applications. Since we have segmentation in our company, we have different domains, and FlexPod really does fit in really well in those situations where you need a FlexPod for a particular application or for a job area. There’s an idea of implementing Citrix and VDI on it, so those kinds of applications are really good.

We were the first company to use EMC's Vblock implementation, and it was a Vblock pain. I was not there when the company selected Vblock, but I was told that there were a lot of issues. Being the first customer on Vblock was really a nightmare. We had to move to FlexPod. But it doesn't mean that Vblock was not good. Our timing on the purchase of Vblock was not right. Our expertise in the company was more Cisco driven and FlexPod really fit in well with that.

I was involved in the installation. FlexPod, or any converged or hyper-converged infrastructure, requires a lot of planning. Once you have your planning done properly, you can just work with networking and other teams. If you have a good coordination with the teams, it's pretty easy to set-up.

I was not involved in the decision-making process. Things have changed since Vblock was launched seven years ago. FlexPod and Vblock both have very similar architecture and I don't see any big pros and cons between them. I think it's just a comfort level with respective companies. If a company has more investment in Cisco and VMware, that's how the FlexPod architecture is designed. I have no comment on Vblock right now.

There were no other vendors at the time. I was going with NetApp only for non-FlexPod environments. That was when we started buying stuff, which was about six years back when there was no competition. However, everybody has their own FlexPod now. Nimble has something like their own stack. Pure has a Pure stack. Everybody's coming with their own converged infrastructure and we are looking around.

When selecting a vendor, partnership plays an important role. A good partner will provide a kind of an independent review of the different vendors. When we select a vendor, we look at:

• Our means
• Our relationship with the vendor
• The standing of the vendor in the industry
• The vendor's new innovative technology
• How the vendor is competing in the market
• How competitive the vendor is in terms of price.

We look at other technologies because other technologies do provide similar kinds of things as NetApp at a cheaper price. That's how other vendors are rolling over each other in the market right now. They can provide the same thing for less money. These are important things, but the company stability and their goodwill in the industry are important factors as well.

Our experience using this tool is that we have been very happy with it for over six year. The solution has given us whatever our company has wanted. It has delivered in a very short time and has quick turn-around for different projects.

I also suggest looking around. NetApp is a good case for us. It really solves our issues. Although there are other solutions available on the market, this tool is definitely worth looking at it.

FlexPod is not cheap and the way things are going, you could probably get the same thing at half the price from another vendor. NetApp has to be very competitive on the prices in order to really compete in this market.

We're using the mirroring capability of the FlexPod. We're having the two heads in separate data centers that are approximately one mile apart with dark fiber. We really like the capability of having that high availability and high resiliency within our data structure, our data centers. That's one of the features.

High availability is outstanding. We haven't had any problems with that.

We've got a FAS6210 and performance is really outstanding, as well.

The high availability feature is what we were really looking for, because we have a campus center, where we have two data centers on campus. So, it just made sense. It was the best fit for us at the time to be able to do that mirroring between the data centers, and be able to also have other aggregates for other purposes; all built into one SAN.

With the hardware and the way that the matrix is formed to validate the infrastructure, everybody does their homework and makes sure that everything is going to be fully supported. When you do have an open case, there is one point of support and you do not have everyone finger-pointing at each other. That was the other big advantage and big selling point for us; that was another feature that drew us to the FlexPod.

We're running a 7-mode right now. With CDOT out there and it being the current operating system, that's going to be a challenge for us. Our roadmap is to go to CDOT gradually over the next two years, so the scalability for us isn't as much of a factor. We're not adding shelves. We're not going wide. We want to be able to scale up and that, honestly, is a bit of a challenge because there's no direct migration between the two right now. That's going to be something that we'll have to look into within the next two years. That's on our roadmap.

I'm not up to date on all the options surrounding that migration right now, but CDOT and 7-mode don't translate. You can't just migrate or upgrade from one to the other seamlessly. If they come out with that, that's something I would look forward to. It's always been a challenge to go from one SAN to the other. There's newer technology, sometimes third party, that can help you get there, but usually it is not possible to have a seamless translation or transition.

The only other area with room for improvement is the interoperability matrix. Sometimes, when the newer versions of any of the partners’ firmware or software come out, there's still sometimes a lag of the partners to support all of those new components. Sometimes, when we are going to a newer version of ONTAP, not everything is supported. Therefore, we can't go to that because of this or because of that. For instance, with vSphere 6, we were held back some because of the hardware interoperability matrix not supporting all the components.

We have used technical support, although not recently. We've pretty much gotten what we expected out of it. We haven't had any major, major issues. We did have some performance issues. That was a couple of years ago; it took a while to track down. Overall, I think support was adequate and we did finally get what we needed. This was pretty much only directed towards NetApp. It wasn't really the Cisco or the VMware components. The support was directed between the parties and handed off appropriately whenever we've needed it.

We were previously using something I would not really call a "SAN", definitely not an enterprise-level one. We got to the point where we kind of handcuffed ourselves by not being able to expand or grow that system. It was really at the limits of what we could do with it.

Obviously, fiber channel versus iSCSI is definitely the direction we wanted to go, plus we wanted the high availability. At the time, we looked at a couple other systems and basically the FlexPod definitely met our needs the best. Also, we knew that it could grow.

In fact, about a year or year and a half ago, when we were spec'ing out our system and making a decision on a SAP ERP program, one of the deciding factors for adopting that technology was that we already had the infrastructure to support it because we had the FlexPod in place.

Initial setup was complex. We were making a pretty big forklift in our environment by putting that in. The design took quite a while, but I'm glad that we did take the time to do that design because it allowed us to have an environment that suited us very well for three-plus years now.

Basically, EMC was the bigger other vendor. We did look very briefly at HP but EMC was the bigger vendor that we were looking at, at the time.

We eventually chose FlexPod mostly because of the FlexPod system’s ability to be split into two different data centers with, basically, one system. Price point was another one, but it just suited our needs almost to a T; it really met the requirements that we were looking for at the time. EMC could do the same thing but it was basically two separate systems and it was a much higher price point.

The most important criteria for my company when selecting a vendor to work with are the stability of the company, the quality of the product, customer service and support. That’s a big deal for our company. We want to make sure that the company that we're dealing with has a similar culture to our own, which is high customer service. We value that.

The idea of the FlexPod: We've all probably experienced the difficulties of working without that type of reference architecture and that acknowledgement of the support. You waste a lot of time because there are going to be problems. There are going to be troubles that you have to go through and the vendors working together on the support has been a value to us. I think almost everybody in this industry has probably gone through that at some point, where you know that a problem lies with one of these three manufacturers, but you spend way too much time finger-pointing and you don't get to the heart of the issue. That was one of the definite advantages of the FlexPod.

Overall, it's really suited our needs. At a time when the storage is kind of a moving target, I think that we did get what we paid for; we have a valued product. We have not had any type of bad experiences that, to me, that would steer us away from NetApp in the future.

Our organization relies on it as the backbone of our infrastructure, which we use to provide services to multiple clients in a multi-client environment.

While I don't have exact figures, there are definite savings in terms of capacity, particularly when using an all-flash storage solution. We may be achieving around a twenty to thirty percent reduction in capacity usage. The familiarity with the architecture has improved troubleshooting, as we now know precisely where to focus our efforts, particularly when dealing with performance-related issues.

Managing the system is straightforward, and we find it easy to handle overall infrastructure upgrades. The main advantage is consolidating everything into a single rack, which helps optimize power consumption, especially in CRM.

Perhaps having a unified interface for managing the entire company could lead to improved efficiency and performance.

I have been using it for eight years.

Once it's installed, it remains stable. Hardware failures are infrequent, aside from the occasional need to replace components.

It is scalable, allowing us to expand our workload capacity.

I'm quite impressed with the support provided by NetApp. They are incredibly responsive, and you can expect immediate assistance. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We used NetApp in combination with HP products at my previous company. This combination worked well, but FlexPod offers more in terms of operational simplicity, making it easier to manage and operate.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Regarding the architecture, the connectivity involving switches, servers, and other components is quite straightforward

Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

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.