FlexPod XCS Reviews

Two hour production products are fully running in AWS. For the FlexPod, we just run everything on it.

We bought all the parts separately. So, we are running a certified FlexPod design with the AFF A700, UCS chassis, and Cisco Nexus FIs.

We are using both AWS and Azure.

The solution makes our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward. The environment is more homogeneous, so there are not as many technologies to study and learn. People can focus on improving their knowledge in existing technologies.

It simplifies our lives.

We use a smaller footprint of equipment right now.

• The compact design
• Cost savings

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization are very important. We use all certified designs to be eligible for the enterprise support and to receive support promptly. That is why we extremely rely on the certified designs and best practices.

There were a lot of elemental failures, like RAM or blades.

Hardware stability needs improvement. We replaced a lot of RAM this past year. We had to replace the complete blade once after extensive troubleshooting. Any given time, we have approximately one blade down within the entire infrastructure, unfortunately.

The stability is good. It breaks sometimes.

The solution has decreased the unplanned downtime incidents in our organization. We have almost eliminated downtime (by 90 percent) since using FlexPod.

The scalability is very expensive.

The technical support is good. We haven't needed to contact Cisco support regarding FlexPod as the entity. For NetApp and UCS, we receive a lot of attention.

The solution’s unified support for the entire stack is very important. With FlexPod, you receive a higher attention level when you ask for support. This is very beneficial in a time-sensitive business.

We did not have FlexPod before. We had a bunch of standalone HPE rack servers.

We switched after analyzing the performance needs and what customers wanted to spend.

We reduced the environmental footprint, like reducing electricity costs and heating. However, we are hosting our data centers from somebody else. We reduced our footprint of equipment by approximately 80 percent. Meaning that about 70 percent of our cabinets right now are empty because we switched to FlexPod.

For the deployment of UCS, we uses an integrator and fellow reseller. Our experience with them was very good. Everything works.

The application performance improved by 50 to 70 percent.

Cisco and NetApp were on our shortlist.

I would rate it an eight (out of 10).

Our primary use case for this solution is infrastructure.

All of our main applications run on this solution, and it has done a stellar job.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the data services that are available.

This solution is very hard to maintain and keep up.

It would like the system to have better usability, where somebody who is less of an expert can still perform the basic functions. In general, simplify the system.

The stability of this solution is very good.

The scalability is extremely good. It scales really, really well.

In terms of performance, our old architecture was far behind and couldn't keep up. That was our tipping point when deciding to move to a new solution.

The initial setup of this solution is complex. There are too many levels of architecture design, with lots of different layers of pointing connections. It takes a really well-trained skill set to get it up and running.

We used an integrator for our implementation, and we found their service to be extremely good.

We have seen a return on investment.

We evaluated other solutions like HP and EMC, but we already had a lot of Cisco equipment and our engineers were trained on Cisco, so this solution made more sense.

My advice for anybody considering this solution is to do their homework. There are a lot of other solutions that do the same thing, but it depends on your use case. This is not the best fit for every situation.

Overall, I think that this is a great product, but it is very hard to maintain.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

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.

We use FlexPod in our data centers. We serve all of our infrastructure off of it, which includes Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, and Citrix. It is all virtualized. We are also using the file share from FlexPod with Snapshotting and SnapMirroring for disaster recovery (DR) between data centers.

We haven't experienced any data loss while on NetApp. The stability of it has probably been the biggest benefit. Because of FlexPod's performance and flexibility, our company is doing much better than what we previously used.

We found FlexPod to be innovative when it comes to compute, storage, and networking. We've taken advantage of their storage optimizations to obtain better use out of the space. We upgraded to All Flash FAS (AFF), which has provided a huge performance increase that we haven't barely scratched the surface of. We have plenty of overhead, so that's always nice when taking on tasks which might have otherwise taxed a smaller system. However, we have a lot of overhead, so this isn't an issue for us.

Because of the stability that we have had on it, it has met our needs on everything. We haven't had a shortcoming in performance nor data loss.

In regards to DR and backup:

• Performance
• Stability
• Capability.

Validate designs are hard. They don't validate all of the available options. We don't generally end up in a validated configuration. We did on our initial install when they first rolled out the FlexPod platform. Over time, we've done upgrades, and we don't necessarily fit into a validated design anymore.

We would like them to improve the validate designs. It is hard to stay in a supported config with the software and firmware versions of the platform. It's always a concern to ensure things not only work well, but they work at all. If we run into incompatibility inside of the NetApp, Cisco, or VMware versions, it can cause real issues.

They should continue to educate and support their Tier 1 support, so we have better, faster resolutions. As the years have gone by, we haven't quite received as good resolution at Tier 1 as we used to. Occasionally, scheduling techs onsite is problematic. There are some gaps in the handoff between the call-in support to on-site support. It would be nice if this was cleaned up, so we didn't have to be quite as involved with verifying techs will be on site or ensuring that techs onsite receive all the information.

As long as it stays in a supported config, the stability is very good. If you leave the supported config, you get directed to come back into a supported config if you have any issues.

We have good resiliency with our FlexPods. I don't know if we've taken advantage of the built-in HA. 

We haven't had much experience with scalability. We gave ourselves room to grow into the product. We've only done any real scaling at refresh time. 

It has not always been the single point of contact for all of vendors who participate as it was sold to be. Occasionally, we end up having to go to each vendor, and there isn't as much cross-vendor support as we had wanted.

There is always room for improvement in support. We want the intercompany communications to not have us have to contact vendors separately to work on one issue. We want them to own it internally, which would be a lot more helpful. This is what they're supposed to do.

Compared to some other vendors, we still receive good support. Unfortunately, the issue being that they still seem to be separate support buckets rather than integrated support. It's hard to ding the platform overall, but that's probably where I would ding it at the moment.

We were using HPE G-Series Servers. We needed a lot more space and performance, since I'm not sure that we had good performance metrics at the time that we moved solutions. However, we were looking to expand our Exchange environment and have more SQL. We wanted making sure that we had enough I/O, and the FlexPod system had it. In addition, integrating with UCS made it much more flexible to add compute in our VM environment, and we were going from physical to virtual at the time. Thus, we cut down on the amount of space and power that we were using by going to blade chassis.

The initial setup was complex at the time our deployment where there was a lot of moving parts. My understanding is that they have since tried to implement more streamlining. 

We used Plan B Technologies out of Maryland, and we also used NetApp. We had a good experience with the install. It was all-new moving parts for us, since FlexPod was brand new at the time. We spent a fair amount of time whiteboarding the solution with them. We visited Raleigh-Durham to go on campus to see some of the hardware to get a better understanding of what we were going to be buying.

We have seen an improvement in application performance. We are pushing a lot more I/O and flexibility. We came from systems which did not have thin provisioning. Therefore, we are more flexible in being able to give out space or have I/O, especially with the AFF being all-flash. 

We probably looked at Dell EMC. We were on HPE SAN for quite awhile. I don't know if we looked at anybody else.

One of the deciders for us in looking at NetApp was, even years ago, they just seemed to be in a much better position in the marketplace. We were pretty confident that they would be around in five years, whereas, some of the other smaller vendors might not be, especially with consolidations going on.

We have saved time with Snapshots, SnapMirrors, and backup and DR capabilities versus other platforms that we have looked at in the past. However, for new deployments, we have not saved, because we don't have any automation on top for deploying VMs or shares. It doesn't really seem to be part of the FlexPod platform.

We don't use it for hybrid cloud, multi-cloud environments, or Managed Private Cloud.

Everything that we are looking for feature-wise seems to be coming out in ONTAP or VMware releases.

Flexibility and performance are the most valuable features. We are a financial company. Performance is very important for us, when it comes to processing data on SQL databases. Scalability is another example of us installing a new 8080 and migrating data from 8040 to All Flash on the 8080.

It's flexible; it's adaptable; it's pretty fast; and it's non-disruptive. That's a huge part of what gives it an edge over other technologies these days – the disruption to the business – because our kind of business is an online business. It has to be 24/7 and zero disruption for the users. It is just great for business.

There is room for improvement in the GUI for the NetApp side. There's a lot that they could do on the CLI side. However, for a lot of novice admin users for NetApp, where you want to delegate certain work to the rest of your team, if you have a new person who joins the team or doesn't have enough experience with the CLI part, the GUI is an easier way for a novice user to use the appliance.

It exists today, but not enough. I've seen some improvements in ONTAP 9 from 8. Some features were added that were not available before, like zeroing spare disks; other features that are there as well. The world is moving more towards GUI rather than CLI. That's because it's less time-consuming. The graphical interface is better. Also, IT administrators are becoming lazier to learn the commands and memorize all the commands that have to do with simple operations; move a volume, create a LUN or something like that. Moving towards GUI would help a lot in administering the appliance, for sure.

I’ve never had any stability issues. What's nice about it is, if we approach NetApp for support, they support us on all the stack. If we approach Cisco for support, they support us throughout the stack. It's a pretty integrated solution. Also, nobody points fingers at anybody else. From the experience I've had with them, if we call Cisco, they support us on everything that has to do with the FlexPod. If we call NetApp, they support us on all FlexPod components.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. It's just great. We increased our space. We moved to flash disks from SATA and SAS. Again, no disruption; better performance; and it's all transparent to the business.

IT has a major problem when it comes to explaining where we stand to the business. All the business understands is, “I want to be always online. I want to have better performance” – whatever that means to them – “and I want it to cost me less.” It's an expensive solution, but when you compare that to what FlexPod actually does, and the performance it provides, it's pretty good.

Technical support is excellent and they support you on the Cisco equipment, too; on the Nexus. We have a Nexus 5K and a Nexus 7K. They've got pointers: where to go, what to do, what you have to look at. It removes the headache from our side, going back and forth between two different companies; one is the storage; the other is the network; and everyone is pointing performance issues on the other. But this solution tells me, “You know what, we work together. It’s our product and we'll help support you on any component,” which is a great thing.

I think the team that I joined had a different vendor. They migrated from that vendor to FlexPod because we're scaling out our business. The business is doing well, so we have a plan to scale out 10 times the business size over the next three years. That's why we addressed all other different solutions and we found the FlexPod would help us out when it comes to scalability.

If we buy the appliance right now, we don't have to buy the full size, but if we want to scale out, it gives us that option to scale out as big as we want it. Our business tripled over the last two years and we're starting to create performance labs to see how much it's going to handle when we go 10 times our size. FlexPod is helping us out with that a lot.

In general, for the backend IT people and the infrastructure team, support is one of the most important criteria when choosing a vendor. When you call, I don't want to be waiting on the line. This is the smallest example I can give: waiting on the line for a callback and support that just keeps pointing fingers at other appliances. We look for the quality of support; getting to solve and follow-up on our issues; RMAing items, if need be; and proactivity.

With NetApp, we have the online support where, if one of the disks goes down, NetApp automatically knows about it and they approach us saying, “Hey, you've got a disk that's going down. If your alerting is not working, our alerting is working. We need to send you an RMA for this disk.” Those things make an IT department feel more secure because it is not only us having to watch our back to show that we're doing a good job for our business; we've got somebody else on our side doing that for us, as well. That's another good thing.

Because it's a scalable appliance, most IT people tend to aim to get the biggest thing because you might as well. You want to cover your back as well, and all of that. But scalability; you've got to have in mind scalability. When looking at FlexPod, buying the basic thing could cost you a little bit, but you have that flexibility of adding and scaling up in FlexPod. You don't have to go all-in like we used to with a lot of different appliances.

It's non-disruptive. That's a huge thing. You want to build something that you can say, “OK, the business is going to grow. We are anticipating the business is going to grow three times the size.” You don't want to buy an appliance now and then, when you want to add an extension to it, you have to take the business down. That doesn't look good for you as an IT department. It also doesn't look good for your appliance, saying, "Why do we have to go down for eight hours or 12 hours? We've already invested so much money and now you're saying we're going to be disrupted for 12 hours." So, FlexPod eliminates that for you.

Start small, have in mind that you can scale out, and scale up, too.

A few of the reasons why I gave it a perfect rating are support; scalability, of course, for the appliance; and scalability for the company itself. NetApp is growing; now they're adding SolidFire to their portfolio. I've taken a brief look at SolidFire. I've noticed that they're dealing with it as a separate entity – not separate technology, but definitely a separate entity – that you can add to a portfolio of NetApp, whether it is EF or FAS; now, they've also got SolidFire.

I'm hoping to see NetApp integrate SolidFire into the OnCommand GUI itself. That way, we wouldn’t have to deal with two separate appliances in the back. That would add more headache to the administrator – having to know two different appliances, adding command capacity and administering two different technologies – rather than integrating them into one and having one admin side. It is new technology so I would give them an almost-perfect rating, but SolidFire is a great technology to add to your portfolio.

I'm a pro-FlexPod guy, which is where this comes from. We haven't faced any usability issues with it before. We've faced a couple of performance issues that turned out to be outside the FlexPod, not within the FlexPod. It turned to be a Microsoft database issue that some on the DB team were able to resolve. Performance-wise, the performance tools give you a great insight on what's going on in your appliance or in your FlexPod; knowing where you could do some enhancements, or where you can help troubleshoot some problems for developers or for the database teams; saying, “This is where we need to enhance or this is how our appliance is performing.” It's pretty cool.

We use FlexPod XCS in our data center to provide IT services like hosting. We also use it to store in-house applications. 

The tool provides a single point for storing applications and it increases the availability of them. It also has improved the way we handle applications within VMware. 

I like the way we change the primary and secondary services in operation. 

The tool is obsolete and we are migrating to HPE. It should improve the pricing. 

I have been working with the product for 11 years. 

I would rate the tool's stability a ten out of ten. 

I would rate FlexPod XCS' scalability an eight out of ten. My company has 6000 users for the product. We use it every day but usage will decrease due to migration. 

FlexPod XCS' setup is complex and I would rate it a six out of ten. The product's deployment took six months to complete. A partner company helps us with the tool's maintenance. 

The consultant helped us with the deployment. They first delivered the equipment and a specialist did the connections and equipment assembly. 

The solution's ROI is good. I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

The product's pricing is high and I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

I would rate FlexPod XCS a nine out of ten. Our experience with the solution is good and we use it well. 

FlexPod is a single product that you can manage. It has very good scalability. We can scale our UCS Servers. We can carry 12 storage nodes in the FlexPod. The main benefit is its single, all in one solution from server switch to storage.

It is enterprise storage. The latency is about five billion milliseconds, which is coming from the cloud servers. 

We have seen an 80 percent improvement in application performance.

If there are any failures, or anything needs to be addressed, we can make one call to support for assistance. 

No matter how busy the data is, we can put the data in the right place at the right time.

We would like to see a new design that comes with more productivity or graphics. Currently, the vendors, like HPE and Dell EMC along with NetApp, all have very similar products. We want more diversification.

The solution is resilient, because it has good scalability, and other products in the market don't have this. It has scalable storage and service. 

The scalability is innovative for both compute and storage. With other products, we can't scale the storage space, we have to buy more storage. E.g. with Dell EMC, if we want more storage with VxBlock, we have to purchase another VxBlock.

The technical support is good. I have been working with NetApp for the last two to three years, and they have solutions readily available for bug and code fixes. 

The initial setup is not complex. It is user-friendly since it is a single solution with all the components delivered in one package.

NetApp does some of our installations on some products, like SolidFire. However, they pass the data on to us, and we have to do the configuration.

It saves a lot of time because it is a single product. We also save time with the installation.

It is cheaper than other products. For example, Dell EMC VxBlock is more expensive.

We also evaluated EMC VxBlock, which has a similar design. Both products have flexibility.

The difference is NetApp's response time of 0.5 milliseconds, which we felt was very good.

This flexible is very good for private cloud solutions.

Our primary use case is a mixture of workloads. We have VMware, Citrix, Oracle and SAP, which are all running within the FlexPod stack.

It created lower total cost of ownership. Previously, we had disparate storage and servers, and there were bits of kits everywhere. Now, we have two data centers with almost identical setups in both. We are Active-Active, but we can easily swing workloads across to one data center, if need be, because it's the same underlying technology.

It's a common platform, which provides for ease of use between all of the blade servers. It uses all the same tech, moving service profiles seamlessly across from one blade to the next. There is also combined support.

There are too many management products: System Insight Manager, Oakum, etc. There are a lot of them and you have to know which one to use at which time. Whereas, with competitors, they have a single pane of glass view which has everything in it.

It is stable. We haven't had an outage in the last year that has been caused by anything related to the FlexPod. It has been 100 percent available.

The solution is resilient. It is easy to spin up another blade with the same service profile as the existing one, then within seconds you are up and running. This can also be done in combination with VMware SRM, Oracle Data Guard, or one of the other vendors' software solutions on top with little downtime. 

It seems scalable. It scales more than we need. I love that we will be able to scale out into the cloud and utilize that when we need it.

The technical support is good. We generally call directly to either NetApp or Cisco. Every time that we have called the support has been good, NetApp especially. We've found that they stick with a problem all the way through to the end (24/7) by switching their engineers, though the underlying problem maybe even isn't a NetApp component.

We had such a disparate collection of servers and vendors which didn't make sense since it meant having a lot of different support contracts. We had different servers, switches, and hardware coming out of support, and keeping track of that was quite difficult. We made the decision to move to consolidate data centers. In that decision, we decided to go with FlexPod.

We followed the validated design. Although on paper it looks quite complex, we followed the validated design and working closely with NEC, who has set up other data centers similar to ours. It was easy.

It has saved our engineers time. The initial setup to get the service profile set up took some time, but now each new blade that is put in is up and running in ten minutes. The previous service that we had would have taken about half a day to a day.

We work with NEC, who was good.

Batch jobs which used to take two or three hours in the evening are now running in ten to fifteen minutes. This is a significant improvement.

We looked at other vendors: IBM and Dell EMC. IBM was our existing vendor at the time, and we found their support was poor. We trialed Dell EMC and FlexPod was the better solution. We were pleased with the way FlexPod went in and worked.

Trial it. See if you can get a demo to a trial system, then put some big workloads through it and see what performance you get.

I like the validate designs. I like the way they are put together and give you an easy building block to configure and set the system up. The one negative is the interoperability matrix. This could cover a more wide range of partners. For example, we have upgraded the whole firmware across the stack, and looking at the matrix, everything looked green. However, something in Oracle would cause us an issue during the upgrade, then we would have to either rollback or sit with support. While support has been good with getting to the bottom of things, it would be nice to have more confidence when we are going into an upgrade that it will work.

Today, it looks like the software design solutions will be able to support our move into the cloud much easier than I initially thought. We are only just starting that transformation now, but I see with Data ONTAP and Cloud Volumes ONTAP, it looks like we will be easily moving our data into the cloud and making better use of the compute that is up there rather than having to expand out in our data center. 

We have four or five weather events every year which cause a huge strain on our systems with customers logging in and working out whether they have power or not, or how long the power outages will last, and whilst that happens, our databases are getting absolutely hammered. Now, historically we've had to build our data center to be able to cope with those big workloads. It's only four or five days a year, so we are effectively wasting money when we don't need to. If we can burst out to the cloud, it would really help.

I think it is innovative with this move to the cloud using ONTAP. With the whole NetApp product range being very similar in its look and feel in the cloud as it is on-prem, I feel comfortable that our engineers will be able to spin up and utilize it quite quickly.

We don't use FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud.