FlexPod XCS Reviews

We use it for generalized workloads in a hypervisor situation, either VMM or Hyper-V. It is used for any particular workloads that the government has for this purpose. It is sometimes used for dedicated hardware as well, so it provides the flexibility as we need it. We can also grow because we can easily expand it from its initial chassis.

It gives you a lot to work with. The problem with this is then you don't know what you want to do anymore. By making it very versatile, it also gives you too many choices.

Depending on how we deploy, we are seeing application performance improvements as we have plenty of horsepower in the solution. However, at the moment, we have development issues, not performance issues.

The ability to have the configurations for it: The blades, the service profiles, and making a standard for it. This makes it easy for the other members on our team when setting things up, because there is already a template for them to use.

I like that everything is integrated, and we can change the port to whatever we need, e.g., Fibre Channel. It is very nice to work with, as it gives the ability to have more choices: Do we want to have more Fibre Channels, iSCSI, or some type of MetroClusters? We can do all this with if we have bandwidth.

The ability to manage the templates across sites. We would like to easily take out the configuration of one FlexPod and copy it over, just making minor changes. There is a way to do it, but it's clumsy.

There is a bit of a learning curve for a new person in understanding FlexPod and going through each of section of making a template for SAN, hardware, networking, etc. The flow isn't very good. The software should be more geared to a top-flow design versus a bottom-up.

I would also like them to improve some integration on the HCI part.

It's very stable. I find it's almost mainframe grade.

We had issues where we had some of the aisle modules failed. Even though its half the system, it was still up and no one actually knew why it was down. It was down for a few days before we could get it fixed. However, it didn't affect anybody else and that includes our major environment. This was at one of our bigger sites and nothing happened.

It scales easily. We went through an upgrade of adding additional chassis, and it wasn't a big deal.

Their technical support is very good. I don't think we have had a call that lasted longer than a couple days, and it was only for one issue where something didn't work properly. It wasn't exactly a hardware problem, but it wasn't a software problem. It was just one of those strange anomalies.

The upgrade was straightforward. There wasn't anything special involved. What we found out is that since no one is using templates properly that we could have done things even faster if we had used the templates. Since then, we use them all across all the sites.

We have seen our data center rack space collapse about 90 percent. We have a data center which only has two racks now out of the 20 that were there previously.

We have also reduced our manpower with the solution.

We may consider another solution for the HCI. We have not decided yet.

Know what your use case will be for and figure out whether you are going on-premise or want a hybrid solution. This will change what you need. If you are going to do some hybrid stuff, you may need to decide to create your own software to make the hybrid connection or you can use HCI. This may change the things you want to buy.

We are trying to decide if we want to go to a private, hybrid or multi-cloud environment. We don't have any services to deploy VMs yet on the cloud.

We have been using FlexPod for five years. We use it for our Epic environment.

We get a unified, collaborative support model. It conforms with the CVD and it helps us with maintaining supportability. All of our vendors give us the support that we need in a timely and effective manner.

It has also been very versatile. We have others that do not exactly conform with it and yet we still benefit from the collaborative support model. And we're not required to go to a certain thing if it doesn't work well or isn't the best case for our situation. That's been wonderful.

We're using the Epic environment on-demand workflow, and that has saved us quite literally thousands of man-hours by helping us refresh, back up, and create new instances. We wouldn't have been able to do so if it wasn't for all of that time-saving. Being able to have SUP, REL, and REL VAL DR instances, we would need to double our staff, at least, to be able to do that.

• The design has already been validated.
• The support element, the lack of finger-pointing, where all of the different vendors are working together collaboratively, sharing data, opening tickets with one another.
• We already use UCS and it goes well with the vendors that we have picked.

At the beginning, there was a little bit of confusion among the support folks on how to open up tickets with the others. There needs to be a little more helping of the partners to make sure that they are able to handle opening tickets with the other vendors.

For our Epic environment, aside from an environmental data center problem, a heating issue, we have not had any issues whatsoever with the infrastructure. From a resilience perspective, we've set it and we've been able to forget it for the most part.

We planned a five-year model for our Epic environment, so that we haven't really needed to scale. For other areas of our environment, it has scaled fairly well. The data mobility helps a lot with that, if we have to do a refresh. It's just simply vol moves, etc.

One thing to note would be that we're now looking to go into a MetroCluster IP with our FlexPod. Going from Fabric to IP, we're not able to do that with vol move. Still, we can do SnapMirror relationships and get all that data moved over.

The one other thing would be that in the transition from 7-Mode to CDOT there was no unplanned downtime, and it went very well with all the tools that NetApp has provided us.

Just fantastic tech support. The chat functionality gets us in touch with top-level engineers when we need it. As a hospital, that level of support is priceless.

We had been using Dell EMC storage before, VPLEX, etc. We had a good bit of experience with that. 

Because our VAR helped us with a lot of it, from our perspective it was very simple.

Initially, for our Epic environment, we used OST. Our VAR, PEAK Resources, also specializes in converged infrastructure. It went fairly well. It was a little bit rocky at the start, but that's why we picked our VAR. Their experience and the level of investment that they make in NetApp are fantastic. They helped us a lot.

We looked at Dell EMC VCE very seriously, as it's a converged product. NetApp was a lot more flexible, it didn't require a forklift approach. We had a really great experience with NetApp specifically. We were already using Cisco, for both network as well as compute, and it just seemed like just a great play, to have that flexibility and to have the support model to help us. And it has proven to be great.

If a colleague was looking at this or similar solutions, I would help them to understand what we've done with it for Epic and the success that we've had. I would share with them the examples of converged support as well as the stability that we've had. They are what has really made this a success story.

Regarding private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, I love it. The idea of the state of Fabric. We haven't been able to leverage the public cloud portion of it yet, but the whole vision of the data movement is where we want to stay, so that we're ready for the cloud where we can do that. As for private, we're looking to bring up StorageGRID to be able to offload cold blocks on our AFF. That kind of a feature set is wonderful. We don't use FlexPod for managed private cloud.

In terms of FlexPod being innovative when it comes to compute, storage and networking, it stays current. We're not five versions back because we're having to be conformed with other solutions. It seems like NetApp is doing a great job of making sure all their vendors are keeping things up to date. There have been some other than Day One-types of events that it's impossible to really get to. We're not waiting long for things to come up.

As for improvement in application performance, we started with an All Flash Epic so we've had really wonderful sub-millisecond latencies from the get-go. We haven't experienced degraded performance.

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.

The primary use case that we have for most of our customers is where they're in a converged environment and they also have file system storage. It's primarily where they're looking for a solid NAS-based appliance that also runs business-critical workloads well, with a highly available architecture.

The focus is data center workload as well as VDI workload. And once they've already got it, why not use it for file storage as well as other things to replace Windows file servers. It's easier to deal with a NetApp - which is typically more secure - than a Windows Server that you're going to have to patch constantly.

For most of our customer base, the benefit is the cooperative support model. While we tend to offer ourselves to our clients as a first call for support - because we are familiar with the environment - when they choose to call NetApp or Cisco directly, the cooperative support model means they can get passed back and forth between the two organizations freely. It works really well.

For me, it really goes back to the protocols; the fact that it can run the entire stack in terms of protocols. The integration for most of our customers is VMware; the full-stack integration. They're into the VMware environment. Also, the ability to do rapid cloning, the whole nine yards. I don't know that there's anything I wouldn't pitch it for in most data center workloads.

In terms of a future release, I don't know that there is anything that I would specifically ask for. I'm happy with it and I like to see how they continue to evolve it.

As the industry as a whole is moving more toward the simplification of IT, that is something where both Cisco and NetApp could look to improve further. Just simplifying the day to day management, the day to day issues that arise, and building more intuitiveness into the interfaces would help. Especially from our customers' perspective, thinking about it from their shoes, a lot of them are wearing a lot of hats. Having things built into monitoring tools that actually provide suggested workarounds or suggested resolutions; continued improvement there is going to go a long way.

It is an incredibly stable solution. Back when I was a customer still, we were previously an all-HPE shop that switched to UCS. Stability with UCS was unparalleled, and it's the same thing with NetApp. I have never seen a more resilient HA product out there then NetApp's solution. If I want to know that I'm putting my workload on a solution, from a storage perspective, that is going to be up 100% of the time, I'm going to choose NetApp.

Scalability is an area where NetApp has definitely grown, once they got out of strictly 7-Mode and moved over to cluster data on tap. The scale-out architecture versus scale-up architecture was more beneficial there and actually carried more weight within the industry when you started to see what some others were doing.

On the UCS side of things, I struggle with it back and forth, tying everything back through the fabric interconnects. I see that over time they're not going to scale out as well as they scale up, and you're going to have to replace them at some point. But it's still a much more scalable architecture compared to some of the competing solutions that are out there, like HPE Synergy.

I get frustrated with TAC (Cisco's Technical Assistance Center) from time to time. Whether it's TAC or NetApp, working through level-one technical support has always been a challenge because it's usually a very scripted conversation. When you're an organization like ours, where we're troubleshooting for our customers all the time, you run through the common scenarios already, before turning to support. I like to be able to work my way up a little bit more quickly, and I've learned some tricks over the years to get to a level-two or level-three tech before burning too much time. 

Especially when you look at the fact that we also sell a lot of HPE and Nimble, solely because Nimble had great tech support - when you made that phone call, they picked up immediately - that's something that really went a long way toward improving their customer satisfaction. I'd love to see NetApp and Cisco do something similar to that. 

When I was a customer we still had NetApp, but it was all 7-Mode and then we were running HPE c7000 chassis. When we switched over we went to UCS Nexus and had upgraded to CDOT with brand new clusters at the time.

With my current organization, we sell a lot of solutions in many different categories but this is my go-to solution because of my comfort level with it, for sure.

When I'm having these conversations with customers, ultimately it's based around what the solution outcome needs to look like, what are the business requirements, what are the business needs and building it out from there. The biggest thing to take into account is the challenges that they're having, whether it's performance, or specific workloads and specific needs they have. A lot of customers use NetApp as just a NAS box, and I really try to do my best to get out there and evangelize that it's far more capable than that. I would say the same thing with UCS.

I have a lot of experience with setup. I'm somebody who loves to dive into CLI on the NetApp side. I love to build the entire thing from scratch and not really use any of the setup tools that are out there. There is definitely a little bit of a learning curve for FlexPod still, especially as you're building out from scratch. But, at the same time, they have both done a great job at working to simplify that deployment process and make it more straightforward.

In terms of maintaining the same level of guidance, had we been working with one vendor as opposed to two vendors at the same time, they both have their own individual best practices and there are a lot of best practices out there. There isn't necessarily one that's really the best. I think that there is enough crossover between them that I don't know that it really makes a big difference.

I rate FlexPod at eight out of 10 because there is always room for improvement, although there is nothing off the top of my head that I can specifically call out. Going back to the simplification of IT, everybody can always do more to really simplify things because we live at a time where so much of what we do is "a little bit of everything."  As we go through the continued evolution there, that is really the biggest area that both NetApp and Cisco could really improve: to simplify management, to simplify the monitoring, and the maintenance. 

Also, bringing down that cost of entry as well and keeping the costs lower would help to us get it into more small to midsize businesses. FlexPod Express is a great product, but continue to bring down that cost of entry.

My advice is "do it." It meets the needs of small to midsize business all the way up to the large enterprise that needs to scale in a massive fashion. It's a great product, it's a great solution, and we're really happy with it.

Our primary use case for FlexPod is Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). We sell multi-tenancy services to our customers.

We appreciate having the validated designs because it takes the guesswork out of piecing it together. The solution can be innovative when it comes to cloud computing storage and networking.

The most valuable features of the solution are reliability, scalability, and support. 

Having the validated designs helps because it takes the guesswork out of piecing it together.

It works well in private and hybrid environments. Multi-cloud, I have yet to see.

The solution saves us engineering time, which translates to savings in money and it streamlines our IT admin.

The FlexPod service and support could be improved. The integration of the different storage equipment could be improved because NetApp is the biggest piece and it seems to be well covered, but not so much on the Cisco side.

FlexPod has been very stable for us. It is resilient. 

The scalability is one of the key features in this solution.

Technical support is reasonably good. It simplifies our support experience.

I don't have as much insight into the NetApp side of it, as compared to the Cisco side.

We were looking to build a fully-certified data center to provide our IaaS solution to customers.

I wasn't part of the initial setup. However, I have been part of the expansion and it's very simple.

The deployment time has been reduced, although I cannot say by how much.

We are a system integrator, so we use our in-house team.

At the time we deployed FlexPod, there wasn't a whole lot else available other than Vblock.

It just came down to a strong relationship with the key vendors that make up the product, NetApp and Cisco.

The biggest lesson that I have learned, working with this solution, is that it's better to go with something that has been vetted, tested, and designed by people with knowledge, as opposed to trying to go on your own. This is why we chose a certified, validated design.

This product has all of the big players behind it. Overall it works, and the reliability is top-shelf. I don't know what's better.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We have sold to more than 500 clients on FlexPod. It becomes an architecture, so in some cases, they understand the architecture. Then, they say, "Okay, I have another data center, and they can go and recreate it." We have had clients who have bought dozens. Others, we give them the assurance that the application is going to run. Therefore, there are a tremendous amount of attributes to it.

FlexPod is an architecture that a lot of our major customers are running with their most mission critical stuff. The big value proposition is it has been well thought out and well put together. So, it is getting them to get their applications to market more quickly, and it has taken the risk out of their business, because there is less for them to try to figure out.

It is always improving. We went from the first FlexPods, then to All Flash. We are actually sitting here with Cisco at Cisco Live talking about some of the new features in UCS that are coming out and be integrated. So, there is exciting stuff that we probably can't even talk about. Better ways to make it simpler to operate. If it is easy for you to set up, it doesn't matter if the customer doesn't have to do it, and they are enabling us to provide those seamless services, cloud-like services and cloud-like experiences. A lot of stuff is still happening, even though it is an eight year-old product.

It has been in the market for probably eight years now. This might seem old for technology, but it is continually improving in simplicity, performance, and reliability. It is absolutely stable. It is very well tested. There are probably 100 CVDs, so this shows you how much testing they do. We do additional testing, management, and monitoring. Because it is an integrated system, it is a lot easier to monitor, manage, and operate.

FlexPod is primarily built to scale up with your most important applications, but you can scale it out to some degree. There are a lot of different architectures: cloud, hyperconverged, etc., which have different attributes to them. However, when you have your most mission critical stuff and you need it to scale up providing consistent performance, that is really what it was built for.

We put a layer over support. We support the entire FlexPod environment plus applications,  cloud, etc., which is something that you will see with us in delivery. 

NetApp and Cisco have been working together very closely. If we run into a problem where we need support from NetApp or Cisco to support our client, it goes very quickly because they are working together in labs: designing, managing, and supporting these environments.

The FlexPod initial setup is straightforward if you know what you are doing in the data centers. There are simpler things. For FlexPod, you still need IT staff to set it up (that is what we do). We help build it out for the client. It is not a one button thing, and there are some things like that. It is more of an enterprise architecture. It is absolutely straightforward for us to set it up, certify it, and validate it, but there is a lot more to getting applications on it and tying them into the operations.

There are a lot of different ways to measure it, but the ROI is compared to the old way. The old way was quite frankly trying to figure out plumbing:

• What do I do with networking?
• What do I do with storage?
• What do I do with compute?
• How do I make it work together?
• How do I test it?

There are a lot of papers on ROI (8:1, 10:1, and so on). It is pretty easy to understand that I am not doing all this busy work, plumbing, etc. It is coming to me pretty much as an integrated system, and I am delivering an application. There are a lot of different ways to measure it, from business outcomes to what it costs me to do it.

It is a 10 out of 10 for us. We will go in and talk to a client about all things that they are trying to do, from cloud on. A significant percentage come to the conclusion that they want to run their most important stuff on FlexPod architecture.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: At first, businesses did not select a vendor. They thought, "Why wouldn't I just buy all this stuff myself and figure it out." 

Initially, five to six years ago, a lot of companies were organized differently. They had a networking team, a server team, and a storage team, which didn't even agree. We had to help them understand the value of coming together. As people start going in and start thinking, "Okay, I need service-like delivery. I need to compete with cloud, if I'm going to deliver an application in my company. How are other people are doing it?"

So, they had to start figuring out how to consolidate. FlexPod is a converged infrastructure, and they had to use it. There are a few companies that are still a little disorganized, but most of them, even large companies, have come back and said, "I get it, this is why I need to do this."

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.

In general, we use it for our storage and computing work loads.

We had challenges finding the right partner regarding performance, flexibility, and support from the vendor. FlexPod is an all-inclusive solution, so we found the right one.

We have about 1,000 end users and 2,500 endpoints.

It provides a good, stable base for all our workloads.

FlexPod’s prevalidated architectures are quite important to our organization because it guarantees that things work together as expected.

FlexPod has helped reduce troubleshooting time by 30% on architecture configs.

The most valuable features are performance and compatibility between devices.

The native integration between different platforms is quite important because it is secure and works together without any interfering issues.

The flexibility, operational efficiency, and scalability of FlexPod are quite high. 

I would like to see increased performance.

I have been using it for about 10 years altogether. Since we have been using NetApp and Cisco devices for several years. Since FlexPod has been available, we have been using it.

I would rate the stability as nine out of 10.

I would rate the scalability as eight out of 10.

When we need the support, their reaction time is quite good. I would rate it as eight out of 10.

Positive

We previously had several components for different workloads, using HPE and other storage providers. After that, we switched to NetApp and Cisco devices. In the end, we switched over to FlexPod's integrated and support solution.

I mainly did the network part of the deployment. My inclusion tests were quite straightforward.

We used NTS in Austria.

We have seen a reduction in support needs.

FlexPod has reduced our overall TCO and simplified our operations. 

The pricing and licensing are quite expensive. However, compared to other solutions, it is okay.

We evaluated EMC and HPE. In the end, we chose FlexPod. The differences between solutions were the flexibility and performance aspects as well as the cost.

It is quite important to have a converged solution. Then, you can have all the components responsible for stability and performance together in one place.

In general, the solution is quite good. I expect improvements in every area over time.

I would rate the product as eight out of 10.