Support could be more integrated. For example, you might call NetApp, and they'll determine that VMware is the issue. It would be helpful if they could automatically engage VMware and bring them onto the same call to transfer ticket information and work together. 

Ideally, you can call any vendor potentially causing the problem—Cisco, VMware, or NetApp. They should automatically bring in the other teams as necessary if it isn't. That doesn't happen as smoothly as it should.

The traditional UCS Blades do not take much storage internally. You would be challenged to create an HCI (Hype converged Infrastructure) solution on FlexPod / UCS or any other solution that pools internal storage. Now, with UCS X-Series, you can carve off an HCI solution, software defined pooled solution if you want. This was one area of improvement that I wanted to see and can now realize with the refresh of the Cisco UCS infrastructure.

With modern modular infrastructure, RESTful API has been added, there are more integrations, ServiceNow and vCenter along with tighter plug-ins. There is cross-user interface launching, for example with Windows Admin Center. The solutions are using Ansible and Terraform for deploying infrastructure as code. All the improvements that I wanted from the last gen are here or coming. 

With modern workloads and GPU use on the rise, adding GPUs to modern modular infrastructure will have some pros and cons. Typically, you can add one or two GPU's to a blade with no or little trade off. With the UCS X-Series, if you are doing a GPU farm, then you may have to sacrifice compute blades in the front slots to put in a GPU tray / module. A chassis holds eight compute blades, but if you are adding a ton of GPUs, a single GPU tray or more will reduce your blade count by as many GPU trays you add. This is not just a Cisco UCS X-Series problem. It is an industry problem with modular infrastructure and one that I would like to see get solved! I am looking into one such solution, VMware BITFUSION where you can send CUDA requests over the network to a BITFUSION server with the results sent back to the requestor, early stages here and only scratched the surface thus far.

With Cisco UCS X-Series, I would like to see the fabric interconnects built into the chassis instead of being external. With the fabric interconnects, the real footprint of UCS X-Series is 9U, where some of the competing solutions are 7U and have collapsed the network fabric into the chassis. This is another thing that I would like to see from Cisco, though, not really on the NetApp side of the fence, NetApp is solid storage.

FlexPod should focus more on automation. Integrating an automation tool with FlexPod would enable customers to leverage automation capabilities.

More automation would be helpful. Currently, we contribute a lot of effort through some automation. But with good playbooks or similar tools, transforming infrastructure would be easier for any user.

I have seventy-six B200 servers. If a server goes down, I have a lot of problems. I’ve also been having random DIMM errors. 

Their DIMMs have been terrible recently. This is a new product that I got about a year ago. My DIMMs are dying left and right and server blades are not being able to function. However, with that being said, when those go down, I have a set of spares that I can put in, and everything works without a hitch, with no problem.

I've had problems with the remote data centers going down due to the connection dropping, and they were not aware that the communication is down. When a link went down previously, the systems didn't know. It then fixed itself. As long as the connections stay up, it works. If the connection fails, it won't.

In my experience with the validated designs, I've always had to go inside and adjust them. I understand that some of them are a base, however, some customers believe that they are 100% proof, and they try to implement it. Then I get called in to correct the errors and correct some of the layouts to include some of the newer features.

Since 2018 or 2019, maybe due to COVID and the chipsets, my DIMMs are dying left and right. That's the only problem I have. My boards are fine. The servers are working fine. 

A feature I would like to have in the next release is an application desktop that talks to it, so I don't have to go to the web GUI as much. Besides that,  it's pretty bulletproof. I use UCS over HP and Dell, nine times out of ten.

I'd like to see a little bit more versatility with the C220s and the C240s, to see the expansion ports on those servers grow. Besides that, everything has been pretty amazing.

The integration between both companies, Cisco and NetApp, is very good but it still needs to be enhanced in terms of visibility and observability. However, I trust these partners that this will be done in the future.

I'd like them to bring back the GUI for NetApp ONTAP. They changed the interface in version 9.8, and it's not great. In 9.9 they've tried to make it better, but its still as useful as 9.7 and before. 

There could be room for improvement in terms of offering more flexibility in CBD options. Many organizations, especially nonprofits like ours, face budget constraints, and having a range of mid-level switch options alongside high-end ones would allow for more cost optimization.

We would like to see the automation improved because there has been a learning curve having to create the workflows. They're looking at other automation tools, including one from Red Hat called Ansible. 

In the next release, it would be really good to have some kind of unified update manager or something, which would allow us to update the whole infrastructure from beginning to end. All together like VMware, NetApp to go with Cisco, so that you don't have to do it separately in upgrading the NetApp, separately everything to UCS infrastructure then going with VMware. Something that will allow us to do it together in some integrated manner.

The upgrades should be improved. We would like to have the ability to do unified upgrades of the whole infrastructure from beginning to end. 

There is always room for improvement. I believe we can do hot swaps on the fly. On the release upgrades, if there was a way to do a release on the fly, that would really be cool because it does take some downtime. It takes restarting. It is more of a software thing. Customers hate doing releases. 

An area for improvement would be on Level 2 and 3 support when there is a release issue.

I would like to see more storage-related features.

This solution has not reduced our capital expenditures.

It would be nice to have a simpler setup, and we could achieve that with UCS Central, but just the licensing for that is out of our scope from a cost perspective.

The initial learning curve is pretty steep.

The majority of the time, if we need more storage, then we need to work with customizing the NetApp deployment. Right now, we just do a generic deployment, then wherever we have a need for storage, we have to move some application out of the next FlexPod deployment. One thing is to customize based on the requirements, but the requirements change so frequently, they are absolutely obsolete in six months.

I would like to see more artificial intelligence and machine language baked into the environment on the healthcare side. Right now, a lot of people are not leveraging AI, but we are in the insurance business and would like more flexibility by offering AI as a feature set into the healthcare environment.

Make it easier to refresh hardware. We got to the point where we couldn't fix vulnerabilities without refreshing the hardware, then that became a little too expensive for us to do.

We would like FlexPod to have in its roadmap: Keeping the hardware refreshed. It should be a little less expensive, not having all of the pieces go end of life at the same time.

We would like to have more monitoring and reporting, because today some of the reporting, and if you purchase it separately is expensive. We use OnCommand Unified Manager today, which is great, but we are looking for more of that.

It’s not the easiest solution to deploy and it doesn’t come integrated like VCE Vblock and HPE ConvergedSystem is (not really plug and play). To simplify what I mean, it’s like seeing a bed in the store; you buy it; and it’s delivered to your house with an easy-to-setup manual and the bed in different pieces with different sets of screws and you need to know what fits where.

If you have expertise setting up such environments, then you are good, but for customers or novices, it becomes a nightmare and stuff may actually be left out.

I would like to see the FlexPod infrastructure get updated more often. Things like the firmware, the software packages, and the compatibility matrix have to update more often and seem to lag in development. We are kind of dragging on this. Because we were not performing all those updates more often, we are kind of delayed a few years.

For example, we are using the FlexPod for the Call Center and Call Center has specific versions of their software. Cisco has recommended that we use NetApp version 91 as the final version for the Call Center software. We can not go beyond 91 and 91 is a two-year-old OS. There have 96 out already and will probably be presenting 97 in a few days. So we are literally lagging behind by years.

Mainly, the interface needs improvement. I'm not a big fan of UCS Manager, sometimes. I believe they released the new one, and it seems like in every version something changes and something else doesn't work. When they switched to HTML5, I believe we had issues in version 3.2. They fixed it in the next version. The amount of work to upgrade a system for change control is tedious to have issues every time. I would recommend more regression testing, then testing the different browsers in that.

The procedure for contacting technical support could be simplified.

We have had a bit of struggle on the support side. 

I am not looking into the next iterations of it yet, because we are still standing up some parts of what we have now. 

I would like to see the partnership with NetApp and Cisco continue. We have been a NetApp shop for a long time. We have seen partner agreements between NetApp and tech companies fall apart over time. They were with Hitachi for a while, then 3Par for a while, and so on. However, we have a lot vested in Cisco and NetApp now. We would like to see the Flexpod service agreement strengthen as we continue to benefit on the customer side.

We like NetApp and Cisco. I do not want to have to figure out how to make either of them work once they have decided to part ways. Therefore, it is important to us that they hold together.

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

The GPU based VDA solutions could use improvement.

If they could reduce some of the complexity at the system manager level for ONTAP. I find it gives a lot of flexibility. You can do as much or as little as you want. But to be able to do as little as you want, you do have to do a lot. So, if they could bring that down to a more manageable effort level, that would be nice and simplify it a bit.

The graphical interface could be made easier to use and more intuitive.

The solution’s ability to manage from edge to core, to cloud, to supporting modern data and compute requirements isn't very good. It manages itself, and it has components to help orchestrate itself across the entire network, which is good. However, not necessarily to the edge.

On the NetApp side, there are definitely things to improve in terms of software updates.

There are a lot of complex, moving parts, and as each revision comes along they get easier to manage it all, but there are a lot of moving parts. Things are not as simple as they market them. Until you learn how to use them all, it is a bit of a challenge. The more than they can consolidate and drive that administration down, the easier it will come. That is the biggest thing for me.

I would like to see more SaaS-based management tools. I think that this is where they are headed with Active IQ and Intersight. A lot of the traditional tools have been on-premise hosted, and that's another thing for us to manage. Essentially, to manage things that we are already managing. So, I'd rather see the SaaS-based tools become the standard.

I would like to see programmability into a SaaS-based offering, as I know Cisco's going in a lot of directions with their Intersight application. I would like to know how that will integrate into converged infrastructure onsite, where it can either be the Intersight application running on the FlexPod or a SaaS-based offering on the cloud. Then, how would they maybe integrate some of the NetApp features into Intersight? This is the next step that I want to see taken with the product.

I think that new developments in what each vendor offers that makes the overall system easier to configure and manage could be better. Customers could be more aware of what to plan for in the future to be able to scale and grow. It depends what the technologies and protocols are in the environment.

As FlexPod is more of a consolidator, it gives you a compute, a network, and storage in a single box. While that's cool, when transforming a data center from what it is today into what it needs to be tomorrow, you must also pay attention to resiliency, security, and performance. FlexPod will do very well on the average app, but there's room for improvement in performance and the data center side, which should be optimized, but that's not a focus of Cisco.

Cisco is a network company that's transitioning to provide a converged infrastructure solution, which means it wants to be more than just a network and provide network storage and computing, so obviously, you don't become a highly performant entity overnight in the database space, which is what Cisco needs to do. Cisco can do that well because it supports open-source databases within the converged infrastructure it delivers to the client, but there's always a handicap in that area.

There's room for improvement in the setup and configuration of FlexPod as well.

The real improvement I could see on the FlexPod side is it falls on the NetApp components. The upgrades that they had to go through from 7-Mode to CDOT (Clustered Data OnTap) did not make for a good transition. I'm pretty sure they learned the lesson from that because you basically had to stand up a side-by-side system, copy your data over, upgrade your stuff and move your data back. No one wants to do that and it is a nightmare.

It would also be nice if you could manage everything through a single pane of glass — but that won't happen. With a single pane, we could look at everything at once in the UCS (Cisco's Unified Computing System) components as well as VMware and the NetApp components. It would be good to be able to do that without having to navigate into four different web pages.

In terms of what needs improvement, nothing jumps out at me. It is meeting our requirements and so I'm pretty happy with the way it is right now.

It would be helpful if they sold a pre-boxed option so that you can buy a rack and everything's already there, everything's connected.

It hasn't saved us CapEx.

I would like to see more cloud-centric modules that are specific to applications and more software-based solutions. That's all that is missing.

It would be very helpful if the upgrades for Cisco, VMware, and NetApp could be bundled together and performed at the same time. Currently, if I need to upgrade NetApp or VMware then I have to request a service outage. If all three were bundled together then it would be very easy.

Every time Cisco introduces a new product like the M3, M4, or M5 blades, I have to build a new cluster because the CPU chipset is different. It cannot be accommodated within the existing cluster, necessitating having to build a new one, which causes me to invest more money.

If we look at data center solutions, any of those solutions are only as good as the people that put it together. If there's a way for us to take a hyperconverged technology or converged technology — like FlexPod — and use it with artificial intelligence, that allows the engineer who is building it to infuse the deployment with intelligence. Turning it on, the necessary steps — done correctly — eliminate human error. If something is in error or not within compliance to confines of what that particular architecture should be like, intelligence lets that engineer know that an object is out of policy. For example, if you implement SAP and Oracle, the Oracle database goes through this way; if you partition it out to this number of lines or a particular number of virtual machines, the recommendation may be different to achieve the maximum efficiency.

If the solution does that, it helps enable and accelerate deployment. Every organization out there has its own challenges. Whether you're an automobile manufacturer, or a cloud solution provider, or a managed service provider, or even application software provider working for social networking where the only thing they need to do is support people, all that is important is when they login to that particular application. They need to have that effort fit the user experience. The collaboration between Cisco and NetApp can learn to provide that.

Millennials today are very intelligent people when it comes to social media, but they're not hands-on with applications or as CLI (command-line interface) as some of the older engineers. The millennial comes in and they look at something and they get it. Okay, as long as that's valid, it is okay. The smarter thing is that something is put into FlexPod to be sure potential errors are covered. 

The client will tell you what they want to do. Well, whatever that is — they can be selling hamburgers, make pizzas, or fly an airplane. If we make a machine dynamic, it allows professionals to go to market and set their strategy a lot better.

We have experienced issues with patching. When there are Cisco releases, there are some vulnerabilities, i.e., security vulnerabilities. We are as a financial company and need to be on top patching. As a company, we cannot have continuous downtime to do patching, which is a challenge that we have faced.

Another issues is that Cisco lists some patching, but NetApp is not certified for it, or vice versa. It's very difficult to keep up-to-date all our levels. Then, we slowly started spinning up our own versions of Cisco separately from NetApp and NetApp separate from Cisco. This has worked well for us.

With the next solution, if there is a virtual Flex part where we can deploy it to private clouds or in public clouds rather tying up the hardware, it would reduce costs and complexity. Then, we could do a lot more automation.

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.

I would like to see more interoperability within FlexPods. This comes into more of how we grow from multiple domains to a massive domain. That would be fun to see in the future.

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.

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

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.

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

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

They could improve the Cisco technical support.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

There have been issues upgrading the firmware.

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.

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

It would be helpful to have more flexibility for adding other components. It is always better to have more possibilities.

I would like them to scale more to rack unit servers instead of blade servers.

All the cabling can be scary when you first see it. It looks complex.

We want always more speed, capacity, fluidity, and growth that we can easily integrate.

We would like to have faster components.

I look forward to seeing some of the innovations that they come out with for the FlexPod solution. It has been one of those products that I do not criticize it too much. I just look forward to seeing what else is there and the new thing that they are going to come out with. So far, I have been happy with what I have beem seeing.

However, for a lot of our customers, the complexity of FlexPod can be a little overwhelming. When I talk to the customers and they stop speaking technically, they start speaking emotionally, that is when I realize, "We need to get back to talking to them about what FlexPod is." It is a term and a partnership. 

If there is something wrong on the NetApp side. Let us focus on that. I have noticed a lot of customers, they will kick it over the fence. It is FlexPod; it is that mystery animal. The room for improvement is to better present it to those users, so they will not have to be afraid of it. Once they realize, "This is actually a good product." They will turn around on it and stop trying to run away.

I would to see a little bit more in the FlexPod interface.

The big problem now is that all of the technology is reaching its end of life and we didn't refresh anything at the right moment. Now, we are moving to a new solution. During these 10 years, it was very nice to work with NetApp, Cisco, and VMware together, especially with NetApp storage. We didn't have any problems during this time. I could count only three or four times that we asked for support and this was only to change hard drives that were blocking something. It's been issue-free.

NetApp needs to improve the user interface to make it easier to work in this environment. The older version is poor. However, I'm not sure what they are doing to upgrade the look and feel of the newer version.

NetApp needs to talk to the clients and see what the clients want out of the cloud solutions in order to move more effectively into the cloud environment. It would be ideal if customers could go to a dashboard. They need to sell not only the infrastructure but also the service and both need to be impressive. That's why NetApp should talk to clients as much as possible. The closer they are to them, the more understanding they will have in terms of what a customer wants. 

If the solution offered more workshops and presentations, it could be helpful to lure clients.

In the next releases of FlexPod, I would like it more integrated with some other HCI solutions. We are currently struggling with what to do for a solution moving forward. We can either continue with FlexPod or go directly to a different HCI solution. We have attended this conference to ask questions and to understand the differences between available products. We have found that FlexPod is already planning to move closer to having more features like NetApp HCI features than we thought, and that would be awesome.

We have had some problems with SnapSuite and the replication functionality.

Cisco should work closely with other vendors to ensure that their specialized hardware can be integrated.

Right now, we have no flash at all in our NetApp side, so one thing we're looking forward to is going to ONTAP 9. We're also looking forward to looking at integrating some flash shelves to see what the performance will really be. Everybody tells me it's fantastic.

We're rolling out J.D. Edwards location by location so the amount of performance we're going to need is going to grow and grow and grow. So far, there's been no problems but I like the fact that I have that growth path to put in flash and improve performance if necessary.

In a perfect world, I would also love to be able to manage everything from a single pane of glass. I think we're talking about such disparate technologies that I would understand if that is very difficult to happen. In our environment, I'm in control of Cisco UCS manager and the NetApp side but when we get to the Nexus switches, I don't even have the log-ins, our networking guy does. That's something that I don't have a problem with. He's very good and he works very well together with me. It would be nice to have control from a single pane of glass.

I would like to see increased performance.

We would like one-click upgrades.

NetApp released a new version with a new interface. For somebody who has been used to the old interface, it's a change. It is taking time to adjust to the new interface, and it would be nice to have some of the old features in it.

Something that we struggle with because we're a relatively small scale organization and the administrative effort is spread across so many different pieces of infrastructure, it would be nice to have a set of tools that enables us to get a little bit more information out of our system. Right now we're in the process of looking at OCI. We have free trial licenses for a two year period and we're investing quite a bit of time into writing reports and allowing it to tell us more information about our systems because we don't have a lot of time and we don't have a lot of sexy tools out there to give us information. We're going to go through this exercise with OCI, but at some point, that tool's going to go away and we may not have the funding to keep it on-premises. There are metrics and there's information in the system that a normal consumer like ourselves, a smaller organization, would probably not be privy to that information. It would be nice if some of those reporting capabilities were available just as a part of the ordinary suite of software that people buy.

The only support call that we have had in six years was related to an ONTAP upgrade, where one of the controllers didn't patch properly.

This is an expensive solution.

No really good opportunities for product improvement come to mind. For our organization, it does what we need it to do.

The biggest thing that I would like to see is more cost-effective FlexPod solutions. I would also like to see more available configurations of FlexPods.

One of the things that I've wanted would be availability of a health status, similar to Active IQ from my converged platform, on an app. I have dashboards so I can see the health of the system when I'm in the office, but when I'm not in the office I can't.

The evolution and the simplicity of IT seem to be this culture shift that we have had in IT over the last few years: the simplification. Many people are out there carrying multiple things on their shoulders. They are basically an engineer wearing a bunch of hats. The continued simplification will be a continued battle and evolution for both Cisco and NetApp, especially on the FlexPod product.

Both NetApp and Cisco need to do improvements in their day-to-day operations management upgrades, and they are working on it. 

A piece where FlexPod has come up short in the past and an area for them to improve upon: single pane of glass management and single pane of glass upgrade process. It gets a tricky, because there are two different companies and two different partnerships. You do not buy it as a single product; you buy it all at once, and deploy it. 

We would like something like a FlexPod Express; we want a smaller version for small offices. At the moment, we have medium and larger offices, plus data centers, but we are also looking for something for smaller offices. A smaller, customizable, express solution, which would fulfill our local, small office needs.

I want to use the expansion to its fullest extent, scaling by deploying 10 to 15 virtual missions in a given FlexPod. Right now, all my virtual missions are approximately five or less, which does not appear to be utilizing the product fully. I want to have scalability in any situation, even during major outages. 

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.

There are certain things that are just hard to do on a physical infrastructure, like for instance you need to make petabytes of data available at high speed. That's really hard to do in private data centers. I'm not really sure how they could do that without making direct links between them, or something.

They can try, but I think really the hardware just needs to get better. I don't know there's a lot they can do about that, other than just let time pass. They already do a great job. There's just certain things that are made better for the cloud as opposed to a private data center, and I'm not sure they can really fix those until the hardware gets better.

They're already doing things that I would like, especially on the Cisco side. They needed to do a better job of allowing API access, and they've done that. So has NetApp, actually. There's a lot of services we would like to put through a software manager, and that was a problem like five to six years ago. Nowadays, it's getting a lot better and as they add more to it, it's just getting better every year.

Upgrades are always scary because you just don't know. Nobody has six or seven different systems sitting around that you can test on before you go into production data.

My complaints are all ticky-tacky, not from a "vision" perspective. If VSC worked properly. It's for disaster recovery. If you have storage networks that are identical across datacenters then it doesn't work for picking off SnapMirrors. That's not a FlexPod thing so much as just a NetApp product thing and they're aware of my issue with that.

Some of the things have not been incredibly intuitive, but once I figured them out they work. That's a matter of their engineers think differently than my mind works. For some, that's a Mac versus Windows thing right there. Windows makes perfect sense for some people and Macs make perfect sense for other people and it doesn't mean one's better than the other. It's just some people like different things.

One of the things that has been less than intuitive is how UCS views storage when you're implementing something new. Some of the 9X ONTAP stuff is just different. It's not less intuitive, it's just different now, and I think I've actually kind of adapted to that. When it's complex there's no easy way to do it, that's why it's complex. But for the most part, they made pretty complex things rather intuitive, so I'm okay with that. It's just different than my mind would think out of the box.

A single pane of glass to manage all of the components. As you know, FlexPod has multiple components from Cisco, to Vmware, to NetApp. I would like to have a single pane of glass from which you could monitor.a

It might be improved with some refinements to tools, such as the virtual storage console and similar items. We've had a few issues with that. The same thing applies, as far as the Cisco side; the UCS manager is kind of bulky and slow; a Java-based kind of thing. Maybe they could just refine the tools that we use to manage it.

Management is still by separate screens. I need to go to NetApp to manage the enterprise storage. I need to go to the vCenter client to manage VMware, and I've got the UCS Manager. My best hope is some kind of combined client in the future.

FlexPod XCS needs to improve its pricing. 

FlexPod can improve with a single control management interface to manage all aspects and components of the solution.

There were several different management consoles that we had to deal with: UCS, VMware, and separate ESXi installations. Maybe one interface console where we could manage everything from might be a little easier.

I would like them to integrate the NVIDIA GRID into the system, so we could easily deploy certain solutions with the FlexPod.

I would like to see them reduce the complexity, that would be my number one request. Right now, doing simple things is pretty complex. You have so many options. It might be better if it was more wizard-driven, as opposed to going through five hundred dials. It's not very easy or intuitive.

I do not have a lot to comment on here.

The next evolution of what we are doing is going to be disaster recovery and business continuity between the US and Canada. In six months, I could give you a different answer.

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.

I think they are working on it, but I would like to be able to log into a portal and see the end-to-end solution and understand where it stands, from a supportability perspective. Something like that has been there, in one form or another over the years, but I believe that they're working to make it something that's more well-supported going forward.

The biggest problem we have seen is, we were using the vStorage which comes with the NetApp environment, a kind of fiber connect. We were missing fibre channel connectivity and we got lots of I/O errors. This is the one big problem we have faced with FlexPod.

I would like to see more orchestration tools in FlexPod because we virtually end up with integrating the v-orchestration tool within FlexPod. I would like to see something like that included within FlexPod.

We don't see the much DR capability within the FlexPod so for that, we have to maintain our own DR capability with DSRM.

I would like to see a better price point. Otherwise, we are pretty much set with the product and the features.

I would like to see an easier implementation, but I think that with newer versions of ONTAP and new versions of FlexPod, it's getting better.

It would be nice to have a single pane to manage all of it, but that's probably a pipe dream.

It's always the same: upgrade and expandability into the future; maybe a little more forethought on that versus having to have outages when you're going over to the next feature. For instance, a smooth transition, because changing from 7-mode to cluster-mode is a little clunky and then you add on to that. But, I know, that's technology.

They've done an excellent job going into cluster with version 9 and the later versions of 8. Everything's more GUI, so you have a choice of doing command line or doing GUI, whichever works better for you at the time. I thought that was an excellent change for them versus just being command line.

Nothing's perfect. Everything can improve. Just because I haven't thought of it or haven't hit it, it doesn't mean it's not out there.

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

A lot of small things could be improved. I'd like to see better integrations with some of the third-party tools, like Terraform. That would be good. We use Ansible to deploy and that's good, but it's slower than it needs to be.

I would like to be able to pull in a file to specify a configuration upfront, rather than go through a lot of screens. There is a lot of manual effort there, and that is one place that mistakes can happen.

In the SolidFire interface, if you use the GUI, you have to create one run at a time, or one device at a time, which is something that needs to be fixed. Having to do that is ludicrous.

There are not really any additional features that I could think of that are not available already. As technology is enhanced, that may change.

One touch upgrades would be nice.

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.

I would like more orchestration and networking in-between the VMs, the virtualization layer for networking. I would like to see better tools for this. For example, the VM to VM networking needs to be better.

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.

I would like them to simplify the UCS configuration. I appreciate that they have about a billion options and a million switches that you can mess with, but this creates a lot of confusion sometimes. I feel like you almost need a Master's course to figure out what you're doing with UCS.

It is hard to think of any additional features. It has everything that we need to reach it in some of the worst circumstances given the limitations on the size of the rack and the stack. The product is very well done.

In terms of features for a future release, that's more for my engineers to answer rather than me. For me, right now, no complaints. My big thing is getting the complaints - they come to me - and since we went to this system, we've had no complaints.

The CVD process requires additional development and validation from each of the vendors involved, which does not allow us to be at the cutting edge of technology. For instance, I'm currently waiting for the next generation of the FlexPod to come out that has the flash integration. As with any platform, scale is always the biggest thing. I would like to see some improvements in terms of scale especially in the way Netapp handles production SAP workloads.

I made a reference to not being able to leverage flash today as an example, an additional example of this would be the fact in the current iteration of the CVD we are following, from the ESX side, we are limited to vSphere 5.5 and from an OS perspective we are limited to RHEL 6.7, and not able to move up to RHEL 7.2.

In both cases this is due to the fact it hasn’t been fully validated from the vendor testing in their labs. From a SAP DB/application support standpoint, this limits our ability to provide some of the recent releases of SAP software like HANA 2.0 for instance as it requires the latest RHEL version (7.2) and ESX (6.x) to run in production.

While this is in the vendor’s roadmap to wrap up this year, I’m dependent on vendor lab testing as opposed to having our teams certify via our existing Agile methodology to ensure we can always provide the latest and greatest technologies to our customer base.

Maybe the migration tools for all of the environments could be improved. We can change the storage in the infrastructure but when we need to change the switches or other components that we can change easily, I don't know how to migrate that component. I’d like to be able to migrate that much easier.

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 would like to see end-to-end automation that would enable service providers to get the infrastructure with faster provisioning, decommissioning, or even performance analysis; end-to-end includes compute, network, storage and applications.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are accessibility, product quality, and support.

I haven't really come across a whole lot of areas for improvement. There are features I'd like to see in our deployment that are already available; all-flash trays, and items like that. It's there; I need to find a project that justifies getting it rolled out in our data center.

Everything works pretty well. I think they should just continue to add more features and capabilities for hybrid cloud, especially items such as cloud bursting to one of the public clouds. Specifically, they need to make sure that, for our client site, it integrates with the FedRAMP clouds; it's got to be Azure Federal or AWS Federal. It can't just be to the regular public cloud.

I haven’t yet come across any features in other solutions that I’d like to see in FlexPod. Some of the newer storage vendors have slightly easier-to-use GUI interfaces, but I weigh that compared to the control and other features I have, such as SSHing into my NetApps. It'd be nice sometimes for quick stuff, but it's not worth giving up the control I have with the NetApp filers there.

There's always something new down the road, something new that can be done, but I think it's doing as well as possible. It seems like they keep getting new features, new ideas out there. We have flash on all four of the different lines now, continuing to evolve more cloud control with the UCS Director; it keeps growing. I love it.

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.

It would be nice to have something like an automated, upgrade solution The tasks needed to upgrade the hardware within FlexPod are still quite behind compared to some of its other aspects. That's more on the Cisco side. For the NetApp side, the upgrade process is quite simple. It's been simplified. So, that's something that could be looked at.

It has gone to HTML5, but it's still quite a bit bland. It still seems a bit like there were some features in the Java version that are quite hard to get into in the HTML5 version of UCS Manager, where you go to a profile and you need to drag it in. You can't move the box across. All the boxes are different sizes. If you have a lot of names, then you can't move it across, which is quite annoying when you're trying to do it.

I would like more with the integration pieces, e.g., more with the REST APIs to be able to access it remotely.

The footprint in the data center is quite large, especially when you scale out. Maybe find some hardware in the future, where if a new blade comes out, then Cisco can say, "Look, we'll buy those blades back off you, and we'll give you this blade for X amount of money." A buyback scheme would be good for hardware, and even NetApp as well. Something like a buyback scheme for blades and stuff moving forward would be good, because I know that they're going to put more power into them. E.g., replacing four blades might equal one blade, which would be awesome, but we are still going to have those four blades around. Maybe having something where it will give you this much money for these blades so we can upgrade. That would be perfect. 

With the upgrading, making that a little bit more streamlined and a bit easier to do, so it doesn't require as many man hours to do. I would like prerequisites for an upgrade.

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 does a really good job of what it is marketed to do. It is not as easy as a hyperconverged solution, but you are going to have a hard time finding that anywhere, where you can just plugin and run a deployment app. I do not know if they could make it work with a deployment app, but it was easy enough already, so no improvement is necessary. 

We really haven't had any issues or problems out of it. We do feel with the whole FlexPod solution that we were actually sold more than we needed as far as extra parts. We just did a lift in shift of one of our FlexPods to a new datacenter, and instead of using the 5000 series switch, we went straight for the 7000. We didn't really need the 5000 series switches in the first place. 

I would think more cloud integration, a lot more flexibility with adapting to different things. Not saying that it does not already. I'm just trying to see if I could do a lot more things with it, in regards to AWS and Azure. A lot more flow.

The mission that NetApp has with the whole fabric, if they can do a lot more with it within the FlexPod, that would be good. They're working on it. Nothing bad to say about it. That's where they're going with it.

Not necessarily with, say, with cloud sync, with cloud ONTAP, with the fabric pools and all that. I guess I want to see other customers do a lot more cool stuff with it, so that I can do it. That's pretty much how I do it. We look at other people, see what they've done, proven, and then we say, "Okay. Let's do it. Let them jump off the cliff first before we go."

I'm thinking vendor agnostic, right? Where instead of having to build your FlexPod, here's your Cisco, here's your Nexus, here's your storage and all that, maybe Cisco can buy out NetApp and then they just have this one big box. Or the other way around. NetApp buys Cisco and then there's just this one box and everything's right on it. You have this big chassis with blades and you just swap everything out. Technically, you could do that with UCS already.

Before the ONTAP 9 release, NetApp was cumbersome and not easy to manage. NetApp as improved a lot in terms of simplicity with ONTAP 9. Pure Storage has made a lot of vendors step up their game on the simplicity side. ONTAP 9 has allowed for most tasks to be wizard-based and dashboards are now easy to read. Making improvements to the user-interface and management will help NetApp stay the leader in storage.

We switched to the new NetApp clustered environment and discovered that the monitoring and reporting features are a little behind the older versions.

The solution has not reduced our data center costs.

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.

• We would like FlexPod to have more power, though it is not lacking in power now.
• The old design of FlexPod made it difficult to remove old hardware and add new servers.
• We would like them to have better features to integrate with the cloud.

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.

This question doesn't really pertain to me.

I know the virtualization guys love the FlexPod, and we do too. It is the visibility into it is nice, and it interacts with our Cisco data center well.

I would like to see, perhaps, an interface that's a little more intuitive than the existing one. I think that goes to being more familiarity with other systems. I came from an ICE environment, and it sets you in your ways mentality.

When it comes to NetApp, you have to forget about some of the things you've done in the past, in order to kind of get yourself past it.

I wish that the interface was perhaps a little more cognizant. There are people coming from environments where ease of use isn't quite there. It almost sounds terrible, but I think that they could probably make everything a little bit easier to use, where the interface was maybe just a hair bit easier to understand and comprehend exactly where you are in the steps. But, again, you're talking to somebody who may be coming at it from being brand new to a storage environment.

The price is something that we are still working on. At some point, it's a bit more expensive than the solution that we had before, as far as I know.

Possibly the UCS could get a bit better. Other than that, overall I don't necessarily have any sorts of constraints or issues with it. It's done the job that it's been bought to do.

FlexPod has not decreased the unplanned downtime incidents in our company. There was a problem with the back-end configuration and we had a downtime of three hours. We encounter more downtime on procedural tasks we have to do than on technical tasks.

In the next release, I would like to have a better monitoring option in which I can see the full stack and can then decide which steps to take.

There is a history of issues with hardware availability. For example, we'll buy an array or a filer with a particular configuration and particular size of drive, sizing it appropriately. Then, as we grow, they're like, "Oh, you can always get more." Then when you go to get more, that model or type of disk is no longer available. 

It becomes this big process to try to figure out what we need to get, how it'll work, and how that'll integrate into the system. That could be simpler. They could do a bit more to guarantee the availability of parts. Obviously, not being the largest storage vendor, I know they can't sometimes control what the hardware vendors do. However, a bit more transparency and communication about this would be helpful.

As we do much of the Tier-I support ourselves, and thus don't normally need it, there is time wasted in moving up to the next level.

The validate designs and overall versatility can be very complex. Because when you try to do automation, there are many bits and pieces tied together. Sometimes, automation gets a little tricky for provisioning. We would like simplicity in the automation.

We would also like better management of cases. For example, if you open a FlexPod case, it's not always straightforward. It would be nice to have centralized resource to open FlexPod cases and ease up management of our cases.

I would like more support on the next level transition to hybrid cloud.

I was speaking to some product managers at NetApp yesterday, which is good. There are apparently some new products coming around the whole FlexPod side of things with regards to auditing, to ensure everything is configured correctly. It's basically a "delta" if there have been any changes. It's important to us, from a support perspective, to know if there have been changes and what impact they have actually had.

I know there are other versions of FlexPods beyond what we use. I've only dealt with basically the Cisco NetApp VMware version. I can't think of any other features that I would need.

It's always nice if it's cheaper. We've been locked into all this. We could save money and go with HyperV but then you have other issues. There are always things you can do to save money but you have to ask yourself if it's worth it.

I would like to see easier day-zero setup. We're having to get other tools to try and set up everything. It's not complex, but it could be faster. It's just time consuming.

At a recent NetApp conference, I was hoping to hit some of the sessions to see the ease-of-use for setup, to make that a little bit faster. That way, it's not taking a bunch of guys a lot of time to get that set up. As I’ve mentioned, it's run rock-solid for over three years, so there's not a lot of areas with room for improvement.

The reason why I haven’t rated it higher is that the initial setup was extremely difficult. We had transitioned from different technologies and so we were trying to learn, as well as set it up correctly.

A couple things could be improved, for example, the interconnect switching. They need to be more flexible. If you already have an all-Cisco, all-certified solution, requiring you to buy the NetApp interchange switch is silly. It should all be one package. They've got to be more flexible on how they deal with that.

I'm looking for making it as simple as possible, leveraging as much as possible my existing infrastructure; not having weird, odd bits and baubles that are kind of added on.

I’d like to see some more troubleshooting capabilities; being able to drill down and pull reports easier, especially from the Cisco side. That would be great. Unfortunately, from what we've seen on the Cisco side, you have to download logs and upload them to their tech support to get any true information. Being able to see some real-time functionalities of troubleshooting would be nice.

The only thing that comes to mind is more hooks in the Citrix side for working with Citrix more interactively. Speaking from the storage side, it is very straight forward and it's just like allocating storage for any other device in your environment, which is really cool.

Improving integration between the different interfaces would possibly help us. The thing about FlexPod is that you don't have to do any architecture to it; it solves the problem. You plug it in, and it solves the problem for you. It's hard to comment on where to take it to the next level. If we’re going to take it to the next level, being an engineer, I'd redesign the whole thing. :)

It's really good; it's very good the way it is. It's a great solution to an existing problem.

Make sure there’s current centralized virtual desktops. I get caught in the upgrade matrix quite a bit, which is an indication that it hasn’t been tested. Need more currency in IMT.

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

It is not easy to implement. 

The networking configurations with UCS need improvement.

I would like to see a more centralized support model.

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.

Our environment does not always require this solution, so we are not reaping the optimal ROI.

We would like to have a single pane of glass available for it. It is something that the management in the business would like to have.

Anything can be improved. As ACI grows and storage grows (and changes), this is how FlexPods can evolve. They can include the new networking and new virtualization of storage and data center interconnectivity with the networking side of it. FlexPods can evolve and grow by connecting pods together.

• Support for multiple vendors' hardware
• Support for SAN with Cisco 9000 switches
• Automated deployment and configuration with respect to CVD

They could improve on the small stuff, like fixing and replacing broken cables.

I am looking forward to playing around with the hyper-converged infrastructure, but that'll be on the next upgrade.

That's pretty tricky, because for what we have and for what we use it for, it's actually pretty perfect, to be quite honest. Even when we brought the finished product to our customer, there were really no complaints. They were happy with just having HA, "Hey, if something goes down, we don't lose services." That was their biggest concern. Outside of that they really don't have any complaints at all.

It wouldn't be more FlexPod as a whole, I think for me it would be more NetApp. What I mean by that is, we are a company that likes to do SnapMirrors all over the place, and the customer is always asking when we set up a SnapMirror, "How long does it take or how long do you have left?" And when you've been dealing with NetApp you have to manually do some calculations, make an educated guess. So if there was something like a progress bar for a SnapMirror, so a customer could say, "Hey, what's the percentage?" and I answer, "It's 57%," versus saying, "I think, well, by the size of this volume and the speed of the link..." and that kind of stuff. A progress bar would probably solve all that because they'd like to know, how much more time do we have when we're doing this SnapMirror. I think that would be pretty cool.

I'm excited to see the SolidFire FlexPod. I think that's going to bring a lot more business opportunities. I think you're going to be able to scale your workloads inside of it. Just integrated, at a lower cost, I think will be great.

The FlexPod, with the UC chassis and the NetApp storage is perfect for us, we had no trouble. The FlexPod SF, the SolidFire, it's just a newer generation. I'm not sure what they could improve on.

The SolidFire, I don't think it is going to natively support SnapMirror. It uses its own replication, I think, but I know it's in the roadmap. They're talking by the end of this year, that it will come out.

You can have AMP servers, in the FlexPods, you can have it join an ESX cluster. So you have that GUI. I think someday you'll see a single pane of glass for management, that would be the best thing for it.

• Stability
• Backward and forward compatibility with bios and firmware

This is one of the key features because I can now associate a firmware REV to a given profile which I may need. I might have to have a particular one because the applications won't work with something different. If I can't float that from piece of hardware to piece of hardware, then it defeats the purpose of use. Thus, it is one of its key and unique features. If it defeats that, then it makes your HPE's just as valuable.

Also, the interface is a little convoluted. There are some additional features, like being able to name devices. Right now, the first one plugged in is Device 1, then Device 2. So, you have to be very particular on how you build out your environment, because with everything floating around, it's very important for you to know where that device is in a rack if you're dealing with remote hands and eyes. I need to tell someone that they need to go to rack J19, this RU, but I can't tell that by looking through the software. I can put notes, but it'd be really nice to kind of go, "This enclosure is ... " Some grid location in datacenter. So when you go to there, you can quickly understand where it is in the datacenter, therefore being able to rely on remote hands and eyes, because an LED light is just not enough when you're talking about rows and rows of these.

ACI is coming and we're going be working with that. The ability to get that implemented within the VMware, Net App, and Cisco environments, so we can have a little better mobility between our different sites would be helpful. I think right now, that's probably a little complicated for us. Other than that, we've just recently moved to flash for our VMs and everything is pretty solid for us and it is working well.

I am referring to how can we improve our NetApp/Cisco/VMware Flexpod installation. Cisco’s ACI is something we are looking into to see if we create even more flexibility with the networking and security of our Flexpod between our sites and our virtual server infrastructure.

I don't really have a great answer, other than a more scalable switched environment. That is what the Nexus 9K is going to provide for us. Nothing's perfect, so I guess we had some growing pains early on.

Some of it was teaching our staff how to deal with the new technologies, how to use it, and how to troubleshoot it. It wasn't perfect in that sense, but the product itself, it was very good.

It was complex to train people in with it. It was a newer technology for our resources, so it did take some time to get them up to speed.

The downside is that the administration is a little bit complex.

Also, don't use the NetApp team to implement it. I did so previously, and it was not the best experience of my life. It is a drawback that you need to use the NetApp team to implement it. It's not easy to work with them and not every technical specialist is a specialist.

I think the support has been our pain point, the hardware and setup are pretty good, and solid but the support could be improved. We always tell them about that.

The UCS firmware code upgrade can totally stall- it’s a brick. Cisco support has been able to help us, but this can be better. They've destroyed equipment and I have lost a few days of deployment.

It’s an expensive product for sure. It’s a Ferrari price for a Ferrari. Not perfect but a very good solution.

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.

It hasn't changed the application performance in our company but obviously the new hardware gives it the performance increase. Overall nothing more changed.

I would like to have the installation of the top virtualization on its own rather than doing it through the admin. For example, if FlexPod is configured after the configuration of the host, the ESXi is installed also, but it should be part of it rather than doing it as a separate system.

As a solution, it isn't really very innovative. It could have better support for portals.

FlexPod is a very mature product. It's a CI product with converged Netapp FAS storage and Stateless UCS compute for modern-day infrastructure. In terms of stability, FlexPod is the best in the industry. Installation with FlexPod is a bit complex, but it can be upgraded easily. I think Flexpod is phasing out, but it is still the right solution.

Installation with FlexPod is a bit complex, but it can be upgraded easily. I think Flexpod is phasing out, but it is still the right solution.

There's no interface I can go and see that it works properly or sometimes it's hard to explain to people. 

Right now you're told to just email or call support and say, "We're a FlexPod customer." It would be nice if there was a number to call or an email address.

I would like to see more involvement with cloud integrating and to be kept more in the loop and up to date. They don't want to take ownership of their bad firmware levels. 

I would also like to feel more support. NetApp has been pretty good, for the most part, but Cisco has more work to do. I've had very good experience with NetApp. Instead of having to call three different areas and saying, "I'm a FlexPod customer." It would be nice if it could be just one that gets routed. I know it would require three large companies to work together, but that's what would make this product a ten. They could definitely use with making it more user-friendly.

There needs to be a discussion around the management plane of things. The driving message has been tied altogether with UCS Director. 

UCS Director is a great product. It is relatively affordable for what it delivers. However, for a lot of the upper/mid-level market, it is probably a little bit of overkill in terms of the day-to-day administration, and even the initial configuration to get it up and running. If there was more of a condensed version, like offering managed services on top of it, that is how we get around it for some of our more simple-minded customers. If there was some sort of middle of the road approach to management, it would probably be an improvement.

According to the product managers, there are some new products coming which will address some of our concerns around portability and compliance.

I can't really say anything about improvements right now because we are relatively new to this product. It is implemented for the functionality and it delivers the functionality. Right now, it does everything we want.

Usability: It's a little bit convoluted. It'd be nice if they had it pretty straightforward. If it was a straightforward out-of-the-box configuration and could operate out of the box, that would be nice.

Ease to work with.

I don't think we've embraced the current solution fully, so we're I think two OSs behind right now.

I probably don't have an answer for that yet until we start getting the new solutions, the new OSs out.

I think they're going in the right direction. They have a virtual OS, they have different ways that we could maybe embrace different storage, but they're still maintaining the front-end. They are going forward with it and we just have to start looking at it with a little more detail.

I was looking at the SF, because we were looking at doing some of the SolidFire stuff. Now, with FlexPod, I know we're at the point where it's about time for us to upgrade, so we are looking into that. NetApp is solid.

On the storage side of things, of course, it can always be a little simpler, but that's why we were looking at SolidFire, just to take it a little bit more out of needing a storage engineer to be able to do anything. We would like to just make things a little bit easier for our administrators.

Just continuing to improve upon speed would be my biggest area with room for improvement, the 10-gig backbone. I'd like to see that increase eventually.

I'd like to see more modularization with NetApp's management and performance monitoring. I know NetApp has a product called OnCommand Insight that covers everything but we don't necessarily need all those features. That’s made it hard for us to justify the purchase there. So, I’d like to see more modularization of the management and monitoring tools.

For instance, if we could have Insight run management and monitoring for the UCS and NetApp at the same time, that would be great. At the same time, we might not need all of its features; maybe, a broader scope of products with more modularization of features and use cases. What I’m thinking is being able to pick and choose the features, or have a watered-down version of it. I'm reaching for that. It's already pretty good.

I'd say the biggest area with room for improvement would be some enhancements to the management tools, but from what we saw at a recent NetApp conference, that's coming. I think NetApp's already heard the change and I think that's what's coming. For us, it would've been just some of the management tool changes they've shown us that that's in the works or already coming out with 9.1.

Other than that, I don't have anything else from our use cases. We just refreshed our FlexPods with AFF-based FlexPods. That was pretty much all you could've asked for really.

I think it still seems that there is isn’t end-to-end automation. I can't say, "I want to build a host," and say, "Provision the blade. Provision the storage. Provision the SAN." All those things in one swipe would be nice. I think that's what everyone wants: push the button, make it work. The big thing is that we'd like to be able to have it provisioned end to end. The biggest weakness is on the SAN side and the fiber channel side is a mess. It isn't very clear at times. That part is the most complex. If we can avoid it, we don't do it.

Specifically, with ONTAP, I would like to see it support more snapshots for retention; greater than 255 snapshots. There are competitors out there offering far more than the 255 snapshots per volume; Nimble, actually, being one of them. Their current marketing blurb is 100,000 snapshots. I need to find out some more details on that. I’d like to see very long-term data protection, an increase in the number of snapshots.

I really don’t have anything. It's what we use, we have four in our main site, and two in our disaster recovery site.

I think a little bit about some of the other models, especially in the hyper-converged space where you add storage and compute at the same time, but on the converged side of things you add each as needed and not both.

I think that it could be improved in terms of the reporting, but really that is pretty good as well, so I cannot think of anything that can be improved.

I don’t think we have enough experience at this point to see the weak points.

For the next release, because I know that we are using Pure Storage, what I want to see is the GUI interfaces on this UCS monitor.

The new one that we are purchasing is going to have solid state drives. So, obviously, more speed is always a good thing.

Performance management: NetApp has some tools that you can purchase to do performance management, or you can go with another vendor and buy a product which does the same thing. It would be nice if there was more of these features with the product, not add-ons.

Compared with other converged solutions, there are better support systems, but you pay for the premium. But outside the support systems, they know what they're doing, and the resolution time is much better, because I've dealt with the other systems as well.

Maybe in the future, they could include the HCI solution into the mix. Maybe the newer solutions, like the ONTAP Fabric Pool or ONTAP Select, as well down the line could be added. That would be nice.

I'm not really sure, to be honest. A lot of what it's doing today is exactly what we need, so I'm focusing on some other things at this point around our database environment and things like that. Everything that I've seen right now from a FlexPod perspective is very good.

I think they can always improve, whether it's dedupe or compression, those algorithms; and flash through better SSDs. I guess faster is not really there with an SSD now, but I think anything that makes it smaller, better cooling, less power, those kinds of things. Help in the datacenter.

The CLI part of it is still evolving enough that commands that you expect to do something become deprecated and you want to take their place and you have to keep up with the code base. In this code base you do this, and in this code base you do this, and in this code base you do that. But for the most part its good and, let's be honest, everything changes.

Automatic tiering would be good to have.

My biggest thing is I would love to see a native SMB or NFS front end to an optic store on the AFF and FAS platforms. Right now you want me to go out and buy a front end for it that creates an optic store on it and gives me the SMB interface. I would love to see that as a native part of the SBM. It doesn't have to be the end all be all; it doesn't have to be this hyper-scale thing but just the fact that I have it, so I can dip my toe in it, and I can get something that kind of works, that would be epic; that is my main thing.

The other big annoyance I have with Net App is the fragmentation of all the software. I have SnapManager, I have this, I have that, and they're all slightly different. They all look slightly different. They all come in different VMs. Some are OBAs, some are installed on Windows, some have weird requirements like, "No, no, no, it has to run on this version of Windows." It would be nice to just have all of that in one giant application and then just turn on and off different features based on license keys. That would make things easier.

Tighter integration with CISCO.

Right now I can't think of any, because we're so specialized in our environment. I think maybe going to a full solid-state would be beneficial. I don't know how beneficial it would be for us in the power industry, because a lot of our equipment in the field is maybe 20-30 years old.

We are interfacing with a lot of older devices. We're using the Fabric Interconnect back to our Nexus chassis, so I don't know if we can go up to 40GB yet. It's probably just added more speed, but we're limited by our connections out to the field anyway.

It probably already is in the product now, but at the time, we didn't have a really great SSD shelf that you can just plug and play in there. I know it is present today, but that was the only feature we were looking for at the time. There are probably some nuances in how the network and those types of things work. Maybe it could have more templates. Other than that, it's a great product.

I would like to see more scalability and possible cost reductions with the all-flash solution. I would like to see a focus on database optimization on the Intel platform. This could be with Windows, or HANA, or even cache, down the line, something with the Linux cache. I would like to get something that is optimized for those databases.

We have two camps now. We have to have a AIX camp and then we have an Intel camp. If we could just have it on the Intel platform, have FlexPod take it all, it would be easier to support.

I can't think of any improvements, because we're so specialized in our environment. I think maybe going to a full solid state would be beneficial. I don't know how beneficial it would be for us in the power industry, because a lot of our equipment in the field is maybe 20-30 years old.

We're interfacing with a lot of older devices. We're using the Fabric Interconnect back to our Nexus chassis, so I don't know if we can go up to 40GB. It's probably just having more speed, but we're limited by our connections out to the field anyway. Speed would be the area where we would like to see room for improvement.

I’d like to see cloud features, for sure, and auto-scaling type things would be good. Automation is important, and that will be more important going forward.

I don't know what they would need to do to earn a better rating from me. I know that, when we do block workloads on NetApp, fiber channels specifically, it hits the filer pretty heavy. I don't know why that is. We're going away from fiber channel anyway.

I'd like to be able to use the distributed FlexPod system with a mobile FlexPod and a stable FlexPod. That way, when we put up a new site, we can easily launch a mobile FlexPod to them and say, "Hey, welcome into our environment," without having to worry about what they have on the disc, and then support it.

We are a closed classified environment system and expand our system by providing a networking stack that allows access to our environment. One of the considerations is reducing utilization of bandwidth on the wide area network for file sharing and access. Having the ability to install a mobile FlexPod for two weeks (timeframe example), then remove that FlexPod to utilize in a new location while maintaining connection to the primary FlexPod would be beneficial. This would allow us to setup a site, without regard to it being temporary, across the WAN for file access.

The vision is not clear with NetApp as to how they want FlexPod to be, as they want it to be for everything but it's not. It needs a specific vision and agenda, what purpose is this solution for, etc.

A unified interface for all the components would be a great start. Since FlexPods are a mixture of three different technologies, each component must be separately administered.

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.

There are times where we have had issues with technical support.

More flash is going to be the biggest thing for us. We use a lot of SaaS currently, but flash is the way to go.

We have had some technical issues around the Java UI, but nothing major.

They could improve their technical support team.

Unified management would be really nice, having one a single pane of glass to manage everything do with the solution.

As a point solution, it does absolutely what it should. I'm not sure it needs any more.

Make it cheaper.

Add more automation into the Cisco UCS firmware upgrade process to make it more streamlined than it is today.

Easier integration from the beginning, which they have put improvements in as far as setting it up. It was just a large learning curve for us at first.

Better integration with other vendors that are involved in the FlexPod solution, like Cisco.

Surprise me with something I haven't thought of.

Maybe it's out-of-the-box and can configure itself. Something that's beyond the simplicity that I already think is there. Abstract away some of the technical details of setting it up, so you don't need the experience of an engineer to come in and do the work.

I really like what it does now. I don't really have any complaints. They plan to give it the ability to add more flash storage in a hybrid shelf. We don't have the need or the capital for an all-flash cache, so we got a hybrid one that's limited to how many flash caches you can have on there.

I know that there's a lot of features that area already out. We are the DOD, and we are two steps behind. We know of a lot of features that we're excited to move to, but we can't yet. In terms of improvement, I would focus on cost. It can be a little bit expensive.

The features are great. We know of things that are in the newer releases, and they will be great once we get access to them. This includes solid state drives that will speed up our connectivity.

I know there's some new Cisco stuff coming down the road that we might be looking at. UCS Minis: I know that they're going to be supported right off the bat.

Nothing's perfect. There's always room to increase: more hyper-conversions; smaller form factor is always on our mind; better ways to align disk up for us; how can we split off our disk correctly for each HA pair that we have, from a cluster standpoint.

There was a little mixup with, at least NetApp, coming to the market with flash. They've slowly gained ground in that marketplace; I’m waiting to see how that plays out. I know Mars was trying to be a big hit for them and then when they dissolved, that kind of set me back a little bit from a time standpoint. Mars was their all-flash platform; something separate from WAFL that we're doing with ONTAP. That had me looking at that infrastructure. That's the only reason why they lost a few points in my rating.

I'm not sure where that's going to go now. Obviously, we're looking to be into that hybrid cloud solution. Where that leads us to? I'm not really sure.

I have not yet seen any features in other different solutions that I'd like to see in FlexPod. From a business-driver perspective, I don't have that need at the moment.

Competitive pricing's always good. It's hit the mark for the most part. I can't complain.

The initial setup should be a little bit more intuitive. It's counterintuitive to start with. It completely changes the idea of where you had come from. That setup process changes all of your thoughts regarding policy and makes sure that you knew what they were doing to start with, and why you were going to do it.

It needs to go down the Vblock way, because in an integrated system, you need a big block of technology between the reference architecture and the lego-type system.

A single place to initiate support to get them all at once – being able to call one place would be great instead of having to initiate with each vendor first and then ultimately finding out you need everyone on the phone. So, a specific FlexPod support instead of having to go through NetApp, Cisco and VMware separately would be something they can improve on.

They just announced that they are going to move it along with Intersight from Cisco. That can be a private or public cloud, which is one of the areas where it can grow more and has a lot of potential.

I would be interested to see more integration with other applications.

The main area that this solution has room for improvement is in Cisco support.

They already have some products or interfaces that leverage APIs, like Cisco UCS Director, and this is a good starting point. However, I would like to have something for smaller organizations where they could just plugin configurations, and everything is done for them.

They should have an easier user interface to get it up and running.

• Some of the define features could use improvement. 
• It needs more power.

I'd like to see a little bit simpler management pane. Using UCS Director to front everything is good and UCS Director is a good product and it's priced well for what it does, but for a lot of that upper mid-market, it's probably a little bit of overkill for what they need. They just want a nice, simply portal to go through and see what's going on. So if there was something that was middle of the road, it would be well received.

Currently, the only issue we have is with our backup solution. We have SnapProtect from NetApp as our backup tool. While taking VM backups, SnapProtect’s requirements say that all VMDKs should be on the same datastore, but from the VMware perspective, all VMDKs should be spread out. This is an ambiguity that we have in our environment.

I would like to see a little bit more monitoring. OnCommand Unified Manager is great. It just kind of gives you a really good high-level overview. So, I would like to see a little more detail.

It could always be better.

My one little pet peeve with all of them is that it's still multiple interfaces. I went to a UCC seminar and they said something like, "Use UCC to run everything." You go to VMware and I know VMware's going to run everything. You go to NetApp and they say something like, “No, no, no. NetApp's going to run on everything.” It would be nice if someone could create a pane that does it all.

It’s not because we purchased each component on our own and had it verified. We've actually bought two FlexPods recently for our voice mail implementation, switching over from Avaya, I think, to Cisco. We bought mini FlexPods for that. There still isn’t a single pane.

When I went to the Cisco UCC seminar a couple of years ago, they said something like, "We can run PowerShell scripts against it, so you can build your structure.” If someone in UCC wants to provision storage, they can do it from that pane. With VMware, you have the SMVI interface. I've gone to the NetApp Insight conference for three years now. The first year, I went to an SMVI session where the guy said something like, "No, no, no; SMVI's going to do everything for you, from VMware." There's still that disconnect. That could be improved.

If I go to NetApp System Manager, it would be great if there was a tie-in to UCC, a tie-in to VMware, versus having to go to three distinct apps. Right now, if I provision the storage for VMware, I provision the storage, then I have to pass it off to the VMware guys. They have to go mount it, and then I have to go back to it to set up my SMVI jobs. That part gets a little annoying.

From its prime competitor, seeing some sort of an architecture around cloud built into the solution would be great, whether that's UCS Director or vRealize Automation, something that's got a validated architecture that's ready to go for that solution would be useful.

We're not exactly with FlexPod, but we have NFS shares and all. Somehow, if we can dig into the end user who is using that share, and who is populating how much data into that. I don't know, maybe it's already there, but to all the people I've talked with, I haven't heard about it.

So if that can be included, that would be good. We have some tools like OCI's and all. So if we can find from there, who is the end person who's using the share - and sometimes they over utilize it - and if you can find out who, to that level, if we can dig down, that'll be good for the administration point of view.

The performance could be improved. Because it's over network, I don't know if they have to improve something on the NetApp end, because over the network it slows down when it's compared to the fiber channel network. If they can, that would be wonderful.

It would be nice to have more of a single pane of glass from a management standpoint. As it is now, we can manage the virtual machines and the storage from one, but then we start getting it, okay, now we have to manage another component, we have to go to another area.

The third component, we have to go to another one. It would be nice just to have one central management component for the whole FlexPod solution.

We also had some issues with some performance initially, under our first system; then once we did an upgrade, we haven't had any issues since. New model would have higher rating.

For me, it's the integration with things that are not part of an ONTAP solution. It is simple management platform that I can manage my NetApp from an ONTAP perspective to the E-Series, to a StorageGRID, to a SolidFire environment in one management layout. That would be the one thing I would want the ability to do.

The user interface isn't as friendly as I would like it to be. I would like to see UCS ditch Java and go with HTML5, just to make that a little simpler. Other than that, NetApp is making good changes. The tools have gotten dramatically better over the past two years, which has helped a lot. Cisco – I generally don't do too much of the networking stuff – but it's still kind of best to use the command line, so I guess they could improve the command line interface.

If there could be an integration between Cisco and NetApp, the single pane of glass works well if you can get it all to actually work and get the data that you need easily and quickly. That could definitely help.

The thing that stops up from jumping in more is that we are resource constrained, I have to piecemeal what we have, and I can’t stop using something because it’s old. I can’t just say “here is a reference architecture” create a clean environment, I have to use my legacy components. We can get a lot of the benefits, but the FlexPod needs you to do it all at once.

I think that there is always room for improvement in any product. I guess the training availability and infinite scalability could be better, and it’s getting there.

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. 

In the digital future, I would like to see included more code compatibility. The storage should be more mobile. We should be able to move it from place to place.

FlexPod needs more support on ML/AI networks.

If there were going to be any improvements, they should probably be UI improvements, overall. It can get a little kludgy sometimes when trying to figure out what to do. But, other than that, from what I'm using right now, it seems to be okay.

There's a learning curve associated with it.

They've just recently announced the SolidFire integration, which I think is pretty cool. We don't have any experience with that yet, but I'd like to see more details come out of that.

I don't think any solution is perfect, there are always little squeaky wheels that can be tuned, but the product works very well. It's not a perfect solution because, obviously, it doesn't always fit everybody, there are unique requirements that people have.

When we initially installed it, the automation piece really wasn't available. Maybe in a future release, if automation was built into the product that would be good.

Maybe some of the graphical interfaces could be a little more user-friendly from the Cisco side of things.

I'm interested to see how the Converged System Manager comes out. It allows you to see all the components in a single graphical interface. Right now, we have to go to a couple different ones to see everything. We can execute scripts in the background against everything, but it would be nice to see a picture. That way we can give that to the executives, and say "Here, check out this cool thing we have." They probably don't understand it all.

We've had a few technical problems, if those weren't present, then it would probably be perfect.

I usually give everything a nine, because there's potentially something better out there that I haven't come across yet. Nine says there isn't anything better, and I hesitate to give anybody top marks across the board on anything.

In terms of the feature set, I can't really think of anything right now. I am looking for changes in architectural and reference designs, which makes more information available to make sure deployments go well.

I would like to see improvements in the documentation. I understanding how things are coming together and a lot of that is from the UCS side.

I have been working with NetApp and working with fast devices for a while. I have been getting up to speed on the UCS pieces on the FlexPod.

Some of those elements were a little bit different than the standard approach and with a new product line for Cisco. It is not just about networking, but also revolves around the compute. Most of that just requires additional documentation and a better explanation of how the management interfaces work.

The UCS director is nice, now that we've got an overlying umbrella that can manage multiple pod environments. Other than that, most of the benefits are really more customer driven. I do architecture design and deployments, and I hand off the infrastructure. It goes from there to the customer.

We really like the all-flash arrays and the solid-state drives. We’d really like to see, not so much from NetApp but from our perspective, going more towards the SolidFire and doing some metro clusters with NetApp.

I would like to see if it could come down in price a little bit. You get what you pay for, and it is good. It's a valuable appliance, but if it could come down in price, it would be great.

I look forward to testing features in ONTAP 9 next-generation data management software during the pilot release. Let's see how that goes.

Seeing some integration to cloud would be important, for sure. That was what I was hoping to see with some of the new data ONTAP features that we were going to learn about at a recent conference I attended. I'd like to see, for example, a namespace that you can extend to a cloud provider, so that you can just do a straight vol move from on-prem out to cloud.

The support aspect was something that was lacking a little bit. NetApp has improved a little bit there, but we have struggled with some support issues, even here recently. I'm hoping that NetApp can get the support piece figured out.

The integration and all of the levels of automation, everything is there. The support is the first thing that needs to be improved. The second thing is that because there are so many products out there, they need a common management tool. I don't think they have that particular management tool, a centralized tool. I can see into WFA and so on, but that is still in the initial phases. I would like to see more on that automation.

The user interface could be a little bit more intuitive but overall, once you get used to the way it works, it works great.

We use SnapMirror to back everything up, so I’m pretty happy with it right now.

I’m sure there is room for improvement, there always is, but I’m hard-pressed to tell you what could be improved.

At this point, it's doing everything we’ve asked.

I would like to see more of a centralized support model because we have all the FlexPod components and we hand build them. So, if we have issues with one particular stack, we're talking to individual vendors, e.g., for UCS, I have to call Cisco, and for storage, I have to call NetApp.

We would like more security features.

I'm happy with the solution as it is.

I would love to see the single interface for managing everything end to end. That would be ideal.

Also, simply the interface a little bit. There are a lot of places to go to get things configured and it's easy to get lost: Did I remember to do this piece over here before I did this piece? Then there's this piece on the other side. There are just a lot of moving parts that I think could be simplified, or wizard-driven; to say, you have all of these together.

FlexPod was born to be used like building-block elements, to create large EDP premises. If used to create a single FlexPod CED, optional operational collaterals (backup, management, etc.) are missing, both in docs and in design.

I would like to see the data fabric of the entire system because. The government is looking to deploy a government cloud solution. We want a data fabric which needs to be managed, for the entire cloud environment.

In this regard, if we use storage on our premises for our cloud infrastructure, along with some other vendor like Azure or AWS. We are wondering how all this data will be synchronized and if we can get a common solution and common input. That is the next challenge, not only for me, but for all of the members of the team.

The price.

Nothing I have seen can be improved, but I think we're still early in the usage.

I do not like the NetApp licensing fees. They are exorbitant. That could become a turn-off to other companies. There are a lot of other streamlined and better solutions out there for a lower price.

Product price is always a concern.

Awareness amongst the customers could be better. Also, the customer base, enhanced blogs and discussions are needed, as there's a small user base right now.

I know about NetApp, not Cisco. So I don't know what's going on in the next release. But for NetApp, I expect with 9.3 coming out, a lot of features, more improvement of the data usage.

The memory, that you can enable flash to even increase your performance. So this will SCM.

I think that allowing faster certification times on newer codes on both Cisco and NetApp sides could be good as this is a pain point. They need to make certification more streamlined.

In the config advisor tool, it could be more specific in pointing out or letting you know what to fix when it confronts issues.

From my perspective there is not much to improve on and NetApp has gone through great strides to make it a great product with great top-notch support.

I think that at this point I don’t know yet – it all sounds good.

I would say that since I haven’t seen SnapManager, I don’t know yet.

The integration with VMware could be a bit smoother.

There’s a lot of talk about security, but very little action. I’d like to see something from NetApp/Cisco that’s beyond simple encryption so that data is not useable or visible when breach occurs.

Storage and compute could be better managed. Right now, there are two separate consoles for NetApp and Cisco components. There's no unified management available, and an add-on for that should be a standard option. Also, the cost.

I would like to see better operations, a single pane of glass to manage and monitor the entire design across VMware, Cisco, etc. I would also like the upgrade process to be a little smoother.

I would like to see synchronous replication and easier automation in the next release.

Newer platform reference architectures take a long time to harden and be publicly available.

I think that a unified dashboard would be beneficial across all three of the components to show you the status of all three components.

I think that the orchestration and automation could be better. I think there are tools out there for it, we just don’t have them deployed. It’s an area that I think our organization could do better at.

Simplification of configurations. Easy instructions/configurability for adding components and expansion. It loses points because it could get simpler.

One feature we would like to see is SSD with the Cisco UCS Mini already available.

Also, integration with the other OEMs. Right now it is their intent that we could integrate with the EMC and the Hitachi, but still there are a few more OEMs out there, customs.

I would like to see a single upgrade download, so you could download an upgrade that would upgrade the NetApps that would have all the parts. Right now, you have to go and download the VMware upgrade pieces from the Cisco website. You have to download the Cisco stuff from their site, and then download the NetApp stuff from their website. It would be helpful if they had a single download area for the versions that work together. I can't think of anything else to improve. They support all the protocols: SCOE and NFS.

There is nothing I can think of at this time.

The price, but nothing from a technical perspective.

Perhaps a unified management for all of the elements within the infrastructure, like a console. I would like to see something that is open-source that can be used to manage or compute networking storage in a single panel.

I'm sure that something like that exists right now, so that would be a plus. Something that consolidated the deployment of firmware or software, in other words, more of an orchestration tool and that would take care of it all.

Make it cheaper.

I'm currently drowning in features. So maybe a simplification would be better. Fewer features.

The service catalogue and gallery. I find it difficult to go through documentation, and I would like to see user cases we can refer to. Would like to follow a specific work flow.

At the moment I do not find any functionality that could improve, other than perhaps the automation interface.

I think it could be a little bit more flexible and if they found a way to implement more of a supported cloud solution to it, I think that could help a lot. 

Then there's things like AltaVault which, if there was a way to have that as a shipped feature with it, could be useful as well.

Compatibility issues with replication. The Oracle table formats were not working and storage replications did not work as well, until we had to introduce other components to make it work. This is a good solution, but only if its on both the DR and DC for replication compatibility.