FlexPod XCS Reviews

We primarily use FlexPod for tier-one applications. We leverage it for ONTAP systems, and sometimes for general-purpose systems as well. XMPPROL speaks around it for ECM, PPM, and CIM, and sequential notifications.

Normally, we use FlexPod internally. XCS comes from Cisco and NetApp, meaning they come together to build a system that satisfies the better-designed CVD.

We are in the finance and banking industry. 

Simplifying operations is more relevant to FlexPod because we transfer its benefits to subsidiaries as we are a group, enabling better collaboration and support.

FlexPod has helped reduce troubleshooting time for architectural configurations. It reduces troubleshooting time, and we don't worry about downtime. Moreover, it gives us more flexibility to control over our system. FlexPod and Cisco UCS offer advanced features that enable flexible configurations and movements compared to traditional systems.

For example, nine years ago, a compatibility issue took us nearly a month to solve. With FlexPod, it wouldn't be a good comparison, but at least for most troubleshooting, the community-controlled aspect helps. It's the upper layer of FlexPod, not FlexPod itself. Some issues like OS-based problems still need individual solutions, but for infrastructure-related matters, FlexPod helps significantly.

Most of my customers have separate server, network and storage teams. Therefore, bringing UCS together with NetApp storage, which makes a FlexPod, speaks to my customers' use cases. We are able to carve it up for almost everything, whether it is for HyperVisor's such as VMware ESXi or bare-metal Linux / Windows servers. My customers love the option to carve it up as they like and use their existing storage investments treating the marriage of compute and storage as a "FlexPod", more a platform. Again, it covers off almost every use case my customers have.

The deployment really depends on what the customer is trying to achieve, in-house IT skillsets, budget and other variables will need to be considered. I have customers who are proponents of everything SaaS with a bit of cloud and customers with SaaS, Cloud and on-premises taking a balanced approach to realize an Hybrid "Multi-Cloud" environment. Others that are pairing SaaS with on-premises, and some, only SaaS with remote workers. I also have customers that remain all on-preemies because of the nature of their data. So, my stance is hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure in the end but I look at all the solutions out there, bring the right pieces together trying to achieve, with my customers a hybrid environment. Lots of stuff in-between and many pause at various places on this journey, whether it is to pivot to new technology previously unavailable, re-assess and or build budget for their "the next steps". Hybrid is where to land, where I think all companies are going to land. There will be many variations like a 70/30 or 80/20 split. We just don't know. It all depends on the customer, use case and workloads!

Most of my customers, if not all of them, have a VMware vSphere ecosystem. FlexPod integrates everything in so you can see it all, full visibility into the infrastructure. This is super important for our customers because they want to use fewer tools in the environment. IT admins, in storage and compute, even networking want to be able to use the same toolsets, reducing or consolidating the tools and even vendors. Then, the customer will achieve more streamlined operations and can more quickly see where problems exist within the environment; reducing the mean-time to resolution.

The primary use case is within our commercial infrastructure, where it integrates with FSCs and factories. This integration allows us to manage and utilize a mix of storage resources efficiently. It's especially valuable for handling heavy SAN workloads, as our site doesn't have a significant amount of NAS storage.

By utilizing a ten-gig converged infrastructure instead of separate components, we've reduced our rack space requirements, eliminating the need for deploying additional switches in separate gear configurations. 

Our FlexPod configuration was custom-built, as we purchased UCS components separately and assembled them into its setup. This approach has resulted in significant cost savings, primarily due to reduced power consumption. We've also achieved impressive performance, with ten-gig line rates, eliminating the need for fiber channels. 

The primary benefits we've seen include reduced rack space requirements, decreased power consumption, and effective consolidation which allowed us to repurpose the reclaimed space to add more NetApp filers. 

It enabled us to scale without the need to expand our cabinet or cage, particularly when adding clusters. It's a bit challenging to provide an exact figure, but I'd estimate that we achieved a cost reduction of approximately ten to fifteen percent.

We use it for different use cases. We have projects that are specialized for the healthcare sector. This is because of the certifications that NetApp has in this sector, both for VDI and standard VMware.

Most of our customers and projects are about hybrid cloud integration. So, having something still on-premises that integrates with hyperscalers is why we are often using NetApp, who has a versatile data platform.

Key benefits, which our customers like, are the solution's customer service, storage, and ability to do operations.

FlexPod's native integration with hyperscalers is very important since every customer is thinking about cloud at some stage. They need to keep in mind that some workloads sometimes go into the cloud, so this flexibility needs to be there. That is why the possibility to choose one of the three hyperscalers is very important.

FlexPod’s prevalidated architectures are very important because our technicians can refer to standardized setups. This helps us know how the SAN should be integrated in the perfect way. We totally count on this. I also love the partnership between Cisco and NetApp on this. We have seen at least a 20% increase in operational efforts due to these prevalidated designs.

The evolution of the solution with Intersight has been very important for reducing operational costs as well as creating customer trust with validated solutions.

The flexibility, operational efficiency, and scalability of FlexPod has been a huge factor for us because our customers have workloads that need to run on classical HTTPs, flash storage, or possibly in the cloud. This flexibility and enhanced ability of the solution is very important for this. We trust in it.

The enhanced ability of the solution is the feature where we can add capacity to the compute, if necessary. So, it is good that it is flexible.

We use FlexPod for onsite virtualized and leveraged hardware, so we work with many VMs and generic workloads. There is no specific single-purpose workload. It would be like the VMware solution.

We have three primary production environments and a legacy environment. Right now, the entire workload of the organization is roughly split into thirds across those various generations: Gen one, Gen two, Gen three, and legacy. Legacy can't move off of old hardware, or it's in the process of being moved to modern platforms. 

Gen one was FlexPod, Gen two was a different Dell solution, and Gen three was yet another Dell solution because somebody up the chain loves Dell these days. They're building a fourth generation of primarily containerized stuff based on Red Hat Kubernetes for new workloads or Red Hat OpenShift. The compute workloads in FlexPod are slowly being moved out. There's no plan to replace that or to continue using that as a FlexPod. However, the storage driving the current compute and network shares will be transitioned into the strategic platform for file-sharing platforms across the enterprise. 

It highlights the flexibility that comes with the product set. They're still using VMware everywhere. They're not going to be using the compute environment. They're still using Cisco network switches everywhere and will continue to use NetApp storage everywhere. Interestingly, this new containerized OpenShift environment they have in place today gets its storage back from the NetApp through NetApp automation and integration tools in their cloud set. It highlights the flexibility of what you can do with the entire platform when you need to do something.

In terms of administration, we have five or six people on the storage side that are primarily doing storage. There's a rather large team in charge of server administration, but they're doing server administration across the entire enterprise as a team. There are around 25 or 30 Windows and Linux system administrators. The house's Windows side also manages the necessary VMware work, but they're not dedicated to FlexPod. They're across the entire enterprise, but any of them could come in and do most of the work.

In addition, there are about 10 people on the engineering side. They're the ones who are primarily responsible for designing and driving operational standards. The same people are in charge of infrastructure across the entire enterprise and aren't limited to FlexPod. There's also a good smattering of network folk. 

The pre-validated architectures are attractive. My organization is in the Fintech industry, where standards are critical, so validations and compliance are essential. There are vendor-designed and vendor-validated design starting points. You can build up for scale or if you need more compute from those starting points. If you need more storage, you put out more storage. For performance and things like that, you can put the components you need to meet your specific needs as long as you stay within those validated designs.  

Even if you start with one and diverge from it, it's still a FlexPod, and you get support from the three primary organizations: Cisco, VMware, and NetApp. Even if you don't use a Cisco-validated or NetApp-validated design, you can still qualify as a FlexPod if you're out of those standard deployments. Executives like having those models as a starting point.

FlexPod has saved us some time, but I must add a caveat. The challenge was getting the operations side of the house aligned with what FlexPod was. Even today, the operational side remains heavily siloed. There are teams for networking, storage, Windows, etc. That separation of concerns continues to be the standard model for operational support today. It took a lot to break down that model a small amount because everybody in FlexPod has to know and work together because of the integration. 

You can't just do the network piece because there's so much that the network touches. You can't just do the compute piece because there's so much the compute touches, especially with VMware. You can't just do the storage piece. You have to understand how that relates to virtualization and the compute. It took them a while to get some people in place that could cross these silos to make troubleshooting more effective. Has it become more effective? Yes. But it took a long time to get there for external reasons.

It hasn't impacted our TCO because everybody who came in still runs everything else they used to run. When they decided to do the next major expansion, and somebody wanted to go with Dell, and they went with Dell hardware, all the same people had to learn that as well. So we don't have a TCO advantage on FlexPod versus anything else.

The pre-validated architectures also haven't affected our productivity if you look at application performance. The application performance is what it is. It also hasn't increased our productivity regarding our ability to operate the system because many outside factors affect our operations, and nothing about the FlexPod design helps us overcome them.

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

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

The way FlexPod has set up our servers has helped our organization. Their OS is on Netapp.

We’ve seen an improvement in application performance. I don't know the percentage off the top of my head, however, after migrating a lot of data from physical servers to virtual servers and putting them on there, it's just amazing.

It increased staff productivity. I was running most of the locations alone. With this solution, I was able to help take care of other problems instead. We ran it and didn't have any problems.

The solution streamlines our IT admin. For the most part, once I get the system set up and put in, adding the VLAN is very easy. Then, users are just adding in VMs. It goes smoothly. I just had to set the solution up and let it run.

Regarding the solution's private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, it works well if the communication stays up. The solution’s infrastructure enables us to run demanding and mission-critical workloads.

The solution's ability to manage from edge to core, to cloud, and support their data and computer requirements is pretty good.

The solution is innovative when it comes to computing, storage, and networking. Once it comes together, it's pretty easy to manage. The only action I’ve got to really do is manage everything from my cores or from my distributed switches.

The solution's granular scalability and broad application support helps us meet the needs of diverse workloads. For instance, two years ago, I had a client that was in a building. They had seventeen floors, and I was able to diverse each one of the floors, which were different companies inside FlexPod, and manage it using VCF or VMware. They had their own clusters and it was easy to manage.

This solution is very resilient. For the most part, since about 2018, my servers have had no problems. I still have servers that have been up for years without any issues.

The solution reduces the time required to deploy a new application in some ways. UCS itself is just a hardware platform. VMware is actually where that question is more tied to. 

The solution reduced data center costs. At one of my locations, we had about twenty-four racks full of physical servers. I ended up migrating everything to virtual platforms and putting it inside. It was a decrease of 68% in the total cost of energy. That included the A/C units always running and the power being used for the servers themselves. 

The solution has saved us money. I wouldn't even know how much precisely. I would say $100,000, however, that's likely really low.

We have high-IO SQL workloads. We have over 200 SQL Servers for our flagship platform so we definitely need compute, storage, network, all of that in one, that's going to perform under pressure.

We're using AFF A700s, which at the time we got them, were the latest and greatest of all-flash storage. The Cisco UCS portion that we're using are M5s and M4s. They were top of the line when they were released, as well. 

We're looking for low-latency and high-compute, and that's what FlexPod gives us.

We have an overnight production run. We take a bunch of files from some of our clients and mash them around and throw them into the databases, and then processes them in SQL. We've been able to reduce that run-time, just by upgrading the UCS portion, by 20 percent in the past year.

We've implemented a lot of initiatives over the past five years, but bringing in SSD was the big one. Then we added more controllers and updated UCS hardware. Those are all steps that have enhanced our application performance. This year, we also adopted SnapCenter, which is a NetApp product, and that has increased the reliability and efficiency of our backups as well.

UCS has also reduced our data center costs. We had HP machines, which took up the better part of 2 racks. Bringing all that into a UCS chassis, with the FlexPod solution, has reduced power use and it has reduced physical footprint and has cleaned up our racks. We have easily saved over 50 percent physical space.