FlexPod XCS Reviews

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 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 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.

We use this solution for the VMware virtualization of all of our servers. We use the Cisco UCS for the blade servers.

From a server storage side, we were previously using the HP BladeSystem c7000 chassis for our blade servers. It was much harder to update the firmware when compared to the Cisco UCS.

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.

The purpose of FlexPod is for a converged infrastructure that provides compute or networking storage and helps launch applications more easily and dynamically.

At the end of the day, AI is not AI without the application that we write into it. With collaboration between Microsoft — utilizing it to build in a manner that is compatible to the FlexPod architecture — we're able to provide specific intelligence that supports our objectives — whatever it is at a given time. Whether it's data aggregation, learning, pouring out the analytics, the intelligence helps specific applications respond to requirements within a business structure. That's what FlexPod enables us to do. That agility reduces the number of hours that it takes to construct a data center, whether it is physical or virtual, by enabling applications to support AI objectives. It just needs to be built correctly.

We have experienced about 28 to 30% improvement in application performance and in our industry that's actually a very significant improvement.

The purpose of using FlexPod, for us, is to simplify and streamline application deployment. 
Compared to utilizing a rack and stack model and using a virtualization technology like VMware, the time savings is about 40% in getting the application into production.

We use this solution for backing up and storing banking and financial data. It is especially important for protecting data mirroring between multiple data centers using a hybrid cloud type approach. We have our own cases for what we use but we do like the input we get from the manufacturers and their suggestions on how we should deploy things.

Before we had FlexPod, we had just stacks and stacks of servers. You know, every time you wanted to build a server you had to go buy a whole pizza box (case for computers or network switches), put it in a rack, plug it up. We had EMC, we had a bunch of different storage providers, the way it connected was makeshift, a couple of late servers here and there. So to be able to put everything in one rack, one solution with the storage, was a big step up. Plus, every time we need to expand the storage for the old system, it wasn't easy. Cisco blades simplify everything from a compute standpoint and you can easily upgrade the blades. All you got to do is add a new chassis, change out your blades, and the blades are done. If a blade dies, you pull it out, you get a brand new one or you change the motherboard and you just slide it back in depending on the policy that you create for the surface profiles and you are good to go.

We have four different use cases that we bought it for:

1. Our production VM or infrastructure is on a FlexPod with a metro cluster.
2. We have a CCTV system, which is a FlexPod using E-Series as a back end.
3. We have another E-Series FlexPod for backup infrastructure, with our combo products.
4. We have a test end environment, which is a mini replica of our production, VMware assistance.

We have been using FlexPod for seven to eight years now. It has evolved a lot over time, primarily in ease of connectivity. It has been built around all the same platforms. It is just what storage back-end that we decide to tie it into it. Will we be using blades, a chassis server, or rack mount servers? This makes it easy for us, because everything is consistent. 

It does not matter whether I bought one five years ago or if I bought it today. All of my connectivity will be the same. When I put it in the data center, it takes a few hours, then I can have a base system up and going.