What is our primary use case?
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!
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
FlexPod, UCS offers a good GUI with easy management. With the management, you can see the inventory of both the storage and compute. There is good integration here and offers a close single pane of glass of management. Most of my customers go to the NetApp GUI, vCenter, and or Cisco UCSM. However, you can see it all under UCSM (Central / Intersight) or VMware vCenter to manage it all. FlexPod provides easy management with a close single pane of glass with good alerting to see the infrastructure as a whole!
VMware vSphere (Hypervisor's) lean heavily on memory. With Cisco UCS, on the compute side, we can get really dense memory hosts to support many virtual machines. With ESXi, we can easily support 50 VMs per host or more. With the FlexPod configuration, we see low latency and fast storage.
The validated designs (CVD's) are important for exploring technology that I haven't touched or seen in-depth. We use the CVD's to get a better understanding of the technology and use it as a roadmap to get customers to that "desired end state".
A lot of my customers don't take advantage of automation but with UCS, software defined templates, policies and pools are heavily used and save time. Generally, you make templates to help with the automation of provisioning of server, network and storage configurations. Cutting a server from a template, creating a server profile, pre-configures compute, network and NetApp storage. This is super important because it reduces the time to deploy a host and or virtual machines.
What needs improvement?
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.
Buyer's Guide
FlexPod
March 2023
Learn what your peers think about FlexPod. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2023.
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For how long have I used the solution?
Cisco UCS came out in 2009 and I have been on the scene since. FlexPod came next enhancing the UCS offering with a marriage of UCS and NetApp storage.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I have built over 15+ datacenters on UCS / "FlexPod", and every solution has been solid. I have done multi-domains within some of my customers datacenters too. More of the problems are "people-generated" / "user error, understanding" than they are technology-based. The stability with this infrastructure is rock-solid.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability is the best that you can get. You can carve it up any way you want, e.g., add storage or compute. With the new UCS X-Series, some of the shortcomings in the traditional UCS have been resolved. Now, it is even more scalable and granular, if you want it to be, but it doesn't have to be.
The flexibility, operational efficiency, and scalability of FlexPod is really high. You can add compute and storage independently with ease. There are no real concerning limitations other than having 20 chassis in a UCS domain and then you need to start another one, which is okay, you can then connect all the domains you have to Intersight for that single pane of glass of management. Most customers don't get past 10 chassis at a single site.
How are customer service and support?
I support my customers but we have called Cisco TAC who has been very responsive. Because it is a FlexPod design and marked as FlexPod, we don't have to call multiple vendors for support. We are calling one number and generally getting responses back within four hours, which has been very acceptable. I know we have called support a dozen times over the last couple of years, and everything, for the most part has been resolved within a few days.
Even though TAC responses, in my experience have been within four hours acknowledging the problem, there is always room for improvement. We have had a case or two with some customers where troubleshooting took a week or longer and I have been asked to come in to help. I help the customer by bridging the gap, which is fine. That is what CDW does, take care of our customers, bringing all parties together when needed. This has only happened a couple of times that I can remember in probably the last five years.
I would rate the technical support as nine out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
A lot of my customers use three-tier infrastructure, like HPE, Dell, and Cisco Rack servers in addition to all sorts of different storage (DAS, NAS, SAN). A lot of my customers also have all of the the vendors and equipment in the mix, e.g., where they had storage from EMC, from NetApp, and from Pure with the same on the compute side with generally, all Cisco networking.
With the FlexPod solution, you are standardizing on a platform and streamlining operations. You are utilizing Cisco compute and NetApp storage, reducing the vendors, less sprawl, fewer admin tools and easier management.
How was the initial setup?
The initial deployment is straightforward. Looking at the validated designs (CVD), you can create detailed implementation plans from.
Depending on the customer, a lot of the time, the customer wants the compute environment build out first and then attach the NetApp storage and flag the environment "FlexPod" after the fact. For SAP HANA, another example, I would look for the CVD and TDI (Tailed Datacenter Integration) so the customer and I understand what the requirements will be, can build an estimate out, architect the solution, put an accurate order together and build it according to the CVD.
I find the CVD's very important and helpful as they provide good reference for the technology that is being used or considered. If a customer has it in hand ahead of time, they get a better understanding of what it takes to build the solution out. Whether we follow the CVD through, at the end of the day, that depends on the customer.
What about the implementation team?
I have actually done end-to-end deployments with my customers along with guiding them. I find it very straightforward. After I go through a few sessions with my customers, they are on board, get up to speed very fast and become very knowledgeable.
What was our ROI?
For ROI, I would have to account for all the time savings and streamlined operations. I haven't done an official ROI yet with the customers. However, when we compare cloud-spend, we are seeing for three years in cloud, we could have purchase FlexPod on-premises for less. Many customers on-premises are achieving the hybrid solution, they are adding cloud to it when and where it makes sense. As a whole, customers are still liking and buying FlexPod as it is today. On-premises spend has increased on the server and storage front with increased cloud spend.
The templates, visibility, and ease of management in my opinion reduce deployment and troubleshooting from a couple of hours or more down to a fraction of that, thinking of an incident, you will also have fewer people on the calls. You are not getting everybody from every aspect of the business, networking, storage, compute, managers, and PMs onto a conference call just to figure out what is going on. You are getting onto a call with specific people knowing what is going on from a single pane of management and alerting perspective.
Other ROI, the FlexPod solution greatly reduces the cabling in the datacenter returning back some savings by way of physical gear purchase and physical IT management time. We are seeing reduced time to troubleshoot, reduced time to inventory the infrastructure, and reduced time to deploy systems with templates. In my experience, the solution is saving easily 10 hours a week in an enterprise environment.
When customers are standardized on this technology it becomes consistent infrastructure and easier to expand when needed. The customers will also have consistent pricing and know what to budget for expansion and or builds in other datacenters. It means that the customer does not have to go out and re-architect for new solutions to fit a workload with new pricing, infrastructure, components, and then slap it all together, again. There has definitely been savings in standardization of this solution by not having to go through the whole process involving more people and adding infrastructure sprawl that needs to be managed differently with more tools, more vendors, managing many service and support contracts.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Licensing can be interesting with the UCS refresh because of Intersight integration (IMM) and SaaS, connected virtual machine or private virtual machine. I have seen some of the different licensing models, but with the new purchasing, all customers are going to have to buy some sort of Intersight licensing with the new UCS X-Series, "FlexPod". I will explore the licensing, setup costs and options with my customers as we discover, assess, architect and get some estimates going!
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I have evaluated most modern modular solutions and deep with Dell Kinetic Infrastructure MX7000 and Cisco UCS solutions. I have explored HPE synergy and Lenovo Flex but feel UCS X-Series and Dell MX7000 are the two most modern modular solutions, each with their pros and cons depending on the customers use case, workloads and desired end state.
What other advice do I have?
Again, FlexPod can be thought of as a platform with easier management and granularity to carve it up for almost any use case, a mega block of modern modular infrastructure and would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: MSP