FlexPod XCS Reviews

The vendor delivers a fully-configured prebuilt system with a certain baseline on it. We can ship it to five continents. They can roll them into place, plug in two power cords and six network cables, and we are off to the races.

Remotely, we have installed 230 systems globally (no domestic) in the past 22 months.

The product is pretty good for our environment. It is overkill for our environment. In places that we are putting these, it could serve 2000 to 3000 users and it has to serve 50 users for us. It is a sledgehammer system approach, in that we are putting systems which are not necessarily rightsized, but they are redundant because they are going to places which are fairly isolated.

• Integrated support: It is all under one support contract. 
• The convergence is excellent. 
• It is number one in reliability.

It is a stable solution. The downtime that we experience are typically related to power or facility issues in countries which have less than stable power, or it may be related to WAN outages in places that do not have solid telecom services.

It is scalable. We could throw another host server or shelf in there. We have Nexus switches at the top of the stack. If the hardware survives, the product will probably last us ten years.

Generally, tech support has been really good. Where we have issues, the vendor steps in and assists. It has been very good.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

Cisco NetApp products are a pretty die-hard.

It is for video solutions. It saves us a lot of money in our environment. My job is to make sure that the government saves money. 

The use case for us is that many users are able to use this when they travel out of the country. With computers right now, all you need to do is log into the website to access the resources, then you can use them in your flexible solution.

Right now, we are trying to deploy on multiple laptops. Using a VDI, which is part of FlexPod solutions, we are able to do this. You can use it on cellphone, iPad, etc.

The flexibility: I used to do the video blog solutions. It is very easy, because with NetApp, a lot of people use NetApp. There is more flexibility to configure with Cisco laser switches.

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 product is robust, stable, and has flexibility. 

It is very scalable.

I would rate technical support as a 10 out of 10. They are good and responsive.

At my previous job, I used to use Vblock, Dell 7000 series (from Dell EMC, Cisco, and BMC).

It was pretty straightforward. I was the main engineer during the initial setup.

• Read the white paper solution online about the product. 
• Engage with the engineers.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Relationship is the key, so they respond better. We may need an onsite engineer to come and do an evaluation for us. 

Our use case is for a life sciences cloud offering.

It makes us more lateral and faster to production.

Quick deployment.

I have not really heard any complaints from our storage engineers.

It is pretty flexible. We are able to deploy faster.

I have not personally used support. 

We were using a different solution between Hitachi and other NetApp solutions. 

We switched to FlexPod for its flexibility and quicker deployment. Also, we use other NetApp products.

I was involved in the networking side of the initial setup. It was pretty straightforward.

We did the installation with a core internal team. We had some NetApp help for the storage guys, but for the network portion, it was more self-explanatory.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: flexibility and licensing costs.

We use FlexPod to simplify support, to accelerate troubleshooting by using the FlexPod in integrating. Whether it's a VMware or a UCS Cisco problem, or a Nexus problem, it makes support a lot simpler.

It keeps us on track. You have to stay FlexPod-certified, you have to really stay on track with your updates, but the troubleshooting and support aspects are really where it's the biggest bang for the buck.

Unified support. Being able to get a vendor from one company or another company on the line without having to go back through the call queue.

It's been very stable. I have no issues with it.

It scales fine, all three components are able to scale. If I need to throw on another chassis, I throw on another chassis. If I need more storage, I expand my NetApp portion of it. It's been easy.

Although it's really hard to automatically get the correct person the first time, what you can do is get someone from one stack, say VMware, and if they say, "Hey, it's not a VMware problem, it's a networking problem," they can loop in the Cisco person, give them all the information, and we can troubleshoot the Cisco or the networking portion of it. They might say, "Hey, you know what, it's storage latency. Let's loop in the NetApp partner." They can all talk in the backend and compare logs, versus me having to open three tickets and wait.

It allows me to loop in support from three different companies and not have to open a ticket with each company, and then have them say, "Send me the logs." Then have them say a couple hours later, "Well, we looked at the logs. It's not us. Go to the next guy." And then you go to the next guy and the next guy says, "Well, send me the logs, describe the problem." He takes a couple of hours, looks at the logs and says, "Hey, it's not us, it's the other guy."

We used physical servers, different storage, older legacy equipment.

The most important criteria when selecting with a vendor are 

• reliability
• technical expertise
• speed in response time.

The setup was pretty straightforward. We obviously engaged a reseller to help us with it. But putting the different components together is pretty straightforward.

We didn't evaluate others. We decided to go with NetApp and that drove the decision every place else. We went with the Cisco UCS chassis because that fit our solution.

Do your research. It's good for our business case but maybe it doesn't fit your particular business needs, or maybe there's a better solution out there. In our circumstance, it fit our needs and has performed as advertised.

We are using it in two cases. 

1. We are using it for a database solution, so we're moving all of our 12G database systems onto Oracle UCS with flash as the hot store. We are still using spinning disk as the cold store. Initial tests are going really well. We're actually moving our first big load on in a couple of weeks. 
2. We are using Oracle VM Citrix-based hypervisor, full solution, with FlexPod as the repo on the back-end. All the guest nodes are running on UCS B200 M4s. We have A700, A300, and A200 on the back-end for various slavers and pulls, and they are all working great.
   

We just put our first full workloads on it about a month ago. Since then, everyone has been saying after booting it, this was their fastest startup ever in that environment. Thus, it is working well so far.

For the management side of our UCS, it is a single pane of glass for multiple people, whether it is data center, sysadmin, or server deployment. 

On the UCS side for server profile, there is a type of layer of abstraction from the actual hardware. It is a lot easier to do hardware replacement, as long as you are Fibre Channel booting, you can just replace hardware which breaks and have things come right back online.

Flash obviously just adds speed and bandwidth to everything.

The most valuable features in a data center, or parts of it, are footprint and power consumption. The flash side is the first time that Moore's Law breaks. It gets smaller, and also takes less power.

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.

We are pretty new, but so far, we have not had issues on the flash side. We just moved our first production workloads onto it about six to eight weeks ago. We did not find MTBF early.

We purchased what we needed, so there is some room for scalability. We went big with the A700, thus we are using the 15TB SSDs. So far, so good.

From a customer perspective, it has been up to us to make sure that we get both NetApp and Cisco involved when we have had an issue. Unfortunately, we cannot just contact one side and they contact the other vendor to sort of work it out in the background, leaving you in the loop. We are interested in what is going on, but we have felt that we have had to pull the two sides together to make the FlexPod service side of it work to our benefit.

They have worked with us to sort things out. Admittedly, we are running the bleeding edge of things. We are using Oracle UEK, which was not necessarily on either side's support matrix right upfront. Therefore, we have had some issues getting both sides' corporate to play nice. Eventually, it did get sorted out, and we are getting these things resolved.

We previously worked with physical servers. We had a lot of HPE c7000 class. We started with RLX, which was pre-HPE. HPE bought them. 

We have played with the P class and C class, doing a couple different proven concepts along the way. We had Dell and Cisco, and some other people all come in, and they taught their stuff.

This time around, from the managed solution side of it, Cisco is what sold us. Hardware is hardware, but how you put the solution together was the selling point for us. To be able to get something saying, "You build it like this." Not, you have a bunch of parts, what do you want to do with it? This is what a lot of the other vendors are still doing. They are tailoring hardware to your workload after you have bought hardware. 

As opposed to finding the solution you need, helping you build it upfront, presenting the hardware and dock, then showing you how to build it. This is what is nice for us. While a little rough, once you have built it, the support matrix says, "Here is newest version of firmware. Here is newest version of something else." Then, off you go. They do not necessarily take all iterations of change back to the lab to recertify them. 

You work with the vendor partnership to keep you in compliance going forward. This is one of the reasons that I want to see the NetApp and Cisco partnership hold together. Otherwise, we are right back where we were before. NetApp has an update and Cisco has an update, and neither one of them have tested it with each other. 

Setup was pretty easy. This was our first venture into UCS at all. It was a steep learning curve figuring it out. We are using Central to manage six different domains, so getting that hierarchy put together upfront so we could do global templating across all those domains was a little rough, mostly from a conceptual standpoint. It deploys easily now that we have got it out.

We have been a NetApp shop forever, so that part was a piece of cake.

Make sure that you engage as much with whom you are buying from as a partnership, not just as a purchase. 

We did a PoC with four different vendors to test out combinations of a hardware build. Storage was kind of a given as we have been a NetApp shop forever. We have gone through a couple other ones. We really like 3PAR, but that's a different story.

The hardware has been rock solid so far. It has gone up easy. It runs well. We have not had issues with it.

Pay attention to what you need upfront as you are building it. Know the workload that you are trying to solve with it. Make sure you are buying for performance, not just capacity. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It is important that they care about the business that we do after sale. It is one thing to get a quote, obtain the parts, and make sure you have all the right things upfront. Your business is going to change the next day, especially for a business like us. We are in a multi-customer type of environment where somebody will have a new bright idea tomorrow. Therefore, we need to be adaptable. It is important to have a partnership with the people that we purchase from. Thus, ongoing modifications can continue to be part of the conversation, not just, "I sold you something. Let me know when it is time to renew your contract."

We have had two FlexPods for five years now. We're currently purchasing a third one. We have never had any problems with them in that time. We are using it for hosting COREmanager and Unity Connection. So far, so good. Its performance is great.

We purchased them when we changed from physical to virtual. We really didn't have a choice but to go virtual. So, I would not be able to tell you how it improved things because it was a different environment entirely. But it definitely streamlines things.

For me, the most valuable feature is the stability. It's one less worry.

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

We have had no stability issues at all. We had a power failure in our data center. They went down. As soon as we restored the power they came up and everything was good.

For us, we were looking strictly at three different data centers. So as far as scalability is concerned, we didn't build one on top of another one. We went for stability more than scalability.

It has never gone down. I think we had one drive go down once, and we opened a tech case. They sent us a new drive.

We were using physical servers, Cisco physical servers. We switched because it was mandatory for updating COREmanager to 8.x, it was mandatory to go VMware.

For us, the most important criteria in a vendor is that they need to pick up when we call.

I coordinated the initial setup, but I wasn't necessarily hands-on. But it was pretty straightforward.

We had other vendors, but we had NetApp in the house as part of our storage, we also had Cisco in the house. It made sense to combine those two and go with FlexPod.

In terms of advice, I can only tell you about FlexPod, I don't have any other solution. I would say definitely go for it.

Our primary use for it is in the healthcare market. We have a lot of customers using it because they want to have some flexibility with storage and compute. That is the reason we are selling it in the healthcare market.

It's much cheaper than the old legacy stuff, especially the storage. It means that our customers don't have to take care of separate storage, separate compute, but can combine them. It streamlines things, especially for development.

The flexibility of using it for compute as well as the flexibility of the storage itself.

When it's running, it's running. It's fine. We are impressed with the product. At the beginning, because it was new for us, there were some issues, but now, after some implementations, it has been okay.

It's scalable.

Technical support has been very helpful, and also very polite. They guided us through the process, followed up with us. I've had a good experience with them.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We also looked at HyperFlex. HyperFlex is also compatible but I think NetApp SolidFire is more robust.

Our primary criteria when selecting a vendor are to get support, a good solution, one that our customers are happy with.

My advice would be, try it, buy it, see what you can do with it and get some experience with it. With that experience, you can better sell it to the customer.

We use it for virtualizing infrastructure and also for the virtual cloud system.

It gives us pretty solid support from either Cisco or NetApp as well as an all-in-one infrastructure. We don't need a storage expert to manage everything for us.

• Easy management
• High performance 
• A single point of support

It's pretty stable. There is a small issue with the NetApp and another small issue with Cisco UCS plates, there is a failed disk, but we got a replacement right away so it's pretty solid.

It's very easy to extend it, add more chassis, more storage capacity.

We use both NetApp and Cisco for support. I would rate the support at eight out of 10.

Before FlexPod we were using IBM. We switched because it's all about unifying the systems, converging the systems. We felt we should have a solution from network to storage to the server, and computing power, from the same vendor, all in one solution; not take pieces from different vendors and put them together.

When choosing a vendor the most important criteria are the vendor's reputation and tech support.

We bought a few chassis because we have different locations, different data centers. For the first location, we got help from NetApp and Cisco. For the next few locations, we mostly did it by ourselves.

We initially spoke with Cisco and they recommended this solution.

I would advise doing a proof of concept, see it first.

Overall, I would rate FlexPod an eight out of 10. It's fast, solid, and it keeps improving, adding new features. The support is very good. There have even been times we didn't realize there was an issue and we have automatically received a replacement; all through "call home."