FlexPod XCS Reviews

It is performing well. It is the data center of devices, e.g., when we are using the call locations in San Francisco and Sacramento.

If we go to different vendors, this solution looks good. Though, it is mainly manufactured to a particular size.

As per the implements, we need to bring more devices for this type of situation. It will be helpful for us to get more infrastructure export, etc.

• Its existing space
• Its design

We would like more security features.

Once it is in place, we do not touch it, so it is more stable than other solutions.

Scalability is good. 

Once our current issue is fixed, it will be good. Then, we will not have any issues on it.

Technical support has been good when we have contacted them in the past. They have been helpful. However, we have the technical experts, so we do not use their services often.

We used it for the remote setup, not the physical setup.

We upgrade it normally during downtime.

We do it ourselves when it is straightforward. When it is a complex installation, we bring their technical person onboard. 

We purchased the solution through CDW. They are a partner and knowledgeable. 

We are good and comfortable with CDW.

It is a good solution compared to other products. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It depends on the device - How much it carries, what the security is, etc.

Primary use case is for virtualization of our phone systems and our domain.

Being able to contact one place to get support, e.g., if it is the virtualization end of it, hardware, or storage. There is just one place to get support.

It has simplified our support.

• Reference design
• Ease of use
• Ease of support

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.

It has been very stable. There has been no downtime.

Over the last six years, it has scaled very well.

On scale of one to 10, I would rate them about a seven. They need to have a specific phone number for you to call in for the FlexPod solution. Some of the partner support knows if it is for FlexPod, they will get you to the right department. 

Overall, I do reach the right person when I call them and they do offer the proper guidance.

We were previously using very individual systems, then our vendor suggested this. Also, because our phone systems, we were also using reference design.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We had a managed project team which did the installation.

We evaluated one other vendor.

We chose FlexPod because we were previous customers and know their support structure.

When considering a solution, look at it in total from purchase. Then, look at what is going on five years down the road. Do a comparison of expansion, ease of expansion, and everything else.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: reliability. We receive this now from the FlexPod solution.

We use it for our inner data center and with our UCS to handle all our server data, and it's doing pretty well.

It was in place when I got to this job. Since I've been here, it has just worked, it functions fine. We haven't had any issues with it.

Ease of use: Get it set up and it just works.

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.

The stability is pretty good. For us, it just works. It's something we don't have to deal with every day, and that's a plus for us.

Whenever it was initially set up, they had a small goal. Now we're using a lot of the storage in it, so we're looking into some expansion, whether we need to do additional pods. We're in the initial stages, we're still trying to figure out how much data we're going to retain and how big we need to scale it. That's the question that we're trying to answer right now.

We have used technical support once or twice, to try to add some functionality into it that we didn't use, and they were pretty good.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup but I'm involved in the upgrading process. It's okay. I haven't worked with it in the past. I'm trying to get in with it, it's a little confusing and different from what I was doing before. But, so far, it's been okay, just minor bumps in the road.

My top criteria when selecting a vendor are that they are easy to work with and have knowledgeable engineers on the other side. When I have questions, I want to be able to get them answered easily.

Make sure to have FlexPod on the list. If you're looking at HPE or Dell EMC, put NetApp in there and take a look at them.

We use it for some 90 servers and systems. It runs our primary student information system, we have our phone systems through it, our email. Everything is running on it, all critical functions, all critical servers.

Because it's virtual, I don't have issues. All the hardware that's tied into it, whether it's memory, disk, etc., it's all seamless. It's not a big deal to make changes, it's not a big deal to upgrade. I've had drives that have failed. It's not a big deal, you just pop it out and pop the new one in and everything's fine.

I really like the architecture and I like the fact that on the storage side I can swap it out. Right now I'm on NetApp, I might go to Pure Storage. I have the flexibility. But as far as the equipment itself, the way it's all bundled together, from the UCS perspective, its rock solid.

I run all the critical applications for the university on my FlexPod solution. It needs to be up 24/7, 365. I don't need "five nines," I need "eight nines" - and it stays up.

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.

Scalability is fine, I'm on my third or fourth iteration with it. As far as I can see, I'm probably going to stick with it.

For the most part, technical support has been on the software side with VMware. As far as going through TAC, we have not had to use it too much. I've been on FlexPod now for about seven, or eight years, and the number of times I have called TAC on issues is very very small. Most of the time, if there is something, I deal with my VAR and they have been great to deal with. I've never had any major issues.

TAC has been really good. The other thing that I do is I work very closely with my account manager, he's a great guy, Tyrone. He has been great to work with and the nice thing for me is that he has brought in the right people. From a data center standpoint, Jamie has been up to see me I don't know how many times. I say, "Here's what I'm trying to do," and they say, "Here are the different options you have," and they try to help us figure out the right way to go, from their perspective. I bring in my guys and we try to put it all together.

I really like the team approach, for me, it's an advantage. I do have other options but it's just so easy to work with them. I get what I need, I get the scalability, I get the future-proofing. I don't have issues. I have too many other things to worry about. If I can eliminate one I'll take it.

Before FlexPod it was all physical servers. Believe me, the time savings, the issue reduction, I can't say enough about the solution over physical servers, to do it justice. It's night and day.

When I'm looking at a vendor, cost is always a component but that's not number one. My number one is their professionalism in getting me through from soup to nuts: from the start of the project all the way to the end, to make sure that it's running right. And on "Day Two", support. If they cover that whole project, I'm good.

The setup is pretty straightforward. The biggest thing I would say to you if you were looking at doing one is, really look at your VAR. Find one that has done it before and that will help you to make sure you don't have any major pitfalls.

I've recommended Flexpod a few times. Every one of them has been extremely happy with it. It's a solid workhorse, especially in shops like mine where we're in the small to mid-range and I don't have the people to sit there and just babysit something. I have too many things for them to do. This product is really good. I don't want to say it's a set-it-and-forget-it, but the daily, hands-on is so light. The visibility - even though I pick on the analytics - is decent. I can get my guys to manage it, but it also frees them up so I can get them working on other things, which is critical in this day and age.

It is used as a data storage infrastructure. We also use it for ERP applications, a combination of SYSPRO and SAP. 

Performance-wise, it is actually doing quite well. The end users are very happy with it.

It has improve my organization through cost savings. I belong to a cost center. I need to try and find ways to optimize solutions by actually reducing costs as opposed to running up the bill.

• TS Series storage functionality
• Scalability
• Flexibility
• Rich features

It is fairly stable. I have not heard about any issues since it was deployed.

It is definitely scalable.

I have not used it personally.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Storage is very expensive. To buy MIC cards and additional storage either on-prem or in the cloud, the IT department does not have money for it, so you need a more niche product or a more flexible way to store your data. That is the benefit that you get from this product.

The strategy of the blueprint and the roadmap were done by the global company. They did the testing in the global company, then once they were happy with the results from the test lab, it was made the standard for the global company and each zone had to comply with it.

It is always best to test it, whether in a DevOps environment or do a demo, before actually going fully live. You need to make sure it behaves right in a new environment, because there is no environment that is exactly same as another. It might work on my environment, then you try it on yours and it does not work, then you will blame the product. However, the issue might not be with the product, it might be something else. So, it is very important to make sure that you test it, you do a POC on your environment, and watch its behavior.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

It is a partnership, more than a transactional relationship. You often find if you work for a massive, FMCG company, like AB InBev, that you will not find all the feature sets that you require as off the table products. 

What I want to see:

1. When you engage your customer and say, "This is what you are trying to go through. This is the direction we are trying to go through."
2. Often our customers want required feature sets, which will help our business going forward as well as keeping the vendor fulling aligned.

The primary use case that we have for most of our customers is where they're in a converged environment and they also have file system storage. It's primarily where they're looking for a solid NAS-based appliance that also runs business-critical workloads well, with a highly available architecture.

The focus is data center workload as well as VDI workload. And once they've already got it, why not use it for file storage as well as other things to replace Windows file servers. It's easier to deal with a NetApp - which is typically more secure - than a Windows Server that you're going to have to patch constantly.

For most of our customer base, the benefit is the cooperative support model. While we tend to offer ourselves to our clients as a first call for support - because we are familiar with the environment - when they choose to call NetApp or Cisco directly, the cooperative support model means they can get passed back and forth between the two organizations freely. It works really well.

For me, it really goes back to the protocols; the fact that it can run the entire stack in terms of protocols. The integration for most of our customers is VMware; the full-stack integration. They're into the VMware environment. Also, the ability to do rapid cloning, the whole nine yards. I don't know that there's anything I wouldn't pitch it for in most data center workloads.

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.

It is an incredibly stable solution. Back when I was a customer still, we were previously an all-HPE shop that switched to UCS. Stability with UCS was unparalleled, and it's the same thing with NetApp. I have never seen a more resilient HA product out there then NetApp's solution. If I want to know that I'm putting my workload on a solution, from a storage perspective, that is going to be up 100% of the time, I'm going to choose NetApp.

Scalability is an area where NetApp has definitely grown, once they got out of strictly 7-Mode and moved over to cluster data on tap. The scale-out architecture versus scale-up architecture was more beneficial there and actually carried more weight within the industry when you started to see what some others were doing.

On the UCS side of things, I struggle with it back and forth, tying everything back through the fabric interconnects. I see that over time they're not going to scale out as well as they scale up, and you're going to have to replace them at some point. But it's still a much more scalable architecture compared to some of the competing solutions that are out there, like HPE Synergy.

I get frustrated with TAC (Cisco's Technical Assistance Center) from time to time. Whether it's TAC or NetApp, working through level-one technical support has always been a challenge because it's usually a very scripted conversation. When you're an organization like ours, where we're troubleshooting for our customers all the time, you run through the common scenarios already, before turning to support. I like to be able to work my way up a little bit more quickly, and I've learned some tricks over the years to get to a level-two or level-three tech before burning too much time. 

Especially when you look at the fact that we also sell a lot of HPE and Nimble, solely because Nimble had great tech support - when you made that phone call, they picked up immediately - that's something that really went a long way toward improving their customer satisfaction. I'd love to see NetApp and Cisco do something similar to that. 

When I was a customer we still had NetApp, but it was all 7-Mode and then we were running HPE c7000 chassis. When we switched over we went to UCS Nexus and had upgraded to CDOT with brand new clusters at the time.

With my current organization, we sell a lot of solutions in many different categories but this is my go-to solution because of my comfort level with it, for sure.

When I'm having these conversations with customers, ultimately it's based around what the solution outcome needs to look like, what are the business requirements, what are the business needs and building it out from there. The biggest thing to take into account is the challenges that they're having, whether it's performance, or specific workloads and specific needs they have. A lot of customers use NetApp as just a NAS box, and I really try to do my best to get out there and evangelize that it's far more capable than that. I would say the same thing with UCS.

I have a lot of experience with setup. I'm somebody who loves to dive into CLI on the NetApp side. I love to build the entire thing from scratch and not really use any of the setup tools that are out there. There is definitely a little bit of a learning curve for FlexPod still, especially as you're building out from scratch. But, at the same time, they have both done a great job at working to simplify that deployment process and make it more straightforward.

In terms of maintaining the same level of guidance, had we been working with one vendor as opposed to two vendors at the same time, they both have their own individual best practices and there are a lot of best practices out there. There isn't necessarily one that's really the best. I think that there is enough crossover between them that I don't know that it really makes a big difference.

I rate FlexPod at eight out of 10 because there is always room for improvement, although there is nothing off the top of my head that I can specifically call out. Going back to the simplification of IT, everybody can always do more to really simplify things because we live at a time where so much of what we do is "a little bit of everything."  As we go through the continued evolution there, that is really the biggest area that both NetApp and Cisco could really improve: to simplify management, to simplify the monitoring, and the maintenance. 

Also, bringing down that cost of entry as well and keeping the costs lower would help to us get it into more small to midsize businesses. FlexPod Express is a great product, but continue to bring down that cost of entry.

My advice is "do it." It meets the needs of small to midsize business all the way up to the large enterprise that needs to scale in a massive fashion. It's a great product, it's a great solution, and we're really happy with it.

Our primary use case is company back-end servers and services. The performance is great. 

We deployed this for our server environment in our company. Therefore, all the typical systems you would see in a commercial company are what we are running it on. It was not built for a specific use case. It was built instead for using hard servers or network-attached storage. Just putting it all together makes it simple to use.

As a whole, it is inexpensive, and it uses the least amount of parts. You do not need a lot of things to make it work. It ships in a rack, so it is very easy to deploy.

• We call it one-man management; I do not have a whole team. 
• It runs very well lights out. Set it and forget it.

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.

The scalability is awesome. With UCS and NetApp, it is very scalable. You cannot get more scalable than that.

We have used technical support mainly for performing a function, not for repair. They have provided us guidance on how to do this.

Before we went FlexPod, we had hard physical servers with networking. Then depending on the networking and a virtual environment, we had several networking environment stacks which required us to have larger servers with more than one cable, maybe even more than one media type. Now, we have a whole rack full of media-type connectors, even media converters doing the same thing.

With this particular setup, you have one 10 gig or 140 gig cable, and that is all you need. Instead of having eight cables, you only have one. We had a physical server to NetApp storage. With the components that come in FlexPod, it has enabled us to reduce connectivity down to one wire, whereas before, we had eight, 12, or 20 wires going to one server.

For design and initial setup, it was very simple.

We had technical support help us with the implementation.

I have seen value from FlexPod. The connectivity is simple. There is less to break. There is less tinkering or lost time that you do not really notice. Also, we run our capital for three to five years, so we size it for that type of environment.

I have run four FlexPod environments, and they have all been phenomenal. They have all worked until you had to turn them off. That is why I like them.

I can't imagine anybody not doing this today. But if nobody was doing this today, I would definitely push them to do it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Reputability. They have to have a good name. That is the big.
• Speed to deploy and getting the purchasing paperwork correct the first time: These are important things in our environment, because they just add to delays.

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.

I work at a state agency. With FlexPod, I can contact to NetApp. I can contact our rep and I can get the building materials from him which includes all of my switching, servers, and storage in one place. It saves me a lot of time when I have to go out and send out a bid, especially the bids for larger dollar amounts and longer terms. The more efficiently I can get those bids out and processed, the better it is, and the faster I can deliver solutions to our customers (our users).

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. 

Considering we are on our second generation of FlexPods. We are fairly happy with them. For the most part, the system is a rock. Whenever we have needed it, it has always been there. That is the key

It has never fallen out from under us when we were trying to do a critical push.

We haven't hit any limits as of yet. Our most recent purchase is actually a 3.6 petabyte raw system. It is a 360, 10TB drive, which, at the time, is the largest they could do. It is an E-Series, it is more storage then we know what to do with right now.

We are only using about half of it right now, so the scale out to the future allows us to get where we want to go. We use it for a CCTV solution, so video never gets smaller, it only gets bigger because there are more cameras. More cameras with a higher resolution and higher frame rates. We made sure that we purchased a system which would will grow with us and scale with us as we need it to.

Unfortunately, we had had to use technical support a few times, but for nothing major. We have not had any major failures, usually it is just your typical drive. We have 1500 spinning disks, so we have a drive die here and there. Most of the time, we do not have to do a whole lot. Usually a drive shows up, we slap it into the system, and it is good to go. 

They have been good working with our newer administrators, who are not as familiar with the storage platforms. They over take them, do the upgrades, or walk them through the deduplication processes. 

We can call them with anything. We also have a TAM who helps and facilitates a lot. Once we get to the back-end texts, we never have a hassle, even if they determine that it is a VMware or Cisco issue. It does not matter. They are always willing to stay on the phone, all we have to do is open a case with the other provider, and everybody works together and says,“Here is what we found.” 

Environments that I worked with have always been hodgepodge. We are not huge right, but HBMSUs were even older than when EVAs were popular, but those were limited to block storage only. Yet, in the organization I am in, they were limited to Fibre Channel, therefore going to a FlexPod and having the flexibility to do NFS, CIS to do Fibre Channel, ISCSI, etc., it doesn't matter. We can do it all in one array for whatever vendor solution that we pick, whatever storage they say we need, whatever hardware they say we need, we have it. We have the flexibility to put it all away.

It was very straightforward. Each solution is a little bit different: Everything from the E-Series being the simplest to MetroCuster being the most complicated, but they have all been relatively straightforward to setup. We have been using NetApp services for most startups, so this has been a big benefit, especially with technology that we did not necessarily understand right off the bat. 

Occasionally, we utilize support for upgrades. They do the prechecks, make sure the firmware is up-to-date, and run our baselines through to ensure everything is good. 

One of the NetApp consultants, Patrick Rodrigue, has always come out and helped us.

It is a little more difficult in government because we do not track that much on the soft dollar side. They look at it more as a capital investment. However, I can tell you from when I started there, when I started with the organization and we put our first FlexPod in our downtime has significantly been reduced.

From that prospective, if we look at our return on investment, we had have more productivity uptime. Our end users are obviously happier and IT is not constantly getting a black mark from the business because tech has not been worked.

Make sure you understand the technology that you need, and anytime that you are buying any storage make sure you understand storage. Do not just buy storage based on what somebody sells you in terms of IO or throughput. Buy storage based on the solutions you need, the technologies you need, and what will make your life a lot easier down the road.

It is not so much that we need to invest in FlexPod. I work pretty closely with all of our vendors, and a lot of times, we look and we evaluate. We evaluate all the available solutions out there. It does not matter whether it is a FlexPod or if it is one of the illegal EMC counterparts. We evaluate them all. We look at everything from Nimble Suite and the big brands, like FlexPod. Every time we go out and we evaluate solutions with their flexibility. The flexibility of a FlexPod wins out every time.

Having an extremely cost effective solution which is a pain in the butt to manage, a pain in the butt to support, or overly complex does not really do us any good. It ends up just costing us, even though we do not track money. It ends up costing us time, which in turn, costs us money, and management does look at that. 

We look at performance. We look at the available options and how they unified a platform, especially when it comes to storage. Recently, we were comparing FAS units to a VNX from EMC. The big difference and big selling point for a FAS unit was the data filer with virtualized block put right on top of it. We do not have to maintain separate controllers. The VNX had to have a Solera and a clearing head in it in order to do block and file based storage. We had to separate discs at a point in time. This is a few years ago, so some of it has changed since then. However, when I talk about simplicity to manage, it also goes into cost. 

On the EMC side, I would have had to have dedicated disc per file and dedicated discs for block-based storage. On the FAS side, I could do whatever I wanted. I just had a big disk pool and I could divide it up however I wanted.

We purchased through CDW. They were knowledgeable about the solution. They won the bid. It was very simple with us. We sent it out for a bid and they came back with the lowest cost on the response.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Cost is always important, but it is not our base. We look at performance, availability, overall usability, and simplicity.