FlexPod XCS Reviews

The solution suits converged infrastructures, where the customer gets a complete system with Cisco servers, NetApp Storage, and Cisco switches.

FlexPod XCS needs to improve its pricing. 

I have been working with the product since September. 

The tool's pricing is fair. 

The tool is recommended for companies with an employee count between 50-500. Bigger companies look for individualized solutions. You must look for a different solution if you have a complicated or bigger infrastructure. I rate the product a seven out of ten. 

We're using it for general purpose virtualization or converged, as well as in specific cases like electronic medical records. That is the big one.

In the partner space, it gives us a validated solution that we can deploy and it's very repeatable for us. It helps our customers in that they can have confidence that it's going to work exactly as it's supposed to.

It has also helped reduce troubleshooting time—easily hours per week—on architecture configs.

FlexPod’s prevalidated architectures are very important to our organization. It has to do with predictability for applications that are always up and that sometimes are life-safety or life-critical applications. Especially in healthcare, it is absolutely critical that we have a validated performance platform. It has to work every time.

A lot of small things could be improved. I'd like to see better integrations with some of the third-party tools, like Terraform. That would be good. We use Ansible to deploy and that's good, but it's slower than it needs to be.

I've been using FlexPod for more than five years.

The stability is a 10 out of 10.

We haven't done much scaling yet on this most recent one, but in general, the scalability is very good. It's a 10 out of 10. It's very easy to grow very big.

The technical support is good. It's not perfect, things never are, but we've had very few issues. It's also relatively new. We'll see in a year. Maybe my opinion of it will go down, but it's been good so far.

Positive

I have experience with Vblock, Vxblock, and FlashStack.

With FlexPod, we have a lot of validation around performance. Especially in the medical world, it's a very well-known entity, so we don't have to struggle a lot with finger-pointing. Those are all good reasons why we picked it.

It is a complex deployment, but we have done it a lot of times so it's not that hard. We have it all scripted. We have a ton of automation in the deployment process.

For healthcare, it is almost always on private cloud. That is still very much the standard. It's mostly Azure and some AWS, a little bit of GCP, and some others. One of the big EMR providers has its own hybrid cloud that is purpose-built.

The most recent one I did was a big EMR. It's a moderately sized NetApp AF series and a bunch of Cisco UCS with NDS storage. It is a reference flash tag straight out of the CBD with 150 nodes.

Our customers definitely see ROI. We generally model the TCO for them over time and we're generally pretty accurate. They usually get their payback on the product-based converged solution in two years or less. They usually avoid having to add headcount.

The solution's flexible consumption has definitely reduced our customers' TCO. It allows them to do more without their having to add staff to support it. The flexible consumption is a good option for some customers and not for others. We have some who love it and some that don't.

They're going to spend the money on the solution one way or the other, and flexible consumption lets them spread it out over time and pay as they grow. That's great for some, while others just want to do the CapEx because of tax reasons or the like. Neither one is better. They're just different and they're both fine.

Overall, the solution works pretty well. The biggest complaint I have from customers is the cost.

The flexibility, operational efficiency, and scalability of FlexPod are very good. We also use other products too, like FlashStack, and these solutions are equally good or similar in most ways. I have a very good opinion of FlexPod, and we've been using it for a long time.

In terms of comparing converged infrastructure solutions and picking the most cost-effective one, you have to pick what works for you. Think about who's going to support it. If you're hiring a vendor, like me, you want to make sure that you trust me and that I'm going to be around. If you're doing it in-house, make sure that you're picking the one that your people can run.

In general, we use it for our storage and computing work loads.

We had challenges finding the right partner regarding performance, flexibility, and support from the vendor. FlexPod is an all-inclusive solution, so we found the right one.

We have about 1,000 end users and 2,500 endpoints.

It provides a good, stable base for all our workloads.

FlexPod’s prevalidated architectures are quite important to our organization because it guarantees that things work together as expected.

FlexPod has helped reduce troubleshooting time by 30% on architecture configs.

The most valuable features are performance and compatibility between devices.

The native integration between different platforms is quite important because it is secure and works together without any interfering issues.

The flexibility, operational efficiency, and scalability of FlexPod are quite high. 

I would like to see increased performance.

I have been using it for about 10 years altogether. Since we have been using NetApp and Cisco devices for several years. Since FlexPod has been available, we have been using it.

I would rate the stability as nine out of 10.

I would rate the scalability as eight out of 10.

When we need the support, their reaction time is quite good. I would rate it as eight out of 10.

Positive

We previously had several components for different workloads, using HPE and other storage providers. After that, we switched to NetApp and Cisco devices. In the end, we switched over to FlexPod's integrated and support solution.

I mainly did the network part of the deployment. My inclusion tests were quite straightforward.

We used NTS in Austria.

We have seen a reduction in support needs.

FlexPod has reduced our overall TCO and simplified our operations. 

The pricing and licensing are quite expensive. However, compared to other solutions, it is okay.

We evaluated EMC and HPE. In the end, we chose FlexPod. The differences between solutions were the flexibility and performance aspects as well as the cost.

It is quite important to have a converged solution. Then, you can have all the components responsible for stability and performance together in one place.

In general, the solution is quite good. I expect improvements in every area over time.

I would rate the product as eight out of 10.

We started to move from rack-mounted servers and we needed to make a virtualized environment. One of the requirements for virtualizing all our bare metal infrastructure was to move to a solution with components such as VMware and central storage. We started to look for the environments and were seeking out which was the best version with the possible solution that was in the market and we found NetApp FlexPod, one of the most flexible and easy to use, ready-to-market solutions. We chose NetApp FlexPod due to its flexibility and ease.

The solution is flexible. It's very easy to implement together with the Cisco UTF firewall. We have a computing environment based on the Cisco UTF firewall for computing. The storage we have is the NetApp 3200 series. The virtualized technology is VMware. Together, these three components are very easy and flexible to implement.

I am not familiar with the new technology from NetApp, and therefore am unsure of the latest in terms of FlexPod's native integration with hyper-scalers. Most of the solutions that run now, run on top of the FAS drive or FAC drive. This will improve more and will gain a new level of performance for the new kinds of solutions and technology that are coming out.

We still use FlexPod as a parallel environment. It is a very nice technology. We don't have any pains with this environment yet. That's why we still run this in parallel as we didn't finish the switchover to the new technology.

We use FlexPod's pre-validated architectures. At the time that we designed the solution, it was based on pre-validated architecture, and we had support from the company that we worked with in order to re-validate the solution. With this integration, we needed some support from a specialized technician. Since we used pre-validated architecture, it was simple to improve. We were able to download and implement this solution with no effort. We did this ourselves.

We feel confident that we did something that is custom. The time to market is also fast with pre-validated architecture. We know that if we follow the rules we will get business as soon as possible.

The flexibility, operational efficiency, and scalability of the solution altogether are good. We have two main sites. With this user-friendly environment, we can make both sites replicate each other. When we talk about business continuity, it's easy. We can take the key indicators and our implementation is ready and works as we need it to. There’s also flexibility to scale in. We ran out of capacity after five years and we could scale it in within one or two months and get back to business with confidence.

The solution has helped shift capital and resources to other IT initiatives or projects that had previously taken a backseat due to budget constraints. This is not due to the supplier. Rather, it's due to the kind of organization that we are. We are a nonprofit organization. What can we do is create a government license that provides us with designated suppliers, in this case, NetApp. A special government license can be created with a low price or some other agreement in order to reduce the budget.

The solution helped reduce troubleshooting time on architecture configurations. It's very easy to understand that we follow a pre-validated design when we have good implementation. It's very easy to solve any issues that may arise. We only have to compare what happened before to what happens now and what has changed during that period. Of course, if this is beyond our skills, it's very easy to ask for support to help.

It is difficult to say how much time was saved as we didn't face any outage problems. We didn't face any downtime problems throughout the years. Compared to what we had before, it was not a centralized storage environment. Centralizing changed a lot as we came from a decentralized storage environment to a centralized storage environment and we used a converged technology in this environment. On one technology, it can run on a schedule, it can run cyber channels and it can run any kind of block operation protocols or even file operation protocols for storing the files or the data.

When you are in this kind of environment, you reduce a lot. It's one environment where you can do three or four connections to the storage. Then, you can use any kind of environment with the same solution.

We also reduced our total cost of ownership and simplified operations with the solution's flexible consumption. This is a bundle which is made of three environments, the virtualization and the computing nodes we used with Cisco and the centralized storage with the NetApp, this reduced a lot of space.

It reduced the total cost of ownership. It comes from a different platform and different architecture, and one needs to have more than three or four skills to support their environment. With the bundled environment, we only need one. It's very easy to support this kind of situation.

It would be quite difficult to understand the amount of money saved. As a government organization, we use our partners. Most of the time, when we implement change for new technology, we need to coordinate as people are not adept to change easily. They need to be trained. This is another cost we have to account for and pay for.

With this product, however, we had no difficulty in maintaining the same team. They transferred over from the old environment to the new one. We saved right there.

I ran two data centers. Each data center had no less than one hundred rack-mounted servers. When we consolidated, we reduced our support costs, space costs, and energy consumption costs. Money is saved across all those variables.

The big problem now is that all of the technology is reaching its end of life and we didn't refresh anything at the right moment. Now, we are moving to a new solution. During these 10 years, it was very nice to work with NetApp, Cisco, and VMware together, especially with NetApp storage. We didn't have any problems during this time. I could count only three or four times that we asked for support and this was only to change hard drives that were blocking something. It's been issue-free.

NetApp needs to improve the user interface to make it easier to work in this environment. The older version is poor. However, I'm not sure what they are doing to upgrade the look and feel of the newer version.

NetApp needs to talk to the clients and see what the clients want out of the cloud solutions in order to move more effectively into the cloud environment. It would be ideal if customers could go to a dashboard. They need to sell not only the infrastructure but also the service and both need to be impressive. That's why NetApp should talk to clients as much as possible. The closer they are to them, the more understanding they will have in terms of what a customer wants. 

If the solution offered more workshops and presentations, it could be helpful to lure clients.

I've been using the solution since 2010.

It's quite difficult to understand the tech support in this kind of environment. The three components that make up this bundle that we created in 2010, composed of VMware, Cisco, and NetApp, make it quite difficult. I cannot understand what kind of error it is if I don't understand where it comes from. I need to figure out if this is a VMware, Cisco, or NetApp problem.

I suggest creating a team inside NetApp, Cisco, or maybe VMware, and this team should have the skills to support the companies that support this kind of solution. This will be good as you will reduce the amount of time that you need to solve the problems. Right now, when we call NetApp, NetApp support does not understand what the solution needs and calls Cisco to ask for support. There needs to be some sort of contract or strategy that is better for the client, where the three are integrated together.

That being said, I've never had problems with NetApp, even in these situations. I know a tech professional who was able to guide me through the support process. The contact that I had with NetApp had information that can be found in the web guide. I never had any issues when I needed to get support from NetApp during this period. I've been mostly very happy with them.

Positive

We're transitioning to another solution right now. The main problem is that we don't have support anymore from NetApp due to the fact that the solutions we designed are end-of-life. We need to design a new solution.

The solution is very easy to implement. 

We started with ONTAP, version 7.0. We have NetApp’s 3200 storage series and that is what we use now. It's still version 7.0, with the live firmware.

We are a government company. When we design a new solution, we cannot point to the technology that we want to use. It's against the government's rules. We need to design a general solution with the main points that we want to cover, and the main points that we want to remain. We will sometimes have to choose between several technologies and several offers that we find on the market. That's why most of the time it's difficult to keep the same technology for long.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. It is a very flexible solution. Its support, usability, and even the scalability of it has been great.

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. 

One of the most valuable features is the interoperability between the devices, between the Cisco, NetApp, and VMware. That's always nice. 

The supportability is also good, the fact that we can call one vendor and they'll help us. We don't need to call our vendor, Softchoice. We could call NetApp and/or Cisco and/or VMware, and they would all help us. We wouldn't be pushed away to the sides. They're not going around blaming people. The solution is sold as-is and it's supported by the three parties. They have to support it, and that's nice.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps are also extremely important in our organization. We don't always have time to research products and solutions ourselves. By going with a validated design, we're assured that it's the latest and greatest. It's supported by the three major vendors that we deal with. That's not really something we could find with other vendors, although, to be fair, we haven't looked around.

I'd like them to bring back the GUI for NetApp ONTAP. They changed the interface in version 9.8, and it's not great. In 9.9 they've tried to make it better, but its still as useful as 9.7 and before. 

We've been using FlexPod for about eight years.

It's extremely stable.

The way that we have NetApp built, with HA, it provides redundant workloads. The storage failover is pretty transparent, so when there is an outage, none of our workloads is affected. It's proven and tested. They throw the term "non-disruptive" around a lot, and it actually is non-disruptive. Obviously, I was hesitant when I read that, and I wanted to test it for myself. But I've personally been involved in some of the storage work that's been done over the past two years, and I can agree that when NetApp says it's non-disruptive, it is, in fact, not-disruptive.

Over the years we've expanded our FlexPod, our NetApp nodes, from four to six.

It's scalable. If we need capacity, if we need to scale up we can purchase new blades and have more powerful CPU and RAM. If we need to scale out and have more space, it's pretty flexible. Whether we need to do storage, compute, or network, they are all components that we can just purchase and hook in.

NetApp has definitely been there for us. They're a good partner of ours. We also use our third-party vendor called Softchoice. They're our primary support guys and we go to them first, and then they will open a ticket with Cisco or NetApp or VMware, if necessary. When it comes to NetApp, when we have needed help their support has helped us. The unified support for the entire stack is extremely important. The fact that we can just call one vendor and get support on it is a huge bonus.

Positive

NetApp has been with our organization since before I started working here, although back then it wouldn't have been a FlexPod solution. It would have been a piecemeal solution of HP and NetApp.

It's expensive, but when you want entreprise services and support you pay for what you get. 

We still require the proper skills and the proper people in place to manage it. It's still a network. It's still storage. It's still virtualization. I wouldn't consider it a small-office type of solution. It's definitely a data center or enterprise-level solution. But it is a little bit simpler than if we were to piece together the solution ourselves with other vendors. If we were to get an HP and build ourselves a NAS, for example, or even if we would get something that's not supported the way that our FlexPod solution is, it could be more complicated.

I don't think the solution has saved our organization in terms of capital expenditures because we do upgrades, either because we need space or because we need compute, every year. But I wouldn't say that's a bad thing either. It's not like we have drastic spending. It's a matter of trending. If the business is doing well and the application and the platform are doing well because we're onboarding more clients, we need more compute and storage.

We use FlexPod XCS to provide primary storage for production data. 

The tool's most valuable features are the flexibility and ability to adapt to redundancy. 

FlexPod XCS' pricing could be cheaper. You need to find the right person for support. 

I have been using the product for ten years. 

The tool's stability is rock solid. 

FlexPod XCS is scalable and flexible. 

FlexPod XCS' support has always been there for us. 

Positive

We evaluated HP, Dell, IBM and Cisco. 

The tool helps to save TCO by consolidating our workloads into smaller footprints. 

FlexPod XCS helps us save money. 

I rate it an eight out of ten. 

FlexPod is a converged infrastructure consolidating the data center and server forms and providing a new contract. It's used primarily for reducing virtual machines, so FlexPod is used for consolidation, optimization, and rationalization purposes.

The most valuable feature of FlexPod is that it allows you to get the old compute storage and the network switch or the fabric of the network in one box. You can use pods to have a tiny cloud in the box, which is one of the best features of FlexPod.

In FlexPod, I also found the utilization and virtualization of resources better because, typically, you'll buy and trigger a scroll of physical servers and virtual servers, so with FlexPod, the process becomes more disciplined.

As FlexPod is more of a consolidator, it gives you a compute, a network, and storage in a single box. While that's cool, when transforming a data center from what it is today into what it needs to be tomorrow, you must also pay attention to resiliency, security, and performance. FlexPod will do very well on the average app, but there's room for improvement in performance and the data center side, which should be optimized, but that's not a focus of Cisco.

Cisco is a network company that's transitioning to provide a converged infrastructure solution, which means it wants to be more than just a network and provide network storage and computing, so obviously, you don't become a highly performant entity overnight in the database space, which is what Cisco needs to do. Cisco can do that well because it supports open-source databases within the converged infrastructure it delivers to the client, but there's always a handicap in that area.

There's room for improvement in the setup and configuration of FlexPod as well.

I started using FlexPod in 2017, and the last time I used it was in January 2022.

The stability of FlexPod depends on what you are putting in there. The client I used the solution for was coming off a mainframe he had for many years, so the question he asked me was, "Can FlexPod deliver the same performance, scalability, reliability, and resilience that the old legacy system gave the company?" The answer is yes, so, to that extent, FlexPod is stable, but this question becomes a bit more around nuance because it depends on what you are loading. For example, if you use it for the banking industry and try to drive high-performance, high-scale applications, FlexPod may not be as reliable.

The initial setup for FlexPod is not straightforward, but it's relative, meaning you need the talent to set it up. It has a two-layer setup and configuration. One is the infrastructure layer, and the second is the provisioning of the application layer.

For example, simply setting up the box is not enough. You need to set it up and configure the box for it to be an environment. That environment could be for testing, development, or production, and you want a controlled mechanism to do that. Even if the physical entity is ready, you still have to fire up some virtual machines. For example, if you have clients with VMware hypervisors and others, you need a tool to do that, such as a VMware tool if you're working with VMware products.

This is not necessarily a Cisco issue, so I'm not saying that the process for setting up FlexPod is too complicated. Cisco is trying to provide you with a tiny cloud data center in a box, and it's converging all the infrastructure into a single box, which means you must make that box work for you by firing up VMs, and then loading the proper application on top of that, whether you built it or you bought it. There's a lot of complexity on that level that Cisco can work on or can partner to optimize, so it's less painful for the end user or customer.

I'm using the Cisco product, FlexPod.

I can recommend FlexPod to others if it's used correctly or for the right purpose. You get into trouble if you use a tool for the wrong purpose.

For what I was using FlexPod for, which was for a client that didn't have a lot of volume and stress in terms of the applications, I'm rating the solution as eight out of ten. However, if FlexPod will be used for highly transactional, high-volume applications, it's a four out of ten.

We were trying to come up with a unified vendor for a hyper-converged solution. Our deployment model was SASE.

Using the solution definitely opened our eyes to how our current infrastructure wasn't performing as well as it should. It made us redefine a couple of RFPs for vendors to provide new types of solutions.

It also helped reduce troubleshooting time on architecture configurations. Our troubleshooting time has dropped by at least 25 percent.

We really like the integration between NetApp and Cisco and how fluid the transition would have been from our previous compute and storage vendor.

FlexPod's native integration with hyperscalers is one of the reasons we chose to look at it and NetApp. That is one of the key components of our infrastructure. That native integration is very important. All of our servers, everything that we have on-prem, runs on it. We haven't moved fully to a hybrid or in-cloud model yet, so we need to be able to run things locally for operational purposes.

I used it at a previous job for about six months and we evaluated it at my current organization for 90 days.

We had no qualms with the stability of the solution. It was up for the entire duration with no problems. We ran into zero issues.

We had contemplated getting multiple FlexPods, but once we evaluated them to fit our models, we determined that one would probably do. The scalability is there, but our exposure to it was not relevant.

We had it spread out across four data centers in a single geographic campus. Multiple departments would have had resources on the equipment if we had gone with the solution.

Tech support from NetApp and Cisco is pretty good. We engaged them multiple times throughout our evaluations.

Positive

We did not have a previous solution.

I was involved in the original spec'ing, scoping, and architecture of the solution. But the integration and implementation was up to some other folks on the team.

We definitely saw a lot of operational cost savings using FlexPod. As far as capital outlay goes, that was a little bit too much for us to swallow and we weren't able to recognize enough savings in that area to afford it.

If the flexible consumption had really minimized our upfront spending, we definitely would have gone into it, but we found that the "cost containers" were not enough to make the operational life cycle of the FlexPod equipment worthwhile for us.

The pricing and licensing were tough to swallow. We would have liked to have had the solution be part of any state or other government GSA contracts.

Everybody wants to see a cheaper and more cost-conscious solution instead of the solutions that are out there today.

We evaluated Pure Storage, Nimble, which is now HPE, and we also took a look at some larger EMC solutions.

The flexibility, operational efficiency, and scalability of FlexPod are amazing. This product would have been the solution that we went with outside the price. The functionality and features that it provides are, bar none, the best in the industry.

The product itself is great. It is just that the cost and licensing are prohibitive.

But for someone looking for the most cost-effective solution, I would definitely tell them to consider this as one of the products to evaluate.