FlexPod XCS Reviews

I used the solution as disaster recovery (DR) for backing up the IBM Power series infrastructure. The primary site is running our core application, which is based on Java and Oracle databases installed on a SUSE Linux environment.

The solution was simple to deploy, but we faced challenges with replication between the primary site and secondary site.

The fact that all the components were integrated, and its simplicity to deploy. The deployment took less than a week since there was no networking and/or storage integration.

Compatibility issues with replication. The Oracle table formats were not working and storage replications did not work as well, until we had to introduce other components to make it work. This is a good solution, but only if its on both the DR and DC for replication compatibility.

• It's a validated architecture, so it's fairly simple to implement.
• The support is unified, so troubleshooting becomes less complicated. 
• It's very easy to expand the solution for performance and capacity growth.

Turnkey. When we put the solution in place, they're able to use the platform within a day of us being complete. It's very quick to implement.

From its prime competitor, seeing some sort of an architecture around cloud built into the solution would be great, whether that's UCS Director or vRealize Automation, something that's got a validated architecture that's ready to go for that solution would be useful.

Because it's all based off of mature hardware with UCS and NetApp and Cisco across the board, it's a very stable platform, it's very quick. There are always little things that we can improve here and there, and configuration changes depending on what the customer is doing. But for the most part, it's a very fast solution and simple to work with.

There are configuration maximums of each platform. I've yet to see an environment that we've hit those numbers on yet, but with the technologies that NetApp is releasing with All Flash, and the new blades from Cisco, we keep getting ahead of any kind of limits with technology advances.

Most technical support issues that we have with the solution as a whole are usually around specific components, a failed drive or a bad blade; generally equipment that hasn't been burned in yet so it's dead-on-arrival, and we don't know it until we get it set up. Generally, we've had pretty good luck with such equipment getting turned around pretty quickly, so we can leave the site with everything fully functional.

I'm involved in most processes from scoping the solution and design through implementation and sometimes support.

Setup for Flexpod is pretty much cut and dry. Our methodology leverages the configuration worksheets that Cisco and NetApp have put together. We have those pre-filled and vetted by the client before we arrive on site. When we get on site it's a very procedural-based implementation. The unknowns are generally limited to a handful of items and we can work through those pretty quickly. The setup is very simple, and very scripted.

The major competitors are probably EMC with Vblock, and Nutanix is bringing up competition pretty quickly, and their solution is less expensive to get in on entry-wise, so that's a real competition point.

The advantage of FlexPod, specifically against Nutanix, is that we we can expand any single component of the solution without having to expand the entire solution. So if we want to add disk or add blades, compute nodes, we don't have to add everything at once. Incremental expansion is less costly. Additionally, NetApp is a more mature company in general - as are Cisco and VMware - than Nutanix is, so their future is fairly well set, where Nutanix's future is still relatively uncertain. That's not due to product reliability issues, but just due to market acceptance and maturity as a company.

Over EMC, EMC's products are generally more complicated to use and less robust overall. With their ever-changing landscape of ownership and acquisitions and leadership challenges, it's tough to say where their products are going to land the next few years.

Don't just buy the solution that your sales guy is trying to sell you. Understand what your needs are, understand what your I/O requirements and capacity requirements are, and leverage the sales team's engineers to truly devise the solution that you're going to actually take advantage of. 

Don't get caught up in price, initially. The sales teams can always work on price. Focus on what the solution is going to do for you, and is it actually going to meet your needs. Then deal with price after that.

The validated design is a huge bit. It means that it's supportable by both NetApp and Cisco, and that means that we're doing it the industry best-practice way.

The benefit is certainly that it's compartmental. You can build a FlexPod for a small installation, you can build it for a big one. You can build a small one and grow it. It's flexible in that regard. It gives you the design and the structure to be able to expand as you need.

As a point solution, it does absolutely what it should. I'm not sure it needs any more.

Make it cheaper.

About three years.

It's great. Very stable. Nothing to complain about, so that's good.

We've engaged technical support somewhat, mainly during the configuration stage.

As I said, you've got the FlexPod system, gives you access to Cisco and NetApp support, and they'll run it through; so whichever one you're more comfortable with. My networking guys will log stuff with Cisco, and the storage guys will log stuff with NetApp, and they're happy using that support.

FlexPod is more about the way that the pod is build. We've probably used all the individual components before but never put it together. The validated design was the big thing for us.

It's fairly straightforward. It's listed out for you, so you just follow the bouncing ball around, essentially.

We're a data analyst company, looking after property data. I'm not sure this product is uniquely valuable for our industry. It certainly has some value, especially in the mergers and acquisitions space where we need to stand up some infrastructure that matches ours in a newer environment, and be able to have that standard.

It's a validated infrastructure, meaning that they're pre-validated. Cisco and NetApp have come together to essentially pre-validate against certain use cases. So a lot of the legwork and design have been eliminated.

Because all the testing and all the validation has been pre-done, a lot of that legwork does not need to be done at the user level. You can deploy faster. A lot of the solution is pre-validated, meaning that it just works out of the box.

They've just recently announced the SolidFire integration, which I think is pretty cool. We don't have any experience with that yet, but I'd like to see more details come out of that.

I don't think any solution is perfect, there are always little squeaky wheels that can be tuned, but the product works very well. It's not a perfect solution because, obviously, it doesn't always fit everybody, there are unique requirements that people have.

We've been using it more than five years.

Stability, I think it works really well.

We've had some issues where, the customer didn't necessarily know what their workload was, so they didn't necessarily know what kind of FlexPod solution they needed. But, for the most part, it works well.

It scales well. Obviously, with cluster-mode and ONTAP, you can scale nodes pretty much to what you need it to be.

I've used the FlexPod support. Cisco will take ownership of that and run with it. I can get through to the right person and they're knowledgeable, absolutely.

My industry is IT consulting, so my company has a lot of clients that are in various verticals. It can be healthcare, it can be education, so depending on what vertical they're in, they'll have a requirement to have a certain converged solution that they know that will work.

• Ease of use
• Safety
• Total cost of ownership
• Return on investment
• Cutting your sysadmin's time in half
• The single pane of glass: Where you can configure your compute and manage your storage, all from a single pane of glass, and it makes it easier on management.

Also, the 1-800 number to call for support across the multiple parts of the FlexPod. So, FlexPod is basically a joint venture between Cisco, VMware and NetApp. You call the 1-800 number and you get supported throughout the stacks.

Total cost of ownership (TCO) is key. The other things are the sysadmin's time is approximately cut in half: managing servers, building servers, deployment, and automation.

It is uniquely valuable for a company in the financial services industry. It is critical for us to use the latest and greatest in technology to have that edge against competitors in our marketplace.

Add more automation into the Cisco UCS firmware upgrade process to make it more streamlined than it is today.

I have been using FlexPod since 2012.

We have had a few deployments of FlexPod, one for production and one for the disaster recovery (DR) sites, and we have been happy with it so far.

If you do not take the time to learn the technology before deploying it, you are not going to be able to deploy it as smooth and as fast.

It is very stable. We have had it since 2012, and we have not had major issues with it. As long as you know what you do and you schedule your patching, following the processes that you have in place. You will have minor issues with it.

It scales out really well. If you need compute, all you need to do, just add more blades into your chassis. If you run out of chassis, you can just add more chassis, then you can add more blades. Same thing with the storage on the back-end, you can add more storage shelves, whether it is SSD, SAS, or All Flash.

We have definitely used the tech support on multiple occasions, like with firmware upgrades, to get their opinion, and regarding interoperability matrices for the different products. If you upgrade the firmware for the CISCO UCS, you need to ensure the firmware version that you are upgrading to is going to work with your VMware vSphere and with the NetApp ONTAP software OS.

They are knowledgeable and we get through to the right people.

I was involved in the initial setup. It is straightforward if you understand the technology and how it works. If you are new to the technology, you will require some training for your people and your team.

The simplicity of having an all-in-one solution.

Simplicity.

Make it cheaper.

About six to eight months.

It's very good.

It's very good as well.

We haven't used it.

I wasn't involved in it.

We went out to tender.

We're in finance. I don't know if this solution is uniquely valuable in our industry but it works for us. It's not perfect but it does what we expected. We haven't had any problems at all.

• The simplicity
• It's really scalable
• The integration with Cisco and NetApp is perfect

Since the customer had Cisco, he was really into Cisco, all the gear was Cisco, the network, the security, etc. It was easier to show UCS and Nexus and then to attach a NetApp storage. I can say that since we have a lot of Cisco clients, Flexpod is really valuable, because they are used to Cisco and it's easier to position NetApp.

I know about NetApp, not Cisco. So I don't know what's going on in the next release. But for NetApp, I expect with 9.3 coming out, a lot of features, more improvement of the data usage.

The memory, that you can enable flash to even increase your performance. So this will SCM.

Stability is really nice. The support of both NetApp and Cisco, the unified support, is really good.

The scalability is really good because it's not a silo. You can expand both storage-wise or network-wise or even servers, and if we pick another convergent infrastructure, it's difficult or they are locked. So you can scale either way, either vertically or horizontally.

When we are positioning against a cheaper solution it's really difficult to sell NetApp to our small customers, so it's really difficult to position. The customer has to see a lot of value. Once we have medium and bigger customers, it's really easy to position and it's perfect.

You've got flexibility within it. It's all profile driven.

And the personalities of the blades within the solution. One could fail, you just pop a new one in and you have SAN booter, you have SD cards that you can just pop right in and it's back up and running. I like the redundancy that you get with that.

It's usually a great fit for most customers, depending on the size obviously. I just feel like it's one of those golden bullets in a lot of cases, to just get something on the ground with them and to have something that they're happy with long term.

About five years now.

It's great. Haven't had any problems with it. I mean, sure there are bugs like anything else, but it's always been solid.

With any software release you're going to have false alarms and you're going to have some failures that you have to upgrade to resolve, but they're usually few and far between, which is great.

It's really scalable. UCS domains, you can just continue adding more if you need to. It's all based on how many you can plug into a set of fabric interconnects, so it's very scalable.

I've had to use tech a lot but it's always been really great. Sometimes there are some language barriers but it's always good.

It's solid compared to everything else I see out there. All these other server manufacturers don't quite have the same level of integration that the Cisco has with this product. I really do like how Cisco has pulled it all together compared to, say, Dell or any of the other manufacturers. It's just much more simple for me to work with, and eventually to customers, it's a great hand-off when it's time to leave.