FlexPod XCS Reviews

I think the most valuable features include it being scalable. We got the product and we have a small environment, but it was able to be scalable to when we started to grow. So I think that was one of the bigger features.

Also, that everything is seamless. And what I mean by that is that you have the components of a Cisco, and you have the components of NetApp; and we have a networking team that is all Cisco certified, and we have a team of NetApp administrators that are also certified. So by not having to reach out and do a whole lot of different training, most of the training had already been done with previous experience. It saved the company a lot more man hours and time to actually get the FlexPod up and running.

That's pretty tricky, because for what we have and for what we use it for, it's actually pretty perfect, to be quite honest. Even when we brought the finished product to our customer, there were really no complaints. They were happy with just having HA, "Hey, if something goes down, we don't lose services." That was their biggest concern. Outside of that they really don't have any complaints at all.

It wouldn't be more FlexPod as a whole, I think for me it would be more NetApp. What I mean by that is, we are a company that likes to do SnapMirrors all over the place, and the customer is always asking when we set up a SnapMirror, "How long does it take or how long do you have left?" And when you've been dealing with NetApp you have to manually do some calculations, make an educated guess. So if there was something like a progress bar for a SnapMirror, so a customer could say, "Hey, what's the percentage?" and I answer, "It's 57%," versus saying, "I think, well, by the size of this volume and the speed of the link..." and that kind of stuff. A progress bar would probably solve all that because they'd like to know, how much more time do we have when we're doing this SnapMirror. I think that would be pretty cool.

For the company it's going on two and a half years. And we're still deploying new ones out.

I think the stability is great. I love the Multipathing for the FlexPlot. You have HA all over the place. You have HA with your storage, you have HA with the blades, you have HA with the Nexus switches as well. You can't ask for more HA than that. So you have time to replace a part, you have time to troubleshoot something without having any downtime. So I think it's excellent.

I have not used tech support yet. All our guys are pretty well versed, especially the knowledge of Cisco and the knowledge of NetApp. And then I forgot to even toss in the knowledge of VMware, because we run VMware on top of four of the blades. Having that group already there at work and having the experience, we all just put our minds together trying to figure it out and it works out pretty well.

It was a little complex but it was because before I started deploying FlexPods I was just in a systems-type realm. But once I completed my initial configuration of one and understood the importance of having HA - once I understood that - I figured out, "Well, cabling, it makes sense." Whatever happens on the A side happens on the B side, and it just started kind of flowing together.

So not too terribly bad. Plus NetApp has real great resources. You can go to their page, you can pull up FlexPod, you can find all the cabling in there for whatever model you have, supported and unsupported, they were really good about that; that was awesome.

The most important criteria when looking at vendors, to me, is honesty about a product. We talked to NetApp folks and they were really good as far as getting us all the information.

It wasn't just that I said I need a solution and they gave me a quote for the biggest solution that I needed to get. They asked, how many people do you have, what kind of expansion do you see yourself going into five years from now, how many services do you want, how is it going to grow. And I thought that was just awesome. Usually they try to sell you the most expensive, like a car salesman. But no, they really looked at our needs, looked at where we were going, picked out a solution.

Even with NetApp, they could've picked a solution that was just NetApp. They looked at it as a whole and said, "For the size of your datacenter, for the users that you're going to have, and to be able to take everybody's unique skill set and put it together, FlexPod will work out for you."

In terms of advice to a colleague, I would definitely tell them to take a look into it. I know most people have their ways with all-in-one systems. In a sense it is that, but in a sense it's not. There are separate components to this system.

If you have a passion for trying to create a better datacenter or if you have a passion for learning new things, FlexPod is the way to go. You're learning about three different technologies, depending on what you use for your hosting, regardless if it's VMware, HyperV, you're learning the stack so you're learning how everything connects.

And, depending on what you do, if you're at a layer-three relationship, you'll be learning about that as well, depending upon how much access you have. But it's definitely an opportunity to satisfy your customer and also increase your knowledge base.

• Resiliency
• Performance

Resiliency: It's extremely fault tolerant so it's highly available. If one component fails, it's got a backup that will take over.

Performance: FlexPod rocks. It's pretty powerful. And it helps when you have a FlexPod, all the workload's inside. There's no external things that can hurt it, except for itself.

Also, it's easy to manage, because you basically have two interfaces that you can use to manage all of the three tiers, storage, computer, networking. So, it's easy to manage.

Once we started using it, people that didn't understand it were skeptical. Once we proved how resilient, and how well it performed, we got more internal customers who wanted to use it.

I'm excited to see the SolidFire FlexPod. I think that's going to bring a lot more business opportunities. I think you're going to be able to scale your workloads inside of it. Just integrated, at a lower cost, I think will be great.

The FlexPod, with the UC chassis and the NetApp storage is perfect for us, we had no trouble. The FlexPod SF, the SolidFire, it's just a newer generation. I'm not sure what they could improve on.

The SolidFire, I don't think it is going to natively support SnapMirror. It uses its own replication, I think, but I know it's in the roadmap. They're talking by the end of this year, that it will come out.

You can have AMP servers, in the FlexPods, you can have it join an ESX cluster. So you have that GUI. I think someday you'll see a single pane of glass for management, that would be the best thing for it.

We've been using FlexPods onsite for four to five years.

Stability is great, never had it go down in the entire four years. Never crashed, never lost anything that was not fault tolerant. So, if we lost a piece of hardware, its HA or failover component took over.

We actually did several upgrades. We've had to upgrade the compute, the UC, chassis. We've added storage, all non-disruptive. So, yeah it's very scalable.

Technical support is great. So the way NetApp set it up is, they're right next door to Cisco in NTP, and they actually have a dedicated team of VMware, Cisco, and NetApp to troubleshoot problems. The beauty is that if any component in it, even if it's a Cisco switch, or the UC chassis, which is Cisco, you call NetApp, and the ticket gets routed to the appropriate group, immediately.

We had specific workloads that needed a converged infrastructure, and it was just the one we picked.

It was new to me. I'm more of a traditional storage guy, replication, backup, recovery guy. But, it was very easy to understand, as we were installing it.

All was upgradable. If you needed to reboot any component, either one of the switchblades or a VM in the chassis, you could just move it over, without any disruption, unless it was CIFS, and then do the upgrade.

We're in the Financial industry but I don't think it's uniquely valuable for just that industry. I think it's valuable for any workload that it's appropriate for. There are many use cases for it.

It's just a great product, it really is.

That it works. That it does exactly what it says on the tin. That once it's set up, it does exactly what's its supposed to do. There are no "gotchas," there are no "oopsies." Not in this particular use case. There is no hidden BS that has to be satisfied, this, that, or the other. It just does exactly what it's supposed to do.

Up time, cost, predictability.

With the old Dell EqualLogic, EMC, up-time was always an issue. There was always something that created a problem here and there. We have, in four years, not had a single system-down issue. That's hard to beat.

The predictability of our system utilization: I can predict fairly easily when I need to go out and buy new shelves because I can trend it all. I can fairly easily predict where I need to open more aisles. I can fairly easily predict where I need more space. It just works.

The CLI part of it is still evolving enough that commands that you expect to do something become deprecated and you want to take their place and you have to keep up with the code base. In this code base you do this, and in this code base you do this, and in this code base you do that. But for the most part its good and, let's be honest, everything changes.

Automatic tiering would be good to have.

My biggest thing is I would love to see a native SMB or NFS front end to an optic store on the AFF and FAS platforms. Right now you want me to go out and buy a front end for it that creates an optic store on it and gives me the SMB interface. I would love to see that as a native part of the SBM. It doesn't have to be the end all be all; it doesn't have to be this hyper-scale thing but just the fact that I have it, so I can dip my toe in it, and I can get something that kind of works, that would be epic; that is my main thing.

The other big annoyance I have with Net App is the fragmentation of all the software. I have SnapManager, I have this, I have that, and they're all slightly different. They all look slightly different. They all come in different VMs. Some are OBAs, some are installed on Windows, some have weird requirements like, "No, no, no, it has to run on this version of Windows." It would be nice to just have all of that in one giant application and then just turn on and off different features based on license keys. That would make things easier.

About four years.

Great. It's been perfect for four years. You can't beat that.

So far I have not had any issues at all. The only couple of things I would like to see would be something, as I said, like internal tiering where you could automatically set up an aggregate spread across a 10K disc and have the controller automatically tier it. But now we're going all flash anyway so who cares? We've kind of brute forced our way out of the problems.

They're good. They're knowledgeable, absolutely. I have no complaints with the tech support that we have had to deal with.

We switched because EMC and Dell, and EqualLogic sucked and it was driving me nuts and it never worked.

It was a paradigm shift because every stack has its own set of unique ways of doing things and getting used to that and getting into that mindset took a little bit of effort but once you get it, it's clear sailing.

Upgrades are not complex.

We're a law firm. I think this product is valuable for pretty much anybody who has a large amount of data that they need to manage. I don't think that this product is uniquely valuable for a law firm.

I am a very happy customer.

I like the management interface in UCS and then UCS Director. I like how I can still automate, the API that you can do with FlexPod - you can work with it through API - which is what we have to have for our environment. We have to produce more with less people. We have to have workflows that can do it a lot faster.

There are a lot of features that the storage and the environment has. I, personally, like the feature with the profiles on the UCS side. You can just take out blades and replace them, and you're back up and running in no time.

Faster provisioning, meeting SLAs, deadlines. We are able to produce more with less resources.

I would think more cloud integration, a lot more flexibility with adapting to different things. Not saying that it does not already. I'm just trying to see if I could do a lot more things with it, in regards to AWS and Azure. A lot more flow.

The mission that NetApp has with the whole fabric, if they can do a lot more with it within the FlexPod, that would be good. They're working on it. Nothing bad to say about it. That's where they're going with it.

Not necessarily with, say, with cloud sync, with cloud ONTAP, with the fabric pools and all that. I guess I want to see other customers do a lot more cool stuff with it, so that I can do it. That's pretty much how I do it. We look at other people, see what they've done, proven, and then we say, "Okay. Let's do it. Let them jump off the cliff first before we go."

I'm thinking vendor agnostic, right? Where instead of having to build your FlexPod, here's your Cisco, here's your Nexus, here's your storage and all that, maybe Cisco can buy out NetApp and then they just have this one big box. Or the other way around. NetApp buys Cisco and then there's just this one box and everything's right on it. You have this big chassis with blades and you just swap everything out. Technically, you could do that with UCS already.

About a year.

It's very stable. As far as being tested and proven by the different vendors, Cisco, NetApp. But it's also stable in the code, UCS on the NetApp side, on the storage side, on the switch side. It's all proven code. It's been around for a long time. I see it as something that's reliable, stable and the fact that everything's redundant, so you don't have to worry about it.

Currently, I think it's great because they support, for example, cluster. You can scale that beyond belief. Then, there's also the UCS domains, you can have multiples in there and expand it, so I think it has no problems scaling.

Unless you're talking a really, really large environment with, say, beyond the petabytes. And even then... Maybe you could run into issues with management, but still I think UCS Director provides value with that.

It's a one-stop shop. It's good. I like it. They were knowledgeable, and if they weren't, they knew where to find the information.

We switched because we needed a converged infrastructure.We didn't have it. We had bunch of siloed environments across the board.

We chose NetApp because it helped us unify what we already had. All our training experiences with UCS - we have an environment of UCS, we have VBlock. We decided, "All right. Let's use the training that we already have and let's take UCS and let's take all the virtualization that we have and let's just continue to use it." We had NetApp already, so might as well just take NetApp with it.

FlexPod has been around for a long time. We said, "All right. Let's PoC this," so we PoC'd it. We got a lot out of it, lot of the requirements were met. It worked well for what we had.

Not complex.

Upgrades, the same, not complex. With ONTAP, you just have to pick your order, find out how you can upgrade them and do your UCS, do your Nexus switches, do your storage. Not difficult.

There was Nutanix. We do have a few Nutanix in there. It's just not as well known.

It's easy to manage if you start out correctly. If you don't, if you just spaghetti everything out and do all kinds of weird things within it, and don't keep standards, you always, like anything, create chaos.

We're in the financial industry but I think FlexPod is valuable for a lot of industries, not just this one. I don't see it as a one niche for just financial, could be for everything.

Right now, I think it's a great product. I don't give anybody a 10 unless they're outstanding, perfect in every way.

I'd say the ease of how we can manage it. That is something I personally like. It means I have to do less work. I manage storage, so with the ease with which we can understand, and then share it to the VMware. We create datastores and we share and all that is easy. Not very difficult.

Sharing over internet. We don't need too many FC connections for that. We just need ethernet connections and we can export it to the virtual machines and to the ESX actually.

We have both the solutions actually. The part where we are right now, yes, it is better. And we are looking forward to going for the hyper-converged one as well.

We're not exactly with FlexPod, but we have NFS shares and all. Somehow, if we can dig into the end user who is using that share, and who is populating how much data into that. I don't know, maybe it's already there, but to all the people I've talked with, I haven't heard about it.

So if that can be included, that would be good. We have some tools like OCI's and all. So if we can find from there, who is the end person who's using the share - and sometimes they over utilize it - and if you can find out who, to that level, if we can dig down, that'll be good for the administration point of view.

The performance could be improved. Because it's over network, I don't know if they have to improve something on the NetApp end, because over the network it slows down when it's compared to the fiber channel network. If they can, that would be wonderful.

In our environment FlexPod has been used for, I think, more than three years now.

It's stable. We don't face a lot of issues often, but sometimes we do face them, performance wise. If the load is increased, sometimes that way. We do get issues, but we are able to resolve them and they are manageable.

Yes, we can scale. We are actually now scaling our environment, including FlexPod on our roadmap, and it does scalability.

For the cases we have, sometimes the issues which we get, we do raise NetApp cases with the team. We use it.

They're good. They're helpful. They're spot on time, that's one good thing. We like it. NetApp is way, way better than some others that we've had really bad times with.

I'm new to my new project, so probably yes, there would have been something, which they have replaced with FlexPod. But I don't know what was replaced, to be honest.

They switched because they wanted better performance and we are especially using FlexPod for datastores over the network. It's more feasible, I'd say. Performance wouldn't be as good as SAN. But still, it is a better solution.

I wasn't involved. I just joined, like a year back. So I wasn't involved when this was procured and all.

I am involved in an upgrade right now. The process is not very complex. Actually, NetApp is helping us, so I wouldn't say they're very complex. They're non-disruptive. That's something which matters to our customer. No down-time so that's what we like about it.

I think I could, maybe, do the upgrade without NetApp's help.

Our industry is management services, Tarragon Consultancy, one of the biggest groups for management services. I think across the industry, FlexPod is a good one, to get convergence of everything in one place; we can get the computer storage and then we can export everything. It's good.

• Pretty much a single phone number to call when there is a problem.
• Ease of use
• Manageability for the storage system

It is valuable, because it is easy. Easy to use, so we don't spend a whole lot of time learning new products out there. That is a major plus.

It definitely made an impact to how we manage our data. We recently have a new data center, and we migrated our data from one of the older storage solutions out there to an all NetApp environment.

Tighter integration with CISCO.

Since 2013.

It's very stable. We haven't really had any major issues with the FlexPod solution in all four years.

I find it very easy to scale upwards and horizontally, as well. It's very easy for us to scale up by adding either additional controllers or additional storage shelves.

We have used tech support. They are very knowledgeable and very prompt in getting back to us.

We have engaged technical support to assist us on a lot of different things. Whenever we have a case open, and if we think it requires some escalation, we have a SAM and they make sure we get the resources that we need and get back to normal operations within a short period of time.

Before Flexpod, we had other Meta app systems going back to 2008.

We're a health system company, so we have a number of different storage solutions. However FlexPod, it has everything.

We still have a few solutions because some applications have their specific storage systems, and being in the health industry, those applications are usually approved by FDA, and it's not something which can be changed at will.

I was involved in the initial setup. It's pretty straightforward.

The valuable features of the product used to be the memory footprint, but technology has come up. Now it's being able to build the profiles so you can move around your firmware, bios revs, your worldwide name, and your Mac addresses from physical planes.

For anyone who needs the flexibility of moving around profiles from physical device to physical device, it really adds an additional layer of virtualization, much like you move a guest from a VMware host to a VMware host. Now, you can move that VMware host from physical box to physical box. It gives you all that flexibility, if your company demands that. It's priceless.

It hasn't. Most of the implementations that I've seen don't take advantage of its features. Where I work now it's been more costly to implement it. That's not because it's a bad product by any means. It's a great product, but we're not using the key features that are exclusive to it. Therefore, we could just have a whole bunch of Dell servers flying around for our implementation for where I work today.

• Stability
• Backward and forward compatibility with bios and firmware

This is one of the key features because I can now associate a firmware REV to a given profile which I may need. I might have to have a particular one because the applications won't work with something different. If I can't float that from piece of hardware to piece of hardware, then it defeats the purpose of use. Thus, it is one of its key and unique features. If it defeats that, then it makes your HPE's just as valuable.

Also, the interface is a little convoluted. There are some additional features, like being able to name devices. Right now, the first one plugged in is Device 1, then Device 2. So, you have to be very particular on how you build out your environment, because with everything floating around, it's very important for you to know where that device is in a rack if you're dealing with remote hands and eyes. I need to tell someone that they need to go to rack J19, this RU, but I can't tell that by looking through the software. I can put notes, but it'd be really nice to kind of go, "This enclosure is ... " Some grid location in datacenter. So when you go to there, you can quickly understand where it is in the datacenter, therefore being able to rely on remote hands and eyes, because an LED light is just not enough when you're talking about rows and rows of these.

My current company has used this solution prior to when I started. I have been working with it for two years.

At a previous company, I used it back in the mid-2000s when Cisco first started coming out with UCS. My previous company evaluated it then and implemented it with EMC along with NetApp to backup storage.

It's pretty good. One of the challenges that we've run into is firmware issues. Which is kind of odd, because this was one of its selling features. Now, I can move my firmware to firmware, in case whatever application, or whatever OS application configuration you're running on it, requires a particular REV. However, they don't float around from physical device to physical device. It's all-in-family. So, if you get a mixed family or generation, you can't float that around. This defeats the purpose and we've run into that a lot of times.

It's great. I've done analysis and I came from a HPE centric mindset. We brought in UCS, and from a scale and price perspective there's a sweet point where UCS definitely has an advantage. Also, I'd add the additional advantage is throughput.

I don't use them, because someone else works with tech support in our organization.

I worked with Tech Support initially when we were evaluating and building out our designs

Where I previously worked, I built about three or four different pods in different configurations converting an EMC FlexPod to a NetApp FlexPod, then to an EMC FlexPod.

The initial setup was straightforward if you do your planning correct. It's pretty easy as far as plug and play goes.

This sounds dumb, but it just works. I don't want to have to deal with support, and I don't need to because, again, it has just worked.

It allows me to focus on other things. Backing up databases. More efficient.

Everybody's short staffed. We're short staffed and so it's allowed me to take on other stuff, and it just sits there and runs. It's not sexy but it does the job.

Upgrades are always scary because you just don't know. Nobody has six or seven different systems sitting around that you can test on before you go into production data.

My complaints are all ticky-tacky, not from a "vision" perspective. If VSC worked properly. It's for disaster recovery. If you have storage networks that are identical across datacenters then it doesn't work for picking off SnapMirrors. That's not a FlexPod thing so much as just a NetApp product thing and they're aware of my issue with that.

Some of the things have not been incredibly intuitive, but once I figured them out they work. That's a matter of their engineers think differently than my mind works. For some, that's a Mac versus Windows thing right there. Windows makes perfect sense for some people and Macs make perfect sense for other people and it doesn't mean one's better than the other. It's just some people like different things.

One of the things that has been less than intuitive is how UCS views storage when you're implementing something new. Some of the 9X ONTAP stuff is just different. It's not less intuitive, it's just different now, and I think I've actually kind of adapted to that. When it's complex there's no easy way to do it, that's why it's complex. But for the most part, they made pretty complex things rather intuitive, so I'm okay with that. It's just different than my mind would think out of the box.

At least ten years, at this and another company.

So far so good. (I don't want to jinx myself).

I have no complaints. You have a DIMM go bad or you have a disk drive die or something like that, but for the most part it just sits there and runs, like I said, which is what I want.

There have been some things. Whether it's an upgrade, whether it's, "Oh, we've got to move this storage from here to here to support this," or whatever. Yes, there's downtime, but the majority of it has been planned. It's once a month, once every two months, something like that. It's not that bad.

I haven't had to cross that bridge yet, but I'm sure it's there if I need it. Don't get me wrong. Scalability's been a big thing because we suddenly needed to maintain backups for a lot longer and I needed more storage space. We went from a half a petabyte to a petabyte within months because we needed to and it worked fine, so I guess that's good, considering it wasn't part of the plan initially.

Well, the one time it was really a problem, it was good and they fixed the problem eventually. The other time they didn't make me feel stupid because it was my fault, so that was good, too.

I was hired to migrate a datacenter from an infrastructure that sucked to a new location on a better infrastructure, and so I put out the RFP for that and was involved in the purchasing decision, although not exclusively.

And unsurprisingly, FlexPod won. Partially, it had a leg up because that was what I knew backwards and forwards and trusted. I had an impact on that, and yes, it was intentional, but frankly it was the best solution for us.

Uneventful. It is more complex than setting up a laptop, so it took more time, but at the same time we did implement it in what most of our partners felt was record time, so that was good.

We did look at Vblock for about ten seconds til we got the price, and frankly we knew they weren't going to work anyway. Not just the price, but it didn't fit us. But that was the only other integrated one

We did sort of look a little at the one that HPE just bought, Nimble. We looked into 3PAR; and I didn't even know what EMC "product of the week" we looked at, but we looked at those as well.

The way the model is now, where, at least with NetApp, effectively you have a partner actually doing the implementation, not an actual NetApp employee - which is fine - I'm looking for good partner knowledge of it. Whoever's setting it up, I want them to know the product, whether it's UCS or whether it's NetApp or whatever. That's critical because I've actually had people that didn't really know what they were doing show up on our doorstep to set stuff up, and that's never good for anybody.

You can't just say you'd want it to be a simple "one button," push this button and everything works sort of a thing either. Not just for job security reasons but because I don't think it's possible, at least at this point in technological terms, to have things be much simpler and still give you the flexibility that you're getting. You get what you put into it. I probably could have made our setup a lot less complex, and I probably wouldn't have nearly the flexibility that I have.

A 10 out of 10 would be a "one button" mind-reading setup; and again, there goes my job. It would be things that just aren't available at this point, such as I'd like to pay very little for this and yet have zero down time, even for upgrades and things like that. It's just not there yet. Someday maybe it will be, but...

I would say it's more important to plan it out and do it right than it is to get it implemented quickly. I would say, no matter how static things are for you, there's going to be change and you probably should know how to make those changes or adapt to those changes as time goes by. That is part of the FlexPod, which comes down to the UCS side of the things. I did not envision needing to change networking as much as I have changed networking for a lot of the machines, so that ability has been really nice. So sometimes you don't know what you will need, what features. Sometimes it's just nice to have the features even though you're never going to use them, because you might.