FlexPod XCS Reviews

The valuable features are just the simplicity of expanding the hardware when you need to and containerizing everything into a single platform.

On FlexPod, we are using Cisco collaboration. Not just Cisco, but other collaborator tools as well. Collaboration is our focus, versus general data storage. So we use it for anything from call manager to contact center, to call reporting.

The collaboration is a very niche group. They focus on voice and do not focus on storage. Their focus is on phones and application. I wanted to keep their focus there. I don't want them to worry about the data, the storage, the drives, the servers, and all that hardware. Those are the biggest benefits. For me, the benefit is insuring that they continue focusing on the work that they need to do and not worry about the hardware. The hardware is so reliable and just easy to use.

A single pane of glass to manage all of the components. As you know, FlexPod has multiple components from Cisco, to Vmware, to NetApp. I would like to have a single pane of glass from which you could monitor.a

Stability has been great so far. We had it in place 9-10 months now, but we're also a platinum partner as far as the service. That way we can receive monitoring. In case one the drive fails, a new drive is shipped, and somebody even comes in and puts it in for you.

We haven't grown yet, but that is why we purchased it. It is to easily expand when we need it.

We haven't used technical support yet.

We were coming to the end-of-life with our hardware, and we needed a platform that could easily grow. We were using the traditional stand-alone servers. We then went to the Cisco C-series, then we started virtualizing, and then we needed something bigger.

I was responsible for the initial setup and it was a breeze. Everything came shipped, plugged-in, and ready to go.

We evaluated IBM, Vblock, and Nutanix.

The factors that made us go with FlexPod were the components that were in FlexPod, NetApp being a big one of those, and Cisco being the other big name. When you think about storage, you think NetApp. There are a few others out there. When you think about routing switching, you typically think Cisco.

Cisco has done a great job coming into the server environment, and I believe in developing partnerships with companies and putting their weight behind it. These companies will continue to perform in in the future. Think about who you would invest in the stock market. Who are you going to put your money in?

Another large hospital, certainly, should focus on the longevity and the simplicity of the solution. I'm really all about the simplicity of it. I have to keep things simple. In IT, we have a habit of making things very complicated, and it's really difficult to change your thinking to keep things smoothly.

We currently have FlexPods and we are going to buy SolidFire to upgrade the FlexPods that we have. Peer organizations have recently purchased SolidFire and have seen a tremendous increase in their performance, not only just with speed, but with reliability. We don't have a choice, because it's that good.

It is always better to have faster, more reliable storage than unreliable and slow storage. Requirements are not getting smaller. We're not seeing a diminishing need for, or a plateauing of requirements.

The organization is growing. The storage requirements are growing. The move to big data that we're seeing is requiring faster storage and faster throughput. The common business applications we use this solution for are the Exchange Server, Outlook, and VMs.

I'm happy with the solution as it is.

I've only been here for a year, and we've had it the entire year I've been here. In the last year, there's been no downtime due to the equipment.

I have not seen anything that would indicate that it's not stable. It hasn't gone down on us, so that's a good thing. There has been no downtime that was the fault of the equipment.

In terms of technical support, we pay them and they do what we pay them to do. Sometimes we pay them, and they don't have to do anything.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Don't buy magnetic media, but rather buy all-flash storage, solid state drives, or other types of flash media. I can't imagine that magnetic media is going to be around for much longer. Eventually, the old stuff is going to go away. Spinning platters are going to go away. I suggest investing in all-flash. Don't buy magnetic media, but rather put them in your garage.

Valuable features include scalability, flexibility, speed, and security.

It has helped us in terms of less overhead and less downtime. It simplifies the administration.

Perhaps a unified management for all of the elements within the infrastructure, like a console. I would like to see something that is open-source that can be used to manage or compute networking storage in a single panel.

I'm sure that something like that exists right now, so that would be a plus. Something that consolidated the deployment of firmware or software, in other words, more of an orchestration tool and that would take care of it all.

It has been consistently stable.

It is very scalable.

When looking for a solution, I look for brand recognition. In this case, Cisco and NetApp both have very good reputations. We look for value, total cost of ownership, and return on investment.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was very easy to deploy.

We’ve worked with Wedlock and third-party integrations.

Give it a try and work with your partner or reseller to see if there is a demo available to try out the product. A lot of partners have that capability. Let people log in and try it. You should try out a solution before you buy.

The valuable features are scalability and all-flash. We are using it with Cisco UCS Blade Servers, so the Cisco switches work very well as a unit. It provides us with the performance we need for our customers to get data on time. Our top customers are very happy with this solution.

The main benefits are scalability, modularity, and fast data transfer. I think the business benefit is a faster response time.

I would like to see the data fabric of the entire system because. The government is looking to deploy a government cloud solution. We want a data fabric which needs to be managed, for the entire cloud environment.

In this regard, if we use storage on our premises for our cloud infrastructure, along with some other vendor like Azure or AWS. We are wondering how all this data will be synchronized and if we can get a common solution and common input. That is the next challenge, not only for me, but for all of the members of the team.

I have been very happy with the scalability.

In terms of technical support team, the support is being provided by a partner of NetApp. However, NetApp people from India do visit us and they ask us if we are facing any problems. We hope to receive very good service from NetApp in the coming days.

I was as consultant for the initial implementation. The team was happy with the implementation.

We looked at other solutions like EMC, but NetApp was the most cost-effective solution.

I would highly recommend NetApp as a storage solution. I am impressed with all types of storage. In terms of choosing NetApp, FlexPod has a very good hyper-converged infrastructure and flash storage. It is a very good way of being cost effective. There are a lot of vendors, but not that many of them are as cost effective as NetApp.

One of the valuable features is that there is generally one throat to choke, if you will.

If you have any problems you can talk to anybody and they'll understand the technical environment you are in, so it makes it easy to troubleshoot.

Whether it's an implementation or a new feature you want to take advantage of, you're troubleshooting an actual problem.

We run pretty much our entire infrastructure within our VMware FlexPod environment. We have application servers, SQL database servers, network monitoring servers, and all our users' data.

All of this is part of the same NetApp system. So pretty much everything that runs at our company, whether it is comprised of financial databases or football analytics, it all runs on a virtual server which is running within FlexPod.

The benefits of Flexpod are that we have a small IT team and it makes it easy for everybody to run and connect things. It just works. If we ever do need to troubleshoot, or increase a feature set, or things like that, just knowing that we can talk to someone who understands the environment makes it a lot simpler to get things moving forward so the whole process goes quicker.

ACI is coming and we're going be working with that. The ability to get that implemented within the VMware, Net App, and Cisco environments, so we can have a little better mobility between our different sites would be helpful. I think right now, that's probably a little complicated for us. Other than that, we've just recently moved to flash for our VMs and everything is pretty solid for us and it is working well.

I am referring to how can we improve our NetApp/Cisco/VMware Flexpod installation. Cisco’s ACI is something we are looking into to see if we create even more flexibility with the networking and security of our Flexpod between our sites and our virtual server infrastructure.

We've been using NetApp since 2004, and we've evolved to FlexPod in 2009. I've been involved in the steps all the way, and we've had a great relationship with our integrators, NetApp in general, with Cisco, and VMware.

It really is kind of "set it and forget it" solution. In my job, I'm kind of a Jack-of-all-Trades, if you will. We have to do a lot of different things, so I'm doing not only the VMware, the storage, and the networking, but I also do firewalls, email, and all the other application servers.

The simplicity of the FlexPod and how well it all works together with all the different systems really is a time saver. It's also easy to help teach other people in our department how to handle things. The training process isn't too long. We've been in it for a long time and it's pretty straightforward and we haven't really had any problems with the inner workings of the different systems.

In terms of scalability, we are a highly visible company and we have ten to twelve days a year where there are eighty-thousand people in the stadium. You need everything to work.

On the whole, we are a small, to mid-sized company and everything's worked well. We've scaled it up slowly over the last ten to twelve years, and we've been using our NetApp system and our Cisco network. I know it would scale really large for us, but we're generally a smaller scale.

I've always had great technical support when it comes to NetApp, or even calling Cisco, or VMware. NetApp has always been really solid for us, and we've been big fans. You get connected pretty quickly to someone, especially if you have a large problem. We don't have a lot of problems, so it's usually not hard to reach somebody, get answers, and find out what we need to do make things work.

The setup was pretty simple. It works well, it's not too hard to get everything connected, and you can use the most efficient and best practices.

We went through a process recently and we probably looked at six or seven vendors and this solution kept coming back to us. We are a smaller shop, and the flexibility of the FlexPod system, in particular the FAS2650 for us, and all the different protocols that we're running on an all-in-one system, was a no-brainer for us.

When it came back to it, we just stuck with NetApp because it was really the best solution for us. We looked at Pure Storage, Nimble, and Tintri. They all have great feature sets and things like that. However, the assortment of protocols for us was a huge feature set, and not being locked into just doing the block level protocol. We really wanted to keep our systems in place. It's really nice to have just that one pane of glass for our storage system. So, NetApp was really a no-brainer to stick with.

I guess it depends what your roles are. We are a one-stop shop, so we have to do all these different things. So for us it was important to accomplish a lot of different goals with one system. So, I would just ask someone: "How easy do you want things to be? Is support important to you? Is it important to work with different vendors who all know how the whole system works? How much time do you need to save when you're doing support?"

We really like the validated design, just being able to reach out to one number and get support from the whole staff. For us, with FlexPod, just the support is really our biggest key. It's just virtualized servers of various sorts: active directory and exchange servers.

Just the biggest benefit has been performance, not having to worry about is this component going to be able to work with another component, since it is all validated. When we've had problems, just being able to call one number to get it fixed. that saved us lots of time.

It would be nice to have more of a single pane of glass from a management standpoint. As it is now, we can manage the virtual machines and the storage from one, but then we start getting it, okay, now we have to manage another component, we have to go to another area.

The third component, we have to go to another one. It would be nice just to have one central management component for the whole FlexPod solution.

We also had some issues with some performance initially, under our first system; then once we did an upgrade, we haven't had any issues since. New model would have higher rating.

We've had FlexPod for five to six years and we have not had any downtime.

Stability has been rock solid. We haven't had any issues from a stability standpoint.

The scalability has been pretty good. We tend to just upgrade components when needed, and just never had any issues with that upgrade process. We are the world's largest tire distributor, so it's been a big deal for us to be able to scale out.

We have used technical support. I would give them a rating of 7/10. Our initial problem is that I think we got an engineer who wasn't quite aware of the whole FlexPod solution, so they were directing us incorrectly. And then we got someone who knew how to do it, and they handled it correctly.

We knew we needed a new solution because we ran out of capacity and performance. On top of the NetApp, we also evaluated EMC. They were the main ones, and we just ended up still staying with the NetApp. We decided to stay with NetApp partially because the support model we had for it, we liked better.

The initial setup was great. We had a partner do the installation and just everything went very smoothly.

The most valuable feature is the converge nature of having compute storage on the network in one rack. We are able to use the virtual switching to add multiple networks, DMZs and sub-nets to be able to use the resource of the FlexPod itself. We are running the full gamut for minding business applications and web applications. We're also using the virtual switch pieces to run our Citrix environment that's also running on FlexPod.

It's greatly reduced the complexity of network storage and compute. It allows us to deliver services quicker. We can provision faster, we have great use of templates, so we can spin things up in minutes and provide services.

It probably already is in the product now, but at the time, we didn't have a really great SSD shelf that you can just plug and play in there. I know it is present today, but that was the only feature we were looking for at the time. There are probably some nuances in how the network and those types of things work. Maybe it could have more templates. Other than that, it's a great product.

We've been using for eight to ten years and we never had any downtime. It's been a great product for us.

In terms of stability, FlexPod has been great. I don't think we've ever had any downtime.

Scalability's been great. We've actually added shelves, we've got blades, and we've added storage. We even extended our presence inside the environment because of what we like inside the FlexPod itself.

In terms of technical support, it’s all been great. We have Phone Home support, which we haven't used very often at all. Any time we've needed any support at all, it's always been first rate.

I was involved in the initial discussions, evaluation, and purchase decision. My IT team was actually the hands-on team that did the setup of the FlexPod. Once we got it installed, got a little bit of knowledge transfer, they really enjoyed it. The solution brought everything together. It made it a lot easier to deliver services, because compute stores and networks weren't these discrete components they had to work on separately.

There wasn't that much hyper-converged at the time we went into FlexPod. It really was the game changer at the time.

We were looking at a new VM farm to start with, so we were looking at Blade Server solutions from HPE/IBM. What really did it was that FlexPod had all the components in one rack that we could basically turn on and forget.

We continue to evaluate solution on the market. We enjoy the UCS environment and that's the way we increase the blade. We like the way it integrates with the NetApp, so the FlexPod just really brought it all home.

Take a look at the product. If you go through your requirements and have to redo either your virtual environment or some of your SAN storage, look at putting your compute storage and network together.

Number one is the ease of deployment and number two is reliability of the solution. We are running electronic medical records applications and also document scanning, in addition to standard infrastructure type servers.

We are using Epic, OnBase, 3M, Nuance Transcription, and then infrastructure servers, BNS, Active Directory, SharePoint, and SQL Server. The performance is excellent.

Benefits for your organization are probably the reliability and the cost. We feel like it's a very cost-effective product, and the fact that it doesn't take a lot of people to support. We're very thinly staffed, so just those two things are really reliability and then cost.

I would like to see more scalability and possible cost reductions with the all-flash solution. I would like to see a focus on database optimization on the Intel platform. This could be with Windows, or HANA, or even cache, down the line, something with the Linux cache. I would like to get something that is optimized for those databases.

We have two camps now. We have to have a AIX camp and then we have an Intel camp. If we could just have it on the Intel platform, have FlexPod take it all, it would be easier to support.

We have been using this going on four years.

It is a very stable platform. I've had minimal downtime in the entire time we've used it.

Scalability has been very good. There really has not been an application, with the exception of the Epic Cache Database, that we haven't been able to use with this solution. Anything that we run on the Intel platform, on the UCS platform, we've been able to use in order to scale.

Technical support is excellent. They've been really good to work with. I think they work well with Cisco. We've never gone into like a finger pointing situation at all. We also use Cisco ONE, in which they'll take on the whole stack. It is very cohesive. We haven't always used that and we just started using it. That's an even better solution, in that it is only one call. Before, we would make two calls: One to NetApp and one to Cisco, and they would then work together. It wasn't a problem, but this just makes it easier from an escalation standpoint.

I was involved in the initial selection process, purchasing, setup, and the whole thing. The setup was very simplistic, which is one of the reasons we went for it. We try to strive for simplicity in our shop because of our staffing situation and because we are non-profit organization. So reliability, efficiency, all those things really come into play. We're a 7/24/365 facility, so things just have to work.

We evaluated EMC, Pure Storage, Tintri, and Nimble. We decided to go with NetApp over the competitors because we did an executive briefing with them in San Jose.

We were really impressed with their road map and their direction. We developed more than just a vendor-customer relationship. It was more of a partnership. We felt we had a good relationship and that we could trust NetApp, and that the solution would work. It was really, in the end, the technology, the price, and the people.

I would definitely recommend FlexPod. The first thing I would say is just the simplicity and the standardization that you can put in place. You can do more with less. This packaged solution already works, so you don't have to figure it out and be your own integrator. This is the way to go.