FlexPod XCS Reviews

• It is a converged platform.

• It is a support model. I can call directly into NetApp and our customers can call directly into NetApp. And when they're troubleshooting an issue, whether it's on virtualization, their compute, the storage side, they have that one level of support. This is big thing for our customers.
• The simplicity of the model itself.
• The overall management aspect of it.
• Being able to manage using tools like OCI from NetApp.
• Being able to manage the entire pod, create things, provisioning, automation, and orchestration. Those are built in to converged stack. That's a big help for our customers.

One of the biggest benefits is the workloads that it can manage. It's not tied to a specific workload and is very diversified. You can do backups on it, you can do production data, you can run virtuals, you can run bare metal, and it will support almost every workload that you can have.

For me, it's the integration with things that are not part of an ONTAP solution. It is simple management platform that I can manage my NetApp from an ONTAP perspective to the E-Series, to a StorageGRID, to a SolidFire environment in one management layout. That would be the one thing I would want the ability to do.

Deployment is a whole lot better now than it was five years ago. It's very simple. We can stand up a standard FlexPod usually in a matter of a half a day. That involves racking, stacking, and starting the configuration of the aggregates, or the Cisco platform, that goes with it.

Stability is built on the redundancy of the platform itself. So you have redundancy throughout the system. The storage platforms have redundant controllers. Customers are very very comfortable with a model, knowing that it is going to be up 24/7/365.

In terms of scalability we can scale to a cluster in CDOT, but we had issues. The cluster CDOT and the evolution of that platform ensures that we had the right mixing rules, because there challenges around that piece of it. So scalability is a big selling point for our customers, and knowing that it's not "rip and replace" is a big thing.

Technical support, from a NetApp perspective, is a model of having an eco-system of Cisco,NetApp, and VMware, or 1800 number that I could call into. In our case, we actually have a network operation center. We place first call for our customers, and then we call directly into a service line. It makes our life much easier and it streamlines the process just for customers.

We get the Level-3 guys and we've had a great relationship with NetApp, and that really helps as well. I can't speak for new partners, who are just coming on, but for us, it's been fantastic.

I was involved in the initial setup. I do all the architecting, I do the set up and configurations for some of our customers. In my previous company, we sold 194 FlexPods to the Department of Veterans Affairs. We architected that entire solution and we helped with the deployment process. We've been very involved in that.

Really in a converged stack, not a hyper-converged, because NetApp doesn't have hyper-converged, now with SolidFire. From a converged stack on a FlexPod, we do work with VCE on the Vblock aspect. We work with HPE on their platform as well. Those are usually the three that we have been competing against. The advantages of NetApp over competitors is honestly the price. There are aspects of VCE and Vblock that have a better overall management stack, than what we have on the FlexPod side. But from the perspective of cost, we always win with NetApp on pricing.

So the first thing is you have to know your workload. A lot of customers go in, and what they do is they push on infrastructure without understanding the applications. So to any customer, I always tell them, you have to do an assessment of the application, understand the characteristics of the application. That will drive the solution, whether it's all-flash, whether it's a hybrid model, or whether it's just spinning disc. So until we know the application stack, I don't even talk infrastructure.

The way everything works together. It is all built to do what it's supposed to do. The performance we get out of it is incredible. We just went through a refresh of basically a whole new FlexPod. We decided to stay with that just because of how well everything works and how great the support is.

The benefit at this point is that we understand it. We know how everything works. If we don't, there's one place where they know how everything works. Support is streamlined. It is absolutely easy to manage. Up until a couple years ago, there was only one person that it took to manage the whole infrastructure.

I really like what it does now. I don't really have any complaints. They plan to give it the ability to add more flash storage in a hybrid shelf. We don't have the need or the capital for an all-flash cache, so we got a hybrid one that's limited to how many flash caches you can have on there.

I haven't had any stability issues with it. I ran into a bug with the software, probably three or four years ago, and this caused deduplication to stop working. However, they resolved that right away and we put the patch on and got back to running it normally.

Scalability is great. We added a new shelf to it last year. There wasn't much down time to add the shelf to it and it was actually very simple. The directions that came with it were straightforward.

Technical support is great. They're always there whenever we need them. They're willing to jump on, spend as much time with us as we need. It is great that Cisco, NetApp, and VMware can all work together on an issue. If you don't know an answer, just call FlexPod support and they are able to help.

It was set up before I got there. I remember how to put in the seven node cluster plus the transition that we are doing now. The setup was simple. It came with a single start-up script. They sent us an Excel sheet ahead of time to fill everything out that we needed. We ran through the script, it asked us for everything, we were together, and it was quick.

We evaluated EMC and HPE for new storage. We decided to stay with NetApp over HPE and EMC because of our experience with it. We didn't have any bad experiences with it, so we didn't want to change it to go down a new learning path. We knew it, it worked, and we had no issues.

They should definitely look into NetApp, especially now with the SolidFire acquisition. They have almost everything you would need for storage. I've used HPE SANs before and EMC, and NetApp just blows them out of the water with manageability and the price point.

I'm on the network side, so I don't have to deal with the NetApp side too much. However, I am on the network side and I really love the fact that I can just swap out blades as fast as I can. We have the M4s in our FlexPod. I personally love it. We are running VMware. We are running a standard data center with domain controllers, Exchange, and primarily Microsoft products.

The main improvement is speed. If you need to troubleshoot or if anything goes wrong, you can swap it out extremely fast. It will rebuild itself and you are up and running in hours at most.

I know that there's a lot of features that area already out. We are the DOD, and we are two steps behind. We know of a lot of features that we're excited to move to, but we can't yet. In terms of improvement, I would focus on cost. It can be a little bit expensive.

The features are great. We know of things that are in the newer releases, and they will be great once we get access to them. This includes solid state drives that will speed up our connectivity.

We've had very few stability problems with it. It's been a very great product for us. Maybe one of these days we can move over to the new and improved SF.

We had to grow and we've added blades. We upgraded our NetApp appliances in it. So we have grown as the organization required. It has been simple to scale up.

We have NetApp support that covers us for anything that we need. We do have a very talented engineer that runs it on our side, so he doesn't have too many challenges. On the Cisco side, the UCF side, which is my domain, we go directly to Cisco and they help us with any issues we ever have. They are knowledgeable and helpful.

We evaluated IBM, they had a blade solution. We evaluated Dell and looked at the FX2s and their VRTX for some of our smaller sites. We decided to go with NetApp over Dell, because it all worked together so easily. Dell had a pretty good product and there is no denying that. However, FlexPod is just all-in-one. It has got a best-practice design built around it so there's no "Hey, does this NIC work in this scenario?" You don't have to worry about that with FlexPod.

Give it a shot. Call your vendors and just get it. They'll demo it for you, so use that. It is important to demo everything first, because there is a lot of money on the line just for a "I guess this might work out for us.”

The compute team that supports our NetApps does not have to call the network team. This means that everything is running properly and correctly. The users don't have problems with latency and there here are no problems in any of the backups, or in the systems that are tied into the NetApps. That tells me that it is a well-built and well-designed system. If it stays up and running and the network team doesn't get involved, then I will give it the highest rating.

Just the ability to have diversity in the backups, and that it follows our financial regulations in having multiple layers of backup. That app is a helpful tool for all of this.

I guess in time, you could probably use larger processors, and reduce the footprint of the system and increase throughput on it, so we can have higher-end models. I believe we do have the highest-end models. I know we have Enterprise. I think it actually has Enterprise written on the stamp itself. We have a lot of them, which means that they can probably compete with better processors.

From a physical aspect, I know they are stable. When we walk on our floor with our facilities teams, I never see red or yellow lights on them. They always seem to be performing properly. From a visual perspective, as well as from our monitoring team perspective, if there's a problem, they let the network team know about it. No news is good news.

It appears to scale well. We have racks and racks of them and there are no problems. We keep building and adding as needed.

I have not used technical support and that's an excellent thing.

When choosing a solution, stability is absolutely what I am looking for. It has to stay running. The software is fine. It's the hardware that we want to make sure runs, runs, and runs.

I was involved in the initial setup at one point. I was involved in verifying our infrastructure and there were no problems. The network assessment was clean. NetApps came in, they got plugged into the network, and everybody was happy. We closed down the project successfully, and nobody had to follow up. This means that it is running well.

I did not evaluate other solutions. I was just told this is what we have built, accommodate it, given these requirements, and it worked.

From a network perspective, it is very stable. We don't have any issues with this. I would recommend it, just because of its uptime and the fact that you can sleep through the night, and not get called at 3 AM. I have peace of mind from the stability. Peace of mind and stability are by far the biggest factors.

It's an integrated system with a single throat to choke for support. It's one phone call and if we believe it to be a Cisco problem, we call Cisco tech. If it turns out that it becomes a NetApp problem, then Cisco tech will engage the NetApp folks for support. It's a single phone call. We don't have to hang up and call the other and get into a finger pointing game. It is a time saver.

We have a lot of home-baked bank applications. We also use PointShop, so we run a lot of Microsoft boxed applications as well.

We're a VMware shop. We are a 98% plus virtualized in our environment. I appreciate the consistency in which it works. It stores data very efficiently. Those of us on the network side provide the path to get to it. We also provide the accesses, and it saves us a great amount of time because of that single feature of a single phone call.

It's been a very sturdy system. It's been a very reliable system and we've had no really great outages over the last six years related to the FlexPod environment. It saves us a lot of money, time, and resources.

I don't really have a great answer, other than a more scalable switched environment. That is what the Nexus 9K is going to provide for us. Nothing's perfect, so I guess we had some growing pains early on.

Some of it was teaching our staff how to deal with the new technologies, how to use it, and how to troubleshoot it. It wasn't perfect in that sense, but the product itself, it was very good.

It was complex to train people in with it. It was a newer technology for our resources, so it did take some time to get them up to speed.

There has been no downtime in six year, related to the actually filer, UCS compute, or switchback involved in the FlexPod.

It's scaled very well for us. We were able to add filers as we needed more storage. We were able to scale out on the existing 5K Nexus environment that we had.

So over the last six years, it's scaled well enough for us to acquire banks at the rate of about four or five banks per year. Now, in 2017, we continue to acquire banks and we're going to move our FlexPods into core locations. So we're going to buy new FlexPods and continue to scale and buy banks off of those.

We deal mostly with the Cisco technical support, but we make a single phone call, we're directed to FlexPod representatives who help to support the FlexPod environment or the NetApp environment, if you will. That has been very good.

We also have a resource from NetApps, specifically, who is a liaison for us to support and that resource is on call for us 24/7. That's been a great help as well.

The initial setup went very well. We provided the information about configurations that we would have liked to have seen. At the end of the day, after four or five meetings, we provided that information. FlexPod then showed up in a crate, ready to be powered on in the data center and start to switch data.

We did a bake-off between the VCE and the FlexPod. We did look at the Dell solution back then, it did come down to VCE and FlexPod.

FlexPod won out for two reasons.

• Pricing
• The resource that manages my data center was historically a NetApp guy. He liked that app and was comfortable with it, and that's what I think the deciding factor was.

To summarize, the comfort level with NetApp and the price.

I would tell them my story, about six years ago buying the FlexPod and how we purchased banks and scaled through it seamlessly. I have never had any downtime, and I feel like the support has been what has been advertised. I would certainly suggest buying that environment.

Ease of use is a valuable feature. In our case, we had multi-versions of FlexPod. We connected an additional storage app. Connecting to any type of storage would have been pretty challenging with another type of system. However, with this solution, it was fairly easy.

The connection to the server more-or-less updated the firmware version on it, made sure that it worked, rebooted, and then it booted up a second system. It was very simple to add additional storage.

Upgrading the operating system version wasn't as much as a pain as I'd expected. It was a pleasant surprise. With other companies out there, you have to jump through hoops to get your SAN controller or app storage upgraded, or do many types of operations where you potentially have downtime. We had zero downtime.

We didn't have to take down a single server, didn't have to take apart anything, and didn't have to do anything else. It was just a matter of connecting a couple of cables in the back, upgrading the firmware, and then upgrading the SAN controller.

It benefits the organization in that we had no downtime. In almost five years of operation, we have never had a single hour of downtime that was directly related to a storage problem. There weren't things like hard drive failures.

In any other company, it would have legitimately been an issue for us to get a hard drive out. But usually it involves some sort of extreme discussion with customer service agents about how important this is to our business operation, and there was none of that with NetApp. They adhered to the SLA.

I was willing to wait if the guy was willing to reset the hard drive. And that's more-or-less what happened. I had a failure, and within two hours of the notification of the failure, I had a new hard drive in my hands on-site. That's pretty impressive, regardless of how you put it.

I would like to see, perhaps, an interface that's a little more intuitive than the existing one. I think that goes to being more familiarity with other systems. I came from an ICE environment, and it sets you in your ways mentality.

When it comes to NetApp, you have to forget about some of the things you've done in the past, in order to kind of get yourself past it.

I wish that the interface was perhaps a little more cognizant. There are people coming from environments where ease of use isn't quite there. It almost sounds terrible, but I think that they could probably make everything a little bit easier to use, where the interface was maybe just a hair bit easier to understand and comprehend exactly where you are in the steps. But, again, you're talking to somebody who may be coming at it from being brand new to a storage environment.

There has not been any downtime. There's never been a downtime directly related to storage environment issue. Anything else was outside the storage environment, so it was typically another company's issue. It was never directly related to NetApp.

In terms of scalability, we've added/matched two additional shelves of storage with very little fanfare. There were no major problems. It was just a matter of upgrading an old SAN controller software, and that was it.

I haven't had to use the technical support much, but my interaction with them has always been very positive and they definitely know their information.

We evaluated HPE, LeftHand before HPE bought them out, and then they became HPE LeftHand.We've also looked at EMC. We've also recently considered HPE MSA technology, and their EEA technology, as well.

We looked HPE 3PAR, before they were HPE. We've looked at pretty much all the big storage vendors out there, such as Tintri and Nimble, but they are more bundled storage and compute.

We decided to stay with NetApp because I'm familiar with their systems. We're already a NetApp customer. So there's a certain investment in time and knowledge with NetApp that we have. We don't want to go back to reinventing the wheel every time we look at storage. We are happy with the product solution.

It's not all about cost. Overwhelmingly, the issue is that you shouldn't be as concerned with cost as much as you should with the scalability and the ability of a system. Even though you may be looking at a product that's more expensive than other equivalents out there, you're probably getting one of the best customer experiences out there, bar none.

I've had to use HPE support, and I've had to use NetApp support, and 100% of the time, I would wind up referring NetApp support overwhelmingly.

When you're looking at everything, it's not all about cost. It's also about usability, scalability, and performance. With all those applications, I've never once had issues with any type of performance, or had scalability problems with NetApp.

The only times we had downtime with our server/storage environment was because of SAN switching issues. One issue was related to a software upgrade on our SAN switches, the other was misconfigured zoning on the SAN switching environment. In both cases, it was human error and not system-intrinsic error that caused our downtime.

I think the valuable features of FlexPod are the integration with several products, especially when it comes to the support model.

If I have any issues, whether it is with be VMware, NetApp, or Cisco, I can call one place and I can get support. It doesn't matter which one I call. I think it's one of the most valuable pieces of it.

Its architecture has been proven, it works together, and it is trusted.

We are using a Citrix VDI implementation. We are about 99% virtualized, so pretty much everything that we do, from the desktop to the servers, is virtualized.

I like how everything just kind of works together. It's been one of those things that have been proven. There are White Papers, a trusted design, and support models. Those are the kinds of things that companies look for. We know there is going to be backing and help when something goes wrong.

We can reduce our team and it has saved us money because it works quickly. In the past, we've gone with other third-party vendors and other products. We ended up having to pay more money in the long run. Going with the FlexPod solution means that we have all the pieces. Having a proven solution and knowing that it works gives us peace of mind and ease of management.

It could always be better.

We have been using this solution for three years.

It is a stable solution. I can't remember the last time we had any kind of major outage.

Up to the point where we needed to replace our controllers on our storage, it had been pretty scalable. I think there is a time when we have to refresh some of the products.

When we needed to, we used the technical support. They were very helpful. It was easy to contact somebody. If one team didn't know the answers, they would be in touch with the other team. That's nice about having a FlexPod team that knows each other's products a little bit, so they can help you resolve your issues.

We worked with CDW consulting to do the setup and the configuration. It went pretty smoothly.

We looked at HPE and that was four years ago. We've worked with CDW. They brought in a number of other vendors with other storage systems. The one we chose fit in with what we wanted to do. We previously used a smaller vendor's storage solution. It didn't quite work with what we wanted to do. We weren't able to fit it in with our model.

Do your research. They all have their own niches. Don't go cheap. That's one thing we've learned: Just because you might see another vendor who offers something a little cheaper, it is not necessarily the best. It might not have the White Papers or the proven technology that works together. That's what is nice about FlexPod, that you do have those elements. This has been working together for many years. They had this relationship with these other companies and you know you'll have the support behind it.

A valuable feature is being a one-rack solution. It was easy to implement and integrate to the existing network. The complexity of how things connect was taken out of it. We use it for mostly for cloud television, CloudTV platforms, and storage of VMware images.

It's a storage solution. That's the benefit.

I do not like the NetApp licensing fees. They are exorbitant. That could become a turn-off to other companies. There are a lot of other streamlined and better solutions out there for a lower price.

It is very stable.

Scalability is very good. You have better horsepower solutions which are great. It is very easy and very scalable. FlexPod itself is pretty scalable. I am pretty happy with the solution itself.

Customer support is very good.

There are several solutions that we used, but I can't be specific for proprietary reasons. We have researched other solutions. We're always researching.

I was involved in some of the initial setup and design. It was very straightforward and very easy.

We are always researching other options. We develop solutions in-house when needed.

It's a great solution. I would recommend FlexPod, except for the licensing fee. I can speak about the implementation part. I don't know what the system admins would say. I'm not able to speak from their perspective.