FlexPod XCS Reviews

I would say the ease of management and ease of support. Growth-wise, you can expand east, west, north, and south.

It integrates well with Cisco, NetApp, and VMware. They aren't pointing fingers. They just want to drive to a solution when we have an issue. We have VMware running on it. We have two FlexPods, one in each data center, running about 400 VMs between the two data centers. We run SQL, IAS, and some normal management VMs as well.

Training somebody on how to manage FlexPods is not real difficult. We can use someone who is more junior, to at least initially get up to speed with them. You can manage the storage well, as long as you do it with best practices. It is not a real difficult system to manage. I would say the latest release for NetApp has made that management even easier.

Before the ONTAP 9 release, NetApp was cumbersome and not easy to manage. NetApp as improved a lot in terms of simplicity with ONTAP 9. Pure Storage has made a lot of vendors step up their game on the simplicity side. ONTAP 9 has allowed for most tasks to be wizard-based and dashboards are now easy to read. Making improvements to the user-interface and management will help NetApp stay the leader in storage.

We have been using this for four years.

There have been no problems at all with the stability. It's rock solid. I've never had any issues with down time with FlexPod.

I can scale it east/west. I've added arrays to the system, and I've added storage within those arrays over the last four years with zero downtime.

As with anything, I think that technical support is getting better to drive to a solution. There have been some struggles to drive to what is actually causing problems. Some of our additional applications that we've purchased, like SnapManager for SQL and some of those add-ons for NetApp, didn't really function properly. I'm trying to drive to a solution between the vendor and us. It kind of was a struggle with some of that. I would give technical support a rating of 9/10 for being on par with everything. There is some room for improvement.

When selecting a vendor, I would say my most important issue is not price. It would be scalability and knowing where the company's future roadmap is five years down the road. That's more of a concern to me. I want to make sure the company is still going be around in five years and has a vision, as far as where they want to go.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. As long as you follow the diagram, it's not too hard to set up at all. It wasn't too complex.

The FlexPod technology is really reliable for us. We have no complaints about the reliability and the stability of the product.

We had an older SAN that needed to be improved and the FlexPod technology was chosen for the integration with Cisco and the NetApp storage. We used to have NetApp and Cisco on-site. It was just a natural merge to add the FlexPod technology.

The downside is that the administration is a little bit complex.

Also, don't use the NetApp team to implement it. I did so previously, and it was not the best experience of my life. It is a drawback that you need to use the NetApp team to implement it. It's not easy to work with them and not every technical specialist is a specialist.

We have been using it for two years now.

It is very stable. There has been no down time.

In terms of scalability, we have a project that is ongoing for the next few months. We are going to get into the scalability portion soon.

We did call technical support a couple of times and we had great support from them. They've been responsive to us.

They made the decision before I started working here. I know that they chose it for the reasons I mentioned.

It is complex to set up.

I know that it is really a good product. In the end, it is doing the job.

I like the consolidation in one rack. You have everything coming together, you just assemble it, and you're ready to go. You don't have to purchase different pieces of the hardware to have one solution. This is one of the best features.

We use it mainly for storage. We are just at the beginning, just deployed one in Asia-Pacific. So far, everything works fine and I assume that the colleagues from the datacenter will consider it for other regions, if everything goes well.

Previously, we used NetApp. The big advantage is that the connectivity is in one rack. As I mentioned before, everything is still segmented, but it comes with everything in one box. It is like buying a computer and everything is there already. You just have to turn it on.

The price is something that we are still working on. At some point, it's a bit more expensive than the solution that we had before, as far as I know.

We have no stability problems so far. I haven't heard about any major issues.

Scalability depends on the result that we will have from the one that we already purchased. I think the future will tell if we will scale well or not. I will definitely have this in mind as we move forward.

I didn’t use technical support for FlexPod, but only for NetApp. I know that we are using NetApp support. This is the case for the installation phase or forNetApp itself. I cannot comment on FlexPod support. I assume it was good. I can tell on you, through the eyes of my colleagues from the network part, that everything is fine. My colleagues from the datacenter have used support and they have had no complaints so far.

This is a tricky question. I don't think there was one major reason. It was a combination of the stability of NetApp, the integration with our environment, and that everything comes in one box.

I was involved in the initial setup from the network side of FlexPod and NetApp. I was not involved in the configuration of NetApp itself. In terms of the network side, as long all the information is provided completely, which has happened so far, I have not had any problem setting it up on our network infrastructure.

I would definitely recommend NetApp. Based on our results with NetApp, the stability, and what I know from my datacenter colleagues, it's a really reliable company.

It has simplified our server farm. We were able to consolidate down to one rack from the three or four server racks we had before. We were running a lot of SCADA servers, which is a supervisory control and data acquisition system for power systems. We also run a lot with OSIsoft's PI solution.

It definitely gave us a more robust system than our original, old, individual servers. It also simplified management, both on the network side and on the server side. It saved us a lot of time. It probably cut our management time of server-network troubleshooting, or just normal management, by 40%.

I can't think of any improvements, because we're so specialized in our environment. I think maybe going to a full solid state would be beneficial. I don't know how beneficial it would be for us in the power industry, because a lot of our equipment in the field is maybe 20-30 years old.

We're interfacing with a lot of older devices. We're using the Fabric Interconnect back to our Nexus chassis, so I don't know if we can go up to 40GB. It's probably just having more speed, but we're limited by our connections out to the field anyway. Speed would be the area where we would like to see room for improvement.

It's been very stable. We've had one or two issues with a spinning disk, but there was no impact to the network as a whole.

Scalability has also been great. We have been able to spin up new virtual machines as needed. We haven't run into any bottlenecks.

We have used the technical support. I know my server-side technical lead has done it more than I have. I haven’t heard him complaining. I think he's been very impressed and the responsiveness has been very good.

We needed to migrate away from our older servers. When we did the cost analysis through the FlexPod, and the cost of replacing each individual server, it just made more financial sense going with FlexPod in the long term. Previously to this solution, we were using individual Dell and HP servers. It was kind of a mishmash.

I was involved in the initial setup. I was the network engineer at the time. That went very smoothly. The most surprising thing, was when I connected Cisco Prime and I had it search for a new Cisco device, it pulled in that app, the UCS part, the fabric, and the connects, automatically.

We had looked at the EMC VNX series at the time. And that point, I wasn't too involved. I only got pulled in when it came to interfacing it with the network. They chose FlexPod over EMC, due to the Cisco commonality to it. That was one of the major reasons why we went with the FlexPod. We knew Cisco, and we worked with Cisco already. I had some experience at a previous job with the VNX, and that was a very good solution as well. But, for our environment, we were trying to standardize on Cisco, and that was a big selling point.

Go for the solution with the Cisco UCS. It definitely will cut your management time down, and it's a very reliable solution.

We are running mostly virtualizations. We use it for VMware, Hyper-V, and XenServer. On top of that, we use it for some Microsoft, Linux, Oracle SQL, and web development.

It's just a nice simple solution. There is a single number to call for support. If you call and say that you have a FlexPod, they will usually include the VMware or UCS pieces for you. You don't have to call Cisco or VMware directly. You can just call your FlexPod help center, and if they know it's a FlexPod, they'll help you with NetApp questions. They will also help you with VMware and Cisco UCS questions.

I would like to see a single upgrade download, so you could download an upgrade that would upgrade the NetApps that would have all the parts. Right now, you have to go and download the VMware upgrade pieces from the Cisco website. You have to download the Cisco stuff from their site, and then download the NetApp stuff from their website. It would be helpful if they had a single download area for the versions that work together. I can't think of anything else to improve. They support all the protocols: SCOE and NFS.

There are no issues at all with stability. Everything is redundant. The Cisco UCS platform is rock solid. The switches are rock solid. You have Nexus switches that are redundant in power and in usability. The NetApps are all rock solid because they have dual controllers. You are running cluster modes so you have lift migration and you have storage failover. There's really no downtime because everything is virtualized and everything is redundant.

Scalability is great. All three parts are real scalable. If you want to add more things to your VMware, you just add the ESXi host. To add to more to the UCS, you just add more blades. To add more to the NetApp, you just put more controllers or shelves under the cluster. The scalability is the same with all three products.

Technical support is awesome. We own a FlexPod, and so do my customers. They've seen a lot of stuff. They've worked with all three vendors. You don't have to call the other vendors, and they usually will bring in resources as needed.

We look at reports out there, and see who is up and to the right. I think that Pure Storage was leading the charge on SSD for a while, but the all-flash FAS has really been awesome.

The ability to do better deduplication is what the differentiation is right now. Who is doing the best deduplication and who is doing the best compression? Right now, the all-flash FAS with 9.2 is pretty awesome on deduplication and compression.

Go look for somebody who is doing it and has been doing it for a while. The FlexPods have been shown to be reliable. They work with two of the best vendors. Cicso: For the compute and for the networking, you can't get better. VMware: For the virtualization. They just work great together. There are other converge solutions out there like EMC, but I think that these are the three agnostic ones. EMC obviously owns a piece of VMware, so it's hard to know what parts they want to play. Maybe Pure Storage is the other agnostic, but I believe that NetApp, right now, is doing the best converged FlexPod design in the FlexPod space.

There was a lot of documentation around it, in terms of what works with what. Customers know that if they upgrade their NetApp to version 9, they know what versions of UCS they need to upgrade to and what versions of VMware will work with that.

The most valuable features are its modularity, scalability, and the ability to scale down the infrastructure and remove some of the physical hardware that was required previously. It gives us the flexibility to build upon it, whether we do one new service or we do the blade service. With the FlexPod, in general, with the UCS chassis and with NetApp, the way they can intermingle and work together seamlessly was a big benefit to us.

As I’ve mentioned, it allowed us to remove some of the redundant hardware aspects of our infrastructure. At the same time, it allowed us to upgrade our top-of-the-rack switches. We were using some of the legacy MDS fiber switches. The Nexus 5Ks gave us the ability to do fiber channel native and FCOE, as well as giving us that fast speed backbone bandwidth that we know we need for FlexPod.

We have greater flexibility than what we've had in the past. Most of our systems were legacy. We're starting to go through a process of upgrading the infrastructure. FlexPod gives us that flexibility to choose between remote sites or the headquarter site; and basically choose between FlexPod Mini, FlexPod Express or full blown FlexPod with 5Ks, UCS chassis and so on. I think the flexibility in the FlexPod designs is what really attracted our organization to it.

We really like the all-flash arrays and the solid-state drives. We’d really like to see, not so much from NetApp but from our perspective, going more towards the SolidFire and doing some metro clusters with NetApp.

So far, we have not had any issues with stability. We just started implementing or migrating some of the services, building some of the new services onto it. We're pretty young into the FlexPod but the future for FlexPod and for our organization looks bright.

As I’ve mentioned, we have a NetApp representative on site. He does most of the storage stuff for us. We rely on them quite a bit. They're fantastic. We get great support with them.

We were on legacy equipment already. We basically said, "What's the next big thing?" Obviously, being a partner with NetApp, they try to promote FlexPod as much as possible.

Initial setup was pretty straight forward. At first, it can be sort of daunting, with all of the components that are brought together, but once you actually start developing the service profiles and the servers, that's pretty much all it is. You've basically got a chassis that serves servers. Once you have the grand scheme of the design, the configurations after that were pretty simple.

I don't deal with the pricing too much but, from what I understand, we got a pretty good deal on some of the FlexPod equipment that we have.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

If you don't have a reseller that you can talk to, talk to some industry experts. Get a demo. Basically, get an idea of what the FlexPod can do for you and which deployment model fits best for your company.

As I’ve mentioned, given what we were dealing with before, integrating with Cisco and NetApp storage, the marriage between those two companies, they came up with a perfect solution that is pretty modular and flexible. We can scale it however we like it, to whatever site we're going to deploy it at.

I'm not too concerned about more integration between the Cisco and NetApp systems. Obviously, you're going to have some separation there, because they are two different companies. Obviously, the interoperability of the different components, being able to work together, is great enough as it is. Being able to have one user interface that controls everything, I don't think you ever get that but, who knows? Cisco could buy out NetApp; who knows? They might just absorb into one interface. For me, that’s not so important, but I can see where some customers, some users, might look at that as a benefit.

When I look at a vendor, the most important criteria for us is what type of premier support they have. If something breaks, do we have 24-hour support? Obviously, pricing comes along with those but I think support is most important to us.

There are very many features, but from experience, the single point of contact for support has been valuable to our customers. They do not have the headache of seeking support with multiple vendors. The single point of support supports hardware, hypervisor, and guest systems running in the FlexPod environment. (NOTE: Your level of support with the guest OS vendor such as RedHat MUST BE premium support, which means spending a little bit more on support, but total peace of mind.)

We don’t use it within our organization. We deploy this for other organizations. We can share the white papers once we are done with customers that we have successfully done this with.

It’s not the easiest solution to deploy and it doesn’t come integrated like VCE Vblock and HPE ConvergedSystem is (not really plug and play). To simplify what I mean, it’s like seeing a bed in the store; you buy it; and it’s delivered to your house with an easy-to-setup manual and the bed in different pieces with different sets of screws and you need to know what fits where.

If you have expertise setting up such environments, then you are good, but for customers or novices, it becomes a nightmare and stuff may actually be left out.

I have used this for the last four years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

Unlike most converged and “hypercoverged” solutions, you can scale up or scale out on either compute, storage, networking, or ALL. Sometimes, the client just needs scale on one aspect; for example, add in storage. The design doesn’t change. With hypercoverged, you find you need extra compute, you need to add a whole node (compute, storage, and networking), which means you don’t have a cost-effective solution that offers a true ROI or, with VCE Vblock, you need another block.

Technical support is outstanding (10/10). Remember, you will pay a little more for additional support for your guest operating system and app vendors such as Microsoft Exchange, but in turn, total piece of mind.

We previously used VCE Vblock, VSPEX, Nutanix, SimpliVity, VxRail, HPE ConvergedSystem, and many others.

We still use some of these products, such as Nutanix, because of many advantages it has especially with new private cloud clients (VDI, virtualization, etc.) and service provider architectures, but the bottom line for a customer is:

• Price in terms of ROI and value for money.
• Flexibility: Does the solution scale both up and out considering the previous point?
• Ease of management, reporting, provisioning (relieving the headache for day-to-day management of infrastructure).
• Support that goes beyond their own boundaries.

I must say, initial setup is the only challenge for a new FlexPod deployment team but once you have set it up, it is very easy to manage and scale.

Pricing and licensing is very affordable from a FlexPod perspective. Bear in mind, for total peace-of-mind support, make sure the guest operating system and off-the-shelf application vendors have premium support so that you can integrate all their supports together into one.

We deploy cloud solutions. We constantly evaluate products.

Definitely ensure you size the environment correctly.

The most valuable features are the service profiles and the temporary profiles that are available if you lose one of your servers. You can move the service template from one server to another. That's an advantage, as you can set it and there's not a lot you have to do. It minimizes the time you spend on administration. It is easy to use and to get support. There's a 1-800 number to get support from Cisco and they are helpful. 

My admin team doesn't have to spend a lot of time trying to provision servers. Provisioning servers used to take hours, and now it takes up to five minutes. 

In addition to that, it helps us with the automation. We use other tools that comply with FlexPod, such as Cisco UCS Director, to help us with workflow automation. That saves us a lot of time and money. My engineers can focus on running new stuff or trying to work on what matters most. They can work on applications more, rather than troubleshooting.

I would to see a little bit more in the FlexPod interface.

This solution is very stable. We haven't had any issues with it so far. It’s been running in our environment for the last three years without a single problem. The upgrade is easy, and there are a lot of tools available when you're planning to do an upgrade. Tools are available by the vendors to tell you which version you need to use for the different FlexPod components.

From the name "FlexPod", you know that it's very flexible. You can scale up or scale out if you need more computes, if you have blade servers, or if you need more storage. You just add additional shelves and then you have extra storage. If you need more virtualization, you just add more licenses, and you can accommodate more VMware ESX.

Before I got to this company, I worked at another company where we had one FlexPod device. We decided to deploy another FlexPod device. After I left that company, I went to another company and adopted the VCE solution. I got exposed to both of them and I was able to judge which solution was going to be best and meet the company’s needs. 

That company had an aged infrastructure that was obsolete. We had to do an infrastructure face lift. It was easy for me, as I was exposed to both VCE and FlexPod.

It made more sense to go with FlexPod. I already had expertise on how to use it, NetApp storage, and VMware. I didn't have to spend a lot of time training my team how to deploy a solution when we already had prior experience on how to use it.

In addition to that, the cost was good compared to other products.

Like VCE, OpenStack was a determining factor because it was going to take us a lot of time to deploy it. Rather than spending three months to deploy OpenStack, it was going to take us a year to get the solution up and running. 

The other solution we looked was Hitachi VSP. At the time, VSP was new on the market and didn't have a validated design by Cisco, EMC, or any of the other vendors. It wasn't adopted widely in the market. I did not feel comfortable going with that. FlexPod was more adopted and in use.

If you are looking into a new storage solution, look at the return on investment, what your requirements are, what types of workloads you need to use, and pick the best storage solution for you.