FlexPod XCS Reviews

The most valuable features are reliability and the ability to give our end-users a reliable system with the performance, the IOPS, and the latency that they want. It just solved all our issues.

We're using all-flash FlexPod, and that's drastically increased the performance of our applications. Our gaming floor and our applications are more reliable.

I would like to see if it could come down in price a little bit. You get what you pay for, and it is good. It's a valuable appliance, but if it could come down in price, it would be great.

We've never had an issue. It's been stable from day one.

We've actually grown it. We've added more nodes to it and the scalability was awesome. It was piece of cake to scale.

We have used technical support and it was great. We opened a ticket, they worked it out on the back-end, and they gave us the solution.

Previous to this solution, we were using NetApp without FlexPod. We had a lot of issues, so this actually fixed those issues.

I was part of the decision to switch. I like the reliability and the all-flash performance.

I was involved in the setup. It was pretty simple actually. We had a form we filled out with all the information, and it was just taking one step after another. It was just a matter of populating the information.

We evaluated EMC. We were already invested in NetApp very heavily, so that swayed our decision in that direction.

When selecting a vendor, I want to know that they are tech-savvy. I want them to know our environment, our system, and how it functions on the back-end. I want them to help us out if we have any problems.

If you are really trying to find a solution to your problems, FlexPod will do it for you and fix it them.

The integration with Cisco is the most valuable feature.

Because we are a big virtualization shop, this tool has benefited our organization. I don't see the benefit from a management perspective, because we still have to manage each and every device separately.

The integration with Cisco is pretty valuable. It has definitely helped us to build our solutions as per the requirements.

I look forward to testing features in ONTAP 9 next-generation data management software during the pilot release. Let's see how that goes.

Stability is a big question mark. We having been using NetApp since 2014 and in the last two years, we have grown quite a bit across the globe. We are now using the FAS system.

We had one data loss incident happen in our organization. The other incident happened due to some known bugs. We suffered with lengthy downtime, so stability has not been fantastic.

It's not a scalable solution. I don't see any scalability occurring. We have 30-40 controllers. Controllers are not there so we can just sit there. I don't see that they are enough to scale out a solution. We have essentially bought AT&T, so we will see how it goes.

On the support side, we had to run to other vendors. If we required specification support, there were plenty of times where we got stuck in the middle of getting a solution. The technical support from NetApp and Cisco often say different things. I'm looking for better, centralized support.

We didn’t have a previous solution. It was relevant for us to get FlexPod from NetApp.

I was involved in the initial setup of FlexPod. When we first set it up, we did receive the help of a NetApp partner. We had an initial issue in which Cisco could not identify the NetApp filer. Cisco and NetApp took almost two months to get this resolved. The setup was very problematic.

There so many options now. It solely depends on your requirements. Some tools have good features, but I don't see any specifics of this tool that I could recommend to someone else.

The most valuable features are flexibility, high availability, and redundancy. It's the easiest way to deploy hardware. We use it with VMware. It's the easiest way to deploy solutions quickly and scale out.

In our environment, we are constantly expanding laterally. It allows us to create the capacity and the resources on the fly that we need to get our jobs done.

It provides ease of control and a simplified architecture that allows us to copy a DR, expand, and grow. We have been able to triple our capacity with the same staffing level. We've been able to increase our space and increase our performance without ever increasing the need to hire more people and train them. Training has been our biggest difficulty.

I would like to see an easier implementation, but I think that with newer versions of ONTAP and new versions of FlexPod, it's getting better.

It would be nice to have a single pane to manage all of it, but that's probably a pipe dream.

Every piece has its pluses on high availability and stability. NetApp is exceptional. DCS is perfect. I think it's a perfect marriage. We haven’t had any latency issues.

There haven’t been any issues. Whenever we need to add capacity, we just add another chassis, fill out the chassis and blades, and then add another chassis if needed; or add storage as needed.

They're awesome. I've only had one catastrophic hardware failure. It was resolved within an hour. That was years ago.

We are existing NetApp and Cisco customers. It just seemed like a natural fit. We didn't really consider many other options. We had the basic infrastructure there to begin with, so it was just a very natural, cheap move for us. We already had FC in place. We were already doing many of the things that FlexPod was going towards.
Cost was probably the biggest factor.

Plan for the worst. Hope for the best. Now that there is a clustered ONTAP, I can't see many other solutions being better. I know that everyone's going towards this hyperconvergence, but I think you still need to keep compute and storage separate. You never know where your growth is going to be.

Maybe I'm old school, but depending on your business model. We tend to grow storage more than compute at times; and other times more compute than storage, but it just depends on your particular needs. I like the separation.

One of the valuable features is ease of use. Getting any environment set up is probably the easiest thing to do. You can set up the entire solution in about a day or so. When we have a requirement for a specific project, we don't need to worry about getting into different gears. FlexPod is a converged infrastructure, so when you get it, you have reference architecture. You just install it and start using it. Those kinds of features are really good.

The storage scales out and you can keep on adding your UCSs. Adding the whole scale-out technology is great. You can grow as you need to and that's a really good feature.

I don't think there's much to be improved with the tool since you can now scale out storage. Before that, this was a shortcoming in that you had to upgrade the head every time.

I would like to see the ability to combine a couple of FlexPods into a cluster. You cannot do that now. You cannot combine two FlexPods into a single entity, into a larger FlexPod. To the best of my knowledge, FlexPods are meant to be in silos and you cannot create clusters at all. If there is a way to do that, that would be interesting.

If there could be a FlexPod management piece, then you could manage all your FlexPods from a single console. That piece is missing even though there are some NetApp tools where you can manage. However, those management tools are specific for the storage.

I would like to be able to manage FlexPod as a single entity for all the different components. If there could be a single tool which can monitor all of them together, that would definitely give a big edge. It would be great if you could manage all of your FlexPods from a single location.

The tool is pretty stable. Stability-wise, I would give it the highest rating. If you follow the reference document, in terms of how to set up FlexPod, it's a very stable environment upon which to work.

I have used technical support, but not exclusively for FlexPod; maybe questions here and there related to the FlexPod environment. I don't think we have ever used FlexPod tech support which is there in NetApp. We have pretty competent resources in-house, so we never feel the need to use FlexPod support.

I was involved in the decision to switch to this product. We were looking for a tool that was designed for the way our organization works. We wanted a silo environment for different applications. Since we have segmentation in our company, we have different domains, and FlexPod really does fit in really well in those situations where you need a FlexPod for a particular application or for a job area. There’s an idea of implementing Citrix and VDI on it, so those kinds of applications are really good.

We were the first company to use EMC's Vblock implementation, and it was a Vblock pain. I was not there when the company selected Vblock, but I was told that there were a lot of issues. Being the first customer on Vblock was really a nightmare. We had to move to FlexPod. But it doesn't mean that Vblock was not good. Our timing on the purchase of Vblock was not right. Our expertise in the company was more Cisco driven and FlexPod really fit in well with that.

I was involved in the installation. FlexPod, or any converged or hyper-converged infrastructure, requires a lot of planning. Once you have your planning done properly, you can just work with networking and other teams. If you have a good coordination with the teams, it's pretty easy to set-up.

I was not involved in the decision-making process. Things have changed since Vblock was launched seven years ago. FlexPod and Vblock both have very similar architecture and I don't see any big pros and cons between them. I think it's just a comfort level with respective companies. If a company has more investment in Cisco and VMware, that's how the FlexPod architecture is designed. I have no comment on Vblock right now.

There were no other vendors at the time. I was going with NetApp only for non-FlexPod environments. That was when we started buying stuff, which was about six years back when there was no competition. However, everybody has their own FlexPod now. Nimble has something like their own stack. Pure has a Pure stack. Everybody's coming with their own converged infrastructure and we are looking around.

When selecting a vendor, partnership plays an important role. A good partner will provide a kind of an independent review of the different vendors. When we select a vendor, we look at:

• Our means
• Our relationship with the vendor
• The standing of the vendor in the industry
• The vendor's new innovative technology
• How the vendor is competing in the market
• How competitive the vendor is in terms of price.

We look at other technologies because other technologies do provide similar kinds of things as NetApp at a cheaper price. That's how other vendors are rolling over each other in the market right now. They can provide the same thing for less money. These are important things, but the company stability and their goodwill in the industry are important factors as well.

Our experience using this tool is that we have been very happy with it for over six year. The solution has given us whatever our company has wanted. It has delivered in a very short time and has quick turn-around for different projects.

I also suggest looking around. NetApp is a good case for us. It really solves our issues. Although there are other solutions available on the market, this tool is definitely worth looking at it.

FlexPod is not cheap and the way things are going, you could probably get the same thing at half the price from another vendor. NetApp has to be very competitive on the prices in order to really compete in this market.

The two big draws for us are the form factor and the converged infrastructure. We'd been using Dell blade centers and HPE blade centers before that. The density and the full integration between NetApp and the compute side, we really enjoyed.

The time to deployment is definitely a lot faster. It enabled us to replace really antiquated equipment. That was the big thing for us. Going with the converged infrastructure, as opposed to the non-converged that we were using before, really enables us to spin up the storage and the network side that much quicker.

Just continuing to improve upon speed would be my biggest area with room for improvement, the 10-gig backbone. I'd like to see that increase eventually.

We have been using it for two years all over the place. We haven't had one UCS or NetApp hardware problem on any of the FlexPods the whole time.

The stability has been top notch. We haven't had any outages at all.

It is absolutely scalable. We haven't scaled yet because we bought very large, but I'm sure it's going to be easy when we do it.

We used NetApp support for one of the problems we were having, and we solved it relatively quickly. I'm a big fan of NetApp support.

We previously used Dell blade centers and HPE blade centers.

We had vendors do it. I was kind of there peripherally with my team, but I was not overly involved.

The process was great. Our vendors really knew what they were doing, so even though it was our first FlexPod, they helped us power right through it.

We evaluated HPE, Dell, and FlexPods all at the same time. We went with the FlexPods. We thought that the price and converged infrastructure offering was more powerful than those offerings from HPE and Dell.

I don't remember what the HPE one was, but the Dell was like an EqualLogic SAN. The Dell just wasn't impressive in terms of features and management more than performance. We were a NetApp shop historically. This enabled us to get the converged infrastructure with NetApp as the back end. This was probably the most compelling reason for us.

Don't design it yourself. Use the certified designs, especially for FlexPod. The one time we went with our own design, we ended up going back and reengineering it so we could put in a certified design later on.

The most valuable feature is the scalability, how the infrastructure can grow. We can grow easily with the infrastructure.

We offer cloud services to our customers in Panama. We can grow when our customers ask for more capacity or more processing. We only add more servers or we only add more storage to the infrastructure.

Maybe the migration tools for all of the environments could be improved. We can change the storage in the infrastructure but when we need to change the switches or other components that we can change easily, I don't know how to migrate that component. I’d like to be able to migrate that much easier.

We have been working with FlexPod for four years, maybe, and we haven’t had any problems.

It’s very scalable.

We have not used technical support yet. We don't have any problems with FlexPod.

Last year, we bought Vblock infrastructure and CloudBurst infrastructure from IBM. We switched because they don't have the scalability and the performance that we have now in FlexPod.

We decided to invest in FlexPod because we have a good relationship with NetApp. We did not only invest in FlexPod; it’s possible that most of our clouds are NetApp.

It's very, very easy to manage and to build.

We evaluated EMC, Hitachi, IBM and Huawei. We chose NetApp because they have more capability with snapshots that the other environments and vendors do not have.
The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are price, performance, scalability, and management.

I recommend buying FlexPod technology.

I think other vendors have more scalability because they use higher-density disks and they can use clusters for storage. When we use a NetApp cluster, we only have a processing cluster. If one controller fails or a pair of controllers fails, all the disks that are connected to those controllers also fail.

We built FlexPod. We didn’t buy it. We bought the Cisco servers, the switches and the NetApp storage. When we built the first FlexPod, we bought infrastructure for the Guatemala and Dominican Republic data centers. We have the same infrastructure for all of the sites.

Flexibility and performance are the most valuable features. We are a financial company. Performance is very important for us, when it comes to processing data on SQL databases. Scalability is another example of us installing a new 8080 and migrating data from 8040 to All Flash on the 8080.

It's flexible; it's adaptable; it's pretty fast; and it's non-disruptive. That's a huge part of what gives it an edge over other technologies these days – the disruption to the business – because our kind of business is an online business. It has to be 24/7 and zero disruption for the users. It is just great for business.

There is room for improvement in the GUI for the NetApp side. There's a lot that they could do on the CLI side. However, for a lot of novice admin users for NetApp, where you want to delegate certain work to the rest of your team, if you have a new person who joins the team or doesn't have enough experience with the CLI part, the GUI is an easier way for a novice user to use the appliance.

It exists today, but not enough. I've seen some improvements in ONTAP 9 from 8. Some features were added that were not available before, like zeroing spare disks; other features that are there as well. The world is moving more towards GUI rather than CLI. That's because it's less time-consuming. The graphical interface is better. Also, IT administrators are becoming lazier to learn the commands and memorize all the commands that have to do with simple operations; move a volume, create a LUN or something like that. Moving towards GUI would help a lot in administering the appliance, for sure.

I’ve never had any stability issues. What's nice about it is, if we approach NetApp for support, they support us on all the stack. If we approach Cisco for support, they support us throughout the stack. It's a pretty integrated solution. Also, nobody points fingers at anybody else. From the experience I've had with them, if we call Cisco, they support us on everything that has to do with the FlexPod. If we call NetApp, they support us on all FlexPod components.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. It's just great. We increased our space. We moved to flash disks from SATA and SAS. Again, no disruption; better performance; and it's all transparent to the business.

IT has a major problem when it comes to explaining where we stand to the business. All the business understands is, “I want to be always online. I want to have better performance” – whatever that means to them – “and I want it to cost me less.” It's an expensive solution, but when you compare that to what FlexPod actually does, and the performance it provides, it's pretty good.

Technical support is excellent and they support you on the Cisco equipment, too; on the Nexus. We have a Nexus 5K and a Nexus 7K. They've got pointers: where to go, what to do, what you have to look at. It removes the headache from our side, going back and forth between two different companies; one is the storage; the other is the network; and everyone is pointing performance issues on the other. But this solution tells me, “You know what, we work together. It’s our product and we'll help support you on any component,” which is a great thing.

I think the team that I joined had a different vendor. They migrated from that vendor to FlexPod because we're scaling out our business. The business is doing well, so we have a plan to scale out 10 times the business size over the next three years. That's why we addressed all other different solutions and we found the FlexPod would help us out when it comes to scalability.

If we buy the appliance right now, we don't have to buy the full size, but if we want to scale out, it gives us that option to scale out as big as we want it. Our business tripled over the last two years and we're starting to create performance labs to see how much it's going to handle when we go 10 times our size. FlexPod is helping us out with that a lot.

In general, for the backend IT people and the infrastructure team, support is one of the most important criteria when choosing a vendor. When you call, I don't want to be waiting on the line. This is the smallest example I can give: waiting on the line for a callback and support that just keeps pointing fingers at other appliances. We look for the quality of support; getting to solve and follow-up on our issues; RMAing items, if need be; and proactivity.

With NetApp, we have the online support where, if one of the disks goes down, NetApp automatically knows about it and they approach us saying, “Hey, you've got a disk that's going down. If your alerting is not working, our alerting is working. We need to send you an RMA for this disk.” Those things make an IT department feel more secure because it is not only us having to watch our back to show that we're doing a good job for our business; we've got somebody else on our side doing that for us, as well. That's another good thing.

Because it's a scalable appliance, most IT people tend to aim to get the biggest thing because you might as well. You want to cover your back as well, and all of that. But scalability; you've got to have in mind scalability. When looking at FlexPod, buying the basic thing could cost you a little bit, but you have that flexibility of adding and scaling up in FlexPod. You don't have to go all-in like we used to with a lot of different appliances.

It's non-disruptive. That's a huge thing. You want to build something that you can say, “OK, the business is going to grow. We are anticipating the business is going to grow three times the size.” You don't want to buy an appliance now and then, when you want to add an extension to it, you have to take the business down. That doesn't look good for you as an IT department. It also doesn't look good for your appliance, saying, "Why do we have to go down for eight hours or 12 hours? We've already invested so much money and now you're saying we're going to be disrupted for 12 hours." So, FlexPod eliminates that for you.

Start small, have in mind that you can scale out, and scale up, too.

A few of the reasons why I gave it a perfect rating are support; scalability, of course, for the appliance; and scalability for the company itself. NetApp is growing; now they're adding SolidFire to their portfolio. I've taken a brief look at SolidFire. I've noticed that they're dealing with it as a separate entity – not separate technology, but definitely a separate entity – that you can add to a portfolio of NetApp, whether it is EF or FAS; now, they've also got SolidFire.

I'm hoping to see NetApp integrate SolidFire into the OnCommand GUI itself. That way, we wouldn’t have to deal with two separate appliances in the back. That would add more headache to the administrator – having to know two different appliances, adding command capacity and administering two different technologies – rather than integrating them into one and having one admin side. It is new technology so I would give them an almost-perfect rating, but SolidFire is a great technology to add to your portfolio.

I'm a pro-FlexPod guy, which is where this comes from. We haven't faced any usability issues with it before. We've faced a couple of performance issues that turned out to be outside the FlexPod, not within the FlexPod. It turned to be a Microsoft database issue that some on the DB team were able to resolve. Performance-wise, the performance tools give you a great insight on what's going on in your appliance or in your FlexPod; knowing where you could do some enhancements, or where you can help troubleshoot some problems for developers or for the database teams; saying, “This is where we need to enhance or this is how our appliance is performing.” It's pretty cool.

The most valuable feature is that FlexClone and all the components are integrated into one single rack. The FlexPod in itself helps us in reducing the complexity of cabling and also creating new designs, because they're all validated by Cisco, NetApp and VMware. That's the best part of it.

We have a validated design from these major vendors and we use all of them; we being the cloud service providers. We can use this as a platform to focus in our business while we have a validated design. We don't have to invest time in designing an infrastructure.

I would like to see end-to-end automation that would enable service providers to get the infrastructure with faster provisioning, decommissioning, or even performance analysis; end-to-end includes compute, network, storage and applications.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are accessibility, product quality, and support.

Stability is pretty good. As a service provider, it has met all of our requirements, but we are interested to see more compatibility with the compute and the virtualization partners like, for example, with Oracle. That's a very great, vast area, where there seems to be two worlds: Oracle on one side; and VMware, NetApp, Cisco, and all of them, on the other. They have to come together to integrate and provide more compatible solutions.

With us being Oracle service providers for Oracle databases and applications, it's a niche area, and FlexPod still isn't there.

NetApp with cDOT is a scalable, performing solution for us, so it has been awesome.

NetApp support has been really great; parts arriving on time and getting to talk to the engineers. We have had several situations where we had services down but we could engage the critical case team, which is superior support within NetApp. We could arrive at proper solutions and get the services back.

We were previously using HPE 3PAR and then we migrated to NetApp. It wasn’t that HPE 3PAR did not serve the purpose, but NetApp having the validated design helped us to arrive at the solution even faster. We know that they have a strong engineering team. It is not that NetApp would just buy other companies and add to their portfolio, but because of their strong engineering team, they invest in their own research and bring out products. It also reflects in the support, when in need.

Initial setup was straightforward. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, we have a virtualized platform like Oracle VM. We don't have a straightforward FlexPod validated design for that, but we could use the compatibility matrix and with support from NetApp and Cisco, we could build a platform.

We were actually considering SolidFire but they eventually were bought by NetApp. Otherwise, we are even now considering Oracle engineered platforms such as PCA and Exadata.

We eventually chose NetApp because of the ease of administration and faster provisioning. It again depends on how NetApp would scale to fit into Oracle and Oracle virtualization platforms. That would be a decision point to continue with NetApp.

Evaluate multiple products. It all depends on how the product would actually fit into your use case. NetApp FlexPod fits well into our use case, so I definitely encourage you to evaluate NetApp and SolidFire.

It has been part of our success so far. I would give it a perfect rating if it fit into all the virtualization platforms that I’ve mentioned.