FlexPod XCS Reviews

It is very powerful. It can support much more than just one FlexPod. One NetApp can support more than just one FlexPod. That's about it. It's powerful.

It’s a standard; it's a spec; so, it's very easy to assemble and use. It's the same across all environments. Our production guys can work on this FlexPod and know that it's the same over here, and it’s is the same over there.

It's saved lots of manpower. It's easy to set up. It's good.

We have about a dozen people administrating our storage.

I would like to see easier day-zero setup. We're having to get other tools to try and set up everything. It's not complex, but it could be faster. It's just time consuming.

It’s very stable; haven't had any issues with stability.

It is very scalable. We are expanding a little bit. We're using one NetApp across multiple FlexPods. We're doing multiple domains off of one NetApp now. It is very scalable and very easy to do.

I've been at my current company for a year. They were already using FlexPod.
I have previous experience with EMC and Pure Storage. Compared to those, I love FlexPod. I like the scalability, because it has the storage virtual machines. It's very easy to build upon that.

For people comparing NetApp vs Pure, or NetApp vs EMC, I'd tell them to seriously look at NetApp because of the scalability and because of the ease of use.

Initial setup was very good. The RESTful API is easy to set up.

Beat them up on pricing, because they’re not cheap.

Buy it. It's a good product.

It runs extremely well. Once the initial setup’s completed, it's very steady and continues to run great. Having something that is kind of like an industry standard is extremely helpful, because there's a lot of information such as other customers’ reviews and issues that they ran into; that becomes nice to have.

For our organization, it makes it extremely consistent across the organization. All of our infrastructure guys are working off of the same things, even if they're at different sites.

We've been able to expand our capabilities with the same manpower.

At a recent NetApp conference, I was hoping to hit some of the sessions to see the ease-of-use for setup, to make that a little bit faster. That way, it's not taking a bunch of guys a lot of time to get that set up. As I’ve mentioned, it's run rock-solid for over three years, so there's not a lot of areas with room for improvement.

The reason why I haven’t rated it higher is that the initial setup was extremely difficult. We had transitioned from different technologies and so we were trying to learn, as well as set it up correctly.

We’ve had it for three years.

It's extremely stable, at least in our environment. We've had very minimal issues. Most of the time, it's a hardware failure; something along those lines; it’s outside of the control of anybody. Things run for three or four years and then, "Oh no, it broke." It's been extremely stable for us.

I know that it's extremely scalable, but when we purchased, we purchased a large amount. We haven't actually exceeded our usage at this point. We're still running at 70% of what we had originally purchased.

The technical support has been great at the customer site that I support. We have vendor support that sits on site, so I can go knock on somebody's door. It's really helpful. They've been very responsive.

We were using HP for blades – the HP C7000, C3000s – and the FlexPod. The FlexPod implementation actually was dramatically different for the setup. Once it was set up, it ran a lot more stable.

In terms of speed, we did see an improvement over the HP blades, but we also upgraded from seven-year-old equipment to three-year-old equipment. We had a massive increase. We purchased on a forecast of five years; this is what we think we will be in five years. As I’ve mentioned, we're at about 70% right now. I think that we overpurchased it. It was a dramatic shift when we first got it and it's still holding up well.

Compared to the HP solution that we were previously using, it's considerably more stable, outside of the initial setup. It’s better in almost every way, outside of the initial setup. The stability; the flexibility that it gives us. It is scalable if we ever need to add additional capacity in.

We decided to invest in a new solution when we were migrating to a new data center. We looked at a bunch of different vendors because we were going to put all brand-new gear in. We already used NetApp previously and so we went to the FlexPod architecture to become more standardized across the industry.

Initial setup was extremely difficult. It takes a lot of time to do the initial setup, at least with the version we had. It looks like there are newer tools that are out to make it a little bit better and faster for the initial setup, but when we first did it, it was extremely difficult.

It took us a few days to get it up and running. That was where the down points were. It took so long to get it set up, where some of the older technologies that we had used set up a little bit faster, but they weren't as flexible or stable with what we were trying to accomplish.

It's provided a good return on investment. It's allowed us to do more with the few people that we actually have.

We looked at HP and then we also looked at Dell. I don't remember what the servers were, but it was similar technologies.

We decided to go with NetApp because of the FlexPod. There was a lot more documentation, "Hey, this is how you set it up; this is what we're trying to do."
We already ran Cisco, and we already ran NetApp. Bringing the Cisco UCS chassis in just made sense; having a product that was supportable by all the different vendors. It was more consistent across the board.

Make sure that it meets the requirements that you're looking for as well as being scalable in the future, because data's constantly growing. You have to be able to forecast a little bit forward. NetApp is configurable, and the ease of use will make configuring it a lot easier. That’s probably why I would recommend it: NetApp itself doesn't have a steep learning curve.

We're using the mirroring capability of the FlexPod. We're having the two heads in separate data centers that are approximately one mile apart with dark fiber. We really like the capability of having that high availability and high resiliency within our data structure, our data centers. That's one of the features.

High availability is outstanding. We haven't had any problems with that.

We've got a FAS6210 and performance is really outstanding, as well.

The high availability feature is what we were really looking for, because we have a campus center, where we have two data centers on campus. So, it just made sense. It was the best fit for us at the time to be able to do that mirroring between the data centers, and be able to also have other aggregates for other purposes; all built into one SAN.

With the hardware and the way that the matrix is formed to validate the infrastructure, everybody does their homework and makes sure that everything is going to be fully supported. When you do have an open case, there is one point of support and you do not have everyone finger-pointing at each other. That was the other big advantage and big selling point for us; that was another feature that drew us to the FlexPod.

We're running a 7-mode right now. With CDOT out there and it being the current operating system, that's going to be a challenge for us. Our roadmap is to go to CDOT gradually over the next two years, so the scalability for us isn't as much of a factor. We're not adding shelves. We're not going wide. We want to be able to scale up and that, honestly, is a bit of a challenge because there's no direct migration between the two right now. That's going to be something that we'll have to look into within the next two years. That's on our roadmap.

I'm not up to date on all the options surrounding that migration right now, but CDOT and 7-mode don't translate. You can't just migrate or upgrade from one to the other seamlessly. If they come out with that, that's something I would look forward to. It's always been a challenge to go from one SAN to the other. There's newer technology, sometimes third party, that can help you get there, but usually it is not possible to have a seamless translation or transition.

The only other area with room for improvement is the interoperability matrix. Sometimes, when the newer versions of any of the partners’ firmware or software come out, there's still sometimes a lag of the partners to support all of those new components. Sometimes, when we are going to a newer version of ONTAP, not everything is supported. Therefore, we can't go to that because of this or because of that. For instance, with vSphere 6, we were held back some because of the hardware interoperability matrix not supporting all the components.

We have used technical support, although not recently. We've pretty much gotten what we expected out of it. We haven't had any major, major issues. We did have some performance issues. That was a couple of years ago; it took a while to track down. Overall, I think support was adequate and we did finally get what we needed. This was pretty much only directed towards NetApp. It wasn't really the Cisco or the VMware components. The support was directed between the parties and handed off appropriately whenever we've needed it.

We were previously using something I would not really call a "SAN", definitely not an enterprise-level one. We got to the point where we kind of handcuffed ourselves by not being able to expand or grow that system. It was really at the limits of what we could do with it.

Obviously, fiber channel versus iSCSI is definitely the direction we wanted to go, plus we wanted the high availability. At the time, we looked at a couple other systems and basically the FlexPod definitely met our needs the best. Also, we knew that it could grow.

In fact, about a year or year and a half ago, when we were spec'ing out our system and making a decision on a SAP ERP program, one of the deciding factors for adopting that technology was that we already had the infrastructure to support it because we had the FlexPod in place.

Initial setup was complex. We were making a pretty big forklift in our environment by putting that in. The design took quite a while, but I'm glad that we did take the time to do that design because it allowed us to have an environment that suited us very well for three-plus years now.

Basically, EMC was the bigger other vendor. We did look very briefly at HP but EMC was the bigger vendor that we were looking at, at the time.

We eventually chose FlexPod mostly because of the FlexPod system’s ability to be split into two different data centers with, basically, one system. Price point was another one, but it just suited our needs almost to a T; it really met the requirements that we were looking for at the time. EMC could do the same thing but it was basically two separate systems and it was a much higher price point.

The most important criteria for my company when selecting a vendor to work with are the stability of the company, the quality of the product, customer service and support. That’s a big deal for our company. We want to make sure that the company that we're dealing with has a similar culture to our own, which is high customer service. We value that.

The idea of the FlexPod: We've all probably experienced the difficulties of working without that type of reference architecture and that acknowledgement of the support. You waste a lot of time because there are going to be problems. There are going to be troubles that you have to go through and the vendors working together on the support has been a value to us. I think almost everybody in this industry has probably gone through that at some point, where you know that a problem lies with one of these three manufacturers, but you spend way too much time finger-pointing and you don't get to the heart of the issue. That was one of the definite advantages of the FlexPod.

Overall, it's really suited our needs. At a time when the storage is kind of a moving target, I think that we did get what we paid for; we have a valued product. We have not had any type of bad experiences that, to me, that would steer us away from NetApp in the future.

We like that the FlexPod is dense; it offers a lot of power in a small package. Specifically, with the Cisco UCS, we like that the hardware and end software is disjointed, so we can apply service profiles and our VMware environment is a little more dynamic that way.

It's brought management into a manageable situation. We came from a data center full of Dell servers and it was getting out of hand. Cisco UCS and NetApp together in one package makes it much easier to manage. Also, as we roll out new sites, it's a very simple build that we know exactly what we need every time.

I'd like to see more modularization with NetApp's management and performance monitoring. I know NetApp has a product called OnCommand Insight that covers everything but we don't necessarily need all those features. That’s made it hard for us to justify the purchase there. So, I’d like to see more modularization of the management and monitoring tools.

For instance, if we could have Insight run management and monitoring for the UCS and NetApp at the same time, that would be great. At the same time, we might not need all of its features; maybe, a broader scope of products with more modularization of features and use cases. What I’m thinking is being able to pick and choose the features, or have a watered-down version of it. I'm reaching for that. It's already pretty good.

We've had no stability problems with FlexPod; no problems with Cisco UCS or the NetApp side at all. The auto support's great. For both, we get notifications and the parts are already on the way before we can even consider calling in an RMA. We're really happy with that.

Of course, with NetApp, you can add expansion shelves. NetApp's very expandable, easily expanded. With the UCS, we can add blades, we can add chassis. We have 18 UCS domains, I think, right now, all with NetApp storage backing it, whether it be E series or FAS; we have both.

We have not used technical support for FlexPod in a long time because, as I’ve mentioned, we've had good experience deploying FlexPod as a whole solution. We haven't had any problems deploying these. For actual day-to-day support, auto support takes care of pretty much everything. Very, very once in a while, we have an issue that we actually have to call in support, but most of the time it's hand off.

When we do call in for support, the Cisco side of it is fairly poor until you get past tier 1. In that situation, we have support and they're supposed to call us back, but a lot of times we don't get call backs. The TAC location that we can call to changes fairly frequently, so we've had some issues there. The NetApp side of things has been flawless, though.

I wasn't involved in the decision process to invest in a FlexPod. They decided on that before I joined the team. I know they evaluated Dell and IBM, and found that FlexPod was the clear choice.

One of the most important criteria for me in selecting a vendor is support; how quick they respond for RMAs and cases is a big one. I like to see how the sausage is made, exactly what the products do and how they do what they do. I like to evaluate on a very, very technical level before we make any decisions.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I've been involved in setting up 10-12 of the 18 FlexPods that we have. Setting them up is very, very easy. There are validated design documents out there; it's very well documented. We've found that there is really no ambiguity at all in the setup and configuration; deployment.

The most valuable feature is that it’s all treated as one piece with regard to support. If you have any problem with it and you need to get through to either the Cisco team, or even some of the partners such as VMware and so on, it's one support case, so my team isn't hunting around for someone to actually figure out how to fix their problem.

As I’ve mentioned, the simplicity is a benefit, as are the reference architectures.

A couple things could be improved, for example, the interconnect switching. They need to be more flexible. If you already have an all-Cisco, all-certified solution, requiring you to buy the NetApp interchange switch is silly. It should all be one package. They've got to be more flexible on how they deal with that.

I'm looking for making it as simple as possible, leveraging as much as possible my existing infrastructure; not having weird, odd bits and baubles that are kind of added on.

It's been highly stable. We've been really happy. We've moved off of HP platform onto the Cisco server platform. We've been using NetApp, but it tends to be a more kind of integrated, overall solution.

We’ve had no problems scaling it; we're just over 9 PB right now.

As I’ve mentioned, we were previously using HP. We decided to switch because we had actually seen the FlexPod at a conference and at a number of other things. We were looking at the solution. At first, we had a specific application that we needed a closed-loop solution on. We tried it with that. When we saw it and liked it, that's when we decided to do a larger deployment with it.

We are working our way out of the C7000 line of BladeSystem infrastructure. We got in Gen 6, I think. We're at Gen 9 now. I just signed a PO for a bunch of Gen 9 gear. Those systems, where we've had them, have been rock solid and have lasted us the entire thing. The storage piece to HP was a little less convincing. Particularly since they are kind of leaning on 3PAR and their storage keeps changing. We weren't as convinced. We had a lot of NetApp and we just felt more comfortable staying with it. When we saw that NetApp had partnered with Cisco, it seemed like a one-shot kill; it seemed like a good idea.

We’ve looked at a lot of different things. At the time, we were looking at what EMC and some other vendors could do. We were definitely looking at HP, around some of their server stuff and some of their server integrated storage server solutions. But, FlexPod is where we ended up.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is reliability. We're in banking, so we are looking for something that's going to be stable and secure.

As long as it's within your budget, it's a great one-shot deal that allows you to really have an integrated platform that you can just build off of.

It's definitely an expensive solution, but it has been a really robust solution. We know what we get with it. We definitely like the vendors teaming up and having a more integrated solution.

Obviously, the most valuable feature is the fact that it's one SKU. Basically, if we have an issue with any one of our features – whether it's VMware, Cisco or the NetApp – they pull everybody together and they work together to solve the issue. It's a one-stop shop. Any issue we have, it's not a matter of that vendor, this vendor or the other vendor. We make one call, they all pull together and they fix it.

FlexPod has just simplified it, really. As I’ve mentioned, they all work together. We’ve had it verified that it works together. We know we don't have any sort of device issues, driver issues and so on. We know that if we upgrade the NetApp, the UCC is supported, the Cisco switches are supported. If we upgrade the Cisco switches, we know that they've verified that the version we're going to is going to work and we're not going to have any issues. It makes upgrading much simpler, more secure, safer for us.

My one little pet peeve with all of them is that it's still multiple interfaces. I went to a UCC seminar and they said something like, "Use UCC to run everything." You go to VMware and I know VMware's going to run everything. You go to NetApp and they say something like, “No, no, no. NetApp's going to run on everything.” It would be nice if someone could create a pane that does it all.

It’s not because we purchased each component on our own and had it verified. We've actually bought two FlexPods recently for our voice mail implementation, switching over from Avaya, I think, to Cisco. We bought mini FlexPods for that. There still isn’t a single pane.

When I went to the Cisco UCC seminar a couple of years ago, they said something like, "We can run PowerShell scripts against it, so you can build your structure.” If someone in UCC wants to provision storage, they can do it from that pane. With VMware, you have the SMVI interface. I've gone to the NetApp Insight conference for three years now. The first year, I went to an SMVI session where the guy said something like, "No, no, no; SMVI's going to do everything for you, from VMware." There's still that disconnect. That could be improved.

If I go to NetApp System Manager, it would be great if there was a tie-in to UCC, a tie-in to VMware, versus having to go to three distinct apps. Right now, if I provision the storage for VMware, I provision the storage, then I have to pass it off to the VMware guys. They have to go mount it, and then I have to go back to it to set up my SMVI jobs. That part gets a little annoying.

We don't have any stability issues. No problems there. It's just solid.

We didn't buy the actual FlexPod as a unit. We got it verified as a FlexPod. We actually kind of built it piecemeal. We bought the individual components and then had it verified for FlexPod. We've actually had no issues expanding that, growing any portion of it, whatsoever. We actually added 20 UCC blades; no issues. Since I've been there, in two years, we've gone from 1.5 PB to 3 PB; again, no issues, no worries.

We use technical support all the time. They're very good. I've not had to deal with the whole TAC issue, with all of them pulling together. We actually did just have an issue with one of our UCC upgrades on one system. We made one phone call. NetApp got pulled in, VMware got pulled in, and Cisco got pulled in. They figured out the issue and they solved it. In that respect, the support's fantastic.

We actually have an account manager that's dedicated to us. Any time we don't get an answer right away, we can get to her and she escalates it. We get our answers pretty quickly.

I've actually been working with NetApps for 15 years now, way before FlexPods; the 800 series, way back when; had a StoreVault for a little while and then the 2200 series. Working with Icon is my first leap from the small business to a global enterprise.

Go with it. Seriously. There are a lot of solutions out there. Converged infrastructure's trying to push its way in. We've looked at it. Maybe for a small company starting out, it might be okay but it won't scale to the level that the FlexPod can scale to, have the same performance, and guarantee that you're going to have it all work together.

It does what it says it's going to do. It makes life much easier all around. It's not a solution where you have to sit there and say, "Is this switch going to work with this system?" The systems are more complicated, they’re more complex, the bandwidth is faster. Anytime you have an issue or a mismatch in config, hardware, drivers, and so on, you're going to have a big issue down the line. Being able to be in a FlexPod, where they're sitting there saying, "No, if you buy this piece, you buy this piece and you buy this piece, we guarantee it's going to work," that's a huge, huge plus.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are responsiveness and ease of use; those two are the biggest. The technology's pretty similar across the board. They all do what they say they're going to do. I haven't worked with EMC. I hear that, for each level, you need to know different commands, different stuff. With NetApp, being able to go from a 2200 series to an 8040 series with the same commands is fantastic. I like that, and they are very responsive. Ease of use, responsiveness and performance, of course, but, as I’ve mentioned, they all do what they say they're going to do, pretty much.

The valuable features are the ease of use and being able to make one call to tech support when I'm having an issue; I can call Cisco. As they're drilling down, if they see it's a NetApp issue, then they reach out to NetApp. I don't have to make that call.

The simplicity of the design is already in place. It's easy for implementation; that's what we've liked about it.

The benefits are quicker implementation and that we have a baseline, because we go by the FlexPod design structure.

We use a VAR to help us implement these items. With their assistance, and our guys, we're usually able to take care of it fairly quickly.

I’d like to see some more troubleshooting capabilities; being able to drill down and pull reports easier, especially from the Cisco side. That would be great. Unfortunately, from what we've seen on the Cisco side, you have to download logs and upload them to their tech support to get any true information. Being able to see some real-time functionalities of troubleshooting would be nice.

After the initial turn up of the FlexPod setup, we haven't had any major outages. We've had one or two minor hardware failures, but it didn't cause a complete outage. The call-home features reported it, and the items were already shipped to us, next day. We had the items replaced, but there was no impact to end users.

Scalability-wise, we do like the features of the Cisco UCS pieces. We're just now learning about the NetApp piece of the FlexPod. As far as that, we haven't really scaled it much. We only have one FAS8080, but we're curious to see how easy it's going to be in the future.

We had outgrown our EMC array and we were looking at alternatives. We began talking to multiple storage vendors. We selected NetApp because they are Meditech approved, which is our EMR at the hospital. We had spoken with a few other hospital entities that have had NetApp in their environment for quite some time. We're very pleased with it.

After our initial reviews and design with our VAR, initial setup actually worked out very well. We already had Cisco UCS in place. Racking the NetApp array, we had that done in probably two hours, and then it was powered up and provisioning within 3-4 hours; in less than a day, we had it up and going, which was really nice.

I looked at Pure Storage and Nimble; we did go back to EMC because we had been an EMC shop. As far as the ease of being able to install it quickly, without having to do a complete redesign of our SAN environment, was very appealing, as well as price point. The price point was quite good compared to the others we looked at.

Do your reviews. Put some thought into what you want and what you need. Try to plan out 3-5 years. Give yourself an idea of your growth. Things like that. How you want to be able to manage that. Make sure that you have all those ideas down and discuss them before you start implementing anything; especially with the FlexPod, because there are so many options. You want to make sure that it's going to sustain you, not just now, but 3-5 years out.

The most valuable feature is the defined architecture, so you know you're going to be using best practices. That's key and important to us. We use the segmented layer 2 architecture that we got from a design on FlexPod, and that's helped a lot.

As opposed to just applying something like a NAS with systems, I don't know that this product necessarily does improve the way I work. We haven't changed a lot of our practices. We follow best practices, generally, anyway. We haven't engaged; we haven't had an issue where we've needed to engage Cisco and NetApp together. I think that would be a benefit if we had an issue or we needed to get everybody involved.

I’d like to see cloud features, for sure, and auto-scaling type things would be good. Automation is important, and that will be more important going forward.

I don't know what they would need to do to earn a better rating from me. I know that, when we do block workloads on NetApp, fiber channels specifically, it hits the filer pretty heavy. I don't know why that is. We're going away from fiber channel anyway.

It’s stable.

It is very flexible and very scalable. We've grown our cluster, so we haven't had a problem.

For tier 1 cases and system down type of issues, NetApp support is very good; for OFFTAP, not good. I've provided that information to them many times. Their OFFTAP support is not the best.

We were doing a technical refresh of our systems and of our storage. That's where we combined that to use a FlexPod-type architecture, to do both of those things and make sure that we're aligned with best practices.

Determining the architecture was complex, because you need to make sure that you know what your requirements are. Then, once you've designed it, initial setup was straightforward.

We looked at other vendors. We keep our eyes open all the time.

The replication was why we chose NetApp, SnapVault. Not a lot of storage vendors do block-based replication with being able to maintain a different set of snapshots on the secondary and the primary. Everybody does SnapMirror, or does a mirror of some type, but SnapMirror XDP or SnapVault is something that NetApp has that most storage vendors don't have.

In general, global- and enterprise-level support is the most important criteria when I’m looking to work with a vendor.

Spend the time up front to architect it, get the details, and make sure your plan is solid.