FlexPod XCS Reviews

I love the ability to migrate my profiles if I have a problem with one. It's worked out great for us: system dies, have it back up on 20 minutes, no problem. Unfortunately, that has happened once.

It just gave us everything in one box. There isn’t any, run over here and configure this, run over here and configure this; it's all in one, nice, neat little rack. It's just one interface, which is always nice.

I would love to see the single interface for managing everything end to end. That would be ideal.

Also, simply the interface a little bit. There are a lot of places to go to get things configured and it's easy to get lost: Did I remember to do this piece over here before I did this piece? Then there's this piece on the other side. There are just a lot of moving parts that I think could be simplified, or wizard-driven; to say, you have all of these together.

Stability and scalability are fantastic. I’ve never had any issues with stability or scalability.

I've had lots of issues with firmware upgrades. I'm locked on an unsupported firmware because I have three production servers that, if I upgrade the firmware on them, I lose those servers. The solution from Microsoft, NetApp, and Cisco is to rebuild those servers on updated firmware. That's not an option.

I’m locked where I’m at. I can't go to 2016. I just barely squeaked into 2012 R2, I'm locked where I'm at now until we refresh our SQL environment. Then, it's however fast I can get my dev team to get off that old SQL environment. The last SQL refresh took me 10 years. We had the new environment in there but they say something like, "Well, we’ve got this legacy app, we can't move it just yet."

To get a perfect rating, they would need to fix these issues, without rebuilding my environment.

Generally, technical support is good. When you call in, as long as you give them a clear issue, you're going to get a good answer. Don't call in and just say it's broken.

We needed faster networking. We use it primarily for our virtual servers, for migrations. To get 10 Gig into our data center, we had to run cables all the way across the building to our networking area. The more cables you're running, that pipe's only so big. We ran a couple of cables to the FlexPod, plugged it in, and all of a sudden, I've got 40 Gig to move data back and forth in the rack. I don't ever have to leave it, so that was our primary reason for bringing it in.

It’s pricey, but provides a high return on investment.

It was a little spendy, but you get what you pay for, though. It's rock solid, other than my firmware issue. Other than that, I plugged it in, and other than checking on it once a month to make sure that there are no alerts, I leave it alone. That's fantastic.

We did not look at any other vendors; we are a Cisco/NetApp/Microsoft shop. It was clear-cut for us.

In general, when we do look for a vendor, the important criteria are reputation, stability and price, obviously. Also, how easily can I talk to them? We've had vendors come in and they've completely bombed on their initial interviews. It's like, "Sorry, guys. You had that one shot to make that first impression and you did it poorly."

Check the interop matrix and check it carefully. Make sure that everything's going to work across the line.

Another thing: Once I've got my FlexPod in place and NetApp knows I've got a NetApp 8040 – they know I have these models – have it pull the interop matrix for me. You know all my parts. Why do I have to hunt it down?

For other customers: Just make sure you do your homework on it. Make sure it's actually going to give you what you need and have fun with it.

The most valuable feature are probably the inter-app ability that it offers; knowing that everything is compatible; and the validated designs that we get with that.

Ease of set up and administration; knowing everything that we have is going to be working optimally. Getting that kind of support, too, when we call in. We can open up a FlexPod case if we have an issue and then we have vendor support across everything that's in our virtual environment.

It might be improved with some refinements to tools, such as the virtual storage console and similar items. We've had a few issues with that. The same thing applies, as far as the Cisco side; the UCS manager is kind of bulky and slow; a Java-based kind of thing. Maybe they could just refine the tools that we use to manage it.

It's really good, it's worked well, but we've had a few issues with various parts of the hardware, with our fabric interconnects from Cisco. We actually had to replace two of them because of some sort of corruption that was on them. We did an upgrade on it. Apparently, the specific version we upgraded from to the specific version that we upgraded to, there was a known bug that would cause corruption on our partitions on there. We had to replace those like three times because of issues we had. That was a big pain point, but besides small things like that, it's been pretty rock solid. That would be why my rating is not higher than it is.

I think it was just one of those things that's just so under the radar that it took them a while to even dig up that it was an issue. I referred to it as a known issue, not being that it happens a lot but known that there was some documentation that had pertained to it. It was one of those things, tough to catch until afterwards; already done.

It's pretty stable; as good as anything else that I've used.

Scalability is good, I guess. I'm not sure I can comment too much on that because we haven't grown our environment too much since we set it up.

Technical support has been pretty good.

It was already implemented when I started at my company, and then I just setup another new environment after I had gotten there.

I was involved in setting up one of our FlexPods. It was pretty straightforward. The most complex part was probably the fiber channel setup. If I would do it again, maybe I would look into more of an NFS-type setup; make that a little bit easier. Otherwise, you had the FlexPod, and as far as from the Cisco side and everything, it was pretty straightforward.

We were just kind of sticking with it for now, because of the validated design; knowing that there are lots of other users that are using the same product; the tried and true results. Our environment requires having a very stable environment. Otherwise, our company loses a lot of money. We wanted to get into something that was well reviewed and know that lots of other people are working with it.

Give it a look. See if it fits your environment. That's kind of it, for anything you purchase, because it's got to fit your environment; it works for us. It works for what we're trying to do.

One of the most valuable features is that I have one vendor that I have to contact to go to all my vendors. I don’t have to call Cisco, NetApp, VMware. I just make one call to one of them, they bridge all of that for me; that's nice.

Also, with the documented architecture, it's not something that we're testing right off the bat; it's been proven and it works.

It allowed us to streamline support tickets that come in. We don't have to call three different vendors. I just call one and they take care of all of that for us. It's been very helpful.

Each individual solution has its own cost benefit. It really fit within our organization. We had a lot of the existing technology there. We were just missing a couple pieces of it. So, once we got those pieces, we were able to certify it with FlexPod. We didn't need to buy too many new pieces. It fit into our original architecture.

We have cut down on the management team running FlexPod compared to our previous system. We've reallocated one FTE so far because of it. We can do more things with fewer people on the team.

I know there's some new Cisco stuff coming down the road that we might be looking at. UCS Minis: I know that they're going to be supported right off the bat.

Nothing's perfect. There's always room to increase: more hyper-conversions; smaller form factor is always on our mind; better ways to align disk up for us; how can we split off our disk correctly for each HA pair that we have, from a cluster standpoint.

There was a little mixup with, at least NetApp, coming to the market with flash. They've slowly gained ground in that marketplace; I’m waiting to see how that plays out. I know Mars was trying to be a big hit for them and then when they dissolved, that kind of set me back a little bit from a time standpoint. Mars was their all-flash platform; something separate from WAFL that we're doing with ONTAP. That had me looking at that infrastructure. That's the only reason why they lost a few points in my rating.

I have been using it for about three-and-a-half years.

It is a stable infrastructure. We've haven't had any major outages in the past three-and-a-half years since implementing it. There's been no downtime from a hardware standpoint that we weren't able to address quickly.

It is very easy to scale out the infrastructure, add more pieces to it as we needed; just kind of plug and go. That’s very easy.

That depends on when I call. Cisco is a little bit more difficult than some of the other ones, but calling it up has been great. They've bridged that gap a couple times at VMware as well.

We were using a mixture of Dell and HP solutions. We were using Dell 910s for a lot of our ESX environment. We were using old Cisco MDS switchers for fiber channel. We were able to consolidate all that infrastructure down and use one standard platform coming off the Nexus.

My engineers worked with one of our strategic partners to help implement the solution. It has been, from a design standpoint, much easier to get set up and running, and much faster than doing it outside of FlexPod.

We haven’t had any technical issues with getting it set up or with running it; none at all. I'm very happy.

It's a little more expensive to go down the FlexPod route, but I think the ease of management in having all the vendors aligned really helps us in the long run. There is more upfront cost, but less down the road that we have to pay; maintenance and support, man-hours, actually managing the system.

We already had NetApp in-house. It was very easy for us to use at least that as a storage platform, so it was just finalizing on the Cisco UCS part. We needed to come up with a hardware platform that we could use and UCS was the hardware platform.
HP’s BL series blade was the other one we were looking at from a blade standpoint.

We decided to go with FlexPod instead of HP because we were already a leveraged Cisco partner, a Cisco shop, with all of our route switch and all of our data center core switching. It was very easy for us, then, to assimilate the UCS chassis within our existing infrastructure without any other type of complexity.

Make sure you get all your requirements up front. Make sure that the protocols that you want to use are supported by your vendor. There are a lot of niche players out there that will say they will do something. When you get them onsite, they don't or they don't perform as well. We were looking at a couple of other flash providers, including Nutanix and Tintri.

Bringing them onsite for a demo works great, but when you start talking to people who actually use the solution... We found that in the demos, they couldn't live up to the promises they were making, or it didn't make sense to add more infrastructure in. I can't get rid of my core NetApp infrastructure, so it didn’t really make any sense to add another storage vendor in, and increase the complexity. Using FlexPod has been simpler than adding in another vendor.

NetApp might be a little more expensive but in the long run, it pays off for itself.
I’ve been very happy with their technical ability, their technical delivery, and the usability; it’s very easy.

I like the fact that it is all integrated. That is the biggest thing. You get everything, all in one shot. A good example of that is when you are doing a rip-and-replace of your storage. It allows you to bring UCS and NetApp in at the same time, at the five- or six-year mark, when your storage starts to get some age on it and you are looking to get into new technology. It is really handy to grab something like that to get everything taken care of. I like the fact that it is all one big, solid unit.

It really didn't change much in the implementation that I had because we already had an existing UCS installation. The good thing about it was that it just fell in and integrated with what we already had.

Seeing some integration to cloud would be important, for sure. That was what I was hoping to see with some of the new data ONTAP features that we were going to learn about at a recent conference I attended. I'd like to see, for example, a namespace that you can extend to a cloud provider, so that you can just do a straight vol move from on-prem out to cloud.

The support aspect was something that was lacking a little bit. NetApp has improved a little bit there, but we have struggled with some support issues, even here recently. I'm hoping that NetApp can get the support piece figured out.

We have had no issues stability-wise.

We didn't need to scale ours.

Technical support is not fantastic. Especially when I was supporting the FlexPod at a previous employer, we had some issues. We were one of the early adopters of cluster mode. Calling up some NetApp engineers to get some support had some issues, where the senior-level engineers were still the 7-mode people, I would get a list of commands saying, "Here is what you would do if you were running 7-mode." It wasn't super helpful.

I did not previously use a different solution; not to the level of storage that NetApp is going to provide for sure. It was kind of a homegrown system that they had.

I didn't set it up, but I oversaw the initial setup of it by a third-party company. It seemed pretty straightforward.

I think we compared three different vendors at the time.

We chose NetApp because of our familiarity with it, for one; two, the price was right.
As far as bringing in vendors for storage, it is important that they have experience with whatever storage that we are looking at; what level their engineers are at. The partner that we went with, we knew that they had experience with NetApp in the past, and so we trusted bringing them in to help get the FlexPod set up.

Definitely leverage NFS datastores if you are going to be running VMware. Don't just treat it as any old storage. Think about the fact that NetApp is invested heavily into the WAFL file system and the whole bit.

There is a ton of preparations that you would need to do before implementation. That could be a months-long process. Make sure that you have the right equipment that is going to connect into it; your top-of-rack switches and the whole bit.

The single line of support is valuable.

It's a validated design, so there's not a lot of questioning to it. Storage and server compute comes in and it's ready to go. When we needed the storage and compute to run our apps, the FlexPod seemed like the right choice because it was a validated design and setup. There wasn't any question to the config. It came in a rack; plug it in, ready to go.

The biggest thing is, it just gave us a standardized platform for our virtualization, so it was consistent across the board. Storage was NetApp, compute was UCS and we had VMware on top of that, and it was just plug and play. Everyone knew how that worked.

I'd say the biggest area with room for improvement would be some enhancements to the management tools, but from what we saw at a recent NetApp conference, that's coming. I think NetApp's already heard the change and I think that's what's coming. For us, it would've been just some of the management tool changes they've shown us that that's in the works or already coming out with 9.1.

Other than that, I don't have anything else from our use cases. We just refreshed our FlexPods with AFF-based FlexPods. That was pretty much all you could've asked for really.

Stability is great; we haven’t had any issues.

Scalability is great; we haven’t had any issues.

We have not needed to use technical support.

The existing solution was a decade old; we had to invest in a new solution.

Initial setup was straightforward; it took a day.

We've got a good team I guess and some good PS partners. We sat down, we went through the design so we knew what we were getting. The equipment showed up, they implemented it and because it's a validated design and everything's already there, it's just, power it up and go. Then we just move our workload on to it and off we went. We had no issues.

The pricing was competitive against what else was out there. We were already a NetApp shop, so it made it more of a sell for us because we already had the knowledge in-house for NetApp and ONTAP. Going to the FlexPod was easy in that sense.

The only other one we looked at was EMC. We weren't really thrilled with what they had to offer.

In general, when I’m looking for a vendor, pre- and post-sale support is important: the actual tech support that they provide; the ONTAP support guys, from once it's installed; implementation resource support from the vendor. When it comes to the pre-sales and the design and then the concepts, we've always found that NetApp’s engineers and SCs are always there. They walk us through everything. They validate it all. We get a lot of support out of them and that's a big requirement for us.

For us, the big incentive would be the support that you get out of NetApp and the partners that we have in our town. There are a lot of strong NetApp FlexPod people. Thereare a lot of FlexPods out where we are. If you're looking for a solution that you know is going to work and that you're going to get some solid support and backing from the vendor throughout your process from start to finish, it's going to be the NetApp guys.

I’ve given it a perfect rating based on our experiences. We've rolled out multiple racks of FlexPod and we've never had an issue. We've got two data centers full of it and we've not actually had to call NetApp support. We've never contacted support even when we had a couple of drive failures. They're proactive on that, so the drive shows up and gets swapped out. We never actually opened a ticket for anything other than those two automated ones.

For our company, the FlexPod solution really hit a sweet spot because it leveraged existing technologies we had with new blade server technology and NetApp's scalable, expandable storage.

We were due for a server hardware refresh, and so we examined solutions from several vendors. We worked out an impressive deal with Cisco to go along with NetApp, who we're already a customer of and VMware vSphere. When we brought that all together, things just fell into place.

Management is still by separate screens. I need to go to NetApp to manage the enterprise storage. I need to go to the vCenter client to manage VMware, and I've got the UCS Manager. My best hope is some kind of combined client in the future.

We've been using FlexPod for just over three years.

We've had one stretch of downtime. It was very short. Unfortunately, it happened on a weekend, and it was related to the failure of a hardware DIMM in one of the blades. Our partner and Cisco worked very quickly to remedy that.

I can give you a perfect example of how this FlexPod solution is scalable. When we first put it in, we had our baseline activities WE wanted to do. Then shortly afterwards, the company decided to go to JD Edwards as a ERP system. We needed to buy additional compute resources. It was quite simple to buy another chassis, some more blades that were aimed for that solution, and buy additional shelves of disk and just connect it to our NetApp filer.

The support we've got from NetApp has been pretty flawless. If something has gone wrong, it's usually been something like a disk fails. For enterprise storage, that's a given, but we've not had any issues where we've had any appreciable downtime outside of scheduled maintenance.

It is complex. I would recommend to anyone considering a FlexPod to get a partner who has done it before because with FlexPod there's a lot of work up front, but if you get it right up front, everything beyond there is smooth sailing.

I mentioned earlier that we added additional chassis and blades. Because we had done the work ahead of time, set up the templates and profiles for the blades, it was very simple to just insert the blade, power it on, apply that profile, and it's up and ready to go.

I look for a vendor with an established history of innovation of stability. That's one of the things with NetApp and Cisco. They're leaders in innovation in their fields. I'm entirely confident in the solutions I have with them today and the solutions they're going to provide tomorrow.

Recommendation to peers: I would recommend that they would really regret it if they didn't at the very least invest in and consider a FlexPod solution.

I'd give it firm 9.5, simply because I don't believe in giving tens out. Literally, it's been in our situation pretty flawless.

One of the valuable features is the simplicity of how all the different technologies actually join together. The perk for us was very straightforward. We came in and said, "This is where we're at, this is where we want to go to." Working with our vendors in Australia – Telstra especially and a couple of companies such as The Versus Group – they've made the transition from classic physical hardware, going to that virtualized platform for us. Now, we're looking to move into a hybrid cloud solution, using the cloud ONTAP, as our next phase to start doing that. It's been quite good.

It provided simplicity for managing the environment, once we had it full stood up. We saw that simplicity with just going around with all the service profiles and things like that; just being able to, on the fly, run up VMs, different machines, and so on as I require.

I'm not sure where that's going to go now. Obviously, we're looking to be into that hybrid cloud solution. Where that leads us to? I'm not really sure.

I have not yet seen any features in other different solutions that I'd like to see in FlexPod. From a business-driver perspective, I don't have that need at the moment.

Competitive pricing's always good. It's hit the mark for the most part. I can't complain.

The initial setup should be a little bit more intuitive. It's counterintuitive to start with. It completely changes the idea of where you had come from. That setup process changes all of your thoughts regarding policy and makes sure that you knew what they were doing to start with, and why you were going to do it.

It’s extremely stable.

Early on, we had scalability issues. Scaling size was an issue at the start. After that, it's been quite good.

In the early days, during the implementation phase, we definitely had a few issues around SMB and similar items; that's all been resolved.

Technical support is really good. I've never had any issues dealing with them directly.

I just thought that the way that the trend of technology was going, aging hardware; there was just a requirement that we needed something like it.

With the initial set up, there was a really steep learning curve to start with. Once you got past that, it was really easy. That learning curve had to do with making sure that due diligence had been completed, the right training had been completed and understanding what the solution was going to be, end to end.

We looked at other solutions besides NetApp, everything that came in at the right price point.

We moved away from EMC to start with. Obviously, they were right up there at the start, but they just couldn't come to the party with our requirements.

I find the support with NetApp, moving forward with it, being so much better.

When I’m looking at a vendor in general, once their business is able to meet our requirements, I look for having someone who can actually explain how they're going to meet those requirements and how we're going to get there on the journey.

Perform due diligence. Understand your business requirement.

The usability and the functionality of the solution as it integrates with the UCS system and Cisco devices makes it absolutely great for our environment. Our only difficulties ever using the system is that we are a closed environment, meaning we have no outside internet connection. It makes support just a little bit difficult. But for everything else, it’s absolutely great.

Because we're a small group of admins and engineers that deal with the functionality, it allows for cross-training and for one person or more to be able to actually function and use the device with very little training needed to handle the device. If they're strong in Cisco, we can easily implement them on to the FlexPod with ease; the same with our system administrators that deal with the application side of things.

I'd like to be able to use the distributed FlexPod system with a mobile FlexPod and a stable FlexPod. That way, when we put up a new site, we can easily launch a mobile FlexPod to them and say, "Hey, welcome into our environment," without having to worry about what they have on the disc, and then support it.

We are a closed classified environment system and expand our system by providing a networking stack that allows access to our environment. One of the considerations is reducing utilization of bandwidth on the wide area network for file sharing and access. Having the ability to install a mobile FlexPod for two weeks (timeframe example), then remove that FlexPod to utilize in a new location while maintaining connection to the primary FlexPod would be beneficial. This would allow us to setup a site, without regard to it being temporary, across the WAN for file access.

I have been using it for about a year and a half.

If we had more of them, stability would probably be great. We're kind of stuck to just one FlexPod, so for us it's a little difficult.

For what we wish we could do, the scalability would be absolutely great. The limitation there is actually on the company itself.

We decided to move over to streamline the equipment and standardize the equipment that's across every site and every place that we deal with.

We considered EMC storage solutions but when it comes to usability, scalability, and the storage capacity we need, they couldn't supply what we were looking for.

If you’re limited to the number of admins you have, like we are, FlexPod is a good solution to look into, especially if the distant end lacks the skill level that you might have in house. FlexPod is good if you have limited management capacity.