FlexPod XCS Reviews

It's a tenant environment. We sell it off to customers who need an environment, depending on the scale of their company, where there might be a couple of servers or 100 to 200 servers.

We are our own cloud provider. We use VMware vCloud Director because we provide that to our customers.

For UCS, we are on version 6.2. For NetApp, we are on 9.5.

Our private cloud sector of our company has grown exponentially thanks to the ease of deployment of the FlexPod architecture. We are also able to deploy a console to customers who want on-prem environments in a smaller deployment structure with a UCS Mini and direct-attached storage. So, it's helped us exponentially grow the business.

All-flash has helped the company a lot, especially for business critical applications. We found that customers want more performance than ever based on what is out there in the market. We find that innovation and integration with the whole FlexPod design has helped a lot.

The guides that we use to install FlexPods are always up-to-date. This is really helpful, especially if there is a new product with NetApp moving so far forward and Cisco as well. For them to join together and update a centralized document for the install process, it is really good. It helps us understand if there are features from the first version that we installed while upgrading that we need to implement. Those are in the document. So, we find that document useful and helpful when moving forward.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization is very important. It helps us to understand what we need to do and deliver, doing it at a supported level for our customers.

It would be nice to have something like an automated, upgrade solution The tasks needed to upgrade the hardware within FlexPod are still quite behind compared to some of its other aspects. That's more on the Cisco side. For the NetApp side, the upgrade process is quite simple. It's been simplified. So, that's something that could be looked at.

It has gone to HTML5, but it's still quite a bit bland. It still seems a bit like there were some features in the Java version that are quite hard to get into in the HTML5 version of UCS Manager, where you go to a profile and you need to drag it in. You can't move the box across. All the boxes are different sizes. If you have a lot of names, then you can't move it across, which is quite annoying when you're trying to do it.

I would like more with the integration pieces, e.g., more with the REST APIs to be able to access it remotely.

The footprint in the data center is quite large, especially when you scale out. Maybe find some hardware in the future, where if a new blade comes out, then Cisco can say, "Look, we'll buy those blades back off you, and we'll give you this blade for X amount of money." A buyback scheme would be good for hardware, and even NetApp as well. Something like a buyback scheme for blades and stuff moving forward would be good, because I know that they're going to put more power into them. E.g., replacing four blades might equal one blade, which would be awesome, but we are still going to have those four blades around. Maybe having something where it will give you this much money for these blades so we can upgrade. That would be perfect. 

With the upgrading, making that a little bit more streamlined and a bit easier to do, so it doesn't require as many man hours to do. I would like prerequisites for an upgrade.

It's very stable. Since we've had it in, knock on wood, it's been absolutely flawless. We've had some issues, but that's to do with the upgrades and mainly with the fabric interconnects, and they can be a bit finicky. They're not as robust. They're robust in a way if you don't touch them, they look fine. But, in the upgrade process, we've had a lot of issues where there would either be corrupted images or they wouldn't upgrade, which would cause one of the switches to fail. Some of that stuff is very worrying. But from a performance perspective, it's worked as it should.

It's highly scalable. It scales really well, but that also comes back to how you want to scale it. In terms of whether you want to add more chassis and if you want to add anything more to that. Then, that comes under the costings of the data center because the chassis are quite big. However, the scalability of it is perfect. We haven't had an issues with it.

The technical support is pretty good. I would give it a seven or eight out of 10. A full 10 would be having the automated upgrading, getting them to do the upgrades, as that would take a lot of time off us having to do them. I am sure that there is a team you can get for that support, but it's quite expensive. Maybe that type of support for upgrades can be bundled in when someone buys a FlexPod deployment. Most of our time on the environment is spent on upgrading of the infrastructure.

We have really good support from NetApp. We get really good, really fast support from Cisco, as well. E.g., if there is a failed memory chip in one of the host servers that needs replacements, they are always on time. They send it out when they need to, and if the problem is not resolved, then they move that forward to the next tier.

We used NetApp from the start. Before my time, I'm not too sure what they were using. I think before it was just storage on servers, like integrated in. As long as I've been here, I've been using NetApp. 

At the time we went with that solution, public clouds didn't exist. However, knowing that it does integrate with public clouds is an absolute bonus. It's awesome because we're moving towards that type of integration. Knowing this makes our lives a lot easier because we don't have to move from where we are to get to where we want to go. We've already got what we want, which is absolutely amazing. So, it's great.

We are very strong NetApp partners.

The initial setup was straightforward. Complexity was added more from a customer perspective, where you need that custom setup for what they require. With the bundle, we did get to go to training for FlexPod's deployment and that sort of area. That also helped us a lot to understand the nuts and bolts and detail of what it is as well, which helped a lot with that knowledge.

We work with Cisco and NetApp for the deployment. The guides are absolutely intuitive. You go from start to finish, deploying it all in one. In terms of time, we have used them to reference different aspects of how we should set it up if there are custom requirements, because not all deployments are put it in and deploy it as we go. We have had some custom requirements over time, but the initial one was just straight in and cable. It was quite intuitive for us, which was good. We didn't need for anyone to come out and install it.

I haven't seen ROI.

From an application point of view, customers have seen an improvement in response times for mainly database-based applications, and the need to have a lot of reads and writes for all-flash storage. The upgrades with the hosts from UCS to the new blades with PASA processes and more memory have also improved.

From a flexible deployment and scalability point of view, we got NetApp. From enterprise and beyond, they are doing above and beyond anything that anyone else is doing at the moment.

Cisco are the leaders in LAN technology. With their hardware for unified communication of the UCS bundle, it's so straightforward and easy to set up. It integrates with a lot of other major vendors, which makes our lives a lot easier.

I would definitely support integrating FlexPod within a company, depending on their requirements. Even if it wasn't a a full, flexible deployment, just having a smaller deployment of the UCS Mini with a smaller NetApp for a customer, it is so scalable. You can do it for a smaller customer to an enterprise customer. I would fully support them implementing this into a data center based on their requirements.

The solution has made our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward, but there's still a lot of manual overhead that needs to be done. We're installing new chassis or upgrades. Upgrades is a really big one.

We find that the UCS shells are still quite power intensive. Maybe moving forward to the new releases of the blades that they have in their FlexPod deployment, we might be able to change a couple of blades to one blade because the power is exactly the same. They have the same quality of processing and memory. Right now, we find that it does take up a lot of space and power. Hopefully, in the future, once we do go through the upgrade process, pull out the old blades, and whatever we need to replace, we might do that.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. Nothing is perfect. You always have that one percent where you say, "Aw, I wish it was doing this," but at the end of the day, it can't. You're always going to be a bit picky.

The primary use case is storage for medical imagery.

We have significantly less latency now with our imagery.

It certainly has increased the speed of operations.

The solution has made our staff more efficient because it is easier to manage. This has enabled them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward. From a management perspective, the interface is much easier to use.

Reliability and convenience are its most valuable features.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization are fairly important. Speed-wise, we are not having any latency issues.

The solution has not reduced our data center costs.

I have no issues with the stability at all. It's a very stable platform.

The solution has decreased unplanned downtime incidents in our organization by 15 percent.

I'm very impressed with the scalability of the solution. It can be expanded almost infinitely.

The technical support is very good.

Our old solution was horrible and slow. We were using Dell EMC. We switched due to perceived latency.

It was very simple and straightforward. I had it racked within half a day and connected.

For deployment, we used NetApp personnel and a reseller. The experiences with them were good.

The solution has improved application performance in our organization by 30 percent.

Our licensing costs are about $50,000 per year.

Dynamics was on our vendor shortlist. 

We chose FlexPod after consulting with the vendor and NetApp.

Definitely consider NetApp. I would rate the product as a 10 out of 10 because it is fantastic. 

We are using for the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for our hospital.

We are using a primary and secondary data center model. We have two locations where one is the primary and the other is the DR.

Essentially, it's reduced some of the overhead from our team of administrators, so they can focus on other areas.

The solution has simplified infrastructure from edge to core to cloud, which has given us some bandwidth to focus on some other core initiatives that we have.

The solution has made our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward. With the administration, it's given us a bit more time to do research and process development, even investing some time in automation.

We had everything that we needed to start it, stand it up, and get it working, then develop a proof of concept to see how it works. We could also scale it out to meet our business needs over time.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization are very important. It's basically become critical to our organization to have that system functioning a 100 percent of the time. If that system is not functional, then our doctors and nurses can't provide the care to the patients in an effective way. So, it's important that it is stable, works, and easy to understand.

There is a history of issues with hardware availability. For example, we'll buy an array or a filer with a particular configuration and particular size of drive, sizing it appropriately. Then, as we grow, they're like, "Oh, you can always get more." Then when you go to get more, that model or type of disk is no longer available. 

It becomes this big process to try to figure out what we need to get, how it'll work, and how that'll integrate into the system. That could be simpler. They could do a bit more to guarantee the availability of parts. Obviously, not being the largest storage vendor, I know they can't sometimes control what the hardware vendors do. However, a bit more transparency and communication about this would be helpful.

The solution has decreased unplanned downtime incidents in our organization. So far, it's been very stable. We haven't really had any issues with it.

We did have one issue which was related to a misconfiguration with the power that did cause downtime. That was the first issue that we had since we put it in about two and a half years ago.

There was a misconfiguration with the power configuration. This relates to UCS where it was set to the grid incorrectly. Then, based on the population of the blades, it was overpopulated and there was a power issue. One of the circuits was actually connected to a low voltage circuit which caused some issues. With that, we lost almost the entire chassis for a period of time. It was not fun.

It is just a system that we can scale as we need.

The scalability is good. We're in the process of systematically replacing all of the desktop computing environment in our health system with the VDI. Our plan is to take what we have and grow it to meet that need.

We have used technical support a few times, mostly just for questions. 

The solution’s unified support for the entire stack is really important. We can't ever find ourselves in a situation where something is down, and it's integrated with another vendor application and we're looking for support, that all the vendors are pointing fingers at each other. One of the requirements that we have for standing up a system like this is that it has this type of support.

We had primarily used another vendor for our Tier 1 storage applications, then when the all-flash options came out, they were seemed to be doing better. It was a more reliable, well-developed product. We actually switched when we upgraded our existing arrays to the all-flash offerings that NetApp had.

I wasn't the primary person for a good portion of the time that we've had it. Now that I've taken over that role, I'll be digging into it a lot more.

The setup is complex, but not unreasonable. There is a lot to learn. There is a lot to do to make sure that all of the versioning is compatible. I know NetApp offers some tools if you're not familiar with it or you haven't done it before. I'm not sure that I've seen everything or know all the places to look for that information. So, it can be a little anxiety provoking in that sense.

We have a partner through NetApp who does consulting for us. They came in and helped us configure it. The experience of working with them was good.

The main return on investment would be that instead of having to refresh all of our desktop hardware we have been able to go reimage existing machines and use those as thin clients, then also purchase new thin clients rather than buying actual hardware. It also reduces the overhead of having our technicians deploy those systems and maintain them.

If there are cost savings, they are are minimal, whether it's CAPEX or OPE. They balance out, as the vendors get paid one way or another.

Develop a relationship with a partner. Those resources for us have been invaluable.

I would probably rate it about an eight (out of 10). That's just because it does meet the needs, but It's not perfect. Nothing is. There are some features or advertisements about what its capabilities are, but when dig into it or you get down the road, it's not exactly what it was advertised as.

We are experimenting with the solution’s storage tiering to public cloud right now. We haven't really gotten too far into it, but that's something that we're actually looking to do.

It is our primary on-premise infrastructure.

It runs our VMs. Our SQL databases are all on VMs, so everything is virtualized.

Once the FlexPod is built, managers provision additional VMs. So, it's pretty simplified.

With the all-flash array, I think it did improve application performance in our organization.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization are very important. We just followed them to make sure the CVD was compliant or matched to what they designed.

The solution’s unified support for the entire stack is beneficial. It is all in one.

I would like to see more of a centralized support model because we have all the FlexPod components and we hand build them. So, if we have issues with one particular stack, we're talking to individual vendors, e.g., for UCS, I have to call Cisco, and for storage, I have to call NetApp.

So far, the stability has been good. We haven't had downtime or issues since I built it. 

The old one did have some outages. The old UCS FIs went down during the firmware upgrade.

Our stuff usually doesn't go down, so the unplanned downtime isn't worse or better than before.

Our department is pretty small.

Our models are pretty small. So, we'll be able to expand additional chassis in place, then additional disk shelves.

We have had to file tech support cases. Our experience with them is okay. We dislike going online with the robot stuff. Many times, it has delayed our reaching out to a real support engineer.

When I came onboard, they had already purchased it. I just put everything together.

The setup is pretty straightforward. 

My recommendation: If you are not familiar with the technology, you probably should engage some type of professional services to set it up.

We hand built our FlexPod environment. It is composed of a Cisco UCS 6332-16UP FI, NetApp AFF A700, and an NDS.

It was easy to build. We had an old FlexPod built by someone else and I built the new one. We're in the process of migrating all the workloads over.

It hasn't decreased our data center cost by much. It just one rack replaced by another.

I heard the NVMe stuff is coming around. We don't have that license or that feature yet. So, we probably will try it out and see how much improvement that's over our current setup.

Give it a shot. If you are experienced with other types of technologies already, it's pretty simple to put it together.

I would rate the solution as an eight (out of 10).

Over the last year, we've implemented several solutions with FlexPod. We implemented whatever the latest version is. I know we just put one in that was the latest version in a New Jersey school.

Our customers are using on-premise. It's all on premise, but we have implemented solutions that are more hybrid where they are deploying a model where they want their app dev groups to be able to deploy resources much easier to an on-premise infrastructure, as compared to an AWS subscription.

Generally, it's a mix between Azure and AWS. That's what we're seeing from customers overall. 

For a large food distributor using FlexPod, we were able to move them away from traditional server storage, networking, etc. This allowed them to have the ability in both data centers to have hybridity where the FlexPod infrastructure was local and wasn't hosted, then using cloud automation (mainly AWS) and being able to deploy company resources for their teams.

This really opened up a lot of doors for them. Their CIO's mantra was sort of cloud first. Well, here's a way to start on that journey and keep some of your stuff local. I think everybody knows you can't just forklift everything to the cloud. You need cloud readiness assessments: What are your application dependencies and tools that are you using? This is how we came up with the FlexPod approach.

The solution has decreased unplanned downtime incidents at our customers' organizations, specifically in the database and SQL realms. We are talking to some of our customers about containerization as well.

The most valuable features is its ability to be able to have multiple options. It can be fully on-premise, it can be hosted, or it can be the hybrid model. For customers, this is the biggest windfall. 

Having the combined Cisco/NetApp platforms. Having the configuration options to tailor it a certain way. This Is a windfall as well, having options for configuration: small, medium, large, etc. Because every customer is different, and there's no cookie cutter.

It is very important that the solution validates the design for major enterprises. We rely on the validated design, specifically for the customer. When you look at the designs and what you have in mind, the prerequisites have already been done for you. So, it was easy to make the fit a little easier for each customer. Each customer being different.

The solution simplifies infrastructure from edge to core to cloud. It definitely simplifies it and aids in going to that journey. Cloud is the last piece of that route and this gives a seamless way to do this.

The solution’s unified support for the entire stack provides one stop shopping.

Data centers are shrinking. These solutions are part of that. Being able to have these solutions which will shrink your footprint in the data center and allow for easy cloud interaction, migration, and deployment.

I would like more support for different platforms, possibly different database platforms. I don't know if it supports Oracle today, but that would be a big improvement.

As the product matures, being able to support the things that customers are really looking at. FlexPod is supporting more containerizations, and that's a step in the right direction.

I just started working with it. I have only been with my company for about six weeks.

It's increased exponentially over time. I'm hearing a lot of this from my peers, as FlexPod has been out for a while now. With the improvements to the different versions, the stability has improved quite a bit.

It is very scalable. Though, I don't had any case examples of where we've had to scale it in terms of customer experience.

This is my understanding, since I don't deploy it. The initial setup is very straightforward compared to its competitors. Compared to an HPE solution, it is exponentially easier to set up. I know that as a fact.

It's sort of the one throat to choke philosophy. The customers in particular don't have to call here. If it's easy to get support, it isolates the problem on whatever stack you're running on. So, FlexPod supports multiple stacks. It doesn't just support one hypervisor or site.

The solution has saved our customers' organization in terms of CapEx. E.g., with the cloud availability, it's turned into sort of a hybrid CapEx/OpEx model.

I'm only delving into this solution over the last six weeks or so. I don't have the same level of expertise with FlexPod as I do with other solutions. I'm getting there slowly; trial by fire.

I came from a much larger integrated reseller. I worked more with FlexPods competitors where they really want to have these connectors and bolt-ons in place to be able to deploy something to Azure. As easy as it is to do it to an on-prem infrastructure, that's really where it's going for a lot of the commercial space.

For my current organization, it's opened up a whole new door for us as a NetApp partner to be able to have a competitive product against Dell EMC, HPE, etc., and to what I think to a degree is a better product in most cases, to go after that business. We go after the different verticals as well because we are in both the public sector and commercial space. So, these are much different verticals. Thus, you need to be able to the scalable solution. You need a solution that can meet the needs of these customers. When you're dealing with a healthcare versus a hedge fund, it is very different. Certain other companies they didn't have the same, they weren't able to scale or fit in these verticals.

Put them side by side. Do your diligence. There are other vendors out there. There are three other big players in this field: Dell EMC, Nutanix, and HPE. Obviously, each customer is different. But, if you're really looking at a true solution for hybridity with the ability to deploy to the cloud, take a real good hard look at the FlexPod CI solution.

We sell other products, and there are times because of the customer's relationship with another vendor that we might go with a different solution. However, we certainly look at putting them side by side.

The product improves over time, it's definitely helped in all-flash CI, private and hybrid cloud deployment, secure-multi-tenancy, end-to-end NVMW, and cloud storage tiering.

We are talking to customers about the solution’s storage tiering to public cloud, but we haven't implemented anything yet.

I would rate them a nine (out of 10). I don't think anybody rates a 10, but FlexPod is close.

We use FlexPod for customer data center solutions — as well as internal solutions in our data center — to host customer data.

FlexPod is easier for us to maintain and do build-outs with scalability. We're able to install a lot of the build-outs and service profiles more quickly and it takes a lot less time to have all that stuff set up for the customer. It cuts down on the man-hours it takes to get an implementation done.

The ease of setup is probably the most valuable feature for us. When we're bringing out a new solution, it's easy to get everything in the rack. When we need to add into it, later on, it's easier to have all that stuff available and then just adding to the installation as we need to in order to build it out. It's easier to bolt on components that are already created than to make them from scratch or retrofit them or replace components. The integration between the pieces is a lot easier on the setup side, too.

There are not really any additional features that I could think of that are not available already. As technology is enhanced, that may change.

We don't have any issues with stability as far as the product is concerned. It's solid. Issues are not directly related to the product itself.

We can scale the solution really easily. We've been doing that fluidly. We were probably one of the first Cisco customers to come online when the UCS line came out. We have a lot invested in our architecture and we pass that on to clients.

Scaling is easy to do. We can pretty much have any one of our clients do it on demand.

We use technical support from time to time. Most of the time if we really need assistance we end up having to get above the tier one support. We're able to do a lot of the tier one troubleshooting on our own. We have a lot of engineers who can handle that. We spend some time trying to get past tier one when we already know the issue is more complicated in order to get to the support we really need.

The setup is generally pretty easy and faster than most other systems.

We do our own installations as we are the ones who install for clients.

We have historically been a really big Cisco partner. We started doing more with hosted client opportunities for data. When they came out with that line, it was something that we moved right into as a natural progression. Once we thought it worked and saw how easy it was to scale it out, we decided to go that way and save a little extra money while scaling out the usage of what we already had in place.

I would probably rate the product as a seven out of ten. The amount of time it saved us on the setup, maintaining the system and the fact that we haven't had to do a whole lot of troubleshooting with it makes it valuable. 

As far as people entertaining the solution, they should go look at their equipment, know what their pain points are and then get in touch with somebody at Cisco. Reach out to an account manager or see a demo. I know when we were first looking at it, an account manager came out to us and brought a systems engineer with him. We had the opportunity to see the solution and they went over the potential benefits in great detail. It was easy for us to see the gain that we would be getting by implementing the product. 

People need to do their own due diligence in researching new solutions. Exploring other solutions is important to determine which particular solution is the best fit. Once you get the possibilities down to two or three solution sets that may work for you, compare them rigorously before committing. One will probably stand out as the best be it because of budget, features, capabilities or application.

Our primary use for this product is for virtual desktop infrastructure and for virtual server storage.

Since going to all Flash, employees are much happier working remotely in our VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure).

The most valuable asset of the product is the use of all-flash storage, low latency I/O (quicker Input / Output).

No really good opportunities for product improvement come to mind. For our organization, it does what we need it to do.

The product is very stable. I don't think it's failed once since I have worked with it within the organization.

We have a pretty stable workload, so we have not had to consider the scalability of the solution.

We did an upgrade during my time but that was just moving to a newer version of the same product.

The initial installation was straightforward.

We implemented through Paramount.

Return on investment is not always tangible. The workload for individuals is faster and our employees are happier for being able to accomplish their responsibilities in less time.

Before this solution, the organization used some Synology products that were more appropriate for small businesses. The organization had many remote sites and it was not centralized. We also considered VMware vSAN as a solution.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate this product as an eight. That is mostly because the cost is comparatively high for what it does.

Storage I/O is pretty important for enhancing user experience and utility.

We use this solution in our data center. It runs all of our ESX environment with SQL and Exchange servers on it.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that there is one call for support.

It is good to have validated designs, so at least supposedly it will work.

It would be helpful to have more flexibility for adding other components. It is always better to have more possibilities.

This is a resilient solution that keeps running, and we haven’t had any problems.

We haven't had to really increase its capacity, so I don't really know how scalable this solution is.

Technical support has helped us out when we needed. When you call for support, at least you don't have a finger pointing session of one vendor product versus the other.

We had to upgrade because our previous equipment was hitting the end of its lifespan. We went to an integrated solution.

The setup of this solution is a little bit complex at first. After you understand the major components, it gets easier.

We purchased our system through a reseller, CDW. However, there wasn't any special value added. They created a bill of materials.

We have a lease for approximately $10,000 USD per month.

This is a stable solution with good technical support. However, there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.