FlexPod XCS Reviews

Everything with NetApp right now is our DR and restore strategy. We have all of our VMs installed in an on-premises FlexPod.

We have another filter down in our DR site and everything is replicated using SnapProtect and SnapSuite.

The validated designs for major enterprise applications are very important to our organization. We have to make sure that everything is fully supported, end to end, and that we're not going to have any problems. When people have trouble they resort to finger-pointing and complain about the network, servers, or storage. With the one validated design, we contact NetApp and get support for everything we need.

This solution has had a serious impact on our organization. How do you measure not having outages? It has allowed us to do business without any interruptions, which means that I can sleep well at night. After the last hurricane, we were completely up once it ended because we just brought up all of the VMs using VMware.

With respect to the history of innovations, the strategy that NetApp has taken with Cloud volumes online, Azure NetApp files, and all of those things, is good. We've already started using cloud volumes online and we're putting in a new solution with NetApp where we're going to be tiering everything off to Azure because we have a huge presence there. For example, we have an SQL server there, and we're going to be replacing the drives that are on SQL with Cloud Volumes Online so that we can leverage efficiencies. Other data, such as shares, are also going to be tiered off to Azure so that we don't have to be using production cycles, production backups and IOPS and everything, locally. We're instead going to send it to cloud storage.

Using FlexPod has absolutely made our staff more efficient.

This solution has increased our application performance, but we have been using this solution since 2003 and no longer keep metrics.

Our data center costs have been reduced because we've been able to shrink our data center. About ten years ago, we were at about one hundred and seventy servers. Now, we're down to eight blades. We've gone from seven racks down to two racks in the data center, and if you think about power, cooling, and everything else, it's a significant saving.

The most valuable features of this solution are efficiency and simplicity. You don't have to waste a lot of time managing things.

We have had some problems with SnapSuite and the replication functionality.

This solution is extremely stable, rock-solid.

We haven't had any failures, hardware-wise, in several years. The only issues that we have had were with SnapSuite, and it was related to replication. For this issue, we engaged with technical support.

This is a very scalable solution.

The unified support for the entire stack is extremely important for us. Anytime we have an issue, even though we haven't had any recently, we need to get it resolved as quickly as possible. Having a single vendor to go to for everything just makes it that much easier.

When we have had to contact technical support, they were very responsive, they follow up, and they take ownership of the issues right away. I would rate them a five out of five. 

We have always been using NetApp, although about twelve years ago we went through consolidation. We had Dell storage, some Hitachi, some IBM storage, and then we had a NetApp filer. Our multi-vendor hardware came about from purchasing the cheapest thing that we could get when something else was needed.

When we met with our NetApp rep, they came in and suggested that we consolidate. We had been having trouble with backups, using Syncsort, and they suggested that we move to SnapProtect and get everything on NetApp. They helped us to take everything off of all the other storage, consolidate down to NetApp, and then replace our entire backup solution with SnapSuite and SnapProtect. After that, they made sure that everything would replicate back up to the DR site.

The initial setup of this solution is fairly straightforward. Obviously, you need to know what storage systems are being used, etc, but in general, it is straightforward.

We use Insight, formerly Datalink, to assist us with the maintenance of this solution. They are excellent. They helped with our implementation and they help us to deploy all of the solutions. If we have any questions about designs, where we are going in terms of the roadmap, etc, then between Insight and NetApp they are invaluable when helping us to make decisions.

I would say that we have seen ROI, although I do not have numbers to support it.

I am looking forward to using the cloud enablement that they have been working on.

In the last three years, I lost money that was budgeted for capital expenditures, meaning that I have had to give it back because I literally have nothing to buy. We do have operating expenses and we have the capability, but everything that we are doing is moving into Azure, using managed services and software as a service. This means that we've been reducing our hardware footprint significantly. Especially with the efficiencies that NetApp brings, we don't need as much storage space.

My advice for anybody researching this solution is to evaluate your workloads.

NetApp is definitely the way to go.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use this solution in our on-premise production environment.

It does optimize operations. There is a huge improvement, between fifteen and twenty percent, in application performance.

This solution allows us to have a highly diverse environment. It is scalable and has been helpful with our DB deployment and DB management.

The solution infrastructure enables us to run mission-control workloads.

This gives us a good opportunity because it allows us to connect different Cisco devices, giving us a highly diverse environment. It is diverse and allows connections between two different vendor’s systems.

The most valuable features of this solution are the scalability, the speed of deployment, and physical server management.

Cisco should work closely with other vendors to ensure that their specialized hardware can be integrated.

This solution is really stable.

This is a very scalable solution.

I would rate technical support a nine out of ten.

It does simplify our support experience. We used to have a SAN environment that was managed by a dedicated team. Now, management is handled by separate teams.

FlexPod was recommended by our architect and vendor, WWT.

The initial setup of FlexPod is straightforward. This solution reduces our application deployment time by approximately five percent.

We had assistance with our deployment from WWT, and our experience was good.

The solution has not reduced our data center costs. From the finance perspective, it doesn't save us money. But performance-wise, we benefit.

Our licensing fees are on a yearly basis.

I highly recommend this solution.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It has not improved my organization, because the products work so well on their own. We have not had any issues with it. Knock on wood.

It just works fine.

The assurance and the peace of mind that we get from knowing if we had an issue with either the NetApp equipment, Cisco equipment, or our VMware enviroment, we can call one number for support, then everyone works together and nobody is pointing fingers all over the place.

It is very consistent. We have had other systems that we have had to replace. Other vendors who we are migrating away from, or have already done so.

However, we are fully onboard with NetApp at this point. We love the company and their products with their ease of use and support.

We have several NetApp systems and we know that if we run low on space that we can add a shelf. We just recently did a head swap on some older systems, and it went fine. There were not any big issues.

NetApp's tech support is top-notch. We have a good relationship with our local guy. If he does not know the answer right away, he reaches out to somebody in the larger office and we receive answer very quickly. We are very happy with support.

Depends on who you are talking to whether the initial setup is straightforward or complex. Setting up a NetApp is one thing, setting up a Cisco UCS environment is another thing. We did not buy it as a FlexPod. We bought all the ingredients individually, then registered it as a FlexPod because it is licensed as such. 

We had subject-matter experts doing their roles. In the end, they realized it was a FlexPod and it should be registered as one. 

As far as ease of management, we do not have to hire more people to administer it or cross-train someone who is not necessarily an expert in one thing or another. If they do not know it and the primary person is out, then we can just call, someone will answer and help us out.

ROI is not a question or concern.

I would give it an eight or nine out of 10. I am not going to give anybody a 10, because you cannot achieve it. We are very happy with NetApp and Cisco, and our FlexPod solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Cisco and NetApp are best of breed. We just fell into this from years of using other products and vendors. 

At some point, you learn along the way that this company over here does a good job and I have heard good things, and this other company also does a good job. Then, these two companies find each other and you get a great solution.

The most valuable features are the integration and the ability to have support, planning and installation from a single service provider.

Integration between the UCS blade side and the NetApp side is excellent.

The ability to really leverage the 10-Gb connections between the UCS to the Cisco Nexus switch and then to our NetApp really improved performance for us and allowed us to experience a huge amount of growth with no loss of performance.

Also, we've been able to move to and implement a new ERP system, J.D. Edwards. Because of the modularity of the system, when we need more compute resources, we just buy more blades. If we need more disk, we just buy disk shelves. They integrated very easily.

It simplified our workflow.

Right now, we have no flash at all in our NetApp side, so one thing we're looking forward to is going to ONTAP 9. We're also looking forward to looking at integrating some flash shelves to see what the performance will really be. Everybody tells me it's fantastic.

We're rolling out J.D. Edwards location by location so the amount of performance we're going to need is going to grow and grow and grow. So far, there's been no problems but I like the fact that I have that growth path to put in flash and improve performance if necessary.

In a perfect world, I would also love to be able to manage everything from a single pane of glass. I think we're talking about such disparate technologies that I would understand if that is very difficult to happen. In our environment, I'm in control of Cisco UCS manager and the NetApp side but when we get to the Nexus switches, I don't even have the log-ins, our networking guy does. That's something that I don't have a problem with. He's very good and he works very well together with me. It would be nice to have control from a single pane of glass.

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

We've had exactly one issue and that was a related to a hardware failure, a RAM stick, that took down one blade. It was at a SQL cluster, so the other blade just took over flawlessly. We didn't have any downtime.

The scalability is tremendous.

Before we went with FlexPod, we were still a NetApp customer. We were using Dell rack servers connected via 1-Gb links for NFS and 4-Gb fiber channel for block storage and still running VMware vSphere. Things were okay but it was time for a hardware refresh. At that time, we evaluated Dell, HP and Cisco UCS; both rack and blade servers. We pretty much eliminated HP right away. One of the reasons we decided to go with the UCS was that our NetApp reseller was very much certified with Cisco and had a good reputation. As I’ve mentioned, it would have that one source, where we could get support for everything through that reseller. It also didn't hurt that Cisco offered a fantastic deal, where they quoted a price for their blade servers almost exactly the same as what Dell wanted for their rack servers. The price is a huge factor for our company. We're a privately held company, so price is often the primary factor.

For the initial setup, I worked with a reseller. They had two awesome engineers, one from the UCS side and one from the NetApp side. They worked hand-in-hand with me and the people at MacLean-Fogg to make sure we got everything done right. That is the real key with the FlexPod. If you get all your definitions and all your profiles set up correctly in the UCS manager, then adding a blade is very simple. You put in the blade, you turn it on, you apply that profile to the new blade and you're up and running.

The big thing with a FlexPod is, you've got to get it right at the beginning and then everything from that point on is very simple.

We were trying to come up with a unified vendor for a hyper-converged solution. Our deployment model was SASE.

Using the solution definitely opened our eyes to how our current infrastructure wasn't performing as well as it should. It made us redefine a couple of RFPs for vendors to provide new types of solutions.

It also helped reduce troubleshooting time on architecture configurations. Our troubleshooting time has dropped by at least 25 percent.

We really like the integration between NetApp and Cisco and how fluid the transition would have been from our previous compute and storage vendor.

FlexPod's native integration with hyperscalers is one of the reasons we chose to look at it and NetApp. That is one of the key components of our infrastructure. That native integration is very important. All of our servers, everything that we have on-prem, runs on it. We haven't moved fully to a hybrid or in-cloud model yet, so we need to be able to run things locally for operational purposes.

I used it at a previous job for about six months and we evaluated it at my current organization for 90 days.

We had no qualms with the stability of the solution. It was up for the entire duration with no problems. We ran into zero issues.

We had contemplated getting multiple FlexPods, but once we evaluated them to fit our models, we determined that one would probably do. The scalability is there, but our exposure to it was not relevant.

We had it spread out across four data centers in a single geographic campus. Multiple departments would have had resources on the equipment if we had gone with the solution.

Tech support from NetApp and Cisco is pretty good. We engaged them multiple times throughout our evaluations.

Positive

We did not have a previous solution.

I was involved in the original spec'ing, scoping, and architecture of the solution. But the integration and implementation was up to some other folks on the team.

We definitely saw a lot of operational cost savings using FlexPod. As far as capital outlay goes, that was a little bit too much for us to swallow and we weren't able to recognize enough savings in that area to afford it.

If the flexible consumption had really minimized our upfront spending, we definitely would have gone into it, but we found that the "cost containers" were not enough to make the operational life cycle of the FlexPod equipment worthwhile for us.

The pricing and licensing were tough to swallow. We would have liked to have had the solution be part of any state or other government GSA contracts.

Everybody wants to see a cheaper and more cost-conscious solution instead of the solutions that are out there today.

We evaluated Pure Storage, Nimble, which is now HPE, and we also took a look at some larger EMC solutions.

The flexibility, operational efficiency, and scalability of FlexPod are amazing. This product would have been the solution that we went with outside the price. The functionality and features that it provides are, bar none, the best in the industry.

The product itself is great. It is just that the cost and licensing are prohibitive.

But for someone looking for the most cost-effective solution, I would definitely tell them to consider this as one of the products to evaluate.

In general, we use it for our storage and computing work loads.

We had challenges finding the right partner regarding performance, flexibility, and support from the vendor. FlexPod is an all-inclusive solution, so we found the right one.

We have about 1,000 end users and 2,500 endpoints.

It provides a good, stable base for all our workloads.

FlexPod’s prevalidated architectures are quite important to our organization because it guarantees that things work together as expected.

FlexPod has helped reduce troubleshooting time by 30% on architecture configs.

The most valuable features are performance and compatibility between devices.

The native integration between different platforms is quite important because it is secure and works together without any interfering issues.

The flexibility, operational efficiency, and scalability of FlexPod are quite high. 

I would like to see increased performance.

I have been using it for about 10 years altogether. Since we have been using NetApp and Cisco devices for several years. Since FlexPod has been available, we have been using it.

I would rate the stability as nine out of 10.

I would rate the scalability as eight out of 10.

When we need the support, their reaction time is quite good. I would rate it as eight out of 10.

Positive

We previously had several components for different workloads, using HPE and other storage providers. After that, we switched to NetApp and Cisco devices. In the end, we switched over to FlexPod's integrated and support solution.

I mainly did the network part of the deployment. My inclusion tests were quite straightforward.

We used NTS in Austria.

We have seen a reduction in support needs.

FlexPod has reduced our overall TCO and simplified our operations. 

The pricing and licensing are quite expensive. However, compared to other solutions, it is okay.

We evaluated EMC and HPE. In the end, we chose FlexPod. The differences between solutions were the flexibility and performance aspects as well as the cost.

It is quite important to have a converged solution. Then, you can have all the components responsible for stability and performance together in one place.

In general, the solution is quite good. I expect improvements in every area over time.

I would rate the product as eight out of 10.

We have FlexPod Mini for the primary data center.

FlexPod's validated designs for major enterprise apps in our company are important because there is stability. There are zero downtimes and high availability. There is good support for the systems that you can run on the platform. FlexPod is a validated architecture, and basically, the spectrum of what's supported is pretty wide. So, you can run pretty much everything without thinking twice about it.

It provides unified support for the entire stack. For example, if you have an upgrade or a new version on NetApp, there is a compatible version for the Nexus switch, and there is a compatible version of VMware and/or Cisco UCS firmware. Instead of upgrading piece by piece or guessing what is going to work with what and whether there are any bugs, for an upgrade, you can follow the chain and what has actually been validated. It reduces a lot of overhead for the team.

It has made our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward. Instead of designing or trying to follow the lifecycle of each piece of equipment, by working with a unified stack, we do it once, instead of doing it five times for five different pieces.

It has definitely improved application performance in our company, but I don't have a baseline.

Integration is most valuable. This is a reference architecture. So, we don't have to design something from scratch and figure out how it is going to work. 

We would like one-click upgrades.

NetApp released a new version with a new interface. For somebody who has been used to the old interface, it's a change. It is taking time to adjust to the new interface, and it would be nice to have some of the old features in it.

We are very positive about it. It has been a great experience. We've actually refreshed the hardware which indicates that it is working and is stable. We are satisfied with it, and we're just continuing with this.

Our experience is positive. We've refreshed it. We've purchased additional NetApp, which speaks of the positive experience. I would rate it a nine out of 10.

This was our first experience with it. Before this, we'd buy hardware, storage products, and networking products, and we tried to integrate them. Whatever surprises we got, we dealt with them. With a validated architecture, there's a little bit more confidence that whatever you're putting in place has been validated, and then you got two major names, NetApp and Cisco, behind you.

In technology, I'm afraid there's really not much that's straightforward.

We have some skills to do some of the tasks, but for implementations, we usually go for integrators. The experience with the integrator was great, and the time was basically within an acceptable timeline. The project timeline did not extend, and from that perspective, the implementation was straightforward. You can have some expectations for start and finish.

We worked with our integrators to look at the available solutions and follow the market trend based on our requirements, and this one checked most of the boxes. At the time, instead of NetApp, there was HP storage or HP servers with HP storage. Based on the previous experience and experience with the staff, integrator's feedback, and market popularity, the choice was Cisco/NetApp.

If anyone is just going from a conventional SAN to VMware Hypervisor, it is the most reliable option moving forward. Following technology trends, if you're moving from a conventional server to SAN and you would like to integrate from encryption to SAN-to-SAN replication to any features—ranging from security, ransomware protection, and DR—this solution covers it.

It simplifies infrastructure from edge to core, but I don't know if it also simplifies from core to cloud. 

We are not yet using FlexPod's storage tiering to a public cloud. We also haven't fully adopted most of the innovations, such as all-flash CI, private and hybrid cloud deployment, secure-multi-tenancy, end-to-end NVMe, cloud storage tiering, but we are getting there in terms of whatever trends are there in the market within cloud integration, flash, and NVMe. It is improving our infrastructure, and we will be there. We are currently in the process of adopting some of these.

It has only theoretically decreased our company's data center costs in terms of floor space, power, or cooling. That's because when we went into FlexPod in a data center, we were migrating from one data center to another. At the moment, they still coexist. We are still in transition. So, in terms of cooling and power, we are still cooling and consuming power in both locations. Until we completely go off one of the data centers and move some of the workloads to the cloud, practically, there won't be any reduction in the data center costs. 

I would rate it a nine out of 10.