FlexPod Reviews

What is most valuable?

Flexibility and performance are the most valuable features. We are a financial company. Performance is very important for us, when it comes to processing data on SQL databases. Scalability is another example of us installing a new 8080 and migrating data from 8040 to All Flash on the 8080. It's flexible; it's adaptable; it's pretty fast; and it's non-disruptive.... more»

What needs improvement?

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

What is most valuable?

We really like the flexibility. I love that – it doesn't happen a whole lot, but – anytime we have a blade die or even just bad RAM, I grab that service profile, throw it on another blade, and we're up and running without any issues. We're... more»

How has it helped my organization?

We actually run one of several private clouds within our company and it is all on FlexPod. We run it as a profit center. We're able to give all our internal clients the fastest response time of any of our server teams and the flexibility to,... more»

What needs improvement?

I haven't really come across a whole lot of areas for improvement. There are features I'd like to see in our deployment that are already available; all-flash trays, and items like that. It's there; I need to find a project that justifies... more»

What is most valuable?

From the integration standpoint, it is a lot easier to integrate than a lot of people initially felt. Being able to leverage either block or file capabilities of the storage is something that has been beneficial. Most customers had to look at... more»

How has it helped my organization?

It has helped my organization in terms of ease of deployment. The approach of utilizing NFS and some of the key features that have been put in for VDI help us limit boot storm and other similar issues. I see is a lot of those things that... more»

What needs improvement?

I usually give everything a nine, because there's potentially something better out there that I haven't come across yet. Nine says there isn't anything better, and I hesitate to give anybody top marks across the board on anything. In terms of... more»

What is most valuable?

This sounds dumb, but it just works. I don't want to have to deal with support, and I don't need to because, again, it has just worked.

How has it helped my organization?

It allows me to focus on other things. Backing up databases. More efficient. Everybody's short staffed. We're short staffed and so it's allowed me to take on other stuff, and it just sits there and runs. It's not sexy but it does the job.

What needs improvement?

Upgrades are always scary because you just don't know. Nobody has six or seven different systems sitting around that you can test on before you go into production data. My complaints are all ticky-tacky, not from a "vision" perspective. If... more»

What is most valuable?

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... more»

How has it helped my organization?

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.