FlexPod Pros and Cons

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. View full review »

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. View full review »

For anyone who needs the flexibility of moving around profiles from physical device to physical device, it really adds an additional layer of virtualization. View full review »

We got the product and we have a small environment, but it was able to be scalable to when we started to grow. View full review »

We like it because everything is 10 Gig all the way through, from the storage to the switches to everything else, which is more than we need, and that's great. View full review »

It's less resource-intensive, given that it comes in a package. View full review »

The benefit is the speed, it's the performance. That's what it comes down to is the performance of the solution. View full review »

That it works. That it does exactly what it says on the tin. View full review »

The ease at which it scales and its redundancy factors. It's extremely redundant and easy-to-scale. View full review »

You can just take out blades and replace them, and you're back up and running in no time. View full review »

The solution was simple to deploy. View full review »

It provides ease of automation. View full review »

Software flexibility. Everything is fully configurable. The reliability results from the design. Elements are well projected (disks, blade, network, etc.). No single point of failure is identifiable. View full review »

It is a very well-thought-out solution with great virtualization. A good option we have is mapping a storage LUN onto an ESX cluster. That way, in case a particular ESX is down, it can migrate (using vMotion) to another host in the cluster, resulting in high-availability. View full review »

The ability to create vDisks on NFS exports is an added advantage. This is very helpful when we reach RDM limit. View full review »

SolidFire all-flash block storage system in an existing FlexPod data center environment. This improves the agility and performance, including the additional load of cabling. View full review »

Centralized administration with Cisco UCS Director allows you to perform all administrative functions from a single interface, as well as automate tasks. View full review »

UCS Profiles enable recovering a physical server in less than 15 minutes. View full review »

FlexClone allows you to create copies of volumes in seconds, and without occupying physical space. View full review »

It provides us with a lot of agility, on-demand or through orchestrations. We deliver hundreds of servers. View full review »

I can leverage its multiple storage abilities. We have various kinds of storage in our environment, like IBM or NetApp. We can mix those types of storage with the FlexPod environment. View full review »

The advantage is being able to consolidate everything into a relatively small chassis. View full review »

I like the combination of the brands that they decided to include, in terms of its compatibility, e.g., they integrated UCS into this solution. View full review »

It has never fallen out from under us when we were trying to do a critical push. View full review »

Our downtime has significantly been reduced. View full review »

It is easy to add-on to the tool. If we need to add a new switch, a new server, or a new chassis for Blades, it is easy. It is not disruptive. You just do it. View full review »

The nice thing about NetApp is the ease of administration. We have a new storage admin who did not do storage at all, and he has fallen right in with it. There are no real issues. View full review »

When our clients choose to call NetApp or Cisco directly, the cooperative support model means they can get passed back and forth between the two organizations freely. It works really well. View full review »

The fact that it can run the entire stack in terms of protocols. The integration for most of our customers is VMware; the full-stack integration. Also, the ability to do rapid cloning. View full review »

I have never seen a more resilient HA product out there then NetApp's solution. If I want to know that I'm putting my workload on a solution, from a storage perspective, that is going to be up 100% of the time, I'm going to choose NetApp. View full review »

It ships in a rack, so it is very easy to deploy. View full review »

It runs very well lights out. Set it and forget it. View full review »

With the components that come in FlexPod, it has enabled us to reduce connectivity down to one wire, whereas before, we had eight, 12, or 20 wires going to one server. View full review »

Performance-wise, it is actually doing quite well. The end users are very happy with it. View full review »

It simplifies the management of our entire system. View full review »

It is a complete solution. View full review »

The vendor delivers a fully-configured prebuilt system with a certain baseline on it. View full review »

Integrated support: It is all under one support contract. View full review »

I really like the architecture and I like the fact that on the storage side I can swap it out. Right now I'm on NetApp, I might go to Pure Storage. I have the flexibility. But as far as the equipment itself, the way it's all bundled together, from the UCS perspective, its rock solid. View full review »

It has simplified our support. View full review »

It has been very stable. There has been no downtime. View full review »

Technical support has been good when we have contacted them in the past. They have been helpful. View full review »

Once it is in place, we do not touch it, so it is more stable than other solutions. View full review »

We have had great support, and this is when we have called for any problems, which have been very minimal to start with. View full review »

It is very stable. We have had absolutely zero problems. View full review »

The virtual environment is a lot more efficient than physical boxes. View full review »

The product is very stable and it does what it needs to do. View full review »

It has been a great product, primarily because of a lot of its deduplication features, and the out-of-the-box thinking on block level storage from NetApp. View full review »

The initial setup was very straightforward. They provided a lot of documentation. View full review »

It has had a big, positive impact, because now everything is centralized. View full review »

Everything is preconfigured. We can ship it and manage it remotely from any server. It is all in a box. View full review »

It took a server room where we had 280 servers and another with 180 and condensed them from 15 racks down to three racks. It's helping us in the data center with all our environmentals... In addition, we're getting the ability of VMware, which is virtualization, so now we have redundancy on all of our boxes, instead of them being physical. View full review »

It scales well. It allows us to have very flexible architecture but to have the same level of simplicity that we'd normally expect in hyper-converged environments. View full review »

Gives us a single point of contact for support. View full review »

The most valuable features are that the solution is vetted and validated and it's supported end-to-end. View full review »

The flexibility and data deduplication have been the biggest practical applications. View full review »

For the management side of our UCS, it is a single pane of glass for multiple people, whether it is data center, sysadmin, or server deployment. View full review »

The hardware has been rock solid so far. It has gone up easy. It runs well. We have not had issues with it. View full review »

It's a new architecture, really scalable and programmable. When you look at SDN propositions it fits very well in a next-gen data center. View full review »

You can add more boxes and you can have more IOPS available if you want. It's very easy to add new hardware to the cluster. View full review »

It is extremely stable and well-supported because of the leadership and partnerships put in place. View full review »

The most valuable thing for me is the shorter time to market. View full review »

Provides unified support: Being able to get a vendor from one company or another company on the line without having to go back through the call queue. View full review »

The most valuable feature is the ability to integrate different products into one validated design. That allows customers to understand and get the value out of the hardware, as it was designed. View full review »

It makes us more lateral and faster to production. View full review »

It is pretty flexible. We are able to deploy faster. View full review »

The product is robust, stable, and has flexibility. View full review »

I would rate technical support as a 10 out of 10. They are good and responsive. View full review »

The real benefit of this solution is that it is pre-architected with the ability to scale-up and scale-out. View full review »

Large and small companies do not have time to design the compute, the amount of storage, and how it works together. They are buying pre-proven, pretested solutions with reference architectures already in place. View full review »

The documentation alone that NetApp provides can guide anybody through the setup process. View full review »

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. View full review »

DR has been tremendously easier. View full review »

Our customers get their applications to market more quickly, and it has taken the risk out of their business, because there is less for them to try to figure out. View full review »

The ability to converge a lot of different data and platforms into a single common platform, then scale horizontally and vertically. View full review »

It is easy to deploy, works well, the reps are good, and the support is great. View full review »

When you open the box, they give you a very nice diagram. Which was my initial guide through setting up any NetApp SAN. It worked itself out pretty well. View full review »

It is the overall collaboration between NetApp and Cisco to come up with a product that is best in class and best in breed. You are bringing together the best things about UCS and NetApp, as well as you are tying it together with the Nexus fabric. View full review »

FlexPods allow us to go through and roll out compute, having a converged infrastructure with the same level of simplicity that you would expect of a hyper-converged. View full review »

The consistent delivery that we receive from the products. We deliver it to different customers, and we know it will be a consistent end-to-end solution as well. View full review »

FlexPod gives us the opportunity to deploy a product which is fully built and racked with minimal touch installation when it arrives onsite, so we can do all the configuration remotely. View full review »

For our DR, we rely heavily on SnapMirror technologies to accomplish our disaster recovery in VMware SRM. View full review »

It is an easy, straightforward system to set up and maintain. View full review »

The most valuable feature is ease of deployment. Once I deploy the chassis and I have the back-end storage, configuring more UCS servers is very quick. I can deploy a new UCS server within minutes. View full review »

ONTAP is the core of FlexPod, so its most valuable features are: FlexClone, Snapshot, and SnapCenter. View full review »

I live by the Validated Designs. I do exactly what those designs say and I haven't had a problem as a result. For example, they used to do the FCoE. They figured out there was a problem and they went over to the NFS. I moved over and I agreed with them. It worked better. View full review »

One of the easiest solutions to implement, maintain, and scale. View full review »

Simplicity and integration with NetApp are its most valuable features. View full review »

We enjoy the standardization and having things consistent across the whole data center sphere. View full review »

Because we use it everywhere, it is standard to set up. Therefore, if you can manage the set up in one place, then you can manage the whole infrastructure. View full review »

It allowed us to scale out as our business grew without any issues. View full review »

It takes all of the homework out of building the solution. The prearchitected design simplifies your deployment, gets you a quicker time to market, and a single point of support. View full review »

The Cisco Validated Designs are the most valuable feature along with the Industry-leading technology, put together; and the fact that it just works. View full review »

It simplifies everything. It gives you a single place to go if you need support or if you need to expand. View full review »

FlexPod is innovative when it comes to compute, storage, and networking. It's using the best technologies in the industry today and deploys them into the reference architecture. View full review »

You can have that one call with all the different organizations to get whatever issues resolved. This is a big improvement over operational efficiency. Their ability to escalate is great. View full review »

We save days of work when doing new service deployments. With LUN clones we have a template provisioned for the image of our hypervisor on our NetApps, and we can deploy a brand new hypervisor in under an hour. Everything is scripted. We just clone a template LUN and boot from SAN, so there are no single points of failure. View full review »

The most valuable features are the CVDs and the support behind it from both companies. View full review »

I have found the platform to be resilient, mainly because all the hardware is fault-tolerant. It has built-in HA, so if one of the components goes down, you're covered by the platform itself. View full review »

The solution is innovative. It handles virtual networking. Also, it can upgrade blades and continue working seamlessly, which is excellent. View full review »

I am happy with the stability. I haven't had any major issues with it in four years. This includes upgrades. View full review »

FlexPod provides very small footprint. We can have it in our offices without bothering with extra cooling, as it is a small unit. View full review »

It's amazingly scalable. It just works. It can expand to large MetroClusters and keep expanding. View full review »

Our performance increase has been about 15 percent from what we previously used. View full review »

The solution is resilient, because it has good scalability, and other products in the market don't have this. It has scalable storage and service. View full review »

The initial setup is not complex. It is user-friendly since it is a single solution with all the components delivered in one package. View full review »

The data is available, compressed, and deduped. View full review »

It scales easily. We went through an upgrade of adding additional chassis, and it wasn't a big deal. View full review »

Our data center rack space collapsed and our manpower decreased. View full review »

We have absolutely been able to save space. View full review »

The most valuable is the one support. I have a 1-800 number. I call one number rather than figuring out whether it's a network, compute, or storage issue. It is beautiful and works out nicely. View full review »

We have seen a 20 percent improvement in application performance. View full review »

Our time from customer interest to time of deployment has shrunk a lot. View full review »

It's all converged into one consolidated platform, which works well together. View full review »

Our footprint is lower than it used to be. View full review »

The overall versatility and validate designs are great. We previously used a different platform, but we gained a lot of utilization with FlexPod. View full review »

It is absolutely resilient. It has built-in redundancy and multipathing. If there is an issue with one part, it doesn't fail automatically. View full review »

It's flexible. You can scale up or out. Our environment has never needed it, but the option has always been there. View full review »

It can scale, compute, and storage independently by what we need. View full review »

It is innovative when it comes to compute, storage, and networking, because there are a lot of the storage efficiencies which allow us to keep a smaller footprint. View full review »

We have also seen an improvement in our application performance. Our VM and database environments are able to go as fast as we need them to now. View full review »

The initial setup is straightforward. It is all interface-based, so point and click. View full review »

It is innovative because it's bare metal and you can customize it easily. This brings a lot of benefits to the solution. View full review »

Since the addition of nodes, it is all automated now. What would normally take us around three to five hours in the past, has come down to 15 minutes to half an hour, creating a significant gain in time. View full review »

The solution is innovative when it comes to compute storage and networking. Each environment has knowledge of another in a FlexPod environment. This would be difficult to operate separately. View full review »

It is scaling to our needs. We don't have any issues. View full review »

Validate designs are a good. They work in the background to combine all the infrastructure and storage. They create automation which can create volumes and attach VMs directly to massive CIFS. View full review »

It's a common platform, which provides for ease of use between all of the blade servers. It uses all the same tech, moving service profiles seamlessly across from one blade to the next. There is also combined support. View full review »

We found FlexPod to be innovative when it comes to compute, storage, and networking. We've taken advantage of their storage optimizations to obtain better use out of the space. We upgraded to All Flash FAS (AFF), which has provided a huge performance increase that we haven't barely scratched the surface of. We have plenty of overhead, so that's always nice when taking on tasks which might have otherwise taxed a smaller system. View full review »

I would like to see improvements in the documentation. I understanding how things are coming together and a lot of that is from the UCS side. View full review »

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. View full review »

The interface is a little convoluted. View full review »

A progress bar would...be pretty cool. View full review »

The management interface of the UCS part of it is a little bit clunky. It uses Java, so when we're managing it, if I have a computer that doesn't have Java on it or has the wrong version of Java on it, there's some iterations that have to happen to get into the manager of it. View full review »

Maybe in the future, they could include the HCI solution into the mix. View full review »

I think they can always improve, whether it's dedupe or compression, those algorithms; and flash through better SSDs. View full review »

Automatic tiering would be good to have. View full review »

There are certain things that are just hard to do on a physical infrastructure, like for instance you need to make petabytes of data available at high speed. View full review »

I would think more cloud integration, a lot more flexibility with adapting to different things. View full review »

Compatibility issues with replication. The Oracle table formats were not working and storage replications did not work as well, until we had to introduce other components to make it work. View full review »

​Newer platform reference architectures take a long time to harden and be publicly available.​ View full review »

FlexPod was born to be used like building-block elements, to create large EDP premises. If used to create a single FlexPod CED, optional operational collaterals (backup, management, etc.) are missing, both in docs and in design. View full review »

I would like to see the following: Support for multiple vendors' hardware; support for SAN with Cisco 9000 switches; automated deployment and configuration with respect to CVD. View full review »

Perhaps the automation interface could be improved. View full review »

The biggest problem we have seen is, we were using the vStorage which comes with the NetApp environment, a kind of fiber connect. We were missing fibre channel connectivity and we got lots of I/O errors. View full review »

I would like to see more orchestration tools in FlexPod because we virtually end up with integrating the v-orchestration tool within FlexPod. I would like to see something like that included within FlexPod. View full review »

We don't see the much DR capability within the FlexPod so for that, we have to maintain our own DR capability with DSRM. View full review »

I have noticed a lot of customers, they will kick it over the fence. It is FlexPod; it is that mystery animal. The room for improvement is to better present it to those users, so they will not have to be afraid of it. View full review »

The FAS in it, with all its flexibility and scalability, it is much more complex and could be simplified. View full review »

It would be great to see some form of interoperability between the FAS units and the E-Series, specifically for replication, even if it is just one more replication from a FAS to an E-Series. That would be amazing. View full review »

They should cram more space in there and find a way to compress things more; dedupe better. View full review »

As the industry as a whole is moving more toward the simplification of IT, that is something where both Cisco and NetApp could look to improve further. Just simplifying the day to day management, the day to day issues that arise, and building more intuitiveness into the interfaces would help. View full review »

NetApp has some tools that you can purchase to do performance management, or you can go with another vendor and buy a product which does the same thing. It would be nice if there was more of these features with the product, not add-ons. View full review »

Some of the define features could use improvement. View full review »

I'd like to see a little more on the provisioning and the replication piece... Also, I don't want to say analytics are lacking but I'd like to see more analytics. View full review »

If there were going to be any improvements, they should probably be UI improvements, overall. It can get a little kludgy sometimes when trying to figure out what to do. View full review »

They could improve their technical support team. They need to have a specific phone number for you to call in for the FlexPod solution. Some of the partner support knows if it is for FlexPod, they will get you to the right department. View full review »

Unified management would be really nice, having one a single pane of glass to manage everything do with the solution. View full review »

We would like more security features. View full review »

There were several different management consoles that we had to deal with: UCS, VMware, and separate ESXi installations. Maybe one interface council where we could manage everything from might be a little easier. View full review »

There is a lot of documentation that has to be reviewed before you go through an upgrade. It is not as straightforward as some other solutions. View full review »

I think they are working on it, but I would like to be able to log into a portal and see the end-to-end solution and understand where it stands, from a supportability perspective. View full review »

I want to use the expansion to its fullest extent, scaling by deploying 10 to 15 virtual missions in a given FlexPod. View full review »

We would like something like a FlexPod Express; we want a smaller version for small offices. View full review »

I'd like to see a little bit simpler management pane. Using UCS Director to front everything is good but for a lot of that upper mid-market, it's probably a little bit of overkill for what they need. They just want a nice, simply portal to go through and see what's going on. So if there was something that was middle of the road, it would be well received. View full review »

There are apparently some new products coming around the whole FlexPod side of things with regards to auditing, to ensure everything is configured correctly. It's basically a "delta" if there have been any changes. It's important to us, from a support perspective, to know if there have been changes and what impact they have actually had. View full review »

We have had a bit of struggle on the support side. From a customer perspective, it has been up to us to make sure that we get both NetApp and Cisco involved when we have had an issue. View full review »

Both NetApp and Cisco need to do improvements in their day-to-day operations management upgrades. View full review »

A piece where FlexPod has come up short in the past and an area for them to improve upon: single pane of glass management and single pane of glass upgrade process. View full review »

I would like to see better operations, a single pane of glass to manage and monitor the entire design across VMware, Cisco, etc. I would also like the upgrade process to be a little smoother. View full review »

For the next release, because I know that we are using Pure Storage, what I want to see is the GUI interfaces on this UCS monitor. View full review »

FlexPods can include the new networking and new virtualization of storage and data center interconnectivity with the networking side of it. They can evolve and grow by connecting pods together. View full review »

I would like to see more interoperability within FlexPods. This comes into more of how we grow from multiple domains to a massive domain. View full review »

Setting up a Cisco USC environment can be complex. View full review »

It is not as easy as a hyperconverged solution, but you are going to have a hard time finding that anywhere, where you can just plugin and run a deployment app. View full review »

The continued simplification will be a continued battle and evolution for both Cisco and NetApp, especially on the FlexPod product. View full review »

I would like to see more CVDs and more published designs around a multi-hypervisor approach within a single pod. View full review »

According to the product managers, there are some new products coming which will address some of our concerns around portability and compliance. View full review »

On the UCS side, sometimes it is difficult to set up. View full review »

We have had bugs which have been released, even though they have been minor. View full review »

I would like to see them reduce the complexity, that would be my number one request because. Right now, doing simple things is pretty complex. You have so many options. It might be better if it were more wizard-driven, as opposed to going through five hundred dials. It's not very easy or intuitive. View full review »

I would like them to scale more to rack unit servers instead of blade servers. View full review »

I would like them to integrate the NVIDIA GRID into the system, so we could easily deploy certain solutions with the FlexPod. View full review »

They should have an easier user interface to get it up and running. View full review »

The technical support is slightly above average. I would like them to have quicker escalation View full review »

I would like to see synchronous replication and easier automation in the next release. View full review »

I would like to see drag and drop connectivity to Azure and Amazon. View full review »

The last two calls that I have made to NetApp support have been handled too casually. People are too lax, not quite as professional as I would have liked. View full review »

We would like to have a single pane of glass available for it. It is something that the management in the business would like to have. View full review »

I would like NetApp to continue to improve all of the things that they are doing in the cloud. They should continue to invest in it, make it seamless, and easy to deploy. View full review »

One of the things that I've wanted would be availability of a health status, similar to Active IQ from my converged platform, on an app. I have dashboards so I can see the health of the system when I'm in the office, but when I'm not in the office I can't. View full review »

I would like more orchestration and networking in-between the VMs, the virtualization layer for networking. I would like to see better tools for this. View full review »

We would like FlexPod to have more power, though it is not lacking in power now. View full review »

We would like them to have better features to integrate with the cloud. View full review »

The initial setup is complex because it has to be done in a certain way. View full review »

We want always more speed, capacity, fluidity, and growth that we can easily integrate. View full review »

There have been issues upgrading the firmware. View full review »

We would like to see a new design that comes with more productivity or graphics. Currently, the vendors, like HPE and Dell EMC along with NetApp, all have very similar products. We want more diversification. View full review »

Our environment does not always require this solution, so we are not reaping the optimal ROI. View full review »

The ability to manage the templates across sites. We would like to easily take out the configuration of one FlexPod and copy it over, just making minor changes. There is a way to do it, but it's clumsy. View full review »

I would also like to feel more support. NetApp has been pretty good, for the most part, but Cisco has more work to do. I've had very good experience with NetApp. Instead of having to call three different areas and saying, "I'm a FlexPod customer." It would be nice if it could be just one that gets routed. I know it would require three large companies to work together, but that's what would make this product a ten. They could definitely use with making it more user-friendly. View full review »

We have experienced issues with patching. When there are Cisco releases, there are some vulnerabilities, i.e., security vulnerabilities. We are as a financial company and need to be on top patching. As a company, we cannot have continuous downtime to do patching, which is a challenge that we have faced. View full review »

I would like to see programmability into a SaaS-based offering, as I know Cisco's going in a lot of directions with their Intersight application. View full review »

We would like to have more monitoring and reporting, because today some of the reporting, and if you purchase it separately is expensive. We use OnCommand Unified Manager today, which is great, but we are looking for more of that. View full review »

Make it easier to refresh hardware. We got to the point where we couldn't fix vulnerabilities without refreshing the hardware, then that became a little too expensive for us to do. View full review »

The initial setup was complex. UCS is not the easiest thing to configure from the ground up. The networking pieces can get confusing, especially when you are talking about virtual segmentation. It is not as easy as other things now on the market, such as hyperconverged. View full review »

I would like them to simplify the UCS configuration. I appreciate that they have about a billion options and a million switches that you can mess with, but this creates a lot of confusion sometimes. I feel like you almost need a Master's course to figure out what you're doing with UCS. View full review »

Sometimes, it can take awhile for support cases to get to the right people, especially if it's not a P1 case. View full review »

Parts of the initial setup were complex, especially on the networking side. View full review »

Cisco support is much slower. Opening cases with Cisco tech is sometimes a bit tedious. The return time for less important calls can be slower. Even Priority 1 calls can sometimes be a bit long and they will have to call me back. View full review »

Because when you try to do automation, there are many bits and pieces tied together. Sometimes, automation gets a little tricky for provisioning. View full review »

We would like better management of cases. For example, if you open a FlexPod case, it's not always straightforward. It would be nice to have centralized resource to open FlexPod cases and ease up management of our cases. View full review »

With the next solution, if there is a virtual Flex part where we can deploy it to private clouds or in public clouds rather tying up the hardware, it would reduce costs and complexity. Then, we could do a lot more automation. View full review »

There are too many management products: System Insight Manager, Oakum, etc. There are a lot of them and you have to know which one to use at which time. Whereas, with competitors, they have a single pane of glass view which has everything in it. View full review »

We would like them to improve the validate designs. It is hard to stay in a supported config with the software and firmware versions of the platform. It's always a concern to ensure things not only work well, but they work at all. If we run into incompatibility inside of the NetApp, Cisco, or VMware versions, it can cause real issues. View full review »