FlexPod Reviews

What is most valuable?

I work at a state agency. With FlexPod, I can contact to NetApp. I can contact our rep and I can get the building materials from him which includes all of my switching, servers, and storage in one place. It saves me a lot of time when I have... more»

How has it helped my organization?

We have been using FlexPod for seven to eight years now. It has evolved a lot over time, primarily in ease of connectivity. It has been built around all the same platforms. It is just what storage back-end that we decide to tie it into it.... more»

What needs improvement?

There are a few nuances. There is always something which bug you. It always seems like we run into the bugs. It is usually just a simple code update or something like that. There is always room for little tweaks and little improvements to... more»

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?

The most valuable features in a data center, or parts of it, are footprint and power consumption. The flash side is the first time that Moore's Law breaks. It gets smaller, and also takes less power.

How has it helped my organization?

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. On the UCS side for server profile, there is a type of layer of abstraction from the actual... more»

What needs improvement?

We have had a bit of struggle on the support side. I am not looking into the next iterations of it yet, because we are still standing up some parts of what we have now. I would like to see the partnership with NetApp and Cisco continue. We... more»

What is most valuable?

For me, it really goes back to the protocols; 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. They're into the VMware environment. Also, the... more»

How has it helped my organization?

For most of our customer base, the benefit is the cooperative support model. While we tend to offer ourselves to our clients as a first call for support - because we are familiar with the environment - when they choose to call NetApp or Cisco... more»

What needs improvement?

In terms of a future release, I don't know that there is anything that I would specifically ask for. I'm happy with it and I like to see how they continue to evolve it. As the industry as a whole is moving more toward the simplification of... more»