FlexPod XCS Reviews

We're in a financial institute and we have two data centers. We use this solution for all of our applications.

The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps are very useful for us from an engineering standpoint.

In terms of simplifying our infrastructure, we do not use the cloud right now.

FlexPod has saved our organization in terms of capital expenditures, although I cannot say by how much at this time.

This solution makes it easier for us, as engineers, to do a lot of design and a lot of the pre-work that goes into things. It is good in that respect.

This solution's history of innovations affected our operations because by using all-flash, we've sped up applications that couldn't do what they do because they were inefficient. These inefficiently-built applications needed more resources, so we used all-flash to compensate.

Generally speaking, application performance has been improved through the use of all-flash storage.

Using this solution has made our staff more efficient because they are spending less time fiddling with the backend stuff. It is more intuitive.

This solution has not had much effect on our unplanned downtime, but we did not have much before.

The most valuable features are the integration and ease of use. The integration is intuitive.

This solution is easy to learn. There is nothing hidden, and it's all available for you.

This is an expensive solution.

We have run into any issues yet, so as far as I can see, stability is good.

This solution is easily scalable, and we have scaled quite a bit.

We haven't had many cases where we have needed NetApp technical support. When we have, it has been quick and efficient.

I was not involved with the initial setup, but I can say that the work we have done with revamping the solution has been straightforward and simple.

We used a reseller to assist us with our original implementation.

Since that time, we have done half of the work ourselves.

FlexPod is expensive but from my perspective, it is worth the cost. I say this because of the ease of use and performance benefits.

The fact that FlexPod integrates with all major public clouds did not specifically influence our decision to go with it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.

This solution is used mostly for isolated pods for SAP, for instance, or for EPIC.

Private, hybrid and multi-cloud environments are heavily in use by various customers. I would say that hybrid is probably the most common today.

We have integrated with cloud services such as NetApp’s ONTAP, AWS, and Azure.

Its ability to manage from edge, to core, to cloud, to supporting modern data and compute requirements has been scoped heavily before we actually spec out the FlexPods, but as far as all the interoperability and the core site, that's all been validated by the OEMs. It's kind of a guarantee. These are all validated technology standards. 

From the perspective of the business picking the right solution, it's all being guaranteed to work and it's supposedly scalable. Those are two of the reasons why it's probably been working for a lot of organizations.

They're always validating new designs on FlexPod to adapt to current versions of software and WMware, for instance. They're all good, validated designs.

Overall it is innovative when it comes to compute, storage and networking. There is a lot of flexibility and the hardware specs are based on what application or applications you're trying to run. There's flexibility in the sense that you're tailoring the stack toward whatever application you're trying to run.

The biggest thing that I would like to see is more cost-effective FlexPod solutions. I would also like to see more available configurations of FlexPods.

This solution is very, very stable. 

Any single point of failure has been removed from the FlexPods, so they all have multiple redundancies built-in.

It's supposedly scalable. The FlexPod examples that I've seen in production are usually built and run from that configuration. I don't see people changing them that much.

Technical support for this solution is very good.

One of the benefits for vendors, being in a FlexPod, is that you don’t have to call support for each of the OEMs to help figure out what the problem is. It’s kind of a one-stop-shop as far as support goes.

There are, basically, validated guidelines on how to deploy all of the FlexPods, so they have all been pretty straightforward.

This solution does reduce deployment time, although I don’t know the exact percentage in terms of time savings. I can say that as far as “go to market”, it’s generally faster

I've seen all three examples; resellers, consultants, and integrators.

Theoretically, we have seen ROI, but I don't know what the number is.

FlexPod is multi-vendor, and it is mostly driven by customer demand.

This is a solution that I see mostly for large enterprises, on the side of cost. Smaller and medium-sized enterprises are usually not interested. Cost is the primary factor behind why I would not give this product a perfect rating.

For anybody who is implementing this solution for a customer, my advice is to get what the requirements are in writing. That way, you have yourself covered once you actually buy the product. That's the requirements they gave you and it hasn't expanded beyond that.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use it for our entire virtualization stack, and one of the big driving factors for us was the support between Cisco and NetApp.

We don't have to worry about support or the resiliency of the solution. Our previous converged platform was Dell EMC. There were single points of failure that were designed into the system, not the implementation, that we couldn't overcome. The only solution was buying more hardware and scaling it out, which was not the best solution or necessarily affordable.

Also, 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 NetApp, 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. There is no spinning disk left in the data center.

Finally, we have easily seen a 100 percent improvement in application performance over our previous platform. It's been night and day, to the point where one of our two identically-configured data centers was refreshed to the UCS before the other, and we started to see a shift in where teams were deploying things. The workload actually became unbalanced because everyone was favoring the newer hardware - they were noticing that it was that much faster. But that also gave us the buy-in from the executive level to proceed with refreshing the other site.

The most valuable features are the CVDs, and the support behind it from both companies.

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.

In terms of resiliency, we've tested the failover by pulling direct cables between Fabric Interconnects, IOM modules, our Switch Fabric, we've rebooted things in the middle of the day and we've never had an outage.

It's very stable. I've only had to engage FlexPod support one time for a driver issue. It was resolved on the same day.

We have had to scale the product. We set up one of our data centers with a single chassis and we've since grown into three chassis, all with no downtime.

If you open a ticket, you get a response from NetApp and Cisco on the same page, on the same team. Their support has been great. You actually get a follow-up a day later: "Is everything still good?" That's great.

In our past converged platforms, we didn't have vendor support that would work together. That's actually what led us to abandon our Dell EMC solution in favor of FlexPod.

Also, there were engineering oversights with our previous Dell EMC solution. There is a single point of failure in the midplane which we had to replace, to the point where we actually replaced an entire chassis. It required a full outage to replace the chassis. On the other hand, there are multiple midplanes in every UCS 5208 chassis and a scale out into more chassis. And those chassis are a lot cheaper and more affordable than the Dell EMC solution. So there is no single point of failure in the system anymore.

The initial setup was more complex for us because we were using Hyper-V. We had to blend a few CVDs, but with the expertise that they had, there weren't any issues.

We had Professional Services from one of our partners. Our experience with them was great. They had Cisco Certified Engineers to assist with everything.

I don't have any data about ROI, but I know we were able to collapse some of our compute workload for virtualization and reduce our licensing count for SQL Server. That saves a lot of money every year, just with denser blades that were available in the UCS platform.

We did look at the Dell EMC PowerEdge FX converged platform, VRTX. At the time, we were a major Dell EMC consumer. Since our switch to the UCS, we haven't bought a single Dell EMC product.

We went with FlexPod because the engineering was better, but support was the major factor: Cisco support and NetApp support. And they support the product even after end-of-sale. Dell EMC has a max term they will support a product: for compute it's seven years. So we had a situation where we could buy the exact same, older technology product just to get more support. We would have been buying old tech just to continue being supported.

Take your time. It's no small undertaking to implement a converged platform or to shift to a different one. Typically, when you make the decision on a converged platform, you're making that decision for the next five to seven years. So take your time.

Regarding the Validated Designs, I've set up VersaStacks as well as FlexPods and it's just like a recipe book or a cookbook. You follow the steps and it's pretty difficult to mess it up. The Validated Designs are great. They're a great reference guide to go back to if you're troubleshooting an issue later on as well. 

In terms of private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, it's great to see because we have a large presence in Azure already. But it's native Azure. There was no tooling to tie it to our data center. Until now. So shifting things to the cloud volumes from Azure Blob Storage inserts a common framework, we can replicate data between the data centers and the cloud. It's great. 

As for managing private cloud, we use FlexPod for own internal hosting of our customers' data, so we ourselves operator our own private cloud.

It's also innovative when it comes to compute, storage, and networking. You can use any number of Nexus lines, MDS. I've done setups with MDS 5000s. I've worked on systems from version 1 all the way to current, so I've seen quite a few iterations of it.

I would rate FlexPod at eight out of ten overall. It's definitely a very complex system. We're definitely not making changes in it daily. There is a little bit of a learning curve for a junior admin.

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. It makes a complete, holistic solution which is easily scalable. It can scale up to the largest size that you could possibly need, as well as scale down to smaller sizes for small business customers.

The evolution and the simplicity of IT seem to be this culture shift that we have had in IT over the last few years: the simplification. Many people are out there carrying multiple things on their shoulders. They are basically an engineer wearing a bunch of hats. The continued simplification will be a continued battle and evolution for both Cisco and NetApp, especially on the FlexPod product.

I worked for many years on the customer side. We ran NetApp for as long as I can remember. 

NetApp is incredibly highly available, very redundant, and very resilient. If I am going to put any workload on any storage platform out there, I am putting it on NetApp. Then, with the bandwidth and throughput that you get with Cisco UCS and the Nexus switching platform, it is really unparalleled and cannot be matched.

It scales out and up, so you can go both directions depending on what the needs are on the NetApp side. On the UCS side, it scales out beautifully. Everything ties back to the fabric interconnects, and you can scale up to 20 chassis, so a ridiculous amount of compute power for any sized workload.

The collaborative tech support model that NetApp and Cisco have together is what sets them apart when you look at other solutions out there. There are so many times where customers and partners who are trying to support their customers have to call around, then you are in a back and forth battle between vendors. This does not happen in the FlexPod solution because of the collaborative support model between Cisco and NetApp, as well as VMware and some of the other partners. They can pass information back and forth to ensure the customer is getting the best experience possible, and that is what makes it shine.

From a setup perspective, I come at it from two different angles. 

1. As a customer, I was involved very early on in some of those stages. At that point in time, it looked complex to me, especially earlier on in my career. 
2. Now, I have quite a few years of industry experience under my belt and working with both of these products. I would not say it is overly complex. Both NetApp and Cisco have gone to great lengths to simplify the process and IT, as a whole. There is a continued evolution of it, and you are going to continue to see the product get better.

I would rate it in the upper echelon of an eight or nine. I like the FlexPod product. Primarily going back to the NetApp resiliency, there is no workload that I would not put on the NetApp platform, whether it is the All Flash FAS, the spinning hybrid disk, etc. NetApp is paramount when it comes to high availability and resiliency. Then, on the UCS side, you are taking the leader in networking, bandwidth, and throughput, and basically building that backbone for compute infrastructure. 

The bandwidth and throughout that you get from it and the changes which we saw in my customer days going from the HPC 7000 series chassis, where we were constantly constrained for throughput and bandwidth. We were seeing 60 to 70 megabit throughput on huge ISO files, and you dump it over into UCS (same NetApp storage on the back-end), and you are seeing 200 to 400 megabits of throughput. 

It is just unparalleled. So, it is definitely the leader out there.

It takes the time to market, then shrinks and shortens it.

The most valuable thing for me as a partner, as well as our customers, is the shorter time to market. 

In addition, the most important pieces are:

• The partnership between NetApp and Cisco.
• The engineering effort and time.
• The resources that they put into writing the CBDs.
• Doing all the lab validations.
• Having this product supported as a converged infrastructure.

Both NetApp and Cisco need to do improvements in their day-to-day operations management upgrades, and they are working on it. 

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. It gets a tricky, because there are two different companies and two different partnerships. You do not buy it as a single product; you buy it all at once, and deploy it. 

It is extremely reliable. The length of time of this whole program has been reduced, greatly. FlexPod is very innovative on a month-to-month basis, but it is also extremely stable and well-supported because of the leadership and partnerships put in place.

It does scale well. I do not want to infinite scalability, but it is no different than a traditional data center. Silos, network, and storage, and compute; it is all of those same components. It is just prevalidated and predesigned. 

I used an analogy the other day. Someone learning how to cook and someone else figured out the entire recipe for you, you just have to cook it. When you go to scale, you can scale whichever pieces of the infrastructure that you need, either collectively, or you can leave it.

Because of the length of time that FlexPod has been around, it has been proven. The support center, Level 1 all the way through to the specialists, understand how the program works. NetApp's support understands the partnership with Cisco, VMware, and Microsoft, and the entirety of the system. 

At this time, they have become very good at understanding limits. They can have a management and/or partner issue during the deployment and still maintain the ticket. Our customers love it.

It is very straightforward. 

If we had never done it before, someone else has been the design guide, someone else has been the deployment guide, and it is step-by-step. If you have never deployed NetApp or Cisco before, you can follow these guides. If you have, they are just an augmentation of what you already know, and just a bunch of best practices, so you can get it up and running in a much quicker fashion.

It has a lot of big partner resources, which are consistently behind it, such as thousands of engineering hours and new CBDs coming out every year. It has both proven infrastructure which has been running for the eight-plus years, as well as being innovative. Every time Cisco comes out with a new Blade, Fabric Interconnects, or new switches, or NetApp comes out with new arrays, they are being integrated into the product that year as well as being integrated into the rest of the data conference suite. From that perspective, you are not really inventing anything; you are taking proven things and implementing them in a particularly efficient manner.

My primary use case for FlexPod is for usage at our remote and small branch offices.

It has had a big, positive impact, because now everything is centralized. I do not have to have a storage or network admin, nor a hypervisor. Everything is preconfigured. Therefore, we can ship it and manage it remotely from any server. It is all in a box. 

We have been very impressed with it.

The biggest challenge that FlexPod helped me with: Now, I am not replying everyone at all my remote locations. I have approximately 38 small offices. Previously, I provided a lot of physical service, and replied to people. 

How I fixed the issue: I configure a FlexPod. I will ship it. I will install it. Then, everything I can, I will manage from my main office. Thus, I reply to fewer people at all my locations.

We would like something like a FlexPod Express; we want a smaller version for small offices. At the moment, we have medium and larger offices, plus data centers, but we are also looking for something for smaller offices. A smaller, customizable, express solution, which would fulfill our local, small office needs.

I want to use the expansion to its fullest extent, scaling by deploying 10 to 15 virtual missions in a given FlexPod. Right now, all my virtual missions are approximately five or less, which does not appear to be utilizing the product fully. I want to have scalability in any situation, even during major outages. 

We have been using it for the last four years. It has not had any outages yet, and I have had about eight deployments so far.

I use FlexPod for small remote offices. I do not come across scalability often because I have a three node minimum, which is working out well. If we want to scale, we would need a lot of technical assessment. However, from what I have read and heard, it is easy to scale, so it should not be a problem.

Once in a while, we do call Cisco. Sometimes Cisco will transfer call to NetApp. Sometimes my admins, by default, will call NetApp. Either way, it works fine. No one pushes back and says, "Why did you call Cisco or NetApp?" Both companies partner behind the scenes getting us the support that we need and help guide us through the process.

We did not have a previous solution. We used to use Dell, IBM, and HPE machines, which were all old. We used to always have a lot of problems with other domain controllers, file servers, DNS, and DNCP. 

Everything is now in FlexPod and virtual. It is always up and running.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. We do leverage a reseller to size it. Our partners are RoundTower and WWT. They configure the sizing, then they install the basic hardware. Afterwards, they will ship it to us. 

We configure the hypervisor and storage network, then we ship it to branch office.

We are looking at the Dell solution, and also we are looking at Cisco Flex. 

Right now, there is no immediate need to switch over.

This is the best hyperconverged infrastructure. No need to be worried (or scared) on how these three solutions will sit in a box. Everything is prepackaged and rebuilt. It is seamless when you want to install or ship it. No complaints.

Most important criteria when working with a vendor: We were concerned how these three partners, NetApp, Cisco, and VMware, would come together for network, storage, and compute. At the beginning, we were a little concerned. It has been four years now with no issues, and it is going well.

The primary use case that we have for most of our customers is where they're in a converged environment and they also have file system storage. It's primarily where they're looking for a solid NAS-based appliance that also runs business-critical workloads well, with a highly available architecture.

The focus is data center workload as well as VDI workload. And once they've already got it, why not use it for file storage as well as other things to replace Windows file servers. It's easier to deal with a NetApp - which is typically more secure - than a Windows Server that you're going to have to patch constantly.

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 directly, the cooperative support model means they can get passed back and forth between the two organizations freely. It works really well.

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 ability to do rapid cloning, the whole nine yards. I don't know that there's anything I wouldn't pitch it for in most data center workloads.

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 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. Especially from our customers' perspective, thinking about it from their shoes, a lot of them are wearing a lot of hats. Having things built into monitoring tools that actually provide suggested workarounds or suggested resolutions; continued improvement there is going to go a long way.

It is an incredibly stable solution. Back when I was a customer still, we were previously an all-HPE shop that switched to UCS. Stability with UCS was unparalleled, and it's the same thing with NetApp. 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.

Scalability is an area where NetApp has definitely grown, once they got out of strictly 7-Mode and moved over to cluster data on tap. The scale-out architecture versus scale-up architecture was more beneficial there and actually carried more weight within the industry when you started to see what some others were doing.

On the UCS side of things, I struggle with it back and forth, tying everything back through the fabric interconnects. I see that over time they're not going to scale out as well as they scale up, and you're going to have to replace them at some point. But it's still a much more scalable architecture compared to some of the competing solutions that are out there, like HPE Synergy.

I get frustrated with TAC (Cisco's Technical Assistance Center) from time to time. Whether it's TAC or NetApp, working through level-one technical support has always been a challenge because it's usually a very scripted conversation. When you're an organization like ours, where we're troubleshooting for our customers all the time, you run through the common scenarios already, before turning to support. I like to be able to work my way up a little bit more quickly, and I've learned some tricks over the years to get to a level-two or level-three tech before burning too much time. 

Especially when you look at the fact that we also sell a lot of HPE and Nimble, solely because Nimble had great tech support - when you made that phone call, they picked up immediately - that's something that really went a long way toward improving their customer satisfaction. I'd love to see NetApp and Cisco do something similar to that. 

When I was a customer we still had NetApp, but it was all 7-Mode and then we were running HPE c7000 chassis. When we switched over we went to UCS Nexus and had upgraded to CDOT with brand new clusters at the time.

With my current organization, we sell a lot of solutions in many different categories but this is my go-to solution because of my comfort level with it, for sure.

When I'm having these conversations with customers, ultimately it's based around what the solution outcome needs to look like, what are the business requirements, what are the business needs and building it out from there. The biggest thing to take into account is the challenges that they're having, whether it's performance, or specific workloads and specific needs they have. A lot of customers use NetApp as just a NAS box, and I really try to do my best to get out there and evangelize that it's far more capable than that. I would say the same thing with UCS.

I have a lot of experience with setup. I'm somebody who loves to dive into CLI on the NetApp side. I love to build the entire thing from scratch and not really use any of the setup tools that are out there. There is definitely a little bit of a learning curve for FlexPod still, especially as you're building out from scratch. But, at the same time, they have both done a great job at working to simplify that deployment process and make it more straightforward.

In terms of maintaining the same level of guidance, had we been working with one vendor as opposed to two vendors at the same time, they both have their own individual best practices and there are a lot of best practices out there. There isn't necessarily one that's really the best. I think that there is enough crossover between them that I don't know that it really makes a big difference.

I rate FlexPod at eight out of 10 because there is always room for improvement, although there is nothing off the top of my head that I can specifically call out. Going back to the simplification of IT, everybody can always do more to really simplify things because we live at a time where so much of what we do is "a little bit of everything."  As we go through the continued evolution there, that is really the biggest area that both NetApp and Cisco could really improve: to simplify management, to simplify the monitoring, and the maintenance. 

Also, bringing down that cost of entry as well and keeping the costs lower would help to us get it into more small to midsize businesses. FlexPod Express is a great product, but continue to bring down that cost of entry.

My advice is "do it." It meets the needs of small to midsize business all the way up to the large enterprise that needs to scale in a massive fashion. It's a great product, it's a great solution, and we're really happy with it.