FlexPod XCS Reviews

FlexPod is a single product that you can manage. It has very good scalability. We can scale our UCS Servers. We can carry 12 storage nodes in the FlexPod. The main benefit is its single, all in one solution from server switch to storage.

It is enterprise storage. The latency is about five billion milliseconds, which is coming from the cloud servers. 

We have seen an 80 percent improvement in application performance.

If there are any failures, or anything needs to be addressed, we can make one call to support for assistance. 

No matter how busy the data is, we can put the data in the right place at the right time.

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.

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. 

The scalability is innovative for both compute and storage. With other products, we can't scale the storage space, we have to buy more storage. E.g. with Dell EMC, if we want more storage with VxBlock, we have to purchase another VxBlock.

The technical support is good. I have been working with NetApp for the last two to three years, and they have solutions readily available for bug and code fixes. 

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

NetApp does some of our installations on some products, like SolidFire. However, they pass the data on to us, and we have to do the configuration.

It saves a lot of time because it is a single product. We also save time with the installation.

It is cheaper than other products. For example, Dell EMC VxBlock is more expensive.

We also evaluated EMC VxBlock, which has a similar design. Both products have flexibility.

The difference is NetApp's response time of 0.5 milliseconds, which we felt was very good.

This flexible is very good for private cloud solutions.

We use it mainly for consolidation in the data center.

Because the platform is a hyperconverged environment, we expect more from the technologies that manage it. We expect people to know system storage, networking, and virtualization. In the past, a lot of engineers were specific to either virtualization or network. However, there is a need now for everyone to know an element of all of those factors so they can better manage these hyperconverged and converged platforms.

Orchestrating and automating deployment of servers and storage are its most valuable features. We use it for automating the profile for specific VMs. The orchestration is innovative.

What I like about FlexPod, there is a lot of knowledge based on it and a lot of field experience now. There are design templates that we can deploy, and follow best practices leveraging other peoples' experience and expertise. This way, we can always follow best practices when deploying it.

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. For example, the VM to VM networking needs to be better.

The stability is solid. 

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.

I have multiple models. You can start out with one or two platforms, then scale it up. They have some great management tools that you can use to orchestrate the whole environment. So, you don't have to go to one server at a time. You can manage a multitude of them.

I would rate the tech support as a ten out of ten. They have a consolidated support team, so you can receive the help you need since they have dedicated support. When you call, you're going to get virtualization, storage, and compute support.

The industry is going mainly for CAPEX, where people are spending less on individual devices, and most of working capital is going to converged or hyperconverged systems. Basically, we can leverage whatever money we're spending on the solution and get more technology built into the same platform.

There is a workbook, so we just use it with our client. It helps us know what they need for implementation. The workbook categorizes all the different information they need, so they know what to expect during the installation. This make the setup clear and concise. They can review the workbook and have plenty of time to fill it out. 

We use an integrator for deployments. Our experience with them has been solid. They deliver what they say they will deliver. They get the northbound network connectivity correct. 

A lot of times with converged or hyperconverged platforms, one of the hardest parts is the networking. When you hire a consultant or an integrator, you expect them to know the unwritten rules of implementing. Sometimes, those are battle-tested; things you learn in the field. That's what I'd expect from a consultant or an integrator.

You get better management and orchestration, but it still costs you money. You won't be spending less money to go to new technology. You're just getting more. You're still spending a lot of money.

We evaluated IBM VersaStack and Dell EMC with their VxBlock.  

FlexPod has more time in the field with more street knowledge. Their support and professional services are better, because people have experience with it. There is not a lot of field knowledge on VersaStack yet. While VxBlock is solid, FlexPod has more experience in the field.

The solution is trustworthy, and it has proven itself too. You get what you pay for. It's the oldest hyperconverged platform in our industry. There's something to be said for that.

The solution works great for multi-cloud environments because you can segment the platform.

FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud makes it easier to manage a large number of environments for a company. This makes it a bit more streamlined on management, deployment, and orchestration.

We use FlexPod in our data centers. We serve all of our infrastructure off of it, which includes Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, and Citrix. It is all virtualized. We are also using the file share from FlexPod with Snapshotting and SnapMirroring for disaster recovery (DR) between data centers.

We haven't experienced any data loss while on NetApp. The stability of it has probably been the biggest benefit. Because of FlexPod's performance and flexibility, our company is doing much better than what we previously used.

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. However, we have a lot of overhead, so this isn't an issue for us.

Because of the stability that we have had on it, it has met our needs on everything. We haven't had a shortcoming in performance nor data loss.

In regards to DR and backup:

• Performance
• Stability
• Capability.

Validate designs are hard. They don't validate all of the available options. We don't generally end up in a validated configuration. We did on our initial install when they first rolled out the FlexPod platform. Over time, we've done upgrades, and we don't necessarily fit into a validated design anymore.

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.

They should continue to educate and support their Tier 1 support, so we have better, faster resolutions. As the years have gone by, we haven't quite received as good resolution at Tier 1 as we used to. Occasionally, scheduling techs onsite is problematic. There are some gaps in the handoff between the call-in support to on-site support. It would be nice if this was cleaned up, so we didn't have to be quite as involved with verifying techs will be on site or ensuring that techs onsite receive all the information.

As long as it stays in a supported config, the stability is very good. If you leave the supported config, you get directed to come back into a supported config if you have any issues.

We have good resiliency with our FlexPods. I don't know if we've taken advantage of the built-in HA. 

We haven't had much experience with scalability. We gave ourselves room to grow into the product. We've only done any real scaling at refresh time. 

It has not always been the single point of contact for all of vendors who participate as it was sold to be. Occasionally, we end up having to go to each vendor, and there isn't as much cross-vendor support as we had wanted.

There is always room for improvement in support. We want the intercompany communications to not have us have to contact vendors separately to work on one issue. We want them to own it internally, which would be a lot more helpful. This is what they're supposed to do.

Compared to some other vendors, we still receive good support. Unfortunately, the issue being that they still seem to be separate support buckets rather than integrated support. It's hard to ding the platform overall, but that's probably where I would ding it at the moment.

We were using HPE G-Series Servers. We needed a lot more space and performance, since I'm not sure that we had good performance metrics at the time that we moved solutions. However, we were looking to expand our Exchange environment and have more SQL. We wanted making sure that we had enough I/O, and the FlexPod system had it. In addition, integrating with UCS made it much more flexible to add compute in our VM environment, and we were going from physical to virtual at the time. Thus, we cut down on the amount of space and power that we were using by going to blade chassis.

The initial setup was complex at the time our deployment where there was a lot of moving parts. My understanding is that they have since tried to implement more streamlining. 

We used Plan B Technologies out of Maryland, and we also used NetApp. We had a good experience with the install. It was all-new moving parts for us, since FlexPod was brand new at the time. We spent a fair amount of time whiteboarding the solution with them. We visited Raleigh-Durham to go on campus to see some of the hardware to get a better understanding of what we were going to be buying.

We have seen an improvement in application performance. We are pushing a lot more I/O and flexibility. We came from systems which did not have thin provisioning. Therefore, we are more flexible in being able to give out space or have I/O, especially with the AFF being all-flash. 

We probably looked at Dell EMC. We were on HPE SAN for quite awhile. I don't know if we looked at anybody else.

One of the deciders for us in looking at NetApp was, even years ago, they just seemed to be in a much better position in the marketplace. We were pretty confident that they would be around in five years, whereas, some of the other smaller vendors might not be, especially with consolidations going on.

We have saved time with Snapshots, SnapMirrors, and backup and DR capabilities versus other platforms that we have looked at in the past. However, for new deployments, we have not saved, because we don't have any automation on top for deploying VMs or shares. It doesn't really seem to be part of the FlexPod platform.

We don't use it for hybrid cloud, multi-cloud environments, or Managed Private Cloud.

Everything that we are looking for feature-wise seems to be coming out in ONTAP or VMware releases.

We use FlexPod for everything: Running our virtual stack, all our research data, etc.

Moving from rack and stack servers (Dell EMC and HPE) to having an overall encompassing design with UCS, NetApp, and VMware, made us more resilient. We can lose nodes and drives and also stuff can go down, but there is no downtime. We can recover quickly. 

It makes disaster recovery (DR) easier as well, if you have a FlexPod set up in one place, then add a DR set.

It can scale, compute, and storage independently by what we need. As opposed to in the hyper-converged realm, you are sort of locked into a linear growth pattern.

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.

It's extremely stable.

The solution is resilient. We have suffered failures before without any downtime.

We are constantly scaling. I just added half a petabyte of storage not too long ago to the storage site. Adding new nodes and making new UCS clusters allows us to scale any way that we want.

• With NetApp, technical support has always been great. 
• With Cisco, it depends. 
• VMware is horrible. I hate calling them for anything.

We were running on legacy rack and stack; just single servers doing single things with server sprawl and multiple racks of servers. It's not a great way to do things. That's what drove us to FlexPod.

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.

Coming from a rack and stack server model to FlexPod, it has saved us a lot of time (approximately hundreds to thousands of hours).

We also looked at VxBlock from Dell EMC.

If you need to scale, storage and commute independently, then you want to go FlexPod. If you don't have that sort of need and want something simple and easy to throw up and use, despite some of its shortcomings, hyper-converged is probably the way to go. It really depends on how big you are and what you need.

Versatility is great. However, in this day and age, it is probably more complex than it needs to be, especially on the Cisco side. I am not a huge Cisco lover. UCS is getting long in the tooth. It's great for what it is, but it is now overly complex compared to other solutions on the market.

FlexPod was at one point on the bleeding edge. Now, I think the bleeding edge is hyperconverged, and I know Cisco and NetApp are looking into that independently.

We use FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud, which is great.

I don't love the Cloud. It is a good space for second copy backups and maybe bursting into the cloud depending on what your application workload is like. However, I'm not a lover of the hybrid cloud model, or even going fully into the cloud, unless you are willing to undertake the paradigm of creating your applications and workload for it. Moving your legacy info into the cloud is expensive and a bad move.

The value in FlexPod is that we have to deploy a virtual suite to 280 locations around the world. 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. 

It is hard to think of any additional features. It has everything that we need to reach it in some of the worst circumstances given the limitations on the size of the rack and the stack. The product is very well done.

It is very stable. We deploy to a lot of countries where they have unstable infrastructure and we have had very few issues with the stack.

It scales very well. If we need to add additional virtual host server capacity, we can throw in another C220 server or additional storage with a NetApp shelf. It is fantastic for that. Our sites range from quite small to up to 3000 users.

The technical support is very good. Being unified under one single point of contact for all products in the stack is very good. We found that our time to open/close incidences is much better than when we were doing it on individual components with individual vendors.

We have absolutely seen ROI. We have saved between two to four million dollars on travel alone over the past 24 months. We have deployed this to 75 percent of the sites where we will be deploying it. We have a little over 200 units installed. The travel savings alone has been huge for the organization.

I would give it a nine out of 10, simply because it has helped us change the way we do business: From being a receive, integrate, box up, ship out, unbox, and rerack. It has been fantastic and changed our business model.   

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It is all of it. 

• Support
• Reliability
• Flexibility to adapt on the fly when we need to modify and install, then support certain circumstances.
• Meet the needs which were not outlined in the original project.

FlexPod has been fantastic.

As far as improvement, I don't know of anything immediate other than the performance with the All Flash. For our disaster recovery (DR), we rely heavily on SnapMirror technologies to accomplish our disaster recovery in VMware SRM. The most immediate benefit is definitely the performance.

When it started out, we did not purchase it as a FlexPod. It sort of organically grew into a FlexPod: UCS, VMware, and Cisco for the network. 

The storage is reliable in its performance.

The only downtime that we have had has been our fault with misconfiguration issues.

It does scale. It scales very well.

I have to admit that I don't call them directly, but everyone on my team has nothing but good things to say about them.

It was organic. We were running IBM storage. We knew we wanted to run a different storage, so we looked at NetApp, which was a good fit. We had run it in the past. So, we decided to go with NetApp. We were already switching from HPE to Cisco UCS for our compute side, and we already had a Cisco network. With the VMware added onto it, we started talking to NetApp and they told us that we could certify it as a FlexPod. So, we just organically grew into the FlexPod product.

From all of the feedback that I have received, it is an easy, straightforward system to set up and maintain.

None that we have measured. We do not measure any of our equipment or our data center, as far as ROI.

I would rate it as a nine out of 10, because I rarely rate anything as a perfect. It does have issues. We have had bugs which have been released, even though they have been minor. As far as the configuration (going back to configuration issues), on the UCS side, sometimes it is difficult to set up. However, once you get it set up, it is easy to add additional compute to it.

What we wanted to do with the FlexPod solution was get VMware, our NetApp, and Cisco solutions, all in one. Also, to be able to take all of our physical servers and move them into a virtual environment, which we were able to accomplish.

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: we're talking about heat, air conditioning, our FM200s, all of that. It brought all of those down, so we're saving money there. Plus, we're saving money in support because we're condensing it all down. 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.

One of the most valuable things is the support. The reason for the FlexPod was that we didn't want solutions where everybody was pointing the finger at each other, blaming each other. With this solution, NetApp really takes control and really wraps its support around the whole solution. It gives us the ability to call one place and to get support and get the product up and running, smoothly.

In terms of features for a future release, that's more for my engineers to answer rather than me. For me, right now, no complaints. My big thing is getting the complaints - they come to me - and since we went to this system, we've had no complaints.

We have had it up now for about two years and we haven't had a problem with it yet.

We have already scaled it. In the last two years, we've already extended out with more hard drive space, with more memory, with more processing power. No problems whatsoever.

Their support is absolutely up to par. I even like their automation support. This morning, I got an email saying that one of our drives had a problem, and they were going to replace the drive. They send it to us and then they show us how to put it in.

We were using all standalone solutions. We had Dell standalones, we had HPE standalones, etc. The problem with the standalones was, if one box went down, whatever application was on it went down too.

When this whole age of virtualization came out, I made the choice that we needed to go that way, for a couple of reason. We have a slim IT department, our resources are valuable, and this allows us to put resources in other places and not have to worry about the technology.

What I like, when choosing a vendor is when they bring solutions to the table, and then they go through with those solutions.

I wasn't involved personally in the initial setup but my staff was. It was very simple. We got on with NetApp, we got the Cisco guys together, we got our VM guys together. NetApp really took the lead and just pushed us through. So it was a very simple setup.

We had all of the options, but not as a FlexPod, rather as separate solutions. We were looking at VM, we were looking at HPE, and this solution brought it all together in a nice little package for us.

Definitely go with FlexPod. It's a great solution, especially with - I keep bringing up NetApp - but NetApp is a great company to work with. They really take the lead. I think it's worthwhile. You'll take your server farm from 200, or however many you have, condense it into one virtual environment, with the backing of Cisco, with the backing of NetApp. I think it's a perfect solution.

I would rate FlexPod a 10 out of 10, absolutely. The best.

The most valuable features are the ACI integration with overall FlexPod and the Application-Centric Infrastructure. This is especially the case with Vnomic automation software for SAP specific workloads. Those elements are great for us as a service provider. We love the integration with the UCS chassis and it allows us to scale. It really ensures faster realization of value for our customers. The type of workloads we are using it for are with SAP workloads at this point however we do plan on expanding into other enterprise-types applications in the near future.

The benefit is the realization of value for our external and internal customers, especially as we are leveraging Vnomic automation. Deployments take a lot of time. Manual deployments of SAP workloads can take months, but with this automation that we have now, we can deploy within weeks or even hours in some cases. This has tremendously reduced the potential for human error, soft dollars for deployment, and provides a secure and auditable environment for our customer base.

The CVD process requires additional development and validation from each of the vendors involved, which does not allow us to be at the cutting edge of technology. For instance, I'm currently waiting for the next generation of the FlexPod to come out that has the flash integration. As with any platform, scale is always the biggest thing. I would like to see some improvements in terms of scale especially in the way Netapp handles production SAP workloads.

I made a reference to not being able to leverage flash today as an example, an additional example of this would be the fact in the current iteration of the CVD we are following, from the ESX side, we are limited to vSphere 5.5 and from an OS perspective we are limited to RHEL 6.7, and not able to move up to RHEL 7.2.

In both cases this is due to the fact it hasn’t been fully validated from the vendor testing in their labs. From a SAP DB/application support standpoint, this limits our ability to provide some of the recent releases of SAP software like HANA 2.0 for instance as it requires the latest RHEL version (7.2) and ESX (6.x) to run in production.

While this is in the vendor’s roadmap to wrap up this year, I’m dependent on vendor lab testing as opposed to having our teams certify via our existing Agile methodology to ensure we can always provide the latest and greatest technologies to our customer base.

Stability, with the UCS/ACI/Vnomic/Netapp, is pretty good from what I've seen so far. I don't really have concerns from that perspective but I'll have a better feeling as this product matures. Following the CVD, it really helps us ensure that everything's been tested through-and-through with all the partnerships as a part of the CVD. We can have that piece of mind that it has been validated.

Scalability, with the ACI, is great. You can get up to a 15 chassis setup, depending on whether you are using 260s or 460s. That is great for us. There are limitations from the storage side that makes capacity management a bit difficult, but nothing strong reporting cannot resolve.

Considering that it is FlexPod, and you have got the 1-800-FLEXPOD line, it is great for us as a service provider. We don't have to chase down each individual vendor that is a part of that overall FlexPod. We can call one number and we get the support that ties in to the partner integration from that. They are very helpful and knowledgeable and always seem willing to help out, no matter what the issue may be. It's great.

We leverage 3PAR in some cases. It really depends on our customer base. The advantages of FlexPod over 3PAR are that FlexPod is all integrated. It's a little bit more native, overall. That's really the major difference there. Also, since Netapp is a fully NAS based deployment and 3par being a mix of FC/NAS, it makes it easier to manage the Netapp from a capacity/deployment view.

Some of the other advantages with NetApp, are that it scales within that environment. It's not really plug-and-play like 3PAR, from the storage app perspective. With that integration, however, everything is native. With the Vnomic software, it handles the automatic deployment of the storage. That's great for us because I don't need to perform manual touches on the environment. That really allows us to stay focused on our customers and the workloads.

With a CVD being provided for this solution, setup and configuration is pretty straightforward.