FlexPod XCS Reviews

One of the most valuable features is that I have one vendor that I have to contact to go to all my vendors. I don’t have to call Cisco, NetApp, VMware. I just make one call to one of them, they bridge all of that for me; that's nice.

Also, with the documented architecture, it's not something that we're testing right off the bat; it's been proven and it works.

It allowed us to streamline support tickets that come in. We don't have to call three different vendors. I just call one and they take care of all of that for us. It's been very helpful.

Each individual solution has its own cost benefit. It really fit within our organization. We had a lot of the existing technology there. We were just missing a couple pieces of it. So, once we got those pieces, we were able to certify it with FlexPod. We didn't need to buy too many new pieces. It fit into our original architecture.

We have cut down on the management team running FlexPod compared to our previous system. We've reallocated one FTE so far because of it. We can do more things with fewer people on the team.

I know there's some new Cisco stuff coming down the road that we might be looking at. UCS Minis: I know that they're going to be supported right off the bat.

Nothing's perfect. There's always room to increase: more hyper-conversions; smaller form factor is always on our mind; better ways to align disk up for us; how can we split off our disk correctly for each HA pair that we have, from a cluster standpoint.

There was a little mixup with, at least NetApp, coming to the market with flash. They've slowly gained ground in that marketplace; I’m waiting to see how that plays out. I know Mars was trying to be a big hit for them and then when they dissolved, that kind of set me back a little bit from a time standpoint. Mars was their all-flash platform; something separate from WAFL that we're doing with ONTAP. That had me looking at that infrastructure. That's the only reason why they lost a few points in my rating.

I have been using it for about three-and-a-half years.

It is a stable infrastructure. We've haven't had any major outages in the past three-and-a-half years since implementing it. There's been no downtime from a hardware standpoint that we weren't able to address quickly.

It is very easy to scale out the infrastructure, add more pieces to it as we needed; just kind of plug and go. That’s very easy.

That depends on when I call. Cisco is a little bit more difficult than some of the other ones, but calling it up has been great. They've bridged that gap a couple times at VMware as well.

We were using a mixture of Dell and HP solutions. We were using Dell 910s for a lot of our ESX environment. We were using old Cisco MDS switchers for fiber channel. We were able to consolidate all that infrastructure down and use one standard platform coming off the Nexus.

My engineers worked with one of our strategic partners to help implement the solution. It has been, from a design standpoint, much easier to get set up and running, and much faster than doing it outside of FlexPod.

We haven’t had any technical issues with getting it set up or with running it; none at all. I'm very happy.

It's a little more expensive to go down the FlexPod route, but I think the ease of management in having all the vendors aligned really helps us in the long run. There is more upfront cost, but less down the road that we have to pay; maintenance and support, man-hours, actually managing the system.

We already had NetApp in-house. It was very easy for us to use at least that as a storage platform, so it was just finalizing on the Cisco UCS part. We needed to come up with a hardware platform that we could use and UCS was the hardware platform.
HP’s BL series blade was the other one we were looking at from a blade standpoint.

We decided to go with FlexPod instead of HP because we were already a leveraged Cisco partner, a Cisco shop, with all of our route switch and all of our data center core switching. It was very easy for us, then, to assimilate the UCS chassis within our existing infrastructure without any other type of complexity.

Make sure you get all your requirements up front. Make sure that the protocols that you want to use are supported by your vendor. There are a lot of niche players out there that will say they will do something. When you get them onsite, they don't or they don't perform as well. We were looking at a couple of other flash providers, including Nutanix and Tintri.

Bringing them onsite for a demo works great, but when you start talking to people who actually use the solution... We found that in the demos, they couldn't live up to the promises they were making, or it didn't make sense to add more infrastructure in. I can't get rid of my core NetApp infrastructure, so it didn’t really make any sense to add another storage vendor in, and increase the complexity. Using FlexPod has been simpler than adding in another vendor.

NetApp might be a little more expensive but in the long run, it pays off for itself.
I’ve been very happy with their technical ability, their technical delivery, and the usability; it’s very easy.

One of the valuable features is the simplicity of how all the different technologies actually join together. The perk for us was very straightforward. We came in and said, "This is where we're at, this is where we want to go to." Working with our vendors in Australia – Telstra especially and a couple of companies such as The Versus Group – they've made the transition from classic physical hardware, going to that virtualized platform for us. Now, we're looking to move into a hybrid cloud solution, using the cloud ONTAP, as our next phase to start doing that. It's been quite good.

It provided simplicity for managing the environment, once we had it full stood up. We saw that simplicity with just going around with all the service profiles and things like that; just being able to, on the fly, run up VMs, different machines, and so on as I require.

I'm not sure where that's going to go now. Obviously, we're looking to be into that hybrid cloud solution. Where that leads us to? I'm not really sure.

I have not yet seen any features in other different solutions that I'd like to see in FlexPod. From a business-driver perspective, I don't have that need at the moment.

Competitive pricing's always good. It's hit the mark for the most part. I can't complain.

The initial setup should be a little bit more intuitive. It's counterintuitive to start with. It completely changes the idea of where you had come from. That setup process changes all of your thoughts regarding policy and makes sure that you knew what they were doing to start with, and why you were going to do it.

It’s extremely stable.

Early on, we had scalability issues. Scaling size was an issue at the start. After that, it's been quite good.

In the early days, during the implementation phase, we definitely had a few issues around SMB and similar items; that's all been resolved.

Technical support is really good. I've never had any issues dealing with them directly.

I just thought that the way that the trend of technology was going, aging hardware; there was just a requirement that we needed something like it.

With the initial set up, there was a really steep learning curve to start with. Once you got past that, it was really easy. That learning curve had to do with making sure that due diligence had been completed, the right training had been completed and understanding what the solution was going to be, end to end.

We looked at other solutions besides NetApp, everything that came in at the right price point.

We moved away from EMC to start with. Obviously, they were right up there at the start, but they just couldn't come to the party with our requirements.

I find the support with NetApp, moving forward with it, being so much better.

When I’m looking at a vendor in general, once their business is able to meet our requirements, I look for having someone who can actually explain how they're going to meet those requirements and how we're going to get there on the journey.

Perform due diligence. Understand your business requirement.

Flexibility of the platform. It allows you to grow whenever you want, and to build the data center as you want. It can get associates to change their work because they don’t have to do grunt work as it has automation, network, and datacenter design. The job is done, and you don’t need to worry about it. The team can be freed up to do more interesting IT, such as building datacenters.

It’s an important tech, and should be a part of IT admin. It’s a one-stop shop that keeps the lights running. It’s not a matter of money, but a matter of staffing.

The capacity to grow at a very rapid pace at a quarter of the cost in terms of physical hardware and staffing -- just put up rack, deploy FlexPod, and it’s up and running.

It compares well with Vblock to provide centralized datastores to all locations that are all linked together with a datacenter fabric.

It needs to go down the Vblock way, because in an integrated system, you need a big block of technology between the reference architecture and the lego-type system.

No issues encountered.

It's very scalable, and able to grow with the business.

You can add more disks, and computer power, which is very simple to do. It takes care of adding blocks back into your data center and any upgrades to storage, hardware, or network.

We often work with our TAM who are always around to help us work better as an interface between our engineers and NetApp’s, so we’re escalated to Tier 1.

We don’t even need to talk to Cisco because their tech support is unified with NetApp.

It loses points because they’re a little behind the competition in the hyper-converged infrastructure pace. When you get to see what the other environment sees, you know they need to catch up to others.

It’s a good solution to implement, and easy to get to work, it’ll provide flexibility and agility you need for a datacenter, but it’s a start of the journey. You need to be on top of it.

Having VMware, Cisco and NetApp on the call when there is an issue is very valuable to us.

When we had a VMware issue that NetApp was saying was a VMware issue and vice versa – getting them all on the conference call at the same time was priceless.

A single place to initiate support to get them all at once – being able to call one place would be great instead of having to initiate with each vendor first and then ultimately finding out you need everyone on the phone. So, a specific FlexPod support instead of having to go through NetApp, Cisco and VMware separately would be something they can improve on.

Extremely stable – everybody has outages, but we've been satisfied with stability.

For our needs, it meets them.

Getting everyone on the phone together, they have all been responsive and helpful.

Initially complex, but that had to do with our environment.

We use it for my private cloud. We are providing a service.

FlexPod has helped us reduce our time of deployment because we are really only missing integration with different applications.

It has also allowed us to streamline our IT administration.

The integration is something else.

The core cloud is a good feature. If we had a login that extended from the private cloud to the public cloud that would be the best, but it's up there.

The solution has granular scalability.

I would be interested to see more integration with other applications.

FlexPod is very resilient. So far, it has been stable. Keep in mind we are still deploying it, so the real use case has yet to be seen.

Scalability looks okay because it’s based on the capacity of the device, so I wouldn’t normally assume any scalability issue.

Their technical support has been okay.

The initial setup was straightforward, but the migration has taken some time.

We used a reseller for the integration. 

FlexPod saves us money. There is definitely a return on our investment.

I would rate FlexPod as seven or eight out of ten. It's too early to say anything, but for now, my only concern is the limited integration with applications.

The biggest lesson I learned was that from the automation point of view, this should be saving us time. When you’re doing it for the first time it’s not going to be very easy.

Our primary use case for this solution is for educational content.

This solution has improved our organization in the way that we now require fewer employees. It has reduced the complexity of our network monitoring. 

It has reduced the workload on our network admins and our network availability has been reduced. 

The most valuable features of this solution are instant scalability and reliability. The solution has good granularity in terms of network visibility.

The main area that this solution has room for improvement is in Cisco support.

The stability of the solution is very good. 

The scalability is good.

FlexPod's technical support is bad, as with everything regarding Cisco support.

The initial setup for FlexPod is complex.

We used a consultancy company for the implementation. 

The solution forces us to ACI to make quotas and we will do that.

FlexPod supports both traditional and SCN reduced costs.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate this product a seven. It's not perfect.

I believe that FlexPod is the best solution. 

It in our primary data centers and almost on all of our sites. Therefore, we use both FlexPod and FlexPod Express.

We enjoy the standardization and having things consistent across the whole data center sphere. 

Simplicity and integration with NetApp are its most valuable features.

They already have some products or interfaces that leverage APIs, like Cisco UCS Director, and this is a good starting point. However, I would like to have something for smaller organizations where they could just plugin configurations, and everything is done for them.

They should have an easier user interface to get it up and running.

It is stable. 

It is very scalable.

I've never had any issues, so tech support is good.

We brought our IT in-house and needed a solution to host it on, and FlexPod was the solution that we decided on. That was for a smaller subset of the company. 

The larger parent company used what the contracting IT provided at the time. When we released that contract, we moved to have all in-house employees and an in-house IT. We also decided to use FlexPod because we had seen the value with the smaller companies. It has scaled out well.

It was straightforward because I was working with an experienced partner. I have more than six years of experience, so when I work with a partner that has experience, it makes it easier.

In the United States, we use IRONBRICK. Internationally, EMEA and Asia PAC, we use Computacenter. Our experience with both of them so far has been good.

We have seen ROI.

We evaluated HPE, Cisco, and NetApp for storage. We chose NetApp because of its storage efficiencies and integration.

The FlexPod solution is one of the easiest solutions to implement, maintain, and scale.

It is the first phase of the hyperconverged systems. 

It simplifies the management of the entire system. 

• Some of the define features could use improvement. 
• It needs more power.

We could not tell with the infrastructure entirely. We had some performance issues, but as soon as we opened the FlexPod, the technical support fixed them.

It is scalable. If you want to scale up merely with capacity, it is easy.

Regarding technical support, if you have any questions with the new configuration, just open a ticket to tech support and they will fix everything.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

I was also in the installation phase, which was easy.

It is a complete solution.