FlexPod XCS Reviews

We have four different use cases that we bought it for:

1. Our production VM or infrastructure is on a FlexPod with a metro cluster.
2. We have a CCTV system, which is a FlexPod using E-Series as a back end.
3. We have another E-Series FlexPod for backup infrastructure, with our combo products.
4. We have a test end environment, which is a mini replica of our production, VMware assistance.

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. Will we be using blades, a chassis server, or rack mount servers? This makes it easy for us, because everything is consistent. 

It does not matter whether I bought one five years ago or if I bought it today. All of my connectivity will be the same. When I put it in the data center, it takes a few hours, then I can have a base system up and going.

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 to go out and send out a bid, especially the bids for larger dollar amounts and longer terms. The more efficiently I can get those bids out and processed, the better it is, and the faster I can deliver solutions to our customers (our users).

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 make life easier. A few things, the E-Series is stupidly, simple. However, the FAS in it, with all its flexibility and scalability, it is much more complex and could be simplified.

We had not upgraded to the most recent release of ONTAP (and some of the other newer tools). The newer version that we are in right now went from an Clustered ONTAP 8.2 to an 8.3. In the 8.3, some of the stuff disappeared. It is there, but it is not intuitive to navigate to, like the IO Statistics, etc. I hear this will be fixed in the next versions, but we have yet to see it. 

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. 

Considering we are on our second generation of FlexPods. We are fairly happy with them. For the most part, the system is a rock. Whenever we have needed it, it has always been there. That is the key

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

We haven't hit any limits as of yet. Our most recent purchase is actually a 3.6 petabyte raw system. It is a 360, 10TB drive, which, at the time, is the largest they could do. It is an E-Series, it is more storage then we know what to do with right now.

We are only using about half of it right now, so the scale out to the future allows us to get where we want to go. We use it for a CCTV solution, so video never gets smaller, it only gets bigger because there are more cameras. More cameras with a higher resolution and higher frame rates. We made sure that we purchased a system which would will grow with us and scale with us as we need it to.

Unfortunately, we had had to use technical support a few times, but for nothing major. We have not had any major failures, usually it is just your typical drive. We have 1500 spinning disks, so we have a drive die here and there. Most of the time, we do not have to do a whole lot. Usually a drive shows up, we slap it into the system, and it is good to go. 

They have been good working with our newer administrators, who are not as familiar with the storage platforms. They over take them, do the upgrades, or walk them through the deduplication processes. 

We can call them with anything. We also have a TAM who helps and facilitates a lot. Once we get to the back-end texts, we never have a hassle, even if they determine that it is a VMware or Cisco issue. It does not matter. They are always willing to stay on the phone, all we have to do is open a case with the other provider, and everybody works together and says,“Here is what we found.” 

Environments that I worked with have always been hodgepodge. We are not huge right, but HBMSUs were even older than when EVAs were popular, but those were limited to block storage only. Yet, in the organization I am in, they were limited to Fibre Channel, therefore going to a FlexPod and having the flexibility to do NFS, CIS to do Fibre Channel, ISCSI, etc., it doesn't matter. We can do it all in one array for whatever vendor solution that we pick, whatever storage they say we need, whatever hardware they say we need, we have it. We have the flexibility to put it all away.

It was very straightforward. Each solution is a little bit different: Everything from the E-Series being the simplest to MetroCuster being the most complicated, but they have all been relatively straightforward to setup. We have been using NetApp services for most startups, so this has been a big benefit, especially with technology that we did not necessarily understand right off the bat. 

Occasionally, we utilize support for upgrades. They do the prechecks, make sure the firmware is up-to-date, and run our baselines through to ensure everything is good. 

One of the NetApp consultants, Patrick Rodrigue, has always come out and helped us.

It is a little more difficult in government because we do not track that much on the soft dollar side. They look at it more as a capital investment. However, I can tell you from when I started there, when I started with the organization and we put our first FlexPod in our downtime has significantly been reduced.

From that prospective, if we look at our return on investment, we had have more productivity uptime. Our end users are obviously happier and IT is not constantly getting a black mark from the business because tech has not been worked.

Make sure you understand the technology that you need, and anytime that you are buying any storage make sure you understand storage. Do not just buy storage based on what somebody sells you in terms of IO or throughput. Buy storage based on the solutions you need, the technologies you need, and what will make your life a lot easier down the road.

It is not so much that we need to invest in FlexPod. I work pretty closely with all of our vendors, and a lot of times, we look and we evaluate. We evaluate all the available solutions out there. It does not matter whether it is a FlexPod or if it is one of the illegal EMC counterparts. We evaluate them all. We look at everything from Nimble Suite and the big brands, like FlexPod. Every time we go out and we evaluate solutions with their flexibility. The flexibility of a FlexPod wins out every time.

Having an extremely cost effective solution which is a pain in the butt to manage, a pain in the butt to support, or overly complex does not really do us any good. It ends up just costing us, even though we do not track money. It ends up costing us time, which in turn, costs us money, and management does look at that. 

We look at performance. We look at the available options and how they unified a platform, especially when it comes to storage. Recently, we were comparing FAS units to a VNX from EMC. The big difference and big selling point for a FAS unit was the data filer with virtualized block put right on top of it. We do not have to maintain separate controllers. The VNX had to have a Solera and a clearing head in it in order to do block and file based storage. We had to separate discs at a point in time. This is a few years ago, so some of it has changed since then. However, when I talk about simplicity to manage, it also goes into cost. 

On the EMC side, I would have had to have dedicated disc per file and dedicated discs for block-based storage. On the FAS side, I could do whatever I wanted. I just had a big disk pool and I could divide it up however I wanted.

We purchased through CDW. They were knowledgeable about the solution. They won the bid. It was very simple with us. We sent it out for a bid and they came back with the lowest cost on the response.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Cost is always important, but it is not our base. We look at performance, availability, overall usability, and simplicity.

We started to move from rack-mounted servers and we needed to make a virtualized environment. One of the requirements for virtualizing all our bare metal infrastructure was to move to a solution with components such as VMware and central storage. We started to look for the environments and were seeking out which was the best version with the possible solution that was in the market and we found NetApp FlexPod, one of the most flexible and easy to use, ready-to-market solutions. We chose NetApp FlexPod due to its flexibility and ease.

The solution is flexible. It's very easy to implement together with the Cisco UTF firewall. We have a computing environment based on the Cisco UTF firewall for computing. The storage we have is the NetApp 3200 series. The virtualized technology is VMware. Together, these three components are very easy and flexible to implement.

I am not familiar with the new technology from NetApp, and therefore am unsure of the latest in terms of FlexPod's native integration with hyper-scalers. Most of the solutions that run now, run on top of the FAS drive or FAC drive. This will improve more and will gain a new level of performance for the new kinds of solutions and technology that are coming out.

We still use FlexPod as a parallel environment. It is a very nice technology. We don't have any pains with this environment yet. That's why we still run this in parallel as we didn't finish the switchover to the new technology.

We use FlexPod's pre-validated architectures. At the time that we designed the solution, it was based on pre-validated architecture, and we had support from the company that we worked with in order to re-validate the solution. With this integration, we needed some support from a specialized technician. Since we used pre-validated architecture, it was simple to improve. We were able to download and implement this solution with no effort. We did this ourselves.

We feel confident that we did something that is custom. The time to market is also fast with pre-validated architecture. We know that if we follow the rules we will get business as soon as possible.

The flexibility, operational efficiency, and scalability of the solution altogether are good. We have two main sites. With this user-friendly environment, we can make both sites replicate each other. When we talk about business continuity, it's easy. We can take the key indicators and our implementation is ready and works as we need it to. There’s also flexibility to scale in. We ran out of capacity after five years and we could scale it in within one or two months and get back to business with confidence.

The solution has helped shift capital and resources to other IT initiatives or projects that had previously taken a backseat due to budget constraints. This is not due to the supplier. Rather, it's due to the kind of organization that we are. We are a nonprofit organization. What can we do is create a government license that provides us with designated suppliers, in this case, NetApp. A special government license can be created with a low price or some other agreement in order to reduce the budget.

The solution helped reduce troubleshooting time on architecture configurations. It's very easy to understand that we follow a pre-validated design when we have good implementation. It's very easy to solve any issues that may arise. We only have to compare what happened before to what happens now and what has changed during that period. Of course, if this is beyond our skills, it's very easy to ask for support to help.

It is difficult to say how much time was saved as we didn't face any outage problems. We didn't face any downtime problems throughout the years. Compared to what we had before, it was not a centralized storage environment. Centralizing changed a lot as we came from a decentralized storage environment to a centralized storage environment and we used a converged technology in this environment. On one technology, it can run on a schedule, it can run cyber channels and it can run any kind of block operation protocols or even file operation protocols for storing the files or the data.

When you are in this kind of environment, you reduce a lot. It's one environment where you can do three or four connections to the storage. Then, you can use any kind of environment with the same solution.

We also reduced our total cost of ownership and simplified operations with the solution's flexible consumption. This is a bundle which is made of three environments, the virtualization and the computing nodes we used with Cisco and the centralized storage with the NetApp, this reduced a lot of space.

It reduced the total cost of ownership. It comes from a different platform and different architecture, and one needs to have more than three or four skills to support their environment. With the bundled environment, we only need one. It's very easy to support this kind of situation.

It would be quite difficult to understand the amount of money saved. As a government organization, we use our partners. Most of the time, when we implement change for new technology, we need to coordinate as people are not adept to change easily. They need to be trained. This is another cost we have to account for and pay for.

With this product, however, we had no difficulty in maintaining the same team. They transferred over from the old environment to the new one. We saved right there.

I ran two data centers. Each data center had no less than one hundred rack-mounted servers. When we consolidated, we reduced our support costs, space costs, and energy consumption costs. Money is saved across all those variables.

The big problem now is that all of the technology is reaching its end of life and we didn't refresh anything at the right moment. Now, we are moving to a new solution. During these 10 years, it was very nice to work with NetApp, Cisco, and VMware together, especially with NetApp storage. We didn't have any problems during this time. I could count only three or four times that we asked for support and this was only to change hard drives that were blocking something. It's been issue-free.

NetApp needs to improve the user interface to make it easier to work in this environment. The older version is poor. However, I'm not sure what they are doing to upgrade the look and feel of the newer version.

NetApp needs to talk to the clients and see what the clients want out of the cloud solutions in order to move more effectively into the cloud environment. It would be ideal if customers could go to a dashboard. They need to sell not only the infrastructure but also the service and both need to be impressive. That's why NetApp should talk to clients as much as possible. The closer they are to them, the more understanding they will have in terms of what a customer wants. 

If the solution offered more workshops and presentations, it could be helpful to lure clients.

I've been using the solution since 2010.

It's quite difficult to understand the tech support in this kind of environment. The three components that make up this bundle that we created in 2010, composed of VMware, Cisco, and NetApp, make it quite difficult. I cannot understand what kind of error it is if I don't understand where it comes from. I need to figure out if this is a VMware, Cisco, or NetApp problem.

I suggest creating a team inside NetApp, Cisco, or maybe VMware, and this team should have the skills to support the companies that support this kind of solution. This will be good as you will reduce the amount of time that you need to solve the problems. Right now, when we call NetApp, NetApp support does not understand what the solution needs and calls Cisco to ask for support. There needs to be some sort of contract or strategy that is better for the client, where the three are integrated together.

That being said, I've never had problems with NetApp, even in these situations. I know a tech professional who was able to guide me through the support process. The contact that I had with NetApp had information that can be found in the web guide. I never had any issues when I needed to get support from NetApp during this period. I've been mostly very happy with them.

Positive

We're transitioning to another solution right now. The main problem is that we don't have support anymore from NetApp due to the fact that the solutions we designed are end-of-life. We need to design a new solution.

The solution is very easy to implement. 

We started with ONTAP, version 7.0. We have NetApp’s 3200 storage series and that is what we use now. It's still version 7.0, with the live firmware.

We are a government company. When we design a new solution, we cannot point to the technology that we want to use. It's against the government's rules. We need to design a general solution with the main points that we want to cover, and the main points that we want to remain. We will sometimes have to choose between several technologies and several offers that we find on the market. That's why most of the time it's difficult to keep the same technology for long.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. It is a very flexible solution. Its support, usability, and even the scalability of it has been great.

Over the last year, we've implemented several solutions with FlexPod. We implemented whatever the latest version is. I know we just put one in that was the latest version in a New Jersey school.

Our customers are using on-premise. It's all on premise, but we have implemented solutions that are more hybrid where they are deploying a model where they want their app dev groups to be able to deploy resources much easier to an on-premise infrastructure, as compared to an AWS subscription.

Generally, it's a mix between Azure and AWS. That's what we're seeing from customers overall. 

For a large food distributor using FlexPod, we were able to move them away from traditional server storage, networking, etc. This allowed them to have the ability in both data centers to have hybridity where the FlexPod infrastructure was local and wasn't hosted, then using cloud automation (mainly AWS) and being able to deploy company resources for their teams.

This really opened up a lot of doors for them. Their CIO's mantra was sort of cloud first. Well, here's a way to start on that journey and keep some of your stuff local. I think everybody knows you can't just forklift everything to the cloud. You need cloud readiness assessments: What are your application dependencies and tools that are you using? This is how we came up with the FlexPod approach.

The solution has decreased unplanned downtime incidents at our customers' organizations, specifically in the database and SQL realms. We are talking to some of our customers about containerization as well.

The most valuable features is its ability to be able to have multiple options. It can be fully on-premise, it can be hosted, or it can be the hybrid model. For customers, this is the biggest windfall. 

Having the combined Cisco/NetApp platforms. Having the configuration options to tailor it a certain way. This Is a windfall as well, having options for configuration: small, medium, large, etc. Because every customer is different, and there's no cookie cutter.

It is very important that the solution validates the design for major enterprises. We rely on the validated design, specifically for the customer. When you look at the designs and what you have in mind, the prerequisites have already been done for you. So, it was easy to make the fit a little easier for each customer. Each customer being different.

The solution simplifies infrastructure from edge to core to cloud. It definitely simplifies it and aids in going to that journey. Cloud is the last piece of that route and this gives a seamless way to do this.

The solution’s unified support for the entire stack provides one stop shopping.

Data centers are shrinking. These solutions are part of that. Being able to have these solutions which will shrink your footprint in the data center and allow for easy cloud interaction, migration, and deployment.

I would like more support for different platforms, possibly different database platforms. I don't know if it supports Oracle today, but that would be a big improvement.

As the product matures, being able to support the things that customers are really looking at. FlexPod is supporting more containerizations, and that's a step in the right direction.

I just started working with it. I have only been with my company for about six weeks.

It's increased exponentially over time. I'm hearing a lot of this from my peers, as FlexPod has been out for a while now. With the improvements to the different versions, the stability has improved quite a bit.

It is very scalable. Though, I don't had any case examples of where we've had to scale it in terms of customer experience.

This is my understanding, since I don't deploy it. The initial setup is very straightforward compared to its competitors. Compared to an HPE solution, it is exponentially easier to set up. I know that as a fact.

It's sort of the one throat to choke philosophy. The customers in particular don't have to call here. If it's easy to get support, it isolates the problem on whatever stack you're running on. So, FlexPod supports multiple stacks. It doesn't just support one hypervisor or site.

The solution has saved our customers' organization in terms of CapEx. E.g., with the cloud availability, it's turned into sort of a hybrid CapEx/OpEx model.

I'm only delving into this solution over the last six weeks or so. I don't have the same level of expertise with FlexPod as I do with other solutions. I'm getting there slowly; trial by fire.

I came from a much larger integrated reseller. I worked more with FlexPods competitors where they really want to have these connectors and bolt-ons in place to be able to deploy something to Azure. As easy as it is to do it to an on-prem infrastructure, that's really where it's going for a lot of the commercial space.

For my current organization, it's opened up a whole new door for us as a NetApp partner to be able to have a competitive product against Dell EMC, HPE, etc., and to what I think to a degree is a better product in most cases, to go after that business. We go after the different verticals as well because we are in both the public sector and commercial space. So, these are much different verticals. Thus, you need to be able to the scalable solution. You need a solution that can meet the needs of these customers. When you're dealing with a healthcare versus a hedge fund, it is very different. Certain other companies they didn't have the same, they weren't able to scale or fit in these verticals.

Put them side by side. Do your diligence. There are other vendors out there. There are three other big players in this field: Dell EMC, Nutanix, and HPE. Obviously, each customer is different. But, if you're really looking at a true solution for hybridity with the ability to deploy to the cloud, take a real good hard look at the FlexPod CI solution.

We sell other products, and there are times because of the customer's relationship with another vendor that we might go with a different solution. However, we certainly look at putting them side by side.

The product improves over time, it's definitely helped in all-flash CI, private and hybrid cloud deployment, secure-multi-tenancy, end-to-end NVMW, and cloud storage tiering.

We are talking to customers about the solution’s storage tiering to public cloud, but we haven't implemented anything yet.

I would rate them a nine (out of 10). I don't think anybody rates a 10, but FlexPod is close.

We use this solution in our data center. We use a hybrid environment. It connects our on-premise system with the cloud.

We are a partner with Cisco, and we assist our customers based on their business requirements. 

We have definitely seen an improvement in application performance. They have high availability, and this is what we are looking for. I would say that it is a ninety percent improvement.

Staff productivity has increased because they have more time. The solution provides centralized management, and less time is required for troubleshooting and research. The documentation is in the GUI, embedded within the software. I would say that there is a thirty percent improvement.

Datacenter costs are reduced by means of less power, cooling, and space. I would say it is a fifty percent reduction.

This solution helps our IT administrator to troubleshoot and understand problems.

The most valuable features are the Fabric Interconnect Manager and the UCS Manager. It connects the virtualization, the network, and the storage all in one cage.

Our data center costs have been reduced by means of less power, cooling, and space.

It is very helpful for our customers to have everything centralized. Most of our customers are moving to the cloud, and they need help to migrate their data. The majority of cases that I see are hybrid cloud and on-premise solutions.

There are too many drivers and software combined all together, and we need to have compatibility between all of them.

At this beginning, the FlexPod solution had too many bugs. Today, however, it is more resilient. It has high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery.

This solution is very scalable. You can increase the number of parts horizontally without affecting the production environment.

Cisco's support is very good, all the time. I love them. You have one number to call, and this call will cover the compute, storage, and networking.

This solution is easy to deploy. This solution reduces application deployment time because we have integrated automation with it. The simple integration makes it easy. We have an eighty percent reduction in time.

Using this product makes our life easy.

I have learned a lot from this solution. When you touch a new technology, there is another new technology coming in.

This resiliency of this solution helps. There is high availability, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, and it is easy to deploy.

One of the solutions that we implemented was the joining of two data centers together. We used EVPN-VXLAN, and this was a great solution for them.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use this solution for our development workloads.

The private hybrid multi-cloud environment works for us. We're using it as a private cloud.

There's a lot less overhead management. It's a lot easier for developers, in particular, to get the compute and storage they need. They don't have to go through a bunch of change requests. They just do it on demand.

The solution's infrastructure enables us to run demanding, mission-critical workloads. Our entire development organization runs on FlexPod. Their full development environment is on it. So, application development is pretty mission critical to us.

I like FlexPod's granular scalability and broad application support. Our workload isn't that diverse, but I could see other use cases for it.

Flexpod helped us reduce the time required to deploy new applications by about 60%. It's a very dramatic change.

It has also reduced data centered costs. It's hard to quantify, but there's a lot less bare metal that we need. It's all in FlexPod, so maybe a 40% saving. That's a guess, but it's significant.

The solution has also increased static productivity, mainly in that the developers are able to self-serve. They're less dependent on infrastructure resources to stage an environment for them to then start developing on. They can stage their own environments now.

Support is probably the same. It's one area that we didn't see a lot of improvement in and it's actually supporting FlexPod. It's new technology to a lot of our staff, so they're a little uneasy when they're in there messing with UCS's. It's not something a lot of them do all the time. When we do have to, we kind of fumble around the UCS a little bit to figure our way around.

FlexPod does help streamline our IT admin.

Agility is probably the most valuable feature for us. It's very easy to send out resources.

I would assess it as very easy to manage from edge to core cloud. It's a central point of management. We've automated the majority of it and service delivery is fine.

I find FlexPod to be innovative in how automated it is and how it provides a unified ecosystem. I don't have to worry about compatibility or things not working well with each other. It all just works. That's the easiest thing. It's kind of a turnkey solution: we just start spinning up the resources as needed.

I'd like to see some more Ansible integration for automation purposes. We automate everything else with Ansible, so it would be great if we could automate our FlexPod with Ansible as well.

We could probably see a little bit more training as well.

The solution is very resilient. We haven't lost our FlexPod once, it's been up to, even power outages and things that happened at the data center. It's remained very stable.

I think it can scale highly.

We really like the technical support. We were able to get up and running in day one of the FlexPod. Like I said, supporting it is a little more challenging only because of the familiarity with the GUIs. A lot of people aren't in there very often though, and when we have to troubleshoot it's a little challenging for us.

We used VMware Private Cloud primarily, but we wanted to get into a more tangible private cloud experience as opposed to building our own with individual components that didn't fit together very well. We like that this is designed for network compute storage all in one rack. That's mainly what drilled us to invest in the FlexPod.

The initial setup was straightforward. We followed the validated design and we had external partners come in and help us build it, and then we were up and running. I wouldn't say it was complex.

We've seen return on investment for sure. The solution saves us money overall.

We only evaluated Cisco. I don't believe that we even looked at Dell or HCI. It's pure Cisco for us.

Know what you're getting into upfront, and make sure to train your staff appropriately before diving in and setting something up and then backfilling on your training. Go in with your eyes open and really understand the solution before you start turning the keys over to users and access.

The CBD was very easy to follow. The validated design we followed to the letter, and we haven't had any problems with further integration. It's all gone well.

I would give this solution an eight or nine out of ten: a very high score. It's been very stable. We've been running our dev environment off of it for three years now without any real hiccups or outages. The developers are certainly much more empowered and there's a lot less overhead on the networking people. It just works.

The biggest lesson for me is probably that there is value in some of the larger marketing items. Not just marketing bullet points, but there are actual truth and experience that can back up what the marketing slides have sold us. It delivered to our expectations, I would say.

We are using it to have production workloads running on it.

Our performance increase has been about 15 percent from what we previously used.

It is the integration between the Cisco, VMware, and NetApp as a combined internal solution. The data access rate is much faster than if we were doing it by ourselves.

It has boosted performance.

There have been issues upgrading the firmware.

It is stable. I haven't seen any issues. It is working fine.

We have found the solution to be resilient. 

It is scalable. We can expand it whenever we want.

The technical support is good. When we want something, they can do it or will redirect to the correct team. It's how we get the right solution with a single click.

We need to invest in a new solution because of our end users' compliance.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We used a consultant for the deployment. They walked us through it very nicely.

We have seen a five to ten percent savings on new service deployments.

We are already using NetApp storage products, and we are using the competition, like VxBlock. In addition, we are using Cisco hardware and VMware. So, we have already done our internal research.

Go for it as a solution.

I like the validated designs because we don't have to do more research on it. Research has already been done by trustworthy companies, like Cisco, NetApp, and VMware. They have provided us with the properly designed ones, which is less headache for us.

We do not use FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud, but maybe in the future.

One of the valuable features is ease of use. Getting any environment set up is probably the easiest thing to do. You can set up the entire solution in about a day or so. When we have a requirement for a specific project, we don't need to worry about getting into different gears. FlexPod is a converged infrastructure, so when you get it, you have reference architecture. You just install it and start using it. Those kinds of features are really good.

The storage scales out and you can keep on adding your UCSs. Adding the whole scale-out technology is great. You can grow as you need to and that's a really good feature.

I don't think there's much to be improved with the tool since you can now scale out storage. Before that, this was a shortcoming in that you had to upgrade the head every time.

I would like to see the ability to combine a couple of FlexPods into a cluster. You cannot do that now. You cannot combine two FlexPods into a single entity, into a larger FlexPod. To the best of my knowledge, FlexPods are meant to be in silos and you cannot create clusters at all. If there is a way to do that, that would be interesting.

If there could be a FlexPod management piece, then you could manage all your FlexPods from a single console. That piece is missing even though there are some NetApp tools where you can manage. However, those management tools are specific for the storage.

I would like to be able to manage FlexPod as a single entity for all the different components. If there could be a single tool which can monitor all of them together, that would definitely give a big edge. It would be great if you could manage all of your FlexPods from a single location.

The tool is pretty stable. Stability-wise, I would give it the highest rating. If you follow the reference document, in terms of how to set up FlexPod, it's a very stable environment upon which to work.

I have used technical support, but not exclusively for FlexPod; maybe questions here and there related to the FlexPod environment. I don't think we have ever used FlexPod tech support which is there in NetApp. We have pretty competent resources in-house, so we never feel the need to use FlexPod support.

I was involved in the decision to switch to this product. We were looking for a tool that was designed for the way our organization works. We wanted a silo environment for different applications. Since we have segmentation in our company, we have different domains, and FlexPod really does fit in really well in those situations where you need a FlexPod for a particular application or for a job area. There’s an idea of implementing Citrix and VDI on it, so those kinds of applications are really good.

We were the first company to use EMC's Vblock implementation, and it was a Vblock pain. I was not there when the company selected Vblock, but I was told that there were a lot of issues. Being the first customer on Vblock was really a nightmare. We had to move to FlexPod. But it doesn't mean that Vblock was not good. Our timing on the purchase of Vblock was not right. Our expertise in the company was more Cisco driven and FlexPod really fit in well with that.

I was involved in the installation. FlexPod, or any converged or hyper-converged infrastructure, requires a lot of planning. Once you have your planning done properly, you can just work with networking and other teams. If you have a good coordination with the teams, it's pretty easy to set-up.

I was not involved in the decision-making process. Things have changed since Vblock was launched seven years ago. FlexPod and Vblock both have very similar architecture and I don't see any big pros and cons between them. I think it's just a comfort level with respective companies. If a company has more investment in Cisco and VMware, that's how the FlexPod architecture is designed. I have no comment on Vblock right now.

There were no other vendors at the time. I was going with NetApp only for non-FlexPod environments. That was when we started buying stuff, which was about six years back when there was no competition. However, everybody has their own FlexPod now. Nimble has something like their own stack. Pure has a Pure stack. Everybody's coming with their own converged infrastructure and we are looking around.

When selecting a vendor, partnership plays an important role. A good partner will provide a kind of an independent review of the different vendors. When we select a vendor, we look at:

• Our means
• Our relationship with the vendor
• The standing of the vendor in the industry
• The vendor's new innovative technology
• How the vendor is competing in the market
• How competitive the vendor is in terms of price.

We look at other technologies because other technologies do provide similar kinds of things as NetApp at a cheaper price. That's how other vendors are rolling over each other in the market right now. They can provide the same thing for less money. These are important things, but the company stability and their goodwill in the industry are important factors as well.

Our experience using this tool is that we have been very happy with it for over six year. The solution has given us whatever our company has wanted. It has delivered in a very short time and has quick turn-around for different projects.

I also suggest looking around. NetApp is a good case for us. It really solves our issues. Although there are other solutions available on the market, this tool is definitely worth looking at it.

FlexPod is not cheap and the way things are going, you could probably get the same thing at half the price from another vendor. NetApp has to be very competitive on the prices in order to really compete in this market.

We're using the mirroring capability of the FlexPod. We're having the two heads in separate data centers that are approximately one mile apart with dark fiber. We really like the capability of having that high availability and high resiliency within our data structure, our data centers. That's one of the features.

High availability is outstanding. We haven't had any problems with that.

We've got a FAS6210 and performance is really outstanding, as well.

The high availability feature is what we were really looking for, because we have a campus center, where we have two data centers on campus. So, it just made sense. It was the best fit for us at the time to be able to do that mirroring between the data centers, and be able to also have other aggregates for other purposes; all built into one SAN.

With the hardware and the way that the matrix is formed to validate the infrastructure, everybody does their homework and makes sure that everything is going to be fully supported. When you do have an open case, there is one point of support and you do not have everyone finger-pointing at each other. That was the other big advantage and big selling point for us; that was another feature that drew us to the FlexPod.

We're running a 7-mode right now. With CDOT out there and it being the current operating system, that's going to be a challenge for us. Our roadmap is to go to CDOT gradually over the next two years, so the scalability for us isn't as much of a factor. We're not adding shelves. We're not going wide. We want to be able to scale up and that, honestly, is a bit of a challenge because there's no direct migration between the two right now. That's going to be something that we'll have to look into within the next two years. That's on our roadmap.

I'm not up to date on all the options surrounding that migration right now, but CDOT and 7-mode don't translate. You can't just migrate or upgrade from one to the other seamlessly. If they come out with that, that's something I would look forward to. It's always been a challenge to go from one SAN to the other. There's newer technology, sometimes third party, that can help you get there, but usually it is not possible to have a seamless translation or transition.

The only other area with room for improvement is the interoperability matrix. Sometimes, when the newer versions of any of the partners’ firmware or software come out, there's still sometimes a lag of the partners to support all of those new components. Sometimes, when we are going to a newer version of ONTAP, not everything is supported. Therefore, we can't go to that because of this or because of that. For instance, with vSphere 6, we were held back some because of the hardware interoperability matrix not supporting all the components.

We have used technical support, although not recently. We've pretty much gotten what we expected out of it. We haven't had any major, major issues. We did have some performance issues. That was a couple of years ago; it took a while to track down. Overall, I think support was adequate and we did finally get what we needed. This was pretty much only directed towards NetApp. It wasn't really the Cisco or the VMware components. The support was directed between the parties and handed off appropriately whenever we've needed it.

We were previously using something I would not really call a "SAN", definitely not an enterprise-level one. We got to the point where we kind of handcuffed ourselves by not being able to expand or grow that system. It was really at the limits of what we could do with it.

Obviously, fiber channel versus iSCSI is definitely the direction we wanted to go, plus we wanted the high availability. At the time, we looked at a couple other systems and basically the FlexPod definitely met our needs the best. Also, we knew that it could grow.

In fact, about a year or year and a half ago, when we were spec'ing out our system and making a decision on a SAP ERP program, one of the deciding factors for adopting that technology was that we already had the infrastructure to support it because we had the FlexPod in place.

Initial setup was complex. We were making a pretty big forklift in our environment by putting that in. The design took quite a while, but I'm glad that we did take the time to do that design because it allowed us to have an environment that suited us very well for three-plus years now.

Basically, EMC was the bigger other vendor. We did look very briefly at HP but EMC was the bigger vendor that we were looking at, at the time.

We eventually chose FlexPod mostly because of the FlexPod system’s ability to be split into two different data centers with, basically, one system. Price point was another one, but it just suited our needs almost to a T; it really met the requirements that we were looking for at the time. EMC could do the same thing but it was basically two separate systems and it was a much higher price point.

The most important criteria for my company when selecting a vendor to work with are the stability of the company, the quality of the product, customer service and support. That’s a big deal for our company. We want to make sure that the company that we're dealing with has a similar culture to our own, which is high customer service. We value that.

The idea of the FlexPod: We've all probably experienced the difficulties of working without that type of reference architecture and that acknowledgement of the support. You waste a lot of time because there are going to be problems. There are going to be troubles that you have to go through and the vendors working together on the support has been a value to us. I think almost everybody in this industry has probably gone through that at some point, where you know that a problem lies with one of these three manufacturers, but you spend way too much time finger-pointing and you don't get to the heart of the issue. That was one of the definite advantages of the FlexPod.

Overall, it's really suited our needs. At a time when the storage is kind of a moving target, I think that we did get what we paid for; we have a valued product. We have not had any type of bad experiences that, to me, that would steer us away from NetApp in the future.