It's really good, it's worked well, but we've had a few issues with various parts of the hardware, with our fabric interconnects from Cisco. We actually had to replace two of them because of some sort of corruption that was on them. We did an upgrade on it. Apparently, the specific version we upgraded from to the specific version that we upgraded to, there was a known bug that would cause corruption on our partitions on there. We had to replace those like three times because of issues we had. That was a big pain point, but besides small things like that, it's been pretty rock solid. That would be why my rating is not higher than it is.

I think it was just one of those things that's just so under the radar that it took them a while to even dig up that it was an issue. I referred to it as a known issue, not being that it happens a lot but known that there was some documentation that had pertained to it. It was one of those things, tough to catch until afterwards; already done.

It's straightforward. It has gotten better. I'm not in touch with the newer deployment methods, but I haven't seen issues, so I think we are good on this.

It would be nice if we can allow config management tools like maybe SaltStack or Puppet. We are comfortable with SaltStack. It would be nice to not only use it for deployment as well as to manage the configs, top to bottom, because that is something we need to have a better handle on, to make sure we are consistent across the board.

Each deployment is different for every client. The use of the FlexPod architecture is different nearly every time in some fashion. Any issues that arise come more from a design aspect than the actual FlexPod itself. Clients tend to design around their needs, and the FlexPod is flexible enough to accommodate, if installed correctly.

We have had a few deployments of FlexPod, one for production and one for the disaster recovery (DR) sites, and we have been happy with it so far.

If you do not take the time to learn the technology before deploying it, you are not going to be able to deploy it as smooth and as fast.

Deployment is a whole lot better now than it was five years ago. It's very simple. We can stand up a standard FlexPod usually in a matter of a half a day. That involves racking, stacking, and starting the configuration of the aggregates, or the Cisco platform, that goes with it.

We designed it about a year ago and have had it about six months.

No issues encountered.