FlexPod is a converged infrastructure option developed by NetApp and Cisco. FlexPod is available in streamlined and simplified Express version, and the FlexPod Datacenter edition for enterprise private clouds, VDI, scale-out infrastructure, or software defined data centers.
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Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Cisco HyperFlex Systems is a hyper-converged infrastructure product, based on technology acquired with SpringPath (acquired September 2017). Cisco's modern HCI solution is Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix.
Being able to move a physical server config to another physical server within the FlexPod is a god send.
Hardware fails, we all know that.
It happens, by being able to move a profile from one blade to another, it allows you to quickly and easily restore service while waiting for hardware to arrive onsite to repair/replace the failed component.
Smaller sites that would benefit from a cluster of 2-5 nodes. Not saying that it can't scale above that, but I find HyperFlex a great solution for those sites. A simple 3-node edge cluster can provide a huge amount of resources and redundancy. It's also really easy to scale the environment to meet growth requirements.
KVM control of the blades still requires Java. Avocent is using HTML5 now, and it would be nice if the KVM console for these UCS blades could too.
Price - Like any Cisco product, there are cheaper options. They aren't nearly as fully featured, but at times, it would be nice if UCS could be a bit cheaper.
Too much integration with Cisco UCS fabric interconnects is required, which makes the product most useful for customers who already have Cisco UCS. Options without fabric interconnects are limited.
Hyper-V integration is way behind (but to be fair I think that's true for most vendors in this space).
I never contacted Cisco support for any problem. I cannot skip this question. It provides good hardware for my organization to using this product. All the updates will be made promptly. Anything happen we just need to open a ticket to the helpdesk team. We can get new info from a team in Malaysia.
I have made use of Smartstack, vBlock and Flashstack, as well as other mixes of storage and virtualization hosts, and FlexPod is probably still my favorite. While something like a Nimble Smartstack or Pure Flashstack is easier to maintain, I love the in depth information and control that a SAN such as Netapp offers us. There is more knowledge and skill required to manage it, but the maturity of the product helps make up for that.
VMware vSAN is more elastic and easy to sell as you can have more flexibility with the hardware and can use or just upgrade hardware already deployment in the client infrastructure and additionally its have no dependencies about the DNS/NTP, what is important..
FlexPod has allowed our team to be extremely quick to resopnd to new VM build requests. The amount of RAM, CPU and backplane offered by B series blades allows us to go with very high VM density. The quick deployment of service profile templates also means that when we have to add new hosts, it is done quicker.
FlexPod and the service profile portability (along with VMware) has allowed for full upgrades and migrations from M1/M2 series hardware to M4 hardware without any downtime or outages to the clients. Blades can be moved into new chassis, or service profiles moved to new generation blades, with no impact to the customers' ability to work.
HX made positive impact on our overall business objective and helped in reducing operational and capital expenditures almost by 60%
We used to have huge footprint of FC SAN storage and highly skilled SME's to manage the FC SAN environments. HX helped in getting rid of costly SAN investments and we could move the skilled SMEs on higher work stack. With HX, we are able to effectively manage day to day operations with less skilled resources.
We also benefitted largely from the single OEM support (Cisco end to end for HX, network fabric and hypervisor). In earlier case, we used to log service requests to SAN vendor, Hypervisor vendor and network fabric vendor separately. In case of inter-related issues between the vendors, our business used to suffer. These all challenges are removed by HX adoption. This is helping us support the business with maximum uptime ever. Our service SLA's are also improved by 70%
