IBM Spectrum Virtualize Reviews

I use IBM Spectrum Virtualize as a storage device that provides storage to servers needing storage. I utilize it in my role for the US government.

The ease of management, the simplicity of the CLI, the speed of that interface, and the well-architected design of the product in general are valuable features. 

The latest incarnation enables significant scalability unless you're dealing with exabytes of data. It also has highly specialized Flash Core modules, which do encryption and compression within each drive with zero impact.

The primary use case is high availability and disaster recovery. They use it as an active-active cluster located in two physical locations for quick recovery using immutable snapshots.

The quick restore, the low latency, and the ease of use are some of the most valuable features. The product is quite easy to setup and maintain. It is an enterprise product that delivers high performance features.

The primary use case with IBM Spectrum Virtualize for us is in relationship to databases.

I like that it can virtualize more than three hundred storage providers. I enjoy the performance, replication, and compression. I value all of the features.

We use it for all our block storage requirements. I was a user of the storage between 2004 and 2017, i.e. 13 years. We sell service, assist others with storage. We have been using it since 2004, and we have used all versions of the product. It is currently up-to-date. We are a platinum business partner of IBM, but we also have competing business partnerships with other companies, such as Dell. It is a product line as opposed to a singular product. There are entry mid-level and enterprise-level tiers of products, the lowest end entry, which is comprehensive in terms of being able to deliver millions of IOPS and microsecond latencies all the way up to the upper level of that product line. All the products have high availability. My clients are generally government agencies. We also have some commercial businesses, and they range overall categories, but mostly it's used by the government. However, even in government situations, there are ranges of business in terms of small, medium and large business size, given the environment we are deploying into. Some agencies have minimal budgets, and I would classify that as a very small business, but some are large. We deploy it both on the cloud and on-premise.

It enabled us to build an infrastructure and replace storage with no disruption to our hosts whatsoever. It's an amazing capability, and we stayed with it. I loved the product so much that while I had learned about several other products, none of them compares unless you're looking for a precise capability. This is a general-purpose but very high-performance system when it comes to flash systems. There are cases where you need more performance than possible with the system's design, but you always have to pick your top requirement.  Most people have similar requirements. They want decent response time, decent costs, a plethora of functionality, including remote and local copy services. It addresses all of those concerns, but it has to sacrifice resources here and there to be that capable. You can't get 32 petabytes running 20 million IOPS at .07 microseconds. Generally, there are limitations to everything. Some systems could offer that, but of course, it'd be memory-based only, and they wouldn't have any storage and cost 1000 times what this solution costs. So there are limitations to everything.

We use this solution to run our virtual machines.

The ability to add the virtual machine on the Spectrum environment to sort out the data movers(DMs) and their schedules is a valuable feature. You are able to have, for example, four data movers to balance them so you do not have too much work on one data mover.

Once you know how to run the commands it tells you what has been backed up and which DM did not get backed up. You have what you call DSM errors. The system talks to the schedule and then it knows why and what happened with a certain backup that was not completed. When you are trying to troubleshoot you are able to go back to the DSM or OPT error files and scroll down and see why the backup did not run. It gives you the error number allowing you to go back to see what the issue was.

It is used for continuity, protecting stuff in the cloud, and migrating data from a legacy device to a new device. 

The big solution that I last implemented was called IBM HyperSwap on SVCs. It is now called IBM Spectrum Virtualize. The solution we build was basically a high availability data center. I replicated all my data with IBM HyperSwap so that if a data center gets destroyed, you can fire up everything on the other side in minutes. It was very fast.

There are many benefits to this solution. Storage virtualization and the ability to migrate massive amounts of data to other systems without impacting your client are the most valuable. It is non-disruptive for my users. We migrated 350 terabytes of data in one night to a new machine without a small system going down and a single user complaining about the performance.

You have to fine-tune a lot of storage machines constantly for performance and for making sure that they are optimal, but IBM Spectrum Virtualize does this by itself. It does the adjustment on its own, and it does it right. That's what makes it different. I had a huge VSP from Hitachi, which is also a type of virtualization-based engine but with a decent size. It was a continuous performance-tuning exercise. I never had that issue with IBM Spectrum Virtualize.