IBM FlashSystem Reviews

The ease-of-use and ease-of-setup are the most valuable features. You can get one up and running in a couple hours. I do it quite frequently for customers. The simplicity of it is the big benefit for me, compared to some others that I've used.

A lot of features are beneficial. It's a robust solution from my standpoint. We've got it running on several different configurations. You've got tiering and a lot of nice features to have in today's world. You can put flash in them. It is a good system to use.

As far as for what we use it for, they have got it spot on for our market. I'm sure others might have some additions, but our market is more in the SNB space. It is everything we've ever needed.

With the latest releases of software, it's pretty robust. They've pretty well nailed it. I don't see any further weaknesses with the interfaces or anything.

I have not had any real issues. I think it is very stable. We have not had any outages or any unexpected issues. I would say it’s very stable.

It is definitely very easy to scale. It's like everybody says, "plug and play". It just works.

Technical support is very good.

We had a few customer requests for it. I attended conferences and they showed me that they have really put a lot of time and effort into this. It's a good solution. It was worth our time to push it for our customers.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We did not look at other vendors. We are a business partner for IBM on the storage side. Primarily, they're the only game we mess around with.

Definitely give it your time. Give it your time, get some IBM folks to show you some benefits and maybe do a demo. It's a great solution.

It is software defined.

It's flexible. You don't need to buy big hardware solutions that are vendor-bound. It's one of the first, fully software-defined solutions on the market available. It's actually built in-house, so it's very robust, tested, and it works right.

I would like it to be more scalable.

It's very stable.

It's not extremely scalable as of today. There are certain limits of the hardware that it runs on. Essentially, it does provide for medium to large enterprises in a single appliance solution.

I have used support and it needs improvement. I don't like the way that levels of support are organized. Level-1 never provides any support anymore. It just relays communication to the actual Level-2 support. Level-1 support barely understands the problem at first.

It's been well established in the market for probably over 10 or 11 years now. This was one of the first solutions available.

The setup was straightforward.

We are open to competitive market solutions, but a single vendor solution is something that definitely makes sense for our enterprise.

When looking for a vendor, support is important, as well as market position.

I find almost all the IBM FlashSystem features beneficial. The performance and the minimum latency IBM FlashSystem provide to the applications are good.  Parsing is the most valuable feature inside IBM Spectrum Virtualize software, which allows us to virtualize any third-party storage for IBM or non-IBM systems. A lot of features like replication/copy snapshots. All of them are very important and amazing, and we have benefited from them with most of the applications.

The generic functionality of IBM FlashSystem, IBM always dismisses using file share or sharing protocols inside their storage hardware, and they only focus on the block-level storage.

I have been using IBM FlashSystem for 10 years.

IBM FlashSystem is a stable solution.

I have found IBM FlashSystem to be scalable. However, with a specific type of FlashSystems scalability is limited. 

The local support for IBM FlashSystem is very weak. Most of the customers are suffering from the IBM support here inside Egypt.

The initial setup is easy. It is not complex at all.

I price of IBM FlashSystem is reasonable and competitive.

We provide this solution to many customers.

I rate IBM FlashSystem an eight out of ten.

We are using FlashSystem 5000. There are about 15 people using this solution in my company.

The deduplication and compression ratio is not very good. It's not reaching a very high ratio.

I would like to see the replication or synchronization between the storage to be IP replication. Right now, the IP replication is only supported in this model. So, the pure IP will be okay.

We have been using this solution for a few months.

Before using this solution, we used Storwize 5000. It was okay, but it's very old, and it's out of the support. So, we are looking for some support.

The solution is only hardware.

The pricing is reasonable.

I would rate this solution 6 out of 10.

We are using IBM FlashSystem for Oracle E-Business Suite backups.

IBM FlashSystem is a powerful effective storage solution. Additionally, it is user-friendly, anyone can use it.

We use some open-source tools for monitoring, such as Grafana and it should be bundled along with IBM FlashSystem.

I have been using IBM FlashSystem for approximately two years.

IBM FlashSystem is stable, we have not found any issues.

The solution is scalable.

The solution can be used for any size of business.

I have not needed to contact the support.

The implementation is very simple.

The price of IBM FlashSystem is reasonable.

IBM FlashSystem is very simple and plug-and-play. I would recommend it.

I rate IBM FlashSystem a nine out of ten.

We are using the IBM FlashSystem 900 in a tiered storage environment virtualized behind the IBM SAN Volume Controller in a stretched-cluster topology.

The FlashSystem 900 consistently delivers performance below 1ms for read/write. This performance is essential for an effective SVC stretch-cluster configuration across two datacenters, and presenting active-active storage to the customer.

The performance monitoring feature is useful as it can report in 15 minute intervals by hour, day, week, month, or by a custom date range. Version 1.5.0.0 also has a useful feature which allows for IBM to provide remote support directly into the FlashSystem 900.

Include an option to upload the support package to the IBM ECuRep when opening an IBM PMR.

The initial customer technical support was efficient and effective.

No previous solution was used.

The initial setup is very similar to setting up the IBM family of enterprise storage products (V7000, V9000, SVC, etc.).

We implemented with a business partner and IBM.

I think the v7000 is versatile, reliable, and gives really good performance in the configuration you choose. The V7000 can be configured in different ways. It has proved to me that it is reliable, that the disks do not constantly break down, and that any administration work is simple. It also has a very complete assistant that helps you to solve the problems that arise.

This product has improved the speed of disk access where I have mounted, but I do not think that is its best feature since others give you the same performance. As I said for me what recommends this product is its reliability and the peace of mind it brings.

Of course the cost, it's expensive compared to other solutions.

I've been using for more than five years.

No problem, in fact it is a characteristic that I like.

No problem, there are very scalable models, everything depends on planning and the requirements.

The technical support in general of IBM, in my personal opinion, could be much better. The truth is that I have never had any problem with them at a hardware level, the service is agile. Things get a bit complicated if the issue is not solved with a replacement part. I would give technical support a seven out of 10.

I have used many solutions, having mounted many projects with storage (NetApp, HPE, Clarion, etc.) but if I had to choose one based on value for money, I think I would stick with V7000.

The initial configuration is simple, but critical because at this point you can make it not work or even damage it completely. I think configuration should be done by a specialist. A storage specialist who had never set up a V7000 would not have problems.

As I have already noted, everything depends on how you want it set up. I think there are others in the market that are equal in cost but much worse.

If you are going to go with a V7000, you will not regret it. Be sure to clarify what you need, and it will give you the expected results.

The easy GUI is the most valuable feature.

As I said When you Sync V7000 to Another V7000 that are located in my case more than 10km and with DWDM as dark fiber , first you need license for long distance from brocade.
Than you can change the buffer credit on the SAN switch to at least 49 . the point is that you need to test the parameter to get the best value .
This depend on the line you have and also check if there is any limitation from your DWDM Provider.

The problem is that if the buffer is not configured correctly this increase the latency because of this delay and the retransmit .

I have been using it for four years.

Remote copy performance impacts latency on the local storage: Must be configured with the correct buffer credit.

Customer service is very good.

Technical support is very good.

We previously used a different solution. We switched because Storwize v7000 is easy to manage.

A vendor team implemented it.