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.

The valuable features are high availability, compression, and a failover mechanism. It's a very highly available storage solution.

It can virtualize external rewrites and you have a single pane of management. Instead of having multiple managements for different storage products, you can have a single pane to manage everything. The external virtualization is a really good feature.

High Availability – any server, physical or virtualized accessing the IBM Storwize can be in a high-availability configurations. This will make applications available all the time to provide service to the end users.

Real-time Compression – it reduces storage costs by compressing it up to 80%, therefore saves rack space and power consumption.
Storage Virtualization – it can virtualize different storage from different vendors, thus helps ease of use by providing single pane of management and device drivers.

Storage Tiering – automatically migrates data between different storage tiers depending on the usage of the data. This will help reduce costs by avoiding to purchase dedicated SSD or Flash drives to applications that needed performance.

It allows the company to be highly available and be able to recover the storage if there are some issues.

I would like to see the snapshot management embedded within the GUI. Right now, the snapshot management, if you want to schedule, or do multiple scheduling in a day, you have to use scripting. Customers are not highly technical, and they really cannot do scripting. If IBM could include the snapshot management within the interface, then that would be good.

I know they have a flashcopy manager, but it is extra software, an additional license, and some customers don't like to add addition costs to their infrastructure. If IBM could create, or include snapshot management within the GUI, that would really be helpful.

I have a lot of customers who are really interested in the Storewize product and they are using snapshot management. It's really good to have this kind of investment, because this product is really good.

It's a very stable product. I like it, and I have a lot of customers using it.

Storewize is scalable, especially the V-7000. The GEN-28 can scale up to 20 expansions. It's highly scalable and you can have a maximum of 8 nodes.

I have used the technical support on occasion, but not a lot. It's good. As long as you provide them with the correct information about the problem, they will respond very quickly.

The initial setup was easy, very easy.

I highly recommend it.

The most important feature that our customers are very interested in is the virtualization. Being able to have the flexibility as they grow, without having to just lift and replace everything that they're doing.

Where it's moving into now is a unified set of advanced features that they're able to lay across their enterprise, without it being different in every single product that they're dealing with.

The virtualization, the flattening, and those advanced characteristics of the product are really what our customers have gravitated towards on the V9000.

When it comes to our benefits from this solution, a lot of it comes down to simplicity. If we take a look at a lot of these complex IT solutions today, they're very hard to maintain and to administer. However, the V9000 and the investment that IBM has made to the user experience, makes it very easy for our customers to be able to self-maintain and self-administer their own environment. They don't have to always go to a storage consultant or have to call into support. That's been very beneficial to our clients.

We think that IBM has to continue to invest in additional data reduction capabilities which are on their roadmap. Being able to use flash most efficiently, where the least amount of data is physically being stored on the V9000 is really where IBM needs to make additional investment. They are doing that.

The stability's been rock solid. If we take a look at the V9000 and the base of what it's built on, it is the heritage of IBM Storwize. This goes back to IBM SAN Volume Controller or SVC. We're on a very mature code base and it is a code base that's been very extendable.

So over the years, they've been able to inject new capabilities in the product line while still keeping the product very stable. We've had customers who have been through multiple upgrade cycles over the life of the product with no issues at all.

The scalability of the V9000 product is really where it shines. Being able to add additional capacity to the unit, without having to come up with a different management of lots of separate units, has been very beneficial to clients.

That idea of starting small with their current flash rollout and then being able to grow as the budget allows, has been very beneficial to clients.

We've been absolutely happy with the technical support.

From an IBM perspective for technical support, they really love the V9000, especially when you're going to do some enhanced service offerings that IBM has.

When it comes to using things like the technical advisor, being able to have more of a concierge service with support has been very beneficial to clients.

A lot of our customers were previously using either all disk or hybrid solutions for their storage. Moving towards an all-flash V9000, allowed them to take performance management and stop having to worry about that in their everyday tasks.

Moving to an all-flash array allowed them to spend more time dealing with application integration and dealing with their end users. This is rather than having to do performance management and moving data around. The all-flash array made their life a lot simpler.

We were involved with all aspects:

• Initial design
• Setup
• Rollout
• Integration with the different operating systems and different hosts through the storage fabric

It was straightforward. What we really like about the V9000 is that we're able to take implementation engineers who had experience with other members of the Storwize family.

They are able to take those skills that they learned within other product sets and directly translate those to the V9000.

They are able to very quickly come up to speed on the product without having to learn a brand new skill set.

From a CAS Severn perspective, IBM continues to be our premier supplier of storage. We do have a lot of experience with other vendors in the industry, including Pure Storage, EMC, and HP.

When it comes to recommending a vendor, the entire lifecycle of supporting a system is important. That's everything from design, to implementation, to ongoing support. IBM provides a strong package on all three aspects of the lifecycle of the equipment.

Folks that are looking to implement the V9000 really should take a look at the simplicity that an all-flash array can bring to their environment. They should look at the efficiency of being able to take skills that they might have learned within other Storwize products and be able to directly translate those into the V9000.

To summarize: Similar interface, similar support interaction, and the way they can take knowledge that they previously had and be able to directly translate that to their all-flash array decision.

The most valuable features are the virtual capabilities that you get from the system and being able to move your data between tiers. We use that feature and we also optimize that with the SAN.

It has helped improve our organizational functionality with the ease of replacement of hardware. We use it a lot for that, for swapping in and out of old hardware to new hardware.

I can't really think of any specific improvements which I would like to see.

Stability has been great. Every time that we had a failed drive or a failed piece of hardware, it's been no problem. The systems have stayed up, with no problems at all.

We haven't scaled it to the maximum. It does scale quite a bit more than we've actually ever used it.

Technical support has been great. As far as responding, we usually get a resolution, or we have somebody calling us from higher up in the chain.

We're an IBM shop, so we've always been on some kind of IBM platform.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's pretty simple.

I would tell them, "The ease of use of the system. If you have a small storage team, then this is the platform for you. It's really easy to manage, really easy to use, and it doesn't take a lot of training." The biggest key to deciding on the product is the support and replacement capabilities.

We do replication and other things. For us, compression, deduplication, and the space saving features are important to us. The price to value ratio, for us, was good.

We are using replication for our backup solutions and it costs us less compared to other solutions. For space saving features, it definitely saves us in a virtual environment in terms of space and money.

There is a limit on the flash memory for fresh copy, i.e., a memory limit. So there are limits within the software, for buffering and then caching. We want to see those items increased.

There are a lot of bugs and they are still adding features in the product. The system has matured from 6.X to 7.X. It has improved a lot, but it still has room for more improvement.

This is not an enterprise solution, and our team doesn't sell that. That's how it is. So we shouldn't expect an enterprise level solution. Whatever is marketable for the segment serves a purpose.

You can scale out as much as you want. We use up to four in a cluster, four to six nodes, so it's working fine for us.

Other than bug fixes, the technical support is really good. If you actually hit a bug in your environment, it's definitely going to take time. It has to be escalated all the way to the third level and then to the engineers. It's a little bit challenging over there. But overall, it's okay.

We were using SVC and DS83. We are actually using that app, but for us, IBM Storwize V7000 was more cost effective in our environment. That's why we chose that specific product.

The setup is straightforward if you want to do a basic setup. But if you want to do customization specific to your environment, then you need to be more intimately involved with it.

We are not, at this point, considering other vendors. These days, it's specifically cost which is more important when selecting a vendor. We are not part of a financial environment or something like that where we would have a lot of penalties. So for us, as long as it is stable enough, we are okay. So for us, it is stability and then cost.

If they are cost conscious and have a release table solution, this is probably the best solution available.

The hardware is the best feature of the product. We have not seen many drive failures. The V9000 all-flash is constructed well.

It has not made us more efficient from a deployment standpoint. That is why we have been migrating to a hyper-converged solution.

• The overall code.
• The ability to have built-in reporting to understand the health of the array.
• Stability within the code.
• Clear upgrade paths for the code.
• Support is horrible. It takes weeks to get simple answers. We had a LUN down and support refused to get on a WebEx without the array being completely down.

We have had the system for over two years.

We currently have about 1PB worth of storage that spans IBM Storwize V5000, V7000, and V9000. This is across two datacenters.

We had stability issues as stated elsewhere.

The V9000 can only hold two shelves of flash, at which point you need new controllers.

Technical support is the worst in the industry, as mentioned elsewhere.

We previously used EMC. We switched based on cost.

Setup is not difficult.

Not worth the money.

EMC was evaluated.

There are far better products with better support for less cost.

The hardware itself is good, but the code that runs on it is not good at all. We have LUNs that will just go offline, and support has no clear answer. Each result is a code upgrade that does not resolve the problem. There is no built-in historical reporting. That is a costly add-on for an already overpriced system.

The cost was low when we purchased it.

It has not improved how we function.

ACLs should be more compatible with other NAS-based platforms. Some of the platform limitations need to be addressed.

I have used this product for two years.

We have had to bounce services several times over the past two years.

Technical support is horrible. IBM doesn't have much expertise with the product.

We were using EMC VNX.

The initial setup was fairly simple.

We migrated from EMC VNX.

We performed a new enterprise storage refresh and kicked out EMC.

We moved from EMC VMAX to Pure Storage All-Flash, and then got this product to replace EMC VNX.

DON'T use it unless you have a new and small NAS environment.