IBM FlashSystem Reviews

The valuable features are snapshots and snap logs. We only use those on our flash system. We value the performance of the system.

Our automatic banking systems have become twice as quick with flash storage.

I don't know about improvements. Maybe having independent snapshots. For now, when we make snapshots one by one, they depend on each other. If we delete the first snapshot, then we can lose the others. We really need functional snapshots which are independent of each other.

The stability is not very good. Over the course of the last two years, we had two incidents with flash storage when we lost our data. We have three flash storages and we lost all the data on two of them. That was not very good.

Scalability is good.

Technical support is good enough. Their advice was mainly to upgrade our firmware and restore our backups.

Test all of the products as you evaluate them.

The most valuable features are the ability to virtualize other storage behind it, thin provisioning, compression, and flash systems.

The benefit of the product is the ease-of-management. It has significantly reduced the IT operation costs to our organization.

I don’t really have a feature that I’d be using. Other storage technologies such as 3D drives or 3D flash would be cool to see, but for the users who I’m selling to, I don’t have this to offer. I don’t think that there is any improvement required.

Stability has been excellent and we never had any problems.

It’s massively scalable, so I’ll never run into that problem.

I have used tech support and they are excellent. They always have an answer for me.

When selecting a vendor, the support mechanism and the reliability are the most important elements.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I have done it for other clients, and it’s very straightforward to set up and use.

Take it for a test drive. You’ll be impressed.

We are solution providers. We deploy solutions around VMware. Typically we deploy data protection, and disaster recovery of workloads in the cloud, and on-premises.

If I need to know about a platform or the base platform on which I'm working, I try to read up on their model. We are also storage integrators and solution providers.

The primary use case is for storage, enterprise workloads, and databases.

The V5000, and the V7000, both are equally good.

Over the years, it has become increasingly user-friendly.

There is always room for improvement, but IBM is less interested in on-premise storage or on-premises solutions going forward. 

They're highly focused on the cloud. I don't see IBM being a very major player, the way that they used to be because they are moving away from this and are trying to move all their customers to the cloud.

Nothing really comes to mind for needing improvement. Some years ago, there would have been an answer to what could be better about this product, but nowadays, virtually all of the companies are meeting all of the features.

More and more, we would like to see how it's easier for the solutions to be bought by the customer more on a pay-per-use basis. That is certainly an improvement.

The customer's expectations are what they get on the cloud, they're expecting even in the on-premises deployments, going forward. 

They want to pay-per-use and not own and get stuck with what they're buying. 

They want flexibility.

IBM does that in a few products, but then more and more you see the business model changing towards that. We'd like to see that in all IBM products.

We have been a services and deployment company for more than 30 years.

We've worked across the board with the various solutions across various vendors.

It's very, very stable, and we have never had issues.

It's extremely scalable. There are no limitations, because of the profile of the customers they work with. 

Most of their boxes are highly scalable to meet that requirement and the scaling is pretty straightforward. 

There's no rip and replace. It's a very scalable tool.

Previously, I had experience with Hitachi SAN.

The suitability of either solution depends on the use case. If you talk about modular storage virtually from any company, they will have solutions which more or less do the same thing. 

There will be a competing model at each bracket of requirements. When you talk about storage hardware, you can't really say which is better, or which is worse. 

You can talk about reliability and support, or you can talk about how good it is in a particular geography. But, this is not like Mercedes Benz is a good car and the Fiat is not, it doesn't work like that.

We find the initial setup to be fairly straightforward because we understand the technology.

We do this as service delivery, so we understand that we have trained ourselves in it.

It can take half a day to get the initial things up and running.

In today's world, nothing is reasonable because the customer's budgets are thinking on a daily basis. 

They've been much more aggressive in the last five or six years than they were before that.

They are more realistic.

My basic advice is to work with partners who really understand what they're talking about. Anybody who sells one of these boxes doesn't necessarily have the capability to supply or support them. Be very clear that you're dealing with organizations that have the experience to actually deploy and support you. 

That would be what is critical. Because it's not something that we just rack it up and switch it on and it works. There are many things involved. 

Also, initially, before purchasing, the sizing is very critical. There has to be enough time spent on performance metrics, analyzing the workload requirements, and things like that.

Before the purchase and after the purchase and the deployment, there needs to be quite a bit of involvement. This is why I would advise the customer to work with partners of IBM or Hitachi. 

Whoever you're talking about, and who has experience. Not somebody who just comes and says, "I'll do anything, and for the price, I'll give you the best deal." 

The best deal is not always the best deal. 

Once you buy it and it doesn't work for you, ultimately you are paying more.

I would rate IBM XIV and eight out of ten.

The performance of the All-Flash System is very good. There is more enhanced performance and data production in the solution, which I appreciate.

They should reduce the cost of the solution and offer smaller storage sizes to target small to medium-sized businesses.

The solution is not easy to implement. It takes a lot of time to study the product and it's a little complicated in general.

The solution should offer integration with the cloud on the next upgrade. It might already be there but we have not integrated that, or gone for that upgrade. It would mean we could keep a copy of our data in the secured cloud, whether it's Amazon or Azure. 

So far, stability is fine. It's been almost three years now and it's working perfectly well. I don't have any hardware issues or any other performance issues. I've had only good feedback about the system.

It is scalable, although it's very expensive. In maybe another three or four years we'll be adding more storage space and hard disk flashes to the existing system. Right now, we have between 500-600 end users on the application.

When you buy IBM products you subscribe to the technical support as well, so as long as the technical support and subscription are valid, they will support you. We took a five-year support subscription; we have two more years of the product subscription left. As long as the support and subscription are there, they are happy because if there is any technical issue or some format upgrade, IBM is there to support you.

We previously used DDN storage. 

We switched because IBM has got a good reputation and they gave us a better price. From a technical and reputational standpoint, IBM was superior.

The initial setup was a little complicated, especially the storage part of the implementation. The solution itself is complicated as well. 

There are multiple applications which require better performance as well as space. Both were a big issue. Some features were expensive, but we had to meet the storage requirement as well as the performance for these and had to design a solution to meet these two requirements. 

It was an implementation handled in phases, so it took about four to five months to deploy the complete solution.

We went phase by phase and then we did a performance analysis at the end of each phase to make sure that the storage performance was not going down and we were getting the best performance out of the bots. After every phase we had and throughout each phase, we had multiple performance and penetration tests as well; this was all mandatory.

We had about five people helping with the implementation. For maintenance, as long as you have an experienced person or team, you only need one or two people. 

We had IBM's main partners do the deployment. IBM was also involved in the implementation. 

They were very professional and experienced in these complicated implementations. It was was a very good experience because they knew what they were doing.

We are seeing an ROI. We are getting better performance and all the applications are working fine. Our users are happy, but performance is the key. The All-Flash System was chosen specifically for performance and we are getting that.

In our case, we calculated the storage capacity and performance we would need for five years and we bought the product outright. After five years we might have to scale the product, but then we will need to invest in the upgrade. Right now I'm not paying anything because everything from support to subscription was paid upfront. Their upgrades are free as well, so we are getting new features for the product, from the website.

I didn't evaluate another solution before choosing IBM.

We use the on-premises deployment model of the solution.

In terms of advice, I would give to others, I would say that you need to have the proper training for the solution. You need to train your staff on this product because it's not a straightforward implementation or a straightforward product, so you need to have some knowledge about the storage and how it works. Then plan and size your infrastructure prior to your deployment. We planned for five years in advance, and we are happy with the solution because we did our homework prior to implementation. 

I would rate this solution eight out of ten.

IBM XIV is the most valuable part of this solution. It is easy to use and manage. It is a cheap and also has reliable technology.

We actually are a hospital and we have zero downtime or any outage whatsoever.

There is need to put a SVC in there.

It is very stable. We've been using this solution for more than ten years. We're using it on our three big sites, there were no issues.

It doesn't scale out that well. It actually goes up to 15 module and after that, you have to add another frame. But, they have come out with a new technology where you can do hyperscale. I wish they had put a SVC in front of it but, it's a hyperscale, i.e., you can be on either the A-side or B-side.

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor are reliability and their level of maturity.

It's not the best solution, but it's very reliable.

It depends as every company is different. Some companies choose reliability, while others prefer the market. You have to assess your own stuff and see accordingly, what fits your bill.

The ease-of-use and scalability are the most valuable features.

The common interface has improved the way we work. We don't have to learn more than one interface to manage the storage arrays.

So far, it seems pretty stable. We haven't had any major issues.

We find the product very scalable. We've been able to implement many storage arrays in our environment with very little effort.

We have used technical support. So far, we haven't had any bad experiences with them. We have been able to get the proper support we needed.

When selecting a vendor, I want stability, years in the industry, and overall stability.

The setup was straightforward.

Make sure you look at a wide variety of products. That way you can come to an intelligent decision on what platform you are going to go with.

We use the on-prem deployment model. Our primary use case for this solution is for backup for the solutions. We sell this solution to customers. 

The most valuable features are deduplication and compression. 

The interface is also good.   

The ease of installation should be improved. We had issues with the configuration model. 

In the next release, there should be and flash and caching features. Customers also have problems accessing their files from the storage. That's what they usually complain about. This is something they should improve. 

The main issue is the speed in terms of accessing the data. That is the customer's big complaint. They also complain about the speed of the hard drive.

We did not have any issues from the client saying that Storwize had stability issues. We didn't have any issues with it. 

Technical support was okay. We had their support remotely and also from the local support stream.

The price is good. We are also IBM partners and the give big discounts for the same product. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

I/O speeds. This products in basically a RAID comprised of SSD drives with PCI-Express interface, that you can connect to 16GB HBAs, making this storage one of the fastest available in the market today.

This storage has incredible performance, the I/O is awesome. It is difficult to understand how fast it is if you don’t have one, that’s why IBM gives you a month trial, to install it in your infrastructure and give it a try.
In my organization's case, we use the FlashSystem basically for virtualization (VMware). It's amazing how fast a virtual machine boots. We use it for databases too, and the disk I/O performance is incredible.

This storage is factory configured so it's very difficult and expensive to add more flash modules (disk capacity).

Scalability is the main area which needs to improve.

Six months.

No, no at all.

IBM support is excellent as always.

No, this is my first experience with a 100% SSD solution.

No, in fact it was easier than I expected.

If you are going to buy one, have in mind the amount of capacity you need, and your estimated growth for the following years. As I mentioned above, it is expensive to add more SSD modules.

Not really, it was recommended to me by a friend, and after the first month, my company couldn't live without it.

I recommend adding a pair of SAN switches to the Flash solution, otherwise it's a waste to use as and direct attach storage.