IBM FlashSystem Reviews

The solution is like a storage device that is for our old organized cloud infrastructure. We are using it as storage for all our databases, for the data we are preparing for in developing our own applications, or for running some infrastructure services. 

The solution is very flexible.

It's a very fast product. It's not slow in any way.

The product is very, very easy to configure.

The installation is nice and easy.

The stability of the solution isn't great. We have had a lot of issues with discs over the years.

There should be better integration with utilization platforms.

The pricing needs to be more competitive.

I've basically been using the solution for ten years or so.

It isn't really stable per se. We've had some problems over the years. We experienced some problems with the backplane, from what I recall. There were issues switching the discs. We had a lot of issues with discs. Of course, the problems didn't really happen in production.

We have about 100 users on the solution currently.

We've dealt with technical support in the past and we were satisfied with their level of service. However, we no longer pay for support. We have enough knowledgeable people in house to handle everything.

We are actually in the process of changing solutions. We're going to switch to Lenovo's DE4000.

The initial setup was not complex at all. It's pretty straightforward and easy to handle.

The deployment was very fast as well and may have only taken about a day or two.

We had a team of three that handled everything. They don't just handle the storage, however. They're handling the servers and network as well.

We didn't need to use a consultant when we were implementing the solution. We did everything in-house and with our own internal teams.

We initially paid for licenses and support for I don't remember how many years. Later on, if you want to extend the support you needed to pay for the license. However, due to the fact that we are rather experienced, we decided we didn't need to renew the support.

Currently, on the market, I see a lot of different vendors who are offering the same functionalities or even better options for the same or less money. They should try to be more competitive.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a six out of ten. If it was less expensive and a bit more stable, I would likely rate it higher.

We use the FlashSystem to store our company data that is used in production systems.

The maintenance service and support from IBM is very good.

It could be easier to implement.

This is an expensive product and if the price were reduced it would be better.

We have been using the IBM FlashSystem for a few years.

This is absolutely a stable product. However, we will probably not continue to use it in the future. One of the reasons for wanting to switch is the price. Also, technology is evolving and we will probably adopt a hyper-converged solution.

This storage solution is scalable. It is used in production and not directly linked to users. It runs various routines and batches, although the developers and IT interact with this. Together, this is about 50 people.

Technical support from IBM is very good.

We did not use another similar product prior to this one.

The initial setup is quite complex. To get it in place and configured took about one week.

We deployed with the help of an integrator.

There are three administrators who handle the routine maintenance and the hardware is well maintained by IBM.

In summary, this is a good product and I absolutely recommend it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

I am using the private deployment model. 

The ability to create LUNs and modify them is the most valuable feature of this solution. It has a very good storage system. 

Enterprise data storage needs improvement. They should create a feature for data and file storage. 

It is stable. 

It has good scalability abilities. 

They have good technical support. IBM has offices in Ukraine that have knowledgable engineers. They speak Ukrainian. 

The initial setup was easy, understandable, and straightforward. It's a very good product. 

The price is fair. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten. Engineers think that Dell EMC has better storage than Storwize. 

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. 

We are running private clouds for various customers on top of VMware with IBM on the storage layer

Performance is not a problem anymore and the space available is enough for about 5 years of operations. Wa are now busy with cross dc failover which will use the capabilities of this system extensively.

A valuable feature of this solution is the metro/global mirror for synchronous/asynchronous copying of data between data centres.

ISCSI/ISER Bandwidth is at 25gbps. Would be nice if that can keep track with the bandwidth currently available in new dc networking deployments.

We are a 100% satisfied with the stability of the solution.

The system can be expanded with additional trays. Current we have about 2,000 users on the system. They are mostly end users, database administrator, and developers. 

We are happy with the technical support.

We used hyper-converged storage in the past and the reason we switched was because the reliability was not as good as we had hoped with the bigger workloads.

The initial setup was straightforward and it took us about two days to implement it. We did everything ourselves.

The biggest lesson we've learned so far is that hyper-converged storage is good for smaller workloads, but the re-syncing after a failure will be a problem for big workloads.

The IBM System is top-notch and offers all the features we need to keep going for another 5 years.

We have a clustered network using an IBM 3650 for our server. Our environment is entirely in-house, and we are not currently running anything in the cloud.

We are planning to migrate from our current system, as the equipment is getting old.

The support is simply not there, so it needs to be improved.

This solution needs a management console where we are alerted to issues and can report them, or escalate them through email or another method. If something happens to our storage, for example, then we will be notified, and we can report it through the console. 

Stability-wise, this solution is fine. However, we have been having some trouble with our cluster breaking. 

This solution is scalable to an extent. 

We have been facing many issues with support. The main dealer here for IBM is not giving us any support. They are useless fellows, and if you raise any IBM issues they are not serious about them. We are fed up with this situation, which is why we are migrating.

The initial setup of this solution is complex.

We are currently in the stage of migrating our environment to a Huawei solution. It is similar to what we have now, being on-premises and nothing related to the cloud for the time being.

We were having too many support issues with IBM. Within the past couple of months, we were having physical server issues, including problems with the RAM.

My advice to anybody who is considering this system is not to do it. I do not recommend it. It is a big no.

The biggest complaint that I have about this solution is the support. It is important to have responsive support. We had a RAM issue, and the RAM is the heart of the server. I had to escalate the ticket and wait for thirty days. During that time, my server was totally down, which caused our productivity to suffer. It was a big disaster.

The hardware may be good, but I cannot rate this solution very high because of the support.

I would rate this solution a five 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.