IBM FlashSystem Reviews

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 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.

Storage virtualisation: Use o storage pool to spread I-O load across as many disks as possible, reduces “hot spots”.

Ability to manage third-party arrays and virtualise them: One screen to control multiple arrays. Simplified administration.

Auto-tiering with Easy-Tier: High usage volumes and parts of volumes are automatically moved to high performance disks in manageable “chunks”. This means volumes with heavy I-O usage are are moved to SSD for the best response. Zero admin overhead.

Using V7000, the storage administrator has complete visibility into the I-O load and response times of the volumes, storage pool. Together with “Easy Tier”, this means volumes with high workloads are automatically moved to the highest performing disks (SSD) in the array. There is almost zero administration required once the storage pool is established.

Data migration: The migration wizard made migration from old to new an absolute doddle. Something that historically had been “hard and difficult” became a background task, once the old array was managed by the V7000.

The replication of data between IBM Storwize arrays in V1 of the product had some major limitations. A lot of the limitations were overcome in V2 of the product. Some improvement can still be made in scalability using clustered V7000 nodes.

One area for improvement is in the GUI, where host clusters are not properly dealt with. With Hypervisor host clusters, all hosts must see the same volumes in the same order. Using the concept of a “host-group” has been around (even with IBM) for many years, so why not with the V7000?

Four years.

Some isues were encountered during upgrades in the early firmware versions. This has now been resolved.

The V7000 can scale up to 10 enclosures (disk shelves), each up to 24 disks per enclosure. A cluster of 2 x V7000 has twice the capacity.

Using the V7000 you must be careful not to overload the CPU and disk backplane. When planning to implement any storage array, you must plan your workload carefully. IBM have a superb tool, Disk Magic, that predicts the I-O performance of the array configuration you have selected. This is an invaluable tool in planning any IBM storage array.

I was lucky to have a very good relationship with the local IBM storage support experts. The implementations were done under IBM guidance and, knowing this, any issues that came up at my sites were quickly dealt with. The support staff knew the arrays had been installed with expert guidance and had no inherent issues in design.

Previous storage solutions included the HPE 3PAR array family. We switched to IBM for 3 reasons:

• Upgrade cost
• Complexity with administration tasks and day-to-day running
• Support costs

The IBM V7000 initial setup was straightforward, as I had engaged IBM support early on and was given very good advice on how to size, configure and implement the array(s), including data migration from the old to the new.

It pays to go back and get the best price you can from your supplier. The first offer is not always at the best discount.

Ensure that all the features you need (including replication) are included in the license options.

Several vendors were evaluated in addition to IBM: HPE, NetApp, EMC.

1. Download the IBM Redbook on best practices to implement.
2. Engage IBM support or your integration partner/reseller at a detailed level.
3. Know what you want to do and document your requirements.
4. Investigate upgrade costs and five-year maintenance options.

In the Unified model it supports SAN and NAS solutions very smoothly. Also, there is a back end command line interface which is very comfortable for scripting, especially for snapshot and business copy solutions.

V7K has better I/O performance than some other storage, such as HPE XP12K, HPE EVA (4K and 8K) and IBM DS (3K and 4K). Because of this, I have seen improvements in long-term business operations (like billing run in a telecom company and end-of-month operations in a financial institution).

It should increase sociability with respect to number of disk shelves and capacity.

Overall, five years.

No.

No.

Eight out of 10.

Switched to decommission older hardware (XP12K and EVA from HPE).

Very simple setup, especially for FC SAN network.

I cannot comment on this as I used it as an IBMer.

I compared the product with IBM DS8K. Due to a huge gap in price, and not having very high-level needs, I selected V7000.

This is highly reliable storage. Other than not having very high IOPS requirements, RAID5 would be good enough for application and database LUN. But before creating the RAID group/array, the implementer should have proper projections.

Ease of use and the GUI are the most valuable features of this product. It's the same platform all over across the same product type.

The benefit of this product is how easy it is to use always. All this storage infrastructure can be done underneath one IBM Storwize product and this is how it has impacted our organization. For example, if they get the IBM Storwize V7000 then they can put the other to be decommissioned storage right underneath and they can get their work done on that.

There is a need for a little bit more of a drill down in the GUI part. There is a lot that they actually did, which is already available in the GUI but still, there's a lot that can't be done. So, I would like to see more improvements to be brought about in the GUI.

I've been using IBM Storwize for about 10 years, it is pretty good.

It is very stable. I see a lot of code upgrades being done on the system. Probably twice or three times in a year, they get new upgrades and code upgrades. That's pretty stable.

Scalability is neat as well. It can grow massively. We usually deal with SMB environments and it's pretty good for that environment.

Technical support has been good as well. Other than, maybe a few five or six different incidents in the past, they've been pretty impressive.

The setup was pretty straightforward.

For us, it's all about the commodity while selecting a vendor. In addition, the other important factors are their support level, infrastructure, how good they are, and what is their roadmap for keeping the product around.

Give it a try and look at the demos. You will like it and you will want to get it.

It's pretty good; I've been happy with it. I've worked with other infrastructures as well such as HPE, Dell, Logic and Nutanix but I like IBM Storwize.

The most valuable features of all the products are the high performance and micro latency.

I'm a Solutions Architect, so I don't have any from my company, but I do some projects for some clients where the unique performance and micro latency of the flash provides real- time information that is used to make strategic decisions.

Because the product is already mature, it doesn't need any improvement.

From about two years when IBM first bought FlashSystem. I knew some things about it when it was Texas Memory System,

I didn't have issues with models 900 and v9000, but on previous versions, like the 720, I had some questions.

It is stable, because it's use an ASIC in it's development. Therefore, that does the job and it doesn't have software at its core.

It has great scalability.

It's very good because IBM always make sure they have good customer service.

Not so good in my country because they only have a few people with great knowledge about FlashSystem.

I've never used another solution.

The initial setup was very simple, because IBM have a default interface for all their storage systems.

I did the implementation in-house.

It's a little expensive, so it's you need to have a good architect involved to explain it and make sure the project goes well.

Have good knowledge about the clients business.

The good thing is that it is very easy to use and anybody can allocate Launch to the systems. The GUI is very easy and performance is also good.

It is easy to deploy. We use this product for a variety of the applications and databases. This is one of the best features I think.

Replication features need improvement. Currently, they are there in the product, but I'm not sure as to how it works exactly.

They are other IBM products that are better than this such as IBM XIV and IBM disk storage (the old one); they have better performance.

It is stable.

We can add more disks or JBODs into it. So, it is scalable and easy to scale.

Technical support is good.

The setup was easy.

You can use this product for your applications, databases or for whatever other solutions that you have.

Cost and performance are the two things that we consider while selecting a vendor.

The V9000 incorporates both the Spectrum virtualization layer as well as flash technology. It does it in such a unique manner that it provides super fast response times. There's low latency for the customers. It's very simple and easy. It uses the same interface as all the Storewize products do, so it's a very short ramp-up time for customers.

Speed. I mean it's flash. It's speed. The benefit is to reduce the amount of workload and transaction time. When customers have put data on the V9000, their response times go down and they can do more work within a shorter span of time.

They've already got one. The clustering host came in 7/8 code, so that's coming in. I would like to see deduplication come very soon. That would be really good to have deduplication built in, not only with compression, but also have deduplication with it.

The stability is awesome. It's based off a mature product line, Spectrum Virtualize. It's a long standing product. It's been around since 1999, so that core technology is there.

The flash system has grown from the old TMS days. It's a well-known and proven technology, so they've combined the two well-known and well-proven technologies to form this solution. It's just very solid.

Scalability is also good because you can add an additional FS900 behind it or you can stack in other V9000s and cluster them together. You can either go deeper or wider with your solution set. It really just depends on how much performance or workload insulation you need, whether you go wide or you go deep.

I haven't used technical support and none of my customers have had to call technical support on a V9000 yet. That kind of speaks to the product itself. It is a relatively new product, but the field time is still good. The resiliency is there.

Our customer was a legacy Storewize customer. We knew that when they were announcing their combination of Spectrum Virtualize and flash that it would be a winning combination. You can't go wrong with that kind of combination.

Our company decided that we needed to train up fast and get on top of it quick. Because of that, we were able to turn out some of the first in the Eastern area.

It can be complex if you don't follow the guide. Follow the instructions that IBM sets forth in the Redbooks and make life simple.

The implementation was very easy. It's almost a "set it and forget it" kind of product.

Read the Redbook.

The most important thing when selecting a vendor for me is how well the vendor works with me. It's a partnership, not just a sales, “here's a product” kind of thing. If you partner with us, you really get in, dive deep with us, and work through the solutions if needed. That's what makes a good vendor.