IBM FlashSystem Reviews

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. 

We have been using this solution for four years.

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.

Our primary use case of this solution is deduplication.

The feature I find most valuable is the deduplication because the nature of the data that we are using in our current environment has a lot of replicated data. You tend to create a copy of the same system multiple times for different reasons. So if you use a flash system that is deduplication-enabled, you end up using less capacity. 

I would like to see an improvement in the handling of large amounts of rights. An automatic flash system that doesn't do compression or deduplication will flush through the rights directly from the host to the flash modules. It doesn't keep them in the cache. For compression and deduplication systems, they have to do compression, deduplication and the memory and cache for the controller. So they have to keep the data there otherwise you will find yourself stuck with performance issues.

I've been using the solution for four years now.

The solution is currently hosting our core banking system and we haven't faced any stability issues, so it is very stable.

I have only four boxes now, so it's not the best scalability you can get, but it is still acceptable. Since we are hosting our core banking on it, we have about 20,000 employees working on it.

I will rate their technical support an eight out of ten. If you send them a question, it takes them ten days to come back to you with an answer. But besides this, we've had no other issues. 

We use EMC devices and IBM FlashSystem concurrently, but we have a different evaluation for these products. They are not the same because our critical applications are hosted on IBM FlashSystem. The less critical applications are hosted on VMAX.

The setup of the IBM devices is really straightforward. The actual deployment for the IBM FlashSystem took about seven hours. One of our partners was responsible for this, and we are very satisfied with his performance.

My advice to others would be to go for the big one, the A9000. It is a little bit more expensive but it offers a better total cost of ownership.

In the next version, I would like to see external virtualization. We are currently using LVC for external virtualization, and then we are using the boxes under LVC. If IBM embeds the LVC feature inside the box, I will only need to use the box and then virtualize the smaller boxes behind it. It will simplify my issues.

I rate this solution a nine 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. 

I've been using the solution for almost three years.

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.

The product is used as a central storage system. All live and test environment data, except for periodic data backups and centralized log management system data, is stored on the IBM Flash system.

As a result of the accelerated read and write operations from disks, productivity across the enterprise has increased in daily work.

Ability to compress the data at the NVMe disks is valuable as it is off-loading the process from the storage controller units. Hyperswap feature is valuable as it is increasing the availability without an intervention in the server operating system.

Deduplication feature is not mature and it is significantly increasing the latency. Additionally, the product has limitations in the software features and granularity. For example, data reduction feature cannot be aligned at the logical unit (LUN) level. It is aligned at the pool level. However, I expect to create some LUNs with deduplication and HW compression while some other LUNs with HW compression only. The other limitation is available at the remote copy feature. You can not create one-to-many scenarious for the LUNs which is created as the Hyperswap LUN.

I've been using the solution for three months.

The product has been stable for the last three months.

It is scalable enough.

We recently contacted the technical support and received prompt response. IBM Company has a strong customer service and support organization in my country.

This is the first time we are using a Flash System. In the past, we were using traditional hard disk drive (SAS and SATA) storage systems. We needed to increase the capacity and didn't want to invest in an old technology and slower systems.

The initial setup was really straightforward. It was not complex. Initial setup, data migration from the old products and the remote copy synchronization between Primary DC and DRC was completed in one month period.

We worked together with a local partner of IBM for the setup of the product. They showed satisfactory performance. Data migration was achieved by our own team.

We didn't buy the product for any specific purpose like increasing the number of such transactions for completing more deal in a day. Therefore, I am not sure how can I say the ROI is but it was pretty big investment for us.

Licensing is very straight forward for IBM Flash System and the warranty includes highest level of support conditions. The initial setup was very easy and smooth. The cost was higher than some other competitors.

We chose this solution among 6 solutions from different vendors. Local support organization, performance test results, cost and the technology of the product were the key parameters in the comparison.

Almost all vendors are offering data reduction functionalities (deduplication, compression, thin provisioning etc.) in their newest products. Reduction techniques are offering up to 10 times reduction in data but this ratio is not more than 2 or 3 in real life for mixed type of data. Therefore, customers should test the products with their real and different type of data to measure the reduction rates properly.

Otherwise, vendors may offer smaller sizes in their proposal and there might be conflict in between two parties after setup of the product in the live environment.

In a bank.

- Migration efforts - Site recovery using SRM - Highly scalable while backend storage can be of many vendors - Ideal solution if you have a mixed intel/power infrastructure Ease of use

• Migration effort
• Site recovery plan.

- CLI though intuitive, no other API available - Lacks scheduling or a cron - Has no built in short term performance graphs - IBM TPC overexceeds the montoring needs, had to fall back on Stor2RRd - Support response times are bad -

Node conditions in specific workload conditions might trigger a node reset.

- Multivendor support for backend storage - Clustering and adding in another IO--group - supports many shelves, large disks, several clusters

- Bad response times

IBM SVC -> HP 3PAR -> Storwize v7000f

- Easy and straighforward

- selfserviced

Biggest return is the easy migration/upgrade path as well as the scalability options - IBM added in compression and deduplication in its portfolio, as well as Garbage collection and space reclamation.

- setup cost is cheap as you can do it yourself - IBM SVC licensing on non IBM back-end storage used to cost a lot in terms of licenses per shelf or even per TB. The equipment on itself is relatively cheap. Watch out for license costs !

- HPE 3PAR StoreServe - EMC Unity

Storage virtualization. Two Storwize V7000 systems in a cluster configuration serve about 500 servers (physical and virtual).

• Storage virtualization simplifies space management. 
• Thin provisioning saves space.
• Copy services simplify environment replication.
  

Virtualization, because it abstracts hardware and allows to use other storages (old DS series) as unique storage spaces.

The cluster should be improved because non-disruptive failover was supported only on a few operating systems.

Three to five years.

We usually use Storwize for SMB customers, when they need small but reliable storage and fast response times. The performance is great.

The virtualization feature shortens the time to convince customers, to sell the solution, and to implement it.

From the moment we first see a customer and tell him that we are capable of doing this, until we do it, is a relatively short time. It's not going to be a long-term project, one that is going to take time for migration.

The user interface is very mature and it's becoming more mature all the time. They made it very easy for the user, very friendly to work with.

They have a virtualization feature and, even if you do not want to buy that feature, you can have it as a trial for two to three months. If you have another brand of storage from another company, you can use this tool to transfer all your data from the old system to the new Storwize system, which really shortens the migration time. This feature makes it much easier for us, as a business partner, to convince the customer that it can be done in a very short time, without any concerns about losing data or something breaking. That's one of the main features, and it works.

It helps me a lot when talking with potential customers who are stuck with all this data and, when they think of moving on to new systems, the first thing that bothers them is how to migrate all this information to a new system.

The other stuff that everybody sells today like tiering, which IBM calls Easy Tier, and FlashCopy, they have been around for years with the other vendors as well.

IBM gets a lot of input from the field, from system engineers, regarding what needs to be done and I believe they have a roadmap to try to constantly make the user interface more mature, as well as the options and tools. I trust they are doing good job on this.

I have looked at a few pages of a report I download and I saw a graph there regarding software-defined vendors. IBM is not in a good position on this graph. I know that they are working very hard on this, to make it much better and to get to a level where it's not only hardware but also software to provide a complete solution.

More than five years.

It's very stable as a single system or you can have it as a cluster for redundancy. We haven't had any issues, as far as I know, of it crashing or something that might make you suspicious about the reliability of the system. It is really reliable. The system engineers we work with have no doubt regarding any stability issues.

The scalability is fine, but it also depends on the type of customer. If they are a lower-level SMB and we can find out what their growth would be over the next year to two years, the availability of different models from Storwize makes us comfortable in telling customers that they can expand, without any doubt, for another three to four years. They don't need to worry about having to buy a new system in two years. Just upgrade and expand, that's all.

We have our own engineers trained by IBM and they are certified. I don't really recall many real issues. As I think back, there has been nothing critical where we had to ask IBM to contact their own labs to find a solution. Day-to-day, we have almost no need for IBM to show up for any problem or technical issues.

We are not in a good position to answer this question because we have worked with IBM for all these years. But I believe the way it came about was that we had a situation where we moved a customer from the competition to IBM Storwize. When we looked at the space it took, the performance, the pricing, the ease of working with it, and the migration - especially the migration, because when you want to move somebody from a different vendor to Storwize, people know it's hard work - it was easily done by Storwize and the software that comes with it.

As a business partner, when selecting a vendor the important criteria are the terms and conditions under which you can work with your supplier. In addition, it's the level of availability of the vendor when you need them, that they will respond immediately and are with you in the problem, hand-in-hand, to go solve the issues. One of the main issues is that you don't feel alone in the field, you have somebody with you. That is very important. If there is a problem, the customer also needs to be confident in who we are. We have a name and we are a business partner, but who is backing us up? When you go with a company like IBM, with all its experience, and with your own experience over all these years, that's a huge advantage.

I'm not involved in installation but, as far as I know, it's very straightforward, it's very easy. The main issue is that if you spend enough time on design, to find out what the customer really wants, that makes the implementation easier. That's where the emphasis should be. But as far as the system itself, the installation and putting it up, it takes no time. As far as I know, it's so easy.

The pricing has been very competitive for the last few years. IBM got to the point where they changed the pricing model and we feel very comfortable with the pricing. It's very competitive.

Over the last two years, IBM has been coming up with all kinds of interesting promos, especially for the SMB systems. That makes it very competitive price-wise and in terms of performance to help convince customers. It benefits both the customer and us.

We also do sell HPE if we have to, but IBM is usuall the first choice because of the pricing and performance.HPE has tried to work with us a lot and we tried to work something out with them, but each time we went back to Storwize, as it fits our needs and it's much easier to work with.

There really aren't any others really on our list. The Infinidat we have in our data center is for our own usage and our own services that we have in the cloud system. It's not something that we go out and install.

IBM is really open and available to those who want to find out what kinds of solutions will fit their needs. More than that, if it becomes more serious, with potential, IBM can provide you almost everything you need to see in its labs, to show you that the numbers they talk about are not only on paper but in real life. They are real and they can get to these performance levels.

IBM does a lot of customer setups in their labs and they invite the potential customers in and show them. But it's not for everyone. When we have a real potential customer and they demand it, that's what we do for them.

There are no 10s in the market right now. Everybody is evolving. As far as where we see storage going, it's not only hardware, it's also software-defined, and everybody is trying to reach a higher and very comprehensive level. And that takes time. It's not IBM, they need others to get to that higher level so we can have a comprehensive solution. It's not because IBM is an eight out of 10 and somebody is a nine or 10. It depends on the solution and application. In some cases, they would rate a 10, in others you might only give them seven.

I use it for virtualization and databases.

It is simple but stable storage. I use the Snapshot feature.

One to three years.

It is very stable.

Excellent.

I have never used technical support for this solution. I haven't needed support.

I did the initial setup based on the documentation it came with. It was very simple.

I looked at Dell and HPE solutions. I probably wouldn't buy a 3PAR but it does have more features than Storewize.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are price, stability, support, and scalability.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. It is a good storage solution, but there many other options out there with more resources.