IBM Spectrum Scale Reviews

We use it a lot for sharing file systems between several Red Hat and AIX servers. It is mostly for different lines of business. It works pretty well. We have been using it for almost a decade now.

It is actually one of the better products of IBM. We have seen applications come and go, but Spectrum Scale is one of those things where we have had more customers move into the product than other vendors' solutions.

It makes our file system sharing a lot easier, even across different continents. We have had file systems shared across different continents with no performance degradation. In this sense, it has helped us. 

The ease of use and the stability of the product. It has been pretty reliable throughout the years. As far as capacity is concerned, it can handle most heavy loads, unlike NFS or even NAS. In this particular case, it is seamless. That is the biggest thing.

Maybe it needs integration with HA.

Stability is one of the main reasons that we are using the product. So far, it has been a very reliable software.

We have had it across 15 to 20 Clients. Especially now that we are using it across Red Hat, the Clients do not even know that it is sitting on AIX servers. As far as scalability is concerned, it is only beginning to show its strength in the past few years. We are using it on Red Hat, but still using NSD servers as the main source of storage. 

As far as scalability, I would support this product more than anything that I have tried before, such as NFS or even HACMP. This product is more robust in my point of view.

We still use NAS and NFS (mainly NFS), which we used prior to Spectrum Scale.

We added Spectrum Scale because of its scalability. There are just large amounts of data, especially with Ab Initio, NFS would not cut it.

It is not that complex for me since I have been working with it for years. 

One thing that is new for me is the implementation across Red Hat Clients. This portion was not as straightforward as I would like it to be. Now that we have it documented, it is about 10 steps, though more steps than I would do if I were to mount it on AIX. They should probably simply the Red Hat implementation portion.

There is nothing else that even compares to Spectrum Scale. We have had customers who switched to AIX just because of it.

It is doing more than it is expected to do as far as file sharing.

We use it for distributed file systems.

We use it primarily in our SAP organization. It allows us to have a centralized location where we can put our files and distribute them among different applications.

We can have multiple systems within the same file system. The performance right now on the file system is better than NAS.

Overall, the stability is pretty good. We do have some issues where Spectrum Scale does not work as expected. We have seen our Spectrum Scale servers go down unexpectedly, but because we have a cluster, it does not take out the entire organization.

I do not think it is applicable.

Technical support has been very helpful. They provide us with pretty good solutions that we can implement moving forward.

We were not using anything before this solution.

It was implemented before my time at the company.

We also evaluated a NAS solution.

We are using it for our SAS work and data areas. It is performing very well for us.

We have data centers onsite and offsite (for whenever we do DR failover). Right now, we manage just one instance of it.

• Keeps the SAS people happy.
• Keeps SAS running.
• Allows us to share files across multiple environments: Unix and Windows.
• Managing the environments outside of the high availability cluster has been huge. This pulls one more factor out of the clusters that we do not have to manage.

It has less overhead. We do a lot of training on our SAS environment. 

We had JFS2 file systems, and we made things so fast that JFS2 could not keep up with it. It took us down to a crawl. Spectrum Scale reduced the overhead and allowed SAS to perform.

It does everything we need it to do. 

Though, making it a little easier to add bad file sets would help. There is a transition to how you add storage and how you add a file set, so making that a little smoother would probably be my recommendation.

It is incredibly stable. This is not the first place that I have used it. I have used it on a 16 node SAS cluster before. I never had any problems with it.

It is incredibly scalable. You can add more storage to it, add more file sets, and add it to more servers. It is a robust product.

The product should be able to expand with us.

We have not used technical support that much for Spectrum Scale. However, we did have one crash and they helped us quickly apply a patch.

We were previously using the JFS2. We switched because it was the recommended solution to our SAS problems, and it worked.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. You had to learn a little bit of new nomenclatures, and what this is called and what that is called. Otherwise, once we got it up and running, it needs very little care.

No other solutions were evaluated. Spectrum Scale fixed the problem and we were good with that.

I would definitely recommend Spectrum Scale.

It performs well. We use it for our data over multiple systems. At the same time, it is a shared file system. It works pretty well for the most part.

We have an on-premise infrastructure. It is basically shared disks. They run three of them through the network. So, we set up NSD disks on all the machines. All the nodes can write to them, and we can have as many nodes as we want to put into the environment. That part works well.

We have approximately 500 instances.

We need the CPU power to do all of our work. You can't do it on just one node. You need multiple nodes. That is what makes it beneficial. It provides more power. We have thousands of users. They need bandwidth to be able to do everything. If they do not have it, they can't run.

Its great servicing high availability. That is what it is used for.

The main issue that we have now is with the encryption. They want to use more metrics in encryption, which is not working very well. Thus, we need to decide whether we need to actually use an IBM solution. However, that decision is way above my level.

Most of the time, the stability is pretty good. Recently, we have been upgrading. This is probably the biggest challenge, getting everything upgraded, because it just takes time. We wish it was a faster solution to be able to do everything at once, but you have do each node individually. The more nodes, the longer it takes.

Scalability is pretty good. We have got a 32 node cluster. So, it runs pretty high. 

We do not feel as a company that the product can grow with us anymore, so we are not going to use it anymore. We are done. The decision was made. What we have, we will keep, but we are not going to put anything new in.

I usually do not deal with them. The Level 2 personnel talk with them. We have our contract with IBM, so we call them all the time for user problems. They usually are effective.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

The product is good. There are other products out there. You should look to see what you really need.

Main criteria for selecting a vendor: The bandwidth. It has the data available to do a lot of nodes at the same time. This product was available at the time.

We use the solution for storage purposes.

The solution's most valuable features are speed, integration with multiple platforms, and the ability to connect to virtualized storage resources.

The solution's pricing could be better.

We have been using the solution for about ten years.

I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten.

Our client has 12,000 solution users. I rate its scalability a ten out of ten.

I rate the solution's initial setup process a ten out of ten. It takes a month to complete.

The solution is costly but reliable.

I advise others to use the solution for backend storage features as its virtualization process is easy to manage.

I rate it a ten out of ten.