IBM Spectrum Virtualize Reviews

I manage the storage environment. In most of the storage environment, we use IBM products: Spectrum Virtualize, Spectrum Control, Spectrum Scale, and StorWize and SVC products with FlashSystem behind it.

It has the ability to seamlessly move hardware in and out as we refresh technology. It provides transparency, because of its advanced copy features. 

Our disaster recovery has also improved drastically because I am able to use a lot of the Spectrum Virtualize features to create multiple copies that we use to test and do development. Our disaster recovery plan tests are always successful, which is good. I have had zero downtime in the last three years.

The SVC gives excellent performance with tiered storage behind it, and the Spectrum Control suite. The newest versions that I have now are very useful in terms of managing, monitoring, and alerting. The full suite handles everything I need. We have had a lot of success through the years with Virtualize, which was originally just SVC, and we use it heavily. My environments are extremely large and busy, and it does the job without any problems. So, we are very happy with it.

It has been very stable. I am pushing a very heavy workload, a couple million I/Os at peak times. I have very heavy throughput with a lot databases: a lot Oracle, a lot of VMware and virtualization, and a lot of midrange virtualization. So, it is handling every platform.

I could scale out really easy with the virtualized product in terms of how I do the tiering behind it. 

We will never probably have everything in the cloud at this point, not until technology can catch up on the from a telecommunications perspective. We have a hybrid type of environment. Right now, we have an on-prem cloud that manages our VMware environment, so the orchestration is centered around that. It's a VMware product, but we anticipate seeing cloud handle a lot of our needs from a file share perspective and collaboration. There are some Microsoft initiatives going on at the moment, and we use cloud for that. 

We are waiting to see where we might be able to fit in with some cloud alternatives, e.g., backup archiving. We are looking at a IBM's cloud products which handle the archiving side of things. 

We are not looking at platform as a service and infrastructure right now. We just have too much load and heavy workload that we just could not get the performance that we would want there yet. 

Technical support has been excellent for all products: SVC, Storwize, DS8000, and FlashSystem. Every one of the different hardware products that I have, I have always had good support. They are very reliable. Therefore, I have been happy with the support.

I set up, bought, designed, purchased, and implemented all of the storage myself.

There were some complex technologies. I learned to go take classes and educate myself, as it is always straightforward when you read the red books. If you follow the best practices and do all the things IBM told you to do, it is always easy. If you do not, you can get in trouble. So, I found it to be very straightforward.

EMC originally was on my list when we were refreshing again six years ago. I decided to introduce EMC back into the fold to create competition. The reason IBM Storage won out over EMC and Hitachi was just performance. It scaled and performed better in our tests and PoCs. There was not enough of a business reason for me to completely change vendors. 

We use Commvault and also have some NetBackup in our environment for our backup software. We are moving primarily to Commvault right now from NetBackup.

It provides a control plane for the data plane. With Spectrum Virtualize, you can extract the physical storage, then hide it and give it flexibility.

Most of my implementations have been on-premise. We could stand up a software instance someplace else and connect to it. However, most people that I work with get it in an appliance format. They use it to migrate off of existing storage. When lease expiration of something is occurring, they will use it to save value and migrate everything. Then, I will see them in a traditional Fibre Channel, a SAN connected to server architecture, or both in virtualized servers as well as standalone.

I do not personally manage any instances, but I have several dozen customers that I have deployed this solution for, so it is up and running in their production.

It lowers cost. It does so by getting more efficient use out of the technology behind it. 

It also simplifies access. You set it and forget it for a lot of things.

• Ease of use
• Scalability 
• The product comes in hardware, software, and appliance models, so I have a lot of choice on how we deploy it and its interoperability.

Tighter integration with cloud storage might be useful as a target for a variety of use cases. 

Stability is very good. I have been working with the product for probably 15 years. I have put it in production during critical workloads without a problem.

The scalability is very good. It can handle anywhere from very small to large enterprise class.

It can handle our customers' future growth. The hardware behind it may get more commoditized, but the capabilities of Spectrum Virtualize remains the same. It still provides value.

Technical support is very good. Most of the support personnel that I have talked to were very knowledgeable, which has always been good.

Originally, it was probably complex. Now, it is straightforward. It is pretty easy to deploy, and with a basic understanding, it comes together easily.

Our customers usually evaluate Dell EMC and Hitachi, but also some of the other newer flash environments, like Compellent. 

I would recommend Spectrum Virtualize. Across the industry, nobody matches it.

Do your homework and architect the solution upfront. The technology will stand by itself if you have done it right.

Customers' main criteria when selecting a solution: Most of my customers buy it in the appliance format, whether it is a Storwize product or something else. They are competitively shopping products, so cost is important along with scalability and usability. They typically start to believe once they see the interfaces, and they like the usability side of it. A lot of my customers have been dissatisfied with other vendors, so this is a rallying point for them. I do not have anybody who has been sorry.

We have a lot of different customers, such as banks and retail customers. In banks, it is mainly used for open environment testing. We have some retail customers, and they use it mostly for their test environments. Retail customers also use the DS8000 for production, because it is a more robust platform.

It is performing well in most cases. The disk reliability is not that good, not as good as with some of these products.

Most of our customers run their solutions via on-premise instances.

The versatility is the main benefit. Since it virtualizes everything, they use it for so many different things. 

It is also good for them when we do upgrades, etc. When we add storage behind it, the product is also good for the customers because their customers do not notice that anything is happening due to the virtualization.

Its versatility, as it has a lot of advanced functions for a reasonable price.

We would like the right support and the ability to add disks concurrently to arrays. There are big arrays now, and if a customer wants add more disks to it, you have to have another array. Adding disks to existing arrays is one of the most demanded things from our customers.

The SVC port (virtualized port) is very stable, but the Storwize port is not so stable.

It is very scalable.

In the past, the technical support has been very good. However, lately, it has not been so good as they are moving the support to Bulgaria. We are really unhappy about this.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I would recommend IBM Spectrum Virtualize.

Mainly, our customers are IBM friendly and have mostly IBM equipment.

Customers' most important criteria when selecting a vendor: cost.

The main reason for our utilizing the product: 

1. The abstraction flair and the abstraction layer. We had a mixture of different storage arrays, and the wonderful thing about SVC is is that it normalizes all it into a single driver. A single view that all hosts see simultaneously. 
2. The mobility that it gives us to move around to different performing storage arrays, depending on their load. 
3. The ease of the mobility, the flash copy product, and the copy services.

ADT acquires companies (and things), so we end up with odd hardware. We bring it behind the SVC and it allows us to migrate stuff off of it seamlessly. SVC can also cover up a host of defects of the underlying storage.

Dell Compellent, which maybe was good at one time, but is no longer ready for prime time, SVC made the Compellent look good. The other thing, because services are licensed at the SVC level, it does not matter what the underlying capabilities of the other storage is. 

The abstraction. Hands down, it is the top reason for having it. 

NBME support and support for a higher Fibre Channel lengths could be improved, but those are already on the roadmap.

Stability is rock solid. We have never had an outage.

We have gone through code updates, UPS battery replacements, and node failures. Nobody ever notices anything.

We have not hit any limits. At one time, we had 8 POWER Frames, almost 400 alt parls, LTO tape in zones, a bunch of Windows, and ESX host servers. So, it is more than adequate for our purposes.

Technical support is effective and helpful.

We were having some bottleneck issues with our DS8800, and it turned out that they had changed best practices on us. So, we involved technical support on the best way to migrate from intermingling hosts and storage to display them out into two separate aisle port groups.

We will do the initial setup on any storage array, but all the management is on the SVC. Therefore we get by with a much smaller staff, but not by design. It allows us to continue to do our jobs effectively. 

I personally am a scripter, I build my own tools. So, I have automated huge amounts of my job, which allows me to leverage the SVC and do the job of three people.

When we brought SVC into the environment, I could see what would be daunting for some people. However, it was not for me. I can script, so I was able to automate much of the process and copying everything back over. 

Anyone who is not very comfortable with command line and the ability to automate their own stuff should probably engage professional services to help them do the transition, at least the initial transition.

Do a proof of concept, if you are not comfortable jumping in, but do it. Look at it.

I love the SVC. I would recommend it.

Main criteria when selecting a vendor: extraction. It was to reduce the complexity of the drivers that we had to deal with. Because at the time we brought it in, we had SSA, DS8100s, Compellent, and a couple of weird little EMC boxes that someone had brought in on us. Therefore, they wanted the ability to move stuff around at will, and SVC was the perfect solution for this.

We use it to virtualize some different storage units. It can virtualize and provide some good migration and disaster recovery options.

Our infrastructure is on-premise. We have two POWER8 systems. For the storage, we have FlashSystem 900s, FlashSystem 820s, and Flash V7000s behind the SVCs.

We can failover easily, because a lot of our data is replicated from family to the second replication.

• The replication
• The flash copies
  

We would like the CPU cycle to save more on the licensing costs for us. Also, anything which improves performance and the ability of our systems would be a nice.

It is pretty stable. We have not had that much downtime. 

It is pretty scalable, as far as the storage which can be added using any additional storage units. We can get two individual storage units or we can add trays to the V7000s, since migrating from one storage unit to another is pretty easy. 

We do use them when there are issues, when we do upgrade, migrate, and work with business partners. We are happy with the support that IBM provides us.

On some of the POWER8 systems, I was involved with the migration.

We worked with business partners, and more recently, with IBM Labs for migration. We have been happy with them. 

In general, the migration is complicated. Though, it is case-by-case.

We did not evaluate any other competitors.

I would recommend this solution.

Main criteria when selecting a vendor: Upgrading our systems and migrating to newer storage products, as we are always on a time crunch.

Primarily, our customers use it to manage a bunch of different storage devices. It works really well, and it is a great platform to migrate data. I am currently helping a customer to migrate off of an HPE storage array to Pure Storage, and we are using SVC as the platform to move that data.

Our customers are mostly enterprise in size.

It is a single pane of glass management interface, so once the storage is allocated to SVC, they only have one place to go to manage it for everything. Then, my Power customers using Power VC can allocate storage themselves from Power VC, because it has integrated with SVC, so AIX admins do not have to know anything about storage. It is very powerful.

1. The virtualization layer
2. Easy tier
3. The ability to have a feature-rich software set which extends the capabilities of the back-end storage arrays.

Occasionally, there are issues with a node or something, but because it is a clustered system, it is stable. Overall, it does not go down. I do not know if IBM has ever had a system which has ever caused any loss of data. Therefore, I am very confident in recommending it to my customers.

It is fantastic. It scales great.

Technical support is mostly good. Most of the time, especially at the Level 2 support and above, it is really good. The guys in Austin are fantastic, plus ATS, Lab Services, and the people from Hursley put out stuff which allows us to better understand the product and support it. That has been great. 

For Level 1 support, I have been trying to decide if it is AIX Level 1 support that I have the problem with or SVC. I probably deal more with Level 1 support for AIX than I do with SVC. Though, nothing really stands out for the support problems from SVC.

Nine times out of 10, customers are looking to invest in a new solution because their previous/existing solution is at the end of life of its existing storage.

The initial setup is totally straightforward. With Storwize products and SVC, it is super simple.

We have struggled with Pure Storage, but people are understanding that much of Pure has been consumer grade SSDs. Therefore, when the customer is really understands what they are getting, they realize that IBM presents the same sort of value as existing vendors.

The typical three competitors that I hear about nowadays:

1. EMC has always been a strong one, but they have faded a little bit.
2. Pure has come on strong.
3. Hitachi seems to have gained some traction recently. 

Customers chose Spectrum Virtualize because of the features that SVC has and its maturity. The product has been around for so long, plus I get involved with customers that select SVC. They can buy a cheap storage system and not invest as heavily in the software layer. However, from the SVC level, they get the whole storage virtualization and whatever they feel is the top tier storage behind the SVC realizing the best of both worlds.

I love Spectrum Virtualize. It is my favorite. I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

Customers' most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Price
• Performance
• Stability
• Supportability.

The simplicity of the product makes IBM Spectrum Virtualize a pleasure to use. With numerous islands of storage arrays, this allowed the company to effectively "pool" all the numerous storage arrays and encouraged a tiered storage approach. The speed at which snapshots can be created are impressive with clones copies taking longer due to the nature of a clone (VM) vs snapshot (copy of VM disk file). Google it. With all flash becoming the new standard, the IBM Spectrum Virtualize nodes boast an array (pardon the pun) of flash technology providing the performance where and when it is needed.

Where does one begin? Although the GUI from the XIV was used (in my view), IBM has polished and refined the GUI providing a pleasant and easy to navigate GUI experience. The IBM Spectrum Virtualize has gone from strength to strength but at the same time setting the bar for what's possible in the storage virtualization market. IBM have just recently released the new SV1 nodes which boasts integrated flash and processor power, thus providing far better response times overall.

Cheaper pricing and GUI should be developed in HTML5 as opposed to Java.

No issues at all.

IBM Spectrum Virtualize loves scalability.

Customer Service:

IBM service is good with no language challenges when speaking to call center agents from different countries and cultures.

Technical Support:

On a scale of one to five (one: terrible to five: excellent): four.

No previous competing products. The challenge was to consolidate islands of storage arrays.

The most challenging parts of the implementation were the initial cabling configuration. With many storage arrays needing cabling and multiple paths needing to be cabled using fibre optic LC cables, zoning also proved to add significant effort but this is to be expected and is a once-off exercise. Although regular commissioning/decommissioning of server/backup infrastructure is part of storage administration duties, the initial setup was far more intensive as an entire storage infrastructure needed to be redesigned. Once the hardware infrastructure was in place and the software configured to best practice (IBM implemented in order to ensure best practice was adhered to).

Combination of onsite and vendor team.

Vendor team was professional and well-skilled.

Not applicable.

Liaise with both the vendor and their partners. You'd be amazed at how much you can score.

No. Competitor products just did not offer the features we required.

HTML5, please.

My view of how the product has aided my customers varies. The replication functions have assisted in the relocation of whole data centres from one site to another, the snapshotting is of value in providing several versioned recovery points for some other customers. The virtualisation of the back end storage gives performance improvements over the direct attachment of the back end storage, as storage pools spanning a large number of drives can be configured, along with the caching algorithms. The migration capability across back end storage appliances has been of particular importance to some of my customers.

There are several good features, many of which have similarities to that of competitive offerings from other vendors (replication, snapshot). Compression is quite useful, but for me the most useful has been the virtualisation of back-end SAN disk systems, from almost any vendor. This enables easy upgrading and updating of storage, across vendors, by moving the storage pools between the back end disk systems. Migration from configurations where servers have storage provisioned from older SAN disk systems to newer storage systems is almost seamless using image mode migration techniques, with only a short outage of the servers. The hybrid storage pools, with SSD and the hard-disk drives, together with the Easy Tier feature, give high IOPs performance for most loads, without the customer needing to purchase all flash storage solutions.

Adding features for data deduplication is one area of improvement.

I have encountered stability issues in situations when the customer-provided AC power has defects. A newer version of the firmware resulted in storage nodes not updating or starting.

No issues with scalability encountered.

Currently, support is generally good, as there is an IBM support web interface to lodge calls. Once the call has been initiated, responsiveness depends on the support contract conditions. The technical expertise, once reaching level 2 or higher, is good.

Going back to the SVC edition of Spectrum Virtualize, I do not recall any comparable alternative storage virtualisation solution.

Like any storage implementation, the details of the complete setup of this solution requires a good understanding of the customer requirements. The base setup of the product itself has varied over time, but has always been fairly straightforward.

Generally the bundled licensing is more cost effective and gives flexibility to the solution. Linking into the Spectrum Suite can also be advantageous, but depends on the scale of the enterprise.

Recently with the many storage virtualisation solutions now available, consideration of other products depends on the size of the customer and their requirements, and what vendor/technology provider may already exist in their organisation.

Spectrum Virtualize has a long history, with the original SAN Volume Controllers (SVC) using early versions of the software. The software on these appliances has had several name changes over the years. I have worked on and been involved with pre-sales, design and implementation on the early SVCs from 2005, and more recently the Storwize implementation, V7000s, 5000s and 3700s. So, product 2145-xxx, 2076, 2077, 2072 and so on. These are all IBM appliances, with their Spectrum Virtualize software running on them.

Obtain a well-qualified technical specialist/architect to review the design and setup if many features such as replication, snapshotting and compression are part of the solution.