IBM Spectrum Virtualize Reviews

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.

One of the main features of Spectrum Virtualize is it virtualizes the servers from the storage. We have a very large infrastructure. A major advantage is when you get the aged storage arrays and you have to replace all of those. Last summer, we replaced four petabytes of aged storage arrays. They were old and past end-of-life. But we did that seamlessly, without affecting any of the server applications. There were no system admin times; nothing required at all. It was really quite good for our client. That was perfect for them.

Our team operates four 8-Node IBM Spectrum Virtualize (SVC) clusters (32nodes total), two clusters at one site and two at a sister site with replication between the two sites.

These four clusters have a number of storage arrays behind them to yield a total storage capacity across the four cluster of approximately ~6 petabytes of Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze Data Classes. The Storage Cloud uses IBM's EasyTier feature to create different performing storage classes and uses Thin Provisioning to lower our clients requested 8 petabytes of capacity to a much less costly 5 petabytes of consumed capacity. The remaining ~1 petabyte is elasticity which is built into the Cloud.

Our client does not have any classical maintenance windows where systems or storage can be taken down for upgrades, repairs, expansion, or replacement. Servers require 24x7x365 data access (actually 4 days are planned power outages for power testing - but no IT changes are permitted).

So when I say our storage services to our client were provided continuously - non-stop - for 12 months, it means that all customer servers had 100% uninterrupted, online SAN access to their data 24x7x365 (minus the power down). During that time, our team provided on-demand capacity provisioning of about 700TB of new client growth and expansion, updated all cluster softwares, decommissioned ~4 petabytes of aging storage arrays, installed ~5 petabytes of new replacement / expansion arrays, and repaired a couple failed components. It really shows the power, utility, versatility and availability of our Cloud Storage design.

The second feature that it is software-defined. Every year, we select a new release and we get new features. This gives us time to test them out. It's just very amenable to our type of delivery of services to the clients that use storage.

In addition to that, they've been able to add some really cool functions. It started out with the usual stuff, such as thin provisioning. Then they added features like compression. Now they're actually adding transparent cloud tiering, so they can put data up in the cloud, just by taking it off of the SVC and sending to the cloud. This is very, very good for us in being able to put together a roadmap for functions for our clients of what they can do with their data.

There are things that occur when you get to this size and capacity. We're very large, i.e., petabytes. When you get to that sheer volume of the numbers of things, it is too big for people to keep track of. So, it's okay if you have 50 volumes, and I can watch them. I can assign people to watch them. But when you have 5,000, it's not possible anymore. So you need capabilities within the products that would do what that person would've done watching the 50. So, they have this “cognitive IT” sort of thing going for them.

I don't think they've realized they can apply that cognitive concept to that. It is like, "Okay, I'm going to use software to watch all that." Now, they have some of that already with Easy Tier that automatically moves data around. It is perfect. Now I need that same concept extended into other areas.

The stability is very good. We just finished running non-stop for one year. It was perfect, with no down-time at all. Zero. 100% availability.

Scalability is perfect. We're at the top of their scale though. Right now, the largest cluster they use is eight. We have eight very high performance servers running the software. That is good, but we added a second cluster to do more, which has worked quite well. You sort of wonder, “Would it be better to have a 10 node, a 12 node, or a 16 node?”

We do use technical support. They do very good work. Because we're so big, they have a little bit of trouble tracking all the products and making sure we get connected with the reports, but, in general, they are very good.

We did a fairly extensive industry search about five years ago, when we were deploying this call initially. We were not using a different product. It was a new offering; Greenfield. We looked at all the major players in the industry and selected IBM.

When selecting a vendor, first the product has to meet future functionality. It needs to have some stability in the industry. It needs to have some past performance proof-points. Our client is somewhat risk averse, so they don't want to be first. That's very important.

I was involved with the initial setup. It was very straightforward. Delivery of all the services has been very methodical and well defined.

We looked at Hitachi, EMC, and NetApp. The major boys.

If you're going to implement this, we have a highly technically skilled team. We hired them and put them together for this purpose. So, if you're in a traditional environment without this, either hire a service like us to come in and help you get started and get “flying lessons”.

Once you're good and once your team is good, once your staff is up to speed, then they can take over if they want. This usually takes about a year. We offer a one year set of services. Afterwards, they can take over if they want to, or they can keep the service there. Once they're there, they'll never look back. It's one of those kinds of things and it's very good the way it works.

It's flexibility. It gives us the ability to move the data across multiple storage devices. That makes our lives as the implementers easy during data migration.

It makes data migration straightforward. And on the customer side, there is downtime, but it is very minimal.

I would like to see some features from the Spectrum Control, such as long term reporting. Right now, the reporting on the Storwize and Spectrum Virtualize is only for a few days. You really need another plug-in, like in Control, to get the historical performance data.

The only thing I really don't like about Spectrum Virtualize is the application area. But it has nothing to do with the product. Most application issues come from the link provided by the telecoms.

If they could make the application much easier, that would be great. But it's okay.

The stability is fine. I've been working with Spectrum Virtualize for two years. I saw them encounter problems and those problems are minimal. It's pretty much stable.

It is scalable, especially the VH8 and the SV1. You can locally attach storage to the SVC nodes. It's now more like Storwize. The scalability is head-on.

I have been working with technical support. Before moving to a business partner, I worked with IBM. There were good times and there were bad times. But pretty much, they delivered.

I have had this storage platform for 10 years. I saw the progress of IBM stepping away from conventional hardware storage and going to software. IBM did pretty good research and development on it.

When selecting hardware, I look for technical experience.

I was involved in the initial setup. Most of the time, I dealt with the planning. I start with the planning rack and stack configuration, teaching the customers and then do documentation. The implementation was easy.

I did not look at any alternatives.

I would recommend it. IBM is not the best in the disk storage industry, but they pull out some good tricks.

The product is very flexible, and it is very easy to add any additional product from the background; so we can use any multi-vendor backend storages and virtualize the product. It becomes a powerful virtualization engine for migrating data, for provisioning data and any type of data migration is easy.

As I have mentioned, the benefits of this solution are that it reduces time.

Basically, we can clear the storage for faster/medium/slower access. We can make three-tiers and migrate the data easily.

The IBM Easy Tier works on different pools of disks and flash. Going forward when everything is Flash storage and no more spinning disks, the Easy Tier is not required. After attending the IBM Tech U, IBM is focusing on all flash storage devices. This is good and hopefully IBM pricing will have an edge over the competition.

Stability is awesome; it's very stable.

The scalability is absolutely outstanding and we can scale as much as we want.

IBM technical support is awesome.

Basically, we had different islands of storage from different vendors. We wanted a product to integrate all of them together. So that is why we found, IBM Spectrum Virtualize, as the product.

They come to us every time when there is an initial setup, they help us with the process. The setup is very straightforward.

We have another EMC brand storage product also, but we are using both of them.

Of course, the product is the most important criteria for vendor selection.

This is an absolutely outstanding product and anyone can use it with ease. It can do everything.

The product helps us to manage our storage in a way that allows us to put different frames inside or out of our storage infrastructure and migrate.

The benefits are that it speeds up provisioning of the storage across different tiers and allows a small team to manage that function, for many petabytes of data.

I think they are doing a good job with the features that are there. I don't really have that much to add for the next release. I like what we see.

Stability has been outstanding. There are failures, but they are designed to have failures, and we have not had a single data loss incident, even throughout some pretty funky upgrades.

We are SVC customers and we would like to see the ability to add more nodes. After some sessions that we've had this morning, now we're understanding why this hasn't happened, but we still have hope that it will happen. We will be able to go from an 8-node cluster up to maybe a twelve or fourteen. It would make us really happy.

For this platform, the technical support has been great. We have had very few issues that haven't been resolved, in a timely fashion.

The expense for support and maintenance is a little bit on the heavy side.

I have been involved in the initial setup process. We have production in the DR clusters, some of the production clusters have been in place prior to my arrival, but we have done the same thing in DRs.

The setup was very straightforward. We also have a guy who we call as “our good luck charm”. He is our reseller who comes to help us out; when he is not there things don't go as good, but when he is there he doesn't do much besides bring us the food and gives us great advice. They provide good, reliable support and he is a great guy.

In regards to the vendor selection, it's a price versus reward scenario. We have to be very conscious of what we spend and we have to make sure that the company is spending their money well. So, we're able to buy the products that allow us to have uptime.

If you can afford it, get it. It's great.