IBM Spectrum Virtualize Reviews

The ability to virtualize multiple storage components is a valuable feature.

It gives flexibility to the customers to view the entire storage infrastructure, as a single entity.

Some of the benefits of this solution are that the customer need not go and manage multiple systems. They can only go and manage a single management view, for all these sorts of systems.

The product should have better management capabilities.

This product is very good in terms of the stability and scalability. The security features are also very good.

Basically, we evaluate the support looking into the performance. Technical support is good.

The setup was straightforward, not complex.

We looked at other solutions namely EMC and IBM.

When I am selecting a vendor I look at the support as well and not just the product. It's the complete ecosystem of the product and support that we evaluate, before selecting a vendor.

I shall definitely recommend it.

It is really a good product which can virtualize your whole data center. It is a road to a whole different software data center. It's a wonderful product for total cost of ownership, production, and providing ease of management.

It is all about the ease of management and better utilization of the storage capacity. It is about the dynamics of the storage. You can move one storage tier to another storage tier.

One very important feature is the analysis of the logs which should be there in the system. Other than that, I'm pretty satisfied with all the features in the system.

This product has been on the market for the last fifteen years. It's a wonderful product and the new releases from IBM are just great. New functionality is being added and it's a wonderful product.

It is immensely scalable. It allows me to start small. It can start at a very small footprint and then it can scale up.

We have used tech support and it is fine. Although it could have been better

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was a wizard driven, intuitive setup.

One other vendor we considered was EMC, but this particular product really has some cool features as compared to the competitor's products.

Close your eyes and go for it.

Being able to move things around from one array to the other has been the biggest feature for us.

There's a little bit of performance benefit. The flexibility that we get from being able to have different vendors' storage arrays presented as one homogenous unit to our hosts has been the main benefit.

Currently, the newer features exceed our needs. What we really need is resiliency and stability in the features that are out there and do run.

We have been using the system for twelve years.

It's been pretty stable, but we've had some issues. I wouldn't say it's poor, but the resiliency has been less than what we expect from an enterprise class product.

It appears to us, over several decades, that quality control waxes and wanes. That's scary for us, because as a new system comes out and we install it, we really expect it to be an enterprise class product and not to have problems. We expect it all to be bullet-proof, and it hasn't been in our experience.

Scalability is limited, but it meets our needs.

Generally, technical support is good.

It's been a long time now, about twelve years. I forgot about previous solutions.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I'd tell them that it's a good product and they should implement it. They probably should not run the latest code and they should look very carefully at advanced features.

When selecting a vendor, honesty is one of the first things to consider, and then stability and resiliency of the products. Performance is nice, but the applications that I support need bullet-proof stuff behind it with no down time.

It enables us to virtualize the entire data center for the Internal Revenue Service. We have about seven or eight terabytes of data behind SVC right now. Before we took this over as a managed service, they had about 120 silo storage areas. Right now, everything is virtualized behind SVC.

It is easier for management with end of life erase. It now takes us less than two-three days to decommission the erase. It has given us an increase in the usage rate on the SVC. It has gone up from probably 30-40% on the silo erase to about 85%.

We have reduced a lot of power and cooling requirements in the data center. We have optimized as much as possible. Right now, it's running very smoothly.

I would like to see data obligation and some features like cluster grouping. I have seen that on the roadmap for the last two years, but it hasn't come out yet. They are still showing it on the roadmap, so I think that it's going to come out soon.

We've had some issues with the production rate behind SVC. We had problems with back-end storage areas having double disk failures. It took a while to recognize errors, due to some of the environmental settings within the data center. When the temperature increased, we started seeing more drive failures on the back-end. But over the last 18 months, we've had zero downtime across the board.

Scalability is very good.

Technical support is very good. We touch base with the IBM house development team in the UK once every quarter to review the roadmap. So it's very good.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We evaluated the Hitachi RV series. I think it was Z100 at that time, and IBM SVC. We tested three solutions and chose IBM SVC to virtualize the environment.

We were looking for stability, such as in the features search and the ease of manageability compared to other products. These products included EMC, Hitachi, and Red Hat.

It's easy to implement. Just become a partner with IBM and you will be successful.

• The ability to use different storage products in the back-end
• Having only one code base for mirroring and all other enterprise features

When you use different storage vendors, you may not get what you want. With this solution, you can put these solutions under Spectrum Visualize and use them, because they will look the same in IBM storage.

I would like to see data obligation which I think is already on the road map.

We have been using this product for eight years.

Stability on our side is very good.

Scalability is also good. It could be improved, but we will see if they will improve it.

Technical support is sometimes good and sometimes it is low.

Eight years ago, we had a different product that was not very well designed. It is no longer on the market. It was LSI Storage, but we switched.

We had a business partner doing the setup for us, but it is complex. This is a special product. It's not a standard storage product, so you have to know a lot about your environment.

We evaluated FalconStor and DataCore. This was based on installing software somewhere on the server. This was software for storage from a very early version in 2008/2009. We don't trust them, so that's why we chose an appliance level from IBM.

When looking at vendors, we look at their ability to perform and give good support.

Difficult question. You have to look at your environment and what you need to do there. I think Spectrum Visualize is a very good product to address a lot of problems.

It is easy to deploy and use. It's very calm. The GUI goes right across the entire platform.

I would like to see more information about the heat map. That would give us an easier view from an architect's standpoint in terms of:

• A better idea of where we have to put data
• What we have to build-in with virtualization
• The ability to grow it
• The ability to make it more scalable.

Stability has been good. Stability has been high, actually. We've had some minor issues, and IBM has been quick to fix those. I don't have any issues with the stability.

Scalability is good. And of course, it works across multiple, different technologies including flash and regular drives. Scalability is definitely good.

Technical support at IBM is actually not as great as it used to be. It seems like IBM has decreased the number of people who can support this environment. We find that locating someone who knows the product line, or more of that product line, is becoming limited.

I'm not the one who invested in this solution, but multiple clients have invested in it. There were business requirements from a technology standpoint, there was performance that they needed, and there were different degrees of availability that they needed.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy.

We deal with multiple vendors. We go from Cisco, to IBM, to EMC when we talk about clients. But I don't know how to answer this question from the perspective you are asking about. It is from a different point of view.

I'd recommend it, for sure. It offers supportability, reliability, and some scalability. The vendor is there as a partner.

It gives us a lot of flexibility and ease of management. We have all the tools in one place. We pretty much do all our storage using the Spectrum Virtualize. It makes it really easy for us to manage all our storage.

We have a lot of different tiers of storage. We have enterprise all the way down to applications that don't need that much performance. It gives us the flexibility to move things in between these. I think a lot of the benefit is just the ease of use of the tool itself.

We are pretty happy with the roadmap that we've seen with the stuff that is coming.

In more recent years, we've been very happy with stability. We went through a lot of bumps with the earlier releases of code.

We've also been very happy with the scalability.

We are not happy with the technical support.

In the last seven or eight years, I honestly think that IBM's technical support has gotten way worse. It's so hard to get hold of someone. There's no more live troubleshooting. In the old days, we used to have live troubleshooting. Now it is a matter of sending them logs and "we'll get back to you. Send us logs and we'll get back to you". It gets pretty frustrating, especially when you're supporting applications that are 24/7.

All they can do is say "send us logs and we'll get back to you". So we are not happy with the support at all.

This solution was actually chosen before I got there. I wasn't a part of the decision making. I was a part of the implementation, but not the decision making.

I was involved with the initial setup. It was pretty straightforward.

We've compared it to other platforms like EMC. This product is really intuitive. It is really easy to use. So from that point of view, it's really good.

I would say, definitely give this a look.

In the past, we've also looked at other solutions. So far, especially from the management point of view, being the administrator for the systems, it can't be beat. I think the tool itself is really intuitive. It's really easy and has a lot of features. Ease of management is the biggest thing. We've been pretty happy with the performance.

Probably the biggest hit, though, is the support.

The most valuable feature is the abstraction layer. Basically, it gives us a single pane of glass between our host and our back-end storage, regardless of what the back-end storage actually is.

Beyond that, I would also add the flexibility of the management itself.

It has significantly lowered management cost, overhead, and everything else. We now have better performance as well.

There is third site replication. Right now, we're limited in our ability to migrate data between clusters. Like I said, we had to scale wide rather than tall and continue to protect our data while we migrate. Additionally, if we wanted to set up a third site for additional DR, we don't really have a good option for that.

Overall, I would say that stability is very good.

There are some caveats with scalability, such as volume count. We are highly limited by volume count at this point in time. We have to grow wide rather than grow tall.

There are some caveats here, too. Sometimes it's been very, very good. Sometimes we have had sessions where we're beating our heads against the wall. It depends on the call. Part of it is has do with us getting better with the technology.

It would be really nice to be able to escalate faster. By the time I'm calling IBM, it's already become such an issue that their Level-1 and usually their Level-2 people can't help me.

We did not use any previous solutions that I am aware of, but this one has been lacking since we first brought it in. It's a wide matrix of considerations. Performance, price, support, availability, and scalability. It's a wide matrix.

The initial setup was a bit of a paradigm shift. Once we got past that, it was very straightforward.

We looked all over the place. But we found what we wanted with this solution.

Absolutely. Period. Do it.

I think probably one of the biggest benefits of this solution is that it is relatively easy to use and easy to understand. It's intuitive. The front interface is very intuitive. I can have any of my administrators know what to do with it with a very small learning curve. I know that it's going to be static across the board, whether I'm using the store wide systems, or if I'm using Spectrum.

Using SBC, a valuable feature is the mirroring, which is the virtualization of the disk between disparate places.

One of the things that we use it for, is that we can bring any storage underneath it. Not only will it recognize it and put it in the pool and add it to the storage, but it also allows me to mirror that storage across the campus, a mile and a half away.

Neither my applications, my servers, nor my hosts even know that the disk is actually split between the two places. It just sees it as the normal disk that it uses. If one side goes away, whether it is disaster recovery or if is normal every day operations, if we're restarting something or there's an issue, we have to do updates, or upgrades, and it doesn't even know it.

For improvement considerations, I would probably say multiple sites. Right now, I'm doing two, and I believe we can go to a larger scale than that. But I think that having to go into three or four sites, where I would have more of a grid-type of technology with them, would probably be a bigger benefit for me.

It has been very stable. I haven't had any concern as far as stability is concerned.

Regarding scalability, that's a good question. I haven't had to really scale it to any more than what we've done with it currently. Actually, I'm in that process right now and I probably will have that answer in maybe a day or so. I don't think there's really too much of an issue. We add the pools underneath the storage, and it seems to just accept what we give it and we move on.

The technical support has been good. We do use Avar as the value added reseller for the professional services. So if I have to go into that space, it's usually not through IBM. I would give them a rating of 4/5.

We were using something very similar previously. It was competitor unit that was a little bit more complex. It did some of the same things, but it was just a lot more complex in its usability and where we were going with our future storage requirements.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We evaluated all the big names: Hitachi, EMC, NetApp, and HPE.

I think we were looking at cost. We were also looking at the technical aspects of where we had requirements up front that we were looking for from every one of the vendors. We had a list of requirements. They were listed in their priority from highest priority, even to the very lowest. Some of them maybe weren't even requirements, but we added them in there. They had to meet at least the first top seven or eight. IBM seemed to meet those, and exceed them, so that was one of the reasons why we chose them.

It fills the use case quite well. I would recommend it.

The most valuable feature for is its ease of use.

I have nothing to suggest regarding improvements. It's fine.

Stability is pretty good.

Scalability is good.

Technical support is sometimes good and sometimes okay.

Give it a try.