IBM Spectrum Virtualize Reviews

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.

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.