IBM Spectrum Virtualize Reviews

• 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.

It has been integrated into our production systems, thereby not having as much online storage. We're using the archiving functionality. When I say reliability, I mean that we are operating 24/7. The product enables us to retrieve our client data at any given point in time.

The most valuable feature is its reliability.

They are actually working on one bug we found, which was with flash restore. This was the user interface design for virtual environments. Supposedly, it was going to be corrected in 8.1, restoring it back to the original UID, but it wasn't done.

The stability is excellent.

At this point in time, scalability is excellent. It's very scalable.

I work in Miami, Florida. Our data center is elsewhere. We may have some connectivity issues every now and then, but overall, it's been excellent. I always make certain to have the right phone numbers for support.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but I'm involved with the new progression from old TSN to Spectrum 8.1.

We look for reliability of the product itself. It's an excellent product. I would not be penny wise and pound foolish, though.

I would honestly utilize as much IBM as I could. I'm an old system manager in multiple, prior jobs. I would always stick with IBM across the board, especially if you look at the high-end tape units. They will get around to the correct drivers and everything. It's much easier to use all IBM.

If you use someone else's server, whether it is an X86 or whatever, you get finger pointed if something doesn't exactly work right. This is especially the case with tape drives, and especially if you were using Jaguar, which was the old type. They came off mainframe. It was very high end, very costly. I would stick with using IBM servers, even IBM storage like XIV if you want to go with something less costly than a DS88.

Make it correct. Make it easy on yourself. Use HPE storage, disc storage, or Dell storage and you will get finger pointing. It always happens. No one's wrong. Even if you get IBM, sometimes they are also wrong.

We had all IBM and we did have an issue when we upgraded our tape libraries, i.e., we had the wrong firmware. That was with IBM. Imagine if we had someone else. It would be a long, drawn-out process.

You may have one or two issues at the same time, and one can mask another issue. Don't go cheap. Have a test system. Never, ever, put something straight into production. I don't care how many things they swear on, or whatever.

You never know because everyone's environment is different. That's the other thing. I don't care if it was AIX, and it's just moving into Linux, you still need to test it. Put it up for a few weeks, if not for a few months. Don't ever go cheap on a test system. If you can have it separate, have it separate from your other actual production servers. In some places, we actually had it in a different machine.

Have a different machine. Never combine. Keep it simple.

• Reducing our costs: We used to have all tier DS8 storage. Even though we had Spectrum Virtualize in front of almost all of that, we still had almost all DS8.
• We've been able to bring in multiple tiers, flash systems, and V7000s

• We can migrate that data, watch it with the tool, and know that the data is not on the right tier.

• We can migrate that data again, place it in the right tier, and reduce our overall cost.

The most valuable feature is probably data migration so we can bring in back-end systems and swap data out. Our end-users, and even our other system administrators, don't have any idea that we've moved storage around.

It's got full features, so we can compress volumes. We can do thin volumes and we can change them on the fly.

Nobody knows that we've migrated that data around. We can ship it off to our DR site. This is all under the hood of Spectrum Virtualize.

We don't have to worry about what type of block is underneath it at the time. It's all being done at that layer.

A feature that is already there, if I remember correctly, is encryption. I think it is coming out, or it is already there.

That is a key management piece. Right now, we're doing an encryption on the back-end flash systems on the V7000s. It's simple, with just a USB key into the controllers.

The integration would be an option that we would like, but I understand that's not how it's going to be implemented.

NPIV is also coming. I'm not exactly sure what benefit it will bring. Initially, that sounded like that was going to be kind of cool. Even though we can migrate data without our end users really knowing it, they do see a path failure, and NPIV would take care of that for us.

The feature that's kind of missing is getting us up to the point where we can help the application owners see where their data is at, understand it, and potentially help us breakout.

We've used easy tiered functions in the pools, so we're trying to help step that storage down. If they can get visibility somehow into that data, help us further break that down, or better tier and separate out their data, that would be helpful.

I know that VMWare has that function, where they are taking multiple tiers themselves and placing subsets of data, as opposed to whole blocks.

For the most part, stability has been really good. Like anything else, the more you use it, the more times you're going to run into a bug. We've certainly done that.

It seems like scalability is OK. I mean, it's kind of hard for us. We're on a four year refresh cycle. So we stay pretty current with the hardware itself. We are adding in things like compression accelerators, and now with the new SV1 nodes, more cache, and we are going to more adapters. Of course, we're always willing to split out workloads onto separate stacks. So it scales pretty well.

Support has been pretty responsive. Software is coming out all the time with PTFs to fix, so staying on top of that is important.

We've run into the seven three code. Specifically, we hit the cache performance bug. We were right on top of that and had to do another upgrade to clear that.

We've also had a bug with the fiber channel cards. Again, by the time we were implementing, it was a known issue. It was not anything that we've really had to wait on, but not something that we were aware of at the time of implementation.

Get a demo of it. If you haven't seen the product and you have not had somebody step you through all of the features and all the things that you can do with it, then I think it would be really tough to see where adding another set of controllers in front of your storage is benefiting you.

You might be thinking, that's just another hop and it's another delay in getting to my data. I think you will see the value of this solution once you:

• See it plugged in
• Understand what's going to come with being able to move, compress, and virtualize your data in one interface

• Are able to manage all the data there, and not worry about the back end-stuff
• Are able to carve up volumes very quickly to the end users

Integration with Spectrum control and a kind of self-service provisioning is good. It is something we're looking at turning over and then deciding about all the data migration that can happen in the back-end. We can look at that request, and then decide. Perhaps we didn't have enough information when we started, and then we can move it on the back-end. We don't have to worry about getting into the weeds, necessarily, from day one.