IBM Spectrum Virtualize Reviews

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.

To be able to seamlessly migrate storage sub-systems underneath Spectrum Virtualize.

Being able to migrate storage without impacting the client.

The ability to migrate between clusters, like between Spectrum Virtualize clusters, seamlessly.

Very good. Very stable.

Scalability needs some work in some areas. The number of volumes needs to be increased drastically.

Technical support is very good.

We were using Direct Attached DS8000 before and we switched for scalability.

It was pretty straightforward.

Don't go with EMC. Go with IBM. Go with this product. Absolutely. It's a very good product compared to the competitors.

• Capability of putting lots of heterogeneous storage systems all in one management pane
• Being able to substitute them out and move between them
• The ability to put it all in one management and fix them into something that's much more usable.

It's just been handy with a lot of customers that have, over the years, developed a mess of storage.

It's all about manageability. The product lets you manage:

• Different sorts of systems
• The same host multi-pathing driver
• The same feature set: snapshots and replication, regardless of what system it is

Spectrum Virtualize gives you the same functionality and all the same management through the same GUI, regardless of whether you are using EMC storage, Hitachi storage, or IBM storage.

I’d like to see deduplication. IBM announced during Tech U that Storwize is adding it in the upcoming Q3 2017 code update-- same as what exists on the A9000. Duplicate blocks of data write references to pre-existing block of data, instead of re-writing the same data multiple times, thereby saving storage capacity.

For the vast majority of the time, it's absolutely awesome. I had a couple isolated problems with reliability, mostly related to replication, but I have been able to work through them.

The scalability is actually one of the great things about the product. It is designed to be able to give you scalability with the virtualization of multiple storage systems. It's very easy to scale.

I've had to use tech support quite a lot of times, because I support a lot of customers. Consultants support a lot of customers. Once you get past Level-1 support, it's generally top notch.

Good luck finding anything that does half of what it does. When looking for a vendor, I look for reliability. I've had lots of good experiences with it. It's been a very reliable product and the feature set is something you can't get anywhere else.

Not having to take any kind of outage to do a storage data migration.

It improves a lot of functions for our clients. The high availability is the best thing. I have been working with it for 15 years, and it's one of the most stable products that IBM has.

There are a few little GUI issues and stuff like that, but nothing major. I would like to see better layout of some stuff. They kept on moving things around from version 7.4 to through version 8. They've made it a little difficult for some customers to find things.

The stability is good.

The scalability is great too. It scales from a single I/O group to up to four.

Technical support has been great. I've been using it for 15 years.

Next to the DSA1000, it's the most enterprise thing that IBM has for storage.

Make sure that it really has all the things that Spectrum Virtualize has, where you can upgrade the hardware and the software and everything without taking any kind of outage. And that's for infinity, not just for the life cycle with that version of the product, but for each subsequent version. It's all done on the fly.

When choosing a vendor, I look for support.

Benefits for us are pretty much the simplicity, ease of implementation, and the ease of maintenance. Flexibility and responsiveness to customer needs are key. They are the things that allow for ease of disaster recovery with global mirror, which we use. So it's just flexibility and ease of use which are the key things that I like about it.

It helps us to reduce time, reduce complexity, and be more responsive to requests instead of taking an hour to do one volume. Now I can do one volume in less than two minutes. So that keeps the business moving forward and keeps up with the pace.

The most valuable features are the simplicity of use, the flexibility, and the options included. I mean, it's just a big time saver.

I already discussed possible improvements with some of the guys from Hearnsley. One of our frustrations is when you go to expand volumes in a global mirror environment, you have to stop everything in order to expand. So that's one of the things.

It's on their roadmap to do, but as I understand, it's very complex. So that's one of the big features that we would like to see. And I'm sure other customers have been asking for it for years and years. That's probably the biggest thing that we can see.

Stability has greatly improved since day one. It's much easier to implement. It's not so white knuckle when you're doing upgrades and things like that. So they have come a long way.

There's a lot of flexibility to it, especially with the new hardware coming out. Software always comes out with new and improved options, features, or fixes. So they're doing a real bang up job.

Overall, technical support is good. It is sometimes frustrating when you supply all the information you think they need upfront and they come back and say, "Hey, we need this." So, there's some frustration to it.

We used to have the Shark ESS, where you had to actually go in through their GUI manually to apply and create volumes at that level. You then had to have them mapped. It was more cumbersome and time consuming.

The initial setup was overall pretty easy. And that was years ago, pretty much when it first came out. Overall, it was pretty easy to set up.

We didn't really consider any alternatives. We're pretty much an IBM shop, so it was like the leader when it came out. We value compatibility and price, obviously.

I'm a technician. I don't care about price per se. I am more involved in the technical advantages, ease of implementation, and stability. They are probably the key factors for me.

I would absolutely recommend it. I would ask them, "Why are you waiting?"

The most valuable feature for sure is the abstraction of the storage. In this way, we can basically stick any storage solution that we want on the back-end. Then we've got a rich feature set above that. We can basically move the data where we need it to be. We have a lot of control. It's a good product.

We're a fairly small shop, as far as the number of IT people that we have. The tool allows us to basically multiply our staff to be able to get our work done. We don't have to rely on consultants. The feature sets are usually ahead of where we need to be.

There's always room for improvement. A little lower price would always be nice. Otherwise, nothing major.

Stability has been very good. We're more on the conservative side, in that we are not going out and downloading the latest and greatest code. We are a couple of releases behind, but it's been very stable.

Scalability has been really great. We've done refresh cycles every three years and the technology is usually ahead of where we need it to be, as far as scaling up is concerned.

Technical support has been pretty good. Maybe sometimes we don't get responses back as fast as we would like, but they have always been very professional and they follow through. No major issues. It's been good.

The initial setup was very easy.

For one, there are very few vendors that actually offer this product on the market. And nobody has the quality feature set that IBM has.

We were looking for quality, support, and service. These are all the normal things most companies look for.

I'm not sure. I'd ask them why they haven't done it already.

The most valuable features are disaster recovery, replication, and multi-site setup. Being able to quickly recover in a disaster and knowing that your data is protected across multiple sites is important.

The benefits are protection of data, usability, and performance speed in a high capacity setup.

We found a gap for smaller clients. Right now, the only offering is a huge, rack-sized storage device, and no more. There was nothing that came after the DS-1600. I'd like to see a smaller form factor for smaller clients.

The product is very, very stable. It is much more stable than the open system configurations that we've worked with. It has the highest stability that we have seen.

The scalability is very good. It is about even with the open system offerings.

I have used technical support. The process to open problem management requests should be faster. Especially in a high pressure situation when things are going wrong. It would be good to just have a quicker way to get the problem out there and get a response.

The initial setup was complex, but that's what keeps me employed. So, it's quite all right.

It's the best mainframe storage available. It is much better than EMC and other competitors.

My advice would be to familiarize yourself with the levels of virtualization and understand how the product works at a lower level in order to implement it.

It is very good for compatibility and stability.

It helps us with the management of automation and migration between other vendors for storage.

I had some ideas for improvement, but I can't recall them at the moment.

For us, the stability is great. We don't have a problem with this solution. We have our own systems and we integrate with other systems. When we have stability problems because of compatibility between other vendors, the same vendor, and many solutions, we lose money because of longer implementation times.

Regarding scalability, it depends. We had some problems with performance on all-flash storage. We don't use Spectrum Virtualize to offer storage, because they are too intensive for this environment.

I have used technical support. It was hard work, but we had some colleagues in IBM and they helped us to move forward.

They should test the solution before starting the implementation. Sometimes IBM documents something, but in the real world, it doesn't work. It depends on the brand or the version of the software. So they should test it and then go to the client to make sure that it works there.