IBM System Storage DS5000 Series Reviews

The solution is quite robust and complex. You can do a lot of things with it.

The stability is excellent.

I find the solution isn't so easy to understand. A user must be quite knowledgeable in the product. It isn't like HPE 3PAR, which you can use quite easily without too much storage experience. In that solution, you can just simply follow instructions. 

They need to add instructions inside the storage the way 3PAR has them. If they can add this usability on the storage web console, it will be very easy to follow.

While I've worked with IBM quite a bit, I'm not really using it so much now. I am helping a client with it. I'm much more comfortable with HPE products.

We've never had stability issues with the solution. There aren't bugs or glitches. It's stable and reliable. It doesn't crash.

On the customer's side, as far as I remember, there were about three disk shells and one controller shelf. I didn't experience any kind of add-on for their storage in that case. As far as I know, however, If he or she would want to go and add some disk shelf on the storage, it's not easy.

I have some experience with HPE 3PAR and Storwize 7000. Both have similar usability and nearly the same storage capacity. They are really easy if you just follow the instructions. This is not the case with the DS 5000 series from IBM.

I've also worked with the SC series of Dell Compellent. It's also really good for any kind of usage. It's so easy to add anything on the shelf due to the fact that you have many of the instructions on the screen to follow. When you follow these instructions, you can easily add or remove a disk shelf.

With the Turkish currency, it's hard to nail down the exact pricing. It fluctuates and the costs are based on the US dollar. Right now, it's fluctuating so much, you can't really do a comparison using the Turkish lira. That said, I would estimate that the cost is a bit lower compared to other models. 

Currently, we don't sell IBM products, although I've worked with IBM via clients.

The customer is still working with the storage. I have experienced full replacements with it. The customer had a problem with it and they had to replace the controller.

I prefer HPE 3PAR for managing. 3PAR has many specifications on the storage web console. You can do anything and analyze everything from there. With IBM you must know the system quite well. You must have some experience in order to use it effectively.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate this solution at a seven. If they improved the usability by adding instructions into the console, I'd probably rate them a nine.

We use it for block storage.

The stability and performance of the drive are the most valuable.

IBM is not always as agile as other competitors when it is about cloud integration and user interfaces. They're not renewing themselves very often. They have been slow to evolve from the old GUI. The user interface should be improved, especially regarding performance analysis, which has always been a little bit weak as compared to other solutions.

As a global solution, it lacks the feature for containing integration object storage. Even though they have now started to offer this feature, it is quite young and not as developed as some other vendors. There are also no mass possibilities at all. 

They have a lot of competition in the mid-range segment. They need to have a NAS gateway or something like that. It doesn't specifically need to be integrated into the controllers that are keys to the gateway.

We have it in the company for a long time, but I have been working on it for like one year.

It is a very stable solution.

We are using it for our Oracle database as well as for MySQL database, so it is being used for a really high-end environment. We have maybe 2,000 people who are using this system through the database.

I am always happy with their technical support.

We're a team of five, but we're not only handling this product. We are also working on Hitachi, IBM, and NetApp products.

Its price is fair. IBM is quite fair in price when you compare it with others. 

We also use Hitachi internally, and Hitachi is always a little bit more expensive. NetApp is also a bit more expensive. So, IBM has good positioning in terms of price.

It is very strong in block storage for the database environment. It has very good quality because the compression, deduplication, and encryption are directly done by the disks, so there is no penalty on the processes of all controllers.

If you need a platform that is oriented towards block storage and has features like multi-protocol, cloud integration, and so on, I don't think this is the best solution. It doesn't have direct NAS protocols or things like this.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten, specifically for the needs of block storage. Its performance is very good, which is the biggest asset of this solution. However, it doesn't provide enough services, which probably solutions like NetApp or Dell are providing.