IBM System Storage DS8000 Series Reviews

We offer it as a Cloud solution to our shared clients and we share these devices between multiple clients. That's how we primarily use the solution.

I use it for storing mainframe data. It's used throughout the mainframe applications and the flash copies for DR, as well as replication utilities, to move data from one facility to another. We use just about all the features on it.

The Global Copy and Global Mirror features are the solution's most valuable aspects.

IBM's been making strides, improving, allowing you to do safeguard copies for banking industries, which is another version of a DR copy. However, it's not accessible from any host and not immune. It's just more difficult for hackers or malicious attempts within it. They're not accessible to the normal user. It's a nice new feature that they've come up with.

The initial setup is easy.

There are a lot of valuable features, but the primary one is that it gave us an end-to-end solution for high availability and disaster recovery. Performance was a big factor, but the reliability of HyperSwap for disaster recovery, using Global Mirror, was the best fit for our company.

The high availability and having HyperSwap has taken us beyond five nines for reliability. Our CTO said that we have now reached 100%. We have had no outages now for literally six years and that's really impressive.

We are a very large company and have a huge workload that is really spiky. Previously, when we were on a different vendor's disk, their replication for our data recovery (DR) would fail and we’d have these long outages to DR.

Now, with Global Mirror, if we get an inordinate amount of data, the RPO elongates and then goes right back down. I like to refer to this like an accordion. It kind of stretches and then comes right back down. We have two to five second recoverability.

Besides the performance, those were some of our biggest issues. There are a lot of other features that have been really important to us. We are a huge DB2 shop and IBM has developed many different products to work with DB2 to help speed it up. Other vendors cannot offer this.

The most valuable features for us are the box itself, the controller, and the DS 8800s. You are able to store more data on them. They have the neat little features that we use these days. These are global mirror and replication for DR, which allow us to do a lot of DR testing.

We do monthly DR testing. So they're very, very fast. So there are fewer footprints, which mean that fewer boxes are needed. These boxes can actually hold much more than the others.

You have fewer boxes to maintain. The throughput increases, and the features are the same, just better.

I use this solution to lighten the workload. Oracle databases and SQL databases have a high workload in IBM.

The high throughput feature is the most powerful thing in this product.

The disk replication, the high availability, the performance, and the speed are the valuable features.

The main benefit is from the standpoint of recovery; recovery time and being able to quickly replicate data. We've had a lot of success and it's taken us a long way to get to where we've come from. There were a lot longer times that it took us to recover in the past. From a disaster recovery and availability aspect, it's brought us a long way. And we certainly are able to do a lot more in much less time, as far as recovery objectives.

It has redundancy and is user-friendly.

The benefits are that you don't need to manage it very often, administration is less.