Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series Reviews

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our customers.

The price of this solution is good.

Many people do not realize that Lenovo has a storage solution, so better marketing from the vendor is needed.

We have just begun working with the DM Series.

Our customers enjoy the stability that the Lenovo DM Series has.

The scalability is very good. However, if the product is a few years old then expanding storage may be expensive because of a change in the technology.

Our customers for this product are normally medium and large companies. The most recent deployment was for a company with 100 employees.

The initial setup is easy. If you have any familiarity with storage solutions, regardless of the vendor, then you can easily configure this product. The length of time required for deployment depends on the size of the project, although I would estimate the average to be one or two days. For a small amount of storage, it will only take a few hours.

I have worked with several similar products and I find that the decision by the customer is normally made based on the price. 

In summary, this is a good product and is one that I recommend.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for our customers. When they have old hardware and infrastructure and need to update them, we set up the Lenovo systems for them.

Lenovo offers a good variaty of Storage Systems. Starts with DS, then DE and the most sophisticated version - DM-Series. When Workload is the question this Storagesystem will help our costumers to solve these issues. In the AllFlash variation of this System Lenovo gives the 1 3 to 1 Promise. Means you buy only the third part of calculated Storage, because the System compresses and deduplicates in a extreme good ratio. 

The second part, as Lenovo partners, we always look there strategic routes so we can imagine where the way is going along - also the contact to the technicians and to the Lenovo Partnermanagement gives us the good feeling for their products and their visions - so we can translate them to our customers, who needs not only reliable systems but also a long term vision where the journey will move.

The licensing model needs to be revisited. It needs to be simplified.

When using flash, users need to calculate the correct combination of SSDs to ensure the correct amount is provided to the customer. If a customer, for example, needs 30 terabytes of disc space or flash storage, a lot of testing and calculations need to happen to see if this is possible to get to with just flash storage.

The solution needs to offer more storage tools so clients can scale while the costs can be kept low.

Lenovo DM offers a costing tool, however, it could be simplified a bit more. If it was easier to use, the costing could happen sooner and everything could get to market faster.

We advice our Customers to use the solution for one year now.

We haven't had any problems with the solution. It's quite reliable. We haven't had bugs or glitches. There haven't been crashes.

We've never had issues with scaling the solution. We have customers with 400 users or more, and customers that have 150 users. However, it's not the number of users that decide how the solution scales, it's the workload.

Currently, the initial setup is a bit complex. There's a new DM series in stock. It's a bit difficult to get the proper experience from Lenovo directly in terms of getting to their technicians. 

The last time we got in touch with them, the process was getting smoother, however. They're making improvements in the process.

We install the solution for our clients.

It's difficult to calculate pricing on the solution. Lenovo does help us, as a partner, however, there are different types of storage at different price points, and also certain items that are built into the cost already. 

Normally, they break down and show you how they get to the final price. Typically, a client will tell you what they need and you run some calculations based on workloads. Once you have a plan that aligns with the customer's needs, you go to Lenovo for pricing, and you need to negotiate with them to try to lessen costs. 

Once you have decided on the costs, there are no extras beyond that which a customer would have to pay for. It's all one set negotiated cost.

We're a Lenovo partner.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten.

With Lenovo, there are only two solutions: the DE or DM series. For common workloads, we tend to recommend the DE series as it's the best match for smaller companies. The DM series is more for those with many workloads that need very high performance. In use cases where the Workload needs performance, we advice our Customer to take the advantage of the Lenovo Best in Breed DM-Systems.

We typically advise customers to choose the DM series.

In Germany, we have many small firms and smaller environments. Most people will tell clients they absolutely need flash. However, we don't think that is always the case. It's similar with DM. You can't sell clients with small issues or small storage requirements something that offers flash all the time. It's expensive. You need to think about costs and be strategic to ensure you're meeting your client's needs responsibly.

We assess requirements and implement this solution for our clients who wish to update and upgrade their equipment, servers and storage. We build a solution and provide the equipment and deploy for our customers. With Lenovo, we use the EMC for storage and HPE for processing. I work with the HP series and we're looking to expand the Lenovo market. I'm working in an IT company and I'm the technical manager. 

In this solution, I like the option of clustering two storages together and that there can be HA availability. You can get two DM Series which is a 5000 Series, and you can cluster them and make a chain solution. This is a very important feature. If you want to build this solution with brands such as EMC, you should be paying a lot of money because it requires buying equipment like a VPLEX which is so expensive. With the other device you can launch as soon as it appears. But with this DM Series, you only need two of these. It's a very good feature. 

Unfortunately, this is a very expensive solution. At the end of the day it's the client that decides whether to implement.

I'd like to see a clustering mode included in the solution as an additional feature. 

I've been using this solution for 15 years. 

This is a very stable solution. 

We try to solve any problems ourselves using the company site because we have no local technical support in our location. If there are any technical issues, it requires us to send servers overseas and it can take several months to solve a problem. 

The initial setup is very straightforward. Deployment takes 30 or 45 minutes to install the hardware and maybe an hour to initialize or setup the software. A maximum two or three hours in total. 

It's important to know that the storage is entry level mode. In comparison with other similar solutions, I think this one is the most expensive. Clients don't understand why they should pay so much money for the DM Series. It's possible to get other solutions with similar configurations like SSV, SaaS, HPE, MS-DOS. These are cheaper solutions. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

The Lenovo ThinkSystem is used for everything in our company from ERP to BI, for production, PLM, CAD for designing, and everything else.

It takes a very long time to enter the management console, as well as to restart the system, and these are things that should be improved.

We have been using Lenovo's ThinkSystem DM series for thirty years.

We are satisfied with the stability.

Scalability is available and could be done, but we bought everything that we needed at the beginning. The system covers our needs so we don't have any reason to improve, update, or scale.

We have a local partner for technical support.

This solution has been in place and part of our IT department since the beginning and we have had no reason to change.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The primary use case of the solution is to renew the IT infrastructure for our customers.

The FlexClone feature is the solution's most valuable aspect.

The solution needs a simpler licensing theme around the DM series. The problem is if you only need one of the features, you still have to buy the whole thing. The licensing needs to be more granular or flexible so you have the option to only license FlexCone or Inline Compression features.

So far we haven't had issues, but after eight months it may be too early to comment on the stability of the solution.

We haven't tried to scale this early into using the solution, so I can't say too much about the potential to scale it.

We previously used the V3700, which is also from Lenovo. The product was at the end of its life which is why we switched.

The initial setup is very complex.

We had a consultant help us with deployment. We also tried to get in touch directly with the partner, Lenovo.

Main Thing is, to look for the Need of your customer! It ist very very important to know where HIS pain Points are. When he Needs a completly ready storage without any thinking about licences or something like that maybe nimble will fit the best. When he Needs more flexibility about scaleability, and superior featureset of already proven Storage Solutions maybe Lenovo DM-Series would match better.

HPE Nimble, HPE VSA, VMware VSAN, Lenovo DE-Series

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I would rate the solution six out of ten.

Our primary use case for Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is file storage and VMware. It serves as the backend infrastructure storage for VMware and for SMB sharing.

It has been a perfect fit for the workload that our customer is doing.

The valuable features include all the ONTAP features such as snapshotting and mirroring. These are very useful.

Lenovo could have a wider variety of storage solutions in the NAS space. Currently, as far as I know, there are only two or three different filers, and they don't extend to high-end filers like those in the NetApp environment.

I have been using it for about fifteen to twenty years.

I have not experienced any problems with stability so far.

There are limitations in terms of the capacity you can add to the filer, but it's quite a high level. The bigger limitation is the amount of client-side connections, which is limited by the number of PCI slots available for networking expansion.

Support from Lenovo has been very good overall. We haven't required technical support for storage products yet, but past experience from servers has been positive.

Positive

The initial setup was really easy. We had two engineers from Lenovo and myself involved in the process.

We had specialist engineers from Lenovo perform the implementation.

My experience with pricing and licensing is limited. However, Lenovo's price point is fairly competitive with NetApp.

We pretty much only considered Lenovo.

I would rate it a ten out of ten.