IBM Spectrum Virtualize Reviews

I use IBM Spectrum Virtualize as a storage device that provides storage to servers needing storage. I utilize it in my role for the US government.

The ease of management, the simplicity of the CLI, the speed of that interface, and the well-architected design of the product in general are valuable features. 

The latest incarnation enables significant scalability unless you're dealing with exabytes of data. It also has highly specialized Flash Core modules, which do encryption and compression within each drive with zero impact.

One of the main features of Spectrum Virtualize is it virtualizes the servers from the storage. We have a very large infrastructure. A major advantage is when you get the aged storage arrays and you have to replace all of those. Last summer, we replaced four petabytes of aged storage arrays. They were old and past end-of-life. But we did that seamlessly, without affecting any of the server applications. There were no system admin times; nothing required at all. It was really quite good for our client. That was perfect for them.

Our team operates four 8-Node IBM Spectrum Virtualize (SVC) clusters (32nodes total), two clusters at one site and two at a sister site with replication between the two sites.

These four clusters have a number of storage arrays behind them to yield a total storage capacity across the four cluster of approximately ~6 petabytes of Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze Data Classes. The Storage Cloud uses IBM's EasyTier feature to create different performing storage classes and uses Thin Provisioning to lower our clients requested 8 petabytes of capacity to a much less costly 5 petabytes of consumed capacity. The remaining ~1 petabyte is elasticity which is built into the Cloud.

Our client does not have any classical maintenance windows where systems or storage can be taken down for upgrades, repairs, expansion, or replacement. Servers require 24x7x365 data access (actually 4 days are planned power outages for power testing - but no IT changes are permitted).

So when I say our storage services to our client were provided continuously - non-stop - for 12 months, it means that all customer servers had 100% uninterrupted, online SAN access to their data 24x7x365 (minus the power down). During that time, our team provided on-demand capacity provisioning of about 700TB of new client growth and expansion, updated all cluster softwares, decommissioned ~4 petabytes of aging storage arrays, installed ~5 petabytes of new replacement / expansion arrays, and repaired a couple failed components. It really shows the power, utility, versatility and availability of our Cloud Storage design.

The second feature that it is software-defined. Every year, we select a new release and we get new features. This gives us time to test them out. It's just very amenable to our type of delivery of services to the clients that use storage.

In addition to that, they've been able to add some really cool functions. It started out with the usual stuff, such as thin provisioning. Then they added features like compression. Now they're actually adding transparent cloud tiering, so they can put data up in the cloud, just by taking it off of the SVC and sending to the cloud. This is very, very good for us in being able to put together a roadmap for functions for our clients of what they can do with their data.

There are things that occur when you get to this size and capacity. We're very large, i.e., petabytes. When you get to that sheer volume of the numbers of things, it is too big for people to keep track of. So, it's okay if you have 50 volumes, and I can watch them. I can assign people to watch them. But when you have 5,000, it's not possible anymore. So you need capabilities within the products that would do what that person would've done watching the 50. So, they have this “cognitive IT” sort of thing going for them.

I don't think they've realized they can apply that cognitive concept to that. It is like, "Okay, I'm going to use software to watch all that." Now, they have some of that already with Easy Tier that automatically moves data around. It is perfect. Now I need that same concept extended into other areas.

The primary use case is high availability and disaster recovery. They use it as an active-active cluster located in two physical locations for quick recovery using immutable snapshots.

The quick restore, the low latency, and the ease of use are some of the most valuable features. The product is quite easy to setup and maintain. It is an enterprise product that delivers high performance features.

We use it for all our block storage requirements. I was a user of the storage between 2004 and 2017, i.e. 13 years. We sell service, assist others with storage. We have been using it since 2004, and we have used all versions of the product. It is currently up-to-date. We are a platinum business partner of IBM, but we also have competing business partnerships with other companies, such as Dell. It is a product line as opposed to a singular product. There are entry mid-level and enterprise-level tiers of products, the lowest end entry, which is comprehensive in terms of being able to deliver millions of IOPS and microsecond latencies all the way up to the upper level of that product line. All the products have high availability. My clients are generally government agencies. We also have some commercial businesses, and they range overall categories, but mostly it's used by the government. However, even in government situations, there are ranges of business in terms of small, medium and large business size, given the environment we are deploying into. Some agencies have minimal budgets, and I would classify that as a very small business, but some are large. We deploy it both on the cloud and on-premise.

It enabled us to build an infrastructure and replace storage with no disruption to our hosts whatsoever. It's an amazing capability, and we stayed with it. I loved the product so much that while I had learned about several other products, none of them compares unless you're looking for a precise capability. This is a general-purpose but very high-performance system when it comes to flash systems. There are cases where you need more performance than possible with the system's design, but you always have to pick your top requirement.  Most people have similar requirements. They want decent response time, decent costs, a plethora of functionality, including remote and local copy services. It addresses all of those concerns, but it has to sacrifice resources here and there to be that capable. You can't get 32 petabytes running 20 million IOPS at .07 microseconds. Generally, there are limitations to everything. Some systems could offer that, but of course, it'd be memory-based only, and they wouldn't have any storage and cost 1000 times what this solution costs. So there are limitations to everything.

Primarily, our customers use it to manage a bunch of different storage devices. It works really well, and it is a great platform to migrate data. I am currently helping a customer to migrate off of an HPE storage array to Pure Storage, and we are using SVC as the platform to move that data.

Our customers are mostly enterprise in size.

It is a single pane of glass management interface, so once the storage is allocated to SVC, they only have one place to go to manage it for everything. Then, my Power customers using Power VC can allocate storage themselves from Power VC, because it has integrated with SVC, so AIX admins do not have to know anything about storage. It is very powerful.

The primary use case with IBM Spectrum Virtualize for us is in relationship to databases.

I like that it can virtualize more than three hundred storage providers. I enjoy the performance, replication, and compression. I value all of the features.

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.

We use it to virtualize some different storage units. It can virtualize and provide some good migration and disaster recovery options.

Our infrastructure is on-premise. We have two POWER8 systems. For the storage, we have FlashSystem 900s, FlashSystem 820s, and Flash V7000s behind the SVCs.

We can failover easily, because a lot of our data is replicated from family to the second replication.