IBM FlashSystem Reviews

This was a great step forward from the XIV in next generation hardware for the customer. We're seeing tremendous data reduction for many workloads. It's not a 100% move from XIV for all workloads, however, but the customer is very pleased, for the most part, in their environment.

Benefits for us include lower overall cost, higher density, lower data center costs, and reduced total TCO, as well as moving to an all-flash solution versus a flash/spinning disk solution.

The HSM management console GUI still need some enhancements. It is still a bit awkward in navigation, and some functions/features are not yet fully integrated into the GUI support, but only via CLI. We also need to get reporting down to individual pool and volume levels, rather than just overall system levels. Customers need a more granular view of their individual business usage as well.

We've had some issues with stability, such as a couple of hardware failures and a couple of code bugs. They were addressed, but they caused initial customer concern.

Scalability is quite nice, with being able to support over 1.5TB effective in one rack is a nice selling feature. One of the early issues was that they weren't at a code release where we were able to add new elements right away in a non-disruptive fashion. We had to wait for a couple of code releases for that. We've gone beyond that now. At this point, scalability is no longer an issue.

Technical support has been great. They have been engaged from start to finish.

Regarding previous solutions, this was more of a technology refresh decision. A customer was heavily invested in an older technology that they were very satisfied with, but they wanted to continue to make the move to flash technology. This was the next logical era of evolution.

The initial setup was a little more difficult than the predecessor XIV, but it's a new product, so a learning curve is to be expected. As it is becoming more common in the field, it should be getting better documented and more straightforward to deploy. We are seeing new and continual updates to Red books and best practices documents now.

We didn't really consider alternative solutions, mainly because there aren’t any out there that can touch the A9000 family. From our standpoint, we're an IBM business partner. We value reliability and performance above everything else. Price is a close second, but reliability is key.

Read anything and everything you can, such as documentation manuals and best practices that are coming out. Stay plugged into the IBM communities and leverage services if this is your first engagement for capacity and sizing.

Auto Tier is 1M-iops.

It improves our number of TPS.

Flash Manager needs to be included.

2 years.

Only battery for controller.

None so far.

If 10 is the highest, I would rate them at 9.

We were using a V7000 before, so only upgraded.

Almost straightforward and the same as doing a V7000 series.

Licensing has already everything you need like replication, but you need to consider the license cost for the SAN switch.

EMC Xtreme IO, HPE 3PAR, Nimble.

Consider which type of disk to use: All flash, High Capacity Drives, SSDs.

I/O speeds. This products in basically a RAID comprised of SSD drives with PCI-Express interface, that you can connect to 16GB HBAs, making this storage one of the fastest available in the market today.

This storage has incredible performance, the I/O is awesome. It is difficult to understand how fast it is if you don’t have one, that’s why IBM gives you a month trial, to install it in your infrastructure and give it a try.
In my organization's case, we use the FlashSystem basically for virtualization (VMware). It's amazing how fast a virtual machine boots. We use it for databases too, and the disk I/O performance is incredible.

This storage is factory configured so it's very difficult and expensive to add more flash modules (disk capacity).

Scalability is the main area which needs to improve.

Six months.

No, no at all.

IBM support is excellent as always.

No, this is my first experience with a 100% SSD solution.

No, in fact it was easier than I expected.

If you are going to buy one, have in mind the amount of capacity you need, and your estimated growth for the following years. As I mentioned above, it is expensive to add more SSD modules.

Not really, it was recommended to me by a friend, and after the first month, my company couldn't live without it.

I recommend adding a pair of SAN switches to the Flash solution, otherwise it's a waste to use as and direct attach storage.

The most valuable feature is the continuity of the user interface. Many of our customers leverage Storwize and XIV storage subsystems. That continuity in look and feel has likely helped the FlashSystem because transitioning to using this new product doesn't require any additional training or familiarization time. Instead, customers leverage their experiences to perform 90-95% of the tasks necessary to get a new FlashSystem 900 running.

It's especially important to be able to walk into a customer site and say, "Hey, you have access to the same user experience that you have with your Storwize system, and/or a very similar user experience to your XIV."

Having a consistent user experience and user interface has helped save our customers' time: we don't have to retrain them for a new user interface, and they don't have the learning curve associated with understanding the nuances of a new interface.

The FlashSystem has really helped improve our customers' I/O intensive workloads. Many of our customers leverage Flash for database workloads and appreciate the extra performance boost it gives.

A lot of the beauty of the FlashSystem 900 is that it's very, very focused on what it does, and it does it well. I don't really think there are additional features required.

The FlashSystem 900 is a relatively stable platform. While any codebase will have some issues and require patching (nothing is perfect), the codebase on which the FlashSystem 900 is built is solid.

As a building block, the FlashSystem 900 isn't really intended to scale out to a large degree. Instead, it's intended to be used as a block with which to build out a scalable solution (such as with an A9000/A9000R or a V9000).

IBM's support for storage hardware is usually excellent.

IBM's storage technical support is usually excellent.

I have been involved in the initial setup with a number of customers. It's very straightforward. It's a lot easier than the old days.

If you are looking for a great flash solution that can be virtualized or utilized as a building block for a scalable flash solution, or if you're looking for flash for a very specific workload, then you may want to consider a FlashSystem 900.

It's probably the most straightforward piece of hardware you can get. The user experience from the interfaces and the price points for the performance a really solid.

I'm an IBM Business Partner, so there's really only one vendor that we go to for our storage. However, even if I weren't an IBM Business Partner, having a pretty stable track record with their products, ease of use, and value delivered for price -- I would probably still recommend a FlashSystem 900 for the use cases I stated earlier.

IBM XIV is the most valuable part of this solution. It is easy to use and manage. It is a cheap and also has reliable technology.

We actually are a hospital and we have zero downtime or any outage whatsoever.

There is need to put a SVC in there.

It is very stable. We've been using this solution for more than ten years. We're using it on our three big sites, there were no issues.

It doesn't scale out that well. It actually goes up to 15 module and after that, you have to add another frame. But, they have come out with a new technology where you can do hyperscale. I wish they had put a SVC in front of it but, it's a hyperscale, i.e., you can be on either the A-side or B-side.

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor are reliability and their level of maturity.

It's not the best solution, but it's very reliable.

It depends as every company is different. Some companies choose reliability, while others prefer the market. You have to assess your own stuff and see accordingly, what fits your bill.

Easy to use GUI, both for me and the customers is the most valuable feature of this solution. It's very self-explanatory, very easy to install and of course, the IBM Easy Tier function is easy to maintain.

The benefits are pretty much the same as I have mentioned herein, i.e., it's the time that takes to do an installation as compared to the old products. So, everything is time-related, i.e., the less time you use then it's also cost-effective.

I really don't have any preference for it, this is very easy to install and is actually a customer setup. I've talked to many customers, and all of them agree that "This is so simple, so easy, and straightforward", so IBM has done a very good job so far.

Since 2012

Very easy so no problems.

The stability is very good.

Scalability is also very good because in the first product you could add four expansions to it, but then today, with the later code you can add nine to the controller units. So, it's very good and also, if you put an SVC product on top of it, then it works very well together as we see in all of the products as well.

Out af 10 I would say 8 for none advanced users

Very good when it's needed.

We are a business partner and what we sell are IBM Storwize products. That's our main focus, we don't sell any other vendors. So, it was a pretty straightforward decision to invest in this solution. But according to what I have seen in the past and worked with than this is without a doubt the most user friendly product.

Actually, I've done many of the installations; it is very straightforward.

This product is so easy to use.

Have it checked over, test it out and try it. Compare it to the other competitors and make a decision from there, because I think this will definitely be a winner.

Ease of use and the GUI are the most valuable features of this product. It's the same platform all over across the same product type.

The benefit of this product is how easy it is to use always. All this storage infrastructure can be done underneath one IBM Storwize product and this is how it has impacted our organization. For example, if they get the IBM Storwize V7000 then they can put the other to be decommissioned storage right underneath and they can get their work done on that.

There is a need for a little bit more of a drill down in the GUI part. There is a lot that they actually did, which is already available in the GUI but still, there's a lot that can't be done. So, I would like to see more improvements to be brought about in the GUI.

I've been using IBM Storwize for about 10 years, it is pretty good.

It is very stable. I see a lot of code upgrades being done on the system. Probably twice or three times in a year, they get new upgrades and code upgrades. That's pretty stable.

Scalability is neat as well. It can grow massively. We usually deal with SMB environments and it's pretty good for that environment.

Technical support has been good as well. Other than, maybe a few five or six different incidents in the past, they've been pretty impressive.

The setup was pretty straightforward.

For us, it's all about the commodity while selecting a vendor. In addition, the other important factors are their support level, infrastructure, how good they are, and what is their roadmap for keeping the product around.

Give it a try and look at the demos. You will like it and you will want to get it.

It's pretty good; I've been happy with it. I've worked with other infrastructures as well such as HPE, Dell, Logic and Nutanix but I like IBM Storwize.

For me and for the operations team, the ease-of-use of the GUI is the most valuable feature. It's really easy to understand. It's really easy to do tasks. That's what I like most. The performance is really good. From an operations perspective, definitely the ease-of-use stands out. Compared to other products and other vendors, it's much, much easier.

Time to value. You finish things a lot quicker. I can provision the storage a lot faster and find problems a lot quicker. The fact that I can SSH in and do CLI commands where some of these other vendors don't let you do it is a big deal. I can write custom scripts and do things a lot quicker. The ease-of-use is a lot better with this product.

There's always room for improvement. Adding deduplication would allow us to get more bang for our buck, basically.

Overall, stability is really, really good. We ran into some issues with compression, but it was because we were trying to overload it. So if we don't do that, it runs really, really well.

We have it architected to keep it at a certain level. But if we needed to, we could scale it pretty easily because it's virtualized storage. There's a lot of flexibility with it.

Technical support is really good. Because we're a bigger company, they get to us a little bit quicker. There's more on the line for IBM, so they really treat us well. It's been pretty good. We get good feedback quickly.

We needed the performance of the applications. Payroll applications are very I/O intensive and flash systems are a perfect fit. It makes sense.

I was involved in the setup and it was easy. I've done those for years.

We looked at pretty many vendors. Anybody you could name, we looked at them. We have multiple vendors in the environment, not just IBM. But for our really critical, high performance apps, we put it on the V9000.

Just be careful if you're going to try to use compression, because of the specific issues we've had. If it's a high performance computing environment, just keep it thick provisioned. Get the best performance from it. Don't try to save and then screw up the user experience.

If something fails, it's not going to bring down the application. V9000 is redundant through and through, so it's a great product.

When selecting a vendor, stability, ease of use, and resiliency are the most important things.