IBM FlashSystem Reviews

The ease-of-use and ease-of-setup are the most valuable features. You can get one up and running in a couple hours. I do it quite frequently for customers. The simplicity of it is the big benefit for me, compared to some others that I've used.

A lot of features are beneficial. It's a robust solution from my standpoint. We've got it running on several different configurations. You've got tiering and a lot of nice features to have in today's world. You can put flash in them. It is a good system to use.

As far as for what we use it for, they have got it spot on for our market. I'm sure others might have some additions, but our market is more in the SNB space. It is everything we've ever needed.

With the latest releases of software, it's pretty robust. They've pretty well nailed it. I don't see any further weaknesses with the interfaces or anything.

I have not had any real issues. I think it is very stable. We have not had any outages or any unexpected issues. I would say it’s very stable.

It is definitely very easy to scale. It's like everybody says, "plug and play". It just works.

Technical support is very good.

We had a few customer requests for it. I attended conferences and they showed me that they have really put a lot of time and effort into this. It's a good solution. It was worth our time to push it for our customers.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We did not look at other vendors. We are a business partner for IBM on the storage side. Primarily, they're the only game we mess around with.

Definitely give it your time. Give it your time, get some IBM folks to show you some benefits and maybe do a demo. It's a great solution.

We used to provision storage from different devices. This requires a lot of manual effort to synchronize all hosts with each storage unit in an environment. IBM SAN Volume Controller helps manage all storage units from a single interface; while IBM FlashSystem provides high performance for our Tier 1 applications.

IBM FlashSystem has an easy to use GUI, similar to the IBM Storewize family, which make it one of the best flash storage systems in the market.

We use the IBM SAN Volume Controller to provide a single management interface for virtualized storage. It is easy to manage many storage devices from a single controller.

The two products should be unified and have a service processor to restart devices remotely. For example, NetApp has devices which include a service processor in nodes, which could be used to restart the nodes remotely. IBM should implement something like this.

Both products are basically for block-level access. There should be a series that also has a file level and block-level access together, which would make it unified.

The stability of the system is fine.

We did not have any problems with scalability.

We receive excellent technical support.

I currently use both NetApp and IBM. NetApp storage is cost efficient, but IBM is way ahead of NetApp in terms of block-level access.

The initial setup was easy.

Pricing can be considered as per market competition. As I am seeing less projects using IBM storage these days, the only reason seems to be the cost of support.

We had a contract with IBM, and now we are also using NetApp storage.

Go ahead and implement it. IBM storage provides you everything that you’ll need for a block-level architecture, as they have many different products which provides you with a variety of options to meet your needs.

• Thin Provisioning
• Flash Copy
• User friendly management interface

We run our business applications on it. Also OS was booted from SAN.

Product support is restricted to IBM only. It must be decentralized to IBM partners as well.

Six years.

Yes, we faced power supply failure, Multiple SAS drives failure, and at the end both controllers were dead.

We are able to add additional drives easily.

One out of 10.

No, it was our first experience with any kind of SAN.

Initial SAN configuration was smooth.

If you are planning to purchase a new SAN then go for all flash. Do not invest in a hybrid SAN.

Yes, HPE and Fujitsu.

Please make sure that you will be getting proper after-sales support from IBM.

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.

We use IBM FlashSystem for backing up data.

There could be some extra features added.

IBM FlashSystem is flexible, quick, and has a solid design.

I have been using IBM FlashSystem for approximately three years.

IBM FlashSystem is a stable solution.

We have the technical support from IBM but we have not needed to use them. We do not have any problems.

The initial setup was easy.

I rate IBM FlashSystem a nine out of ten.

The availability of the product is great.

I appreciate how well it can scale. 

The solution is stable. The performance is quite good.

It's very easy to manage. They make it very, very easy to add notes.

The solution is quite expensive. That's one of the downsides to using it. 

I've used the solution over the last 12 months at least.

The stability is quite good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's a very reliable product.

The scalability of the product is quite good. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. It's not a problem at all. 

We don't need any external support. We do it on our own.

The cost of the solution is too high. They should work to make it lower.

I'm not sure if the company I work for has any business relationship with IBM. I am just an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It's been quite good overall and I like the capabilities it has. 

The most valuable features are the ability to virtualize other storage behind it, thin provisioning, compression, and flash systems.

The benefit of the product is the ease-of-management. It has significantly reduced the IT operation costs to our organization.

I don’t really have a feature that I’d be using. Other storage technologies such as 3D drives or 3D flash would be cool to see, but for the users who I’m selling to, I don’t have this to offer. I don’t think that there is any improvement required.

Stability has been excellent and we never had any problems.

It’s massively scalable, so I’ll never run into that problem.

I have used tech support and they are excellent. They always have an answer for me.

When selecting a vendor, the support mechanism and the reliability are the most important elements.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I have done it for other clients, and it’s very straightforward to set up and use.

Take it for a test drive. You’ll be impressed.

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.