IBM FlashSystem Reviews

We usually use Storwize for SMB customers, when they need small but reliable storage and fast response times. The performance is great.

The virtualization feature shortens the time to convince customers, to sell the solution, and to implement it.

From the moment we first see a customer and tell him that we are capable of doing this, until we do it, is a relatively short time. It's not going to be a long-term project, one that is going to take time for migration.

The user interface is very mature and it's becoming more mature all the time. They made it very easy for the user, very friendly to work with.

They have a virtualization feature and, even if you do not want to buy that feature, you can have it as a trial for two to three months. If you have another brand of storage from another company, you can use this tool to transfer all your data from the old system to the new Storwize system, which really shortens the migration time. This feature makes it much easier for us, as a business partner, to convince the customer that it can be done in a very short time, without any concerns about losing data or something breaking. That's one of the main features, and it works.

It helps me a lot when talking with potential customers who are stuck with all this data and, when they think of moving on to new systems, the first thing that bothers them is how to migrate all this information to a new system.

The other stuff that everybody sells today like tiering, which IBM calls Easy Tier, and FlashCopy, they have been around for years with the other vendors as well.

IBM gets a lot of input from the field, from system engineers, regarding what needs to be done and I believe they have a roadmap to try to constantly make the user interface more mature, as well as the options and tools. I trust they are doing good job on this.

I have looked at a few pages of a report I download and I saw a graph there regarding software-defined vendors. IBM is not in a good position on this graph. I know that they are working very hard on this, to make it much better and to get to a level where it's not only hardware but also software to provide a complete solution.

It's very stable as a single system or you can have it as a cluster for redundancy. We haven't had any issues, as far as I know, of it crashing or something that might make you suspicious about the reliability of the system. It is really reliable. The system engineers we work with have no doubt regarding any stability issues.

The scalability is fine, but it also depends on the type of customer. If they are a lower-level SMB and we can find out what their growth would be over the next year to two years, the availability of different models from Storwize makes us comfortable in telling customers that they can expand, without any doubt, for another three to four years. They don't need to worry about having to buy a new system in two years. Just upgrade and expand, that's all.

We have our own engineers trained by IBM and they are certified. I don't really recall many real issues. As I think back, there has been nothing critical where we had to ask IBM to contact their own labs to find a solution. Day-to-day, we have almost no need for IBM to show up for any problem or technical issues.

We are not in a good position to answer this question because we have worked with IBM for all these years. But I believe the way it came about was that we had a situation where we moved a customer from the competition to IBM Storwize. When we looked at the space it took, the performance, the pricing, the ease of working with it, and the migration - especially the migration, because when you want to move somebody from a different vendor to Storwize, people know it's hard work - it was easily done by Storwize and the software that comes with it.

As a business partner, when selecting a vendor the important criteria are the terms and conditions under which you can work with your supplier. In addition, it's the level of availability of the vendor when you need them, that they will respond immediately and are with you in the problem, hand-in-hand, to go solve the issues. One of the main issues is that you don't feel alone in the field, you have somebody with you. That is very important. If there is a problem, the customer also needs to be confident in who we are. We have a name and we are a business partner, but who is backing us up? When you go with a company like IBM, with all its experience, and with your own experience over all these years, that's a huge advantage.

I'm not involved in installation but, as far as I know, it's very straightforward, it's very easy. The main issue is that if you spend enough time on design, to find out what the customer really wants, that makes the implementation easier. That's where the emphasis should be. But as far as the system itself, the installation and putting it up, it takes no time. As far as I know, it's so easy.

The pricing has been very competitive for the last few years. IBM got to the point where they changed the pricing model and we feel very comfortable with the pricing. It's very competitive.

Over the last two years, IBM has been coming up with all kinds of interesting promos, especially for the SMB systems. That makes it very competitive price-wise and in terms of performance to help convince customers. It benefits both the customer and us.

We also do sell HPE if we have to, but IBM is usuall the first choice because of the pricing and performance.HPE has tried to work with us a lot and we tried to work something out with them, but each time we went back to Storwize, as it fits our needs and it's much easier to work with.

There really aren't any others really on our list. The Infinidat we have in our data center is for our own usage and our own services that we have in the cloud system. It's not something that we go out and install.

IBM is really open and available to those who want to find out what kinds of solutions will fit their needs. More than that, if it becomes more serious, with potential, IBM can provide you almost everything you need to see in its labs, to show you that the numbers they talk about are not only on paper but in real life. They are real and they can get to these performance levels.

IBM does a lot of customer setups in their labs and they invite the potential customers in and show them. But it's not for everyone. When we have a real potential customer and they demand it, that's what we do for them.

There are no 10s in the market right now. Everybody is evolving. As far as where we see storage going, it's not only hardware, it's also software-defined, and everybody is trying to reach a higher and very comprehensive level. And that takes time. It's not IBM, they need others to get to that higher level so we can have a comprehensive solution. It's not because IBM is an eight out of 10 and somebody is a nine or 10. It depends on the solution and application. In some cases, they would rate a 10, in others you might only give them seven.

The Flash core models offer amazing performance.

The basic setup can be challenging when it comes to certain IP addresses and the configuration of the IP. You have to go in to different menus to makes changes and ensure it is stable.

Ina future release, we would like to have a better way to install and to configure FlashSystem.

I have been using this solution for two years. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten for stability. I have experienced one problem and that was solved by EBM. It was for a FS 5,200. I had to connect to an IBM i system without some switches. I was the second or third customer who did it, worldwide. They had to make a special patch for it.

This is a scalable solution. 

I would rate the technical support for this solution a three out of five. 

Neutral

I would rate the pricing of this solution a four out of five. 

We considered Dell PowerStore. From a capability and technology point of view, both solutions are comparable. However, from a price perspective, IBM is 30% cheaper.

I would definitely recommend this solution to other users. It is suitable for many sizes of business due to the options they offer. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten as it offers great performance and stability. 

Our primary use case of this solution is deduplication.

The feature I find most valuable is the deduplication because the nature of the data that we are using in our current environment has a lot of replicated data. You tend to create a copy of the same system multiple times for different reasons. So if you use a flash system that is deduplication-enabled, you end up using less capacity. 

I would like to see an improvement in the handling of large amounts of rights. An automatic flash system that doesn't do compression or deduplication will flush through the rights directly from the host to the flash modules. It doesn't keep them in the cache. For compression and deduplication systems, they have to do compression, deduplication and the memory and cache for the controller. So they have to keep the data there otherwise you will find yourself stuck with performance issues.

The solution is currently hosting our core banking system and we haven't faced any stability issues, so it is very stable.

I have only four boxes now, so it's not the best scalability you can get, but it is still acceptable. Since we are hosting our core banking on it, we have about 20,000 employees working on it.

I will rate their technical support an eight out of ten. If you send them a question, it takes them ten days to come back to you with an answer. But besides this, we've had no other issues. 

We use EMC devices and IBM FlashSystem concurrently, but we have a different evaluation for these products. They are not the same because our critical applications are hosted on IBM FlashSystem. The less critical applications are hosted on VMAX.

The setup of the IBM devices is really straightforward. The actual deployment for the IBM FlashSystem took about seven hours. One of our partners was responsible for this, and we are very satisfied with his performance.

My advice to others would be to go for the big one, the A9000. It is a little bit more expensive but it offers a better total cost of ownership.

In the next version, I would like to see external virtualization. We are currently using LVC for external virtualization, and then we are using the boxes under LVC. If IBM embeds the LVC feature inside the box, I will only need to use the box and then virtualize the smaller boxes behind it. It will simplify my issues.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The solution has good performance and the highest throughput ratio in a single enclosure. The most valuable feature of the solution is SCM (Storage Class Memory), which has the lowest latency value in the storage industry.

The solution's infrastructure technology level could be PCI Express 5 instead of PCI Express 4 for the next version.

In addition to SaaS-based enclosures, the solution's expansion options must include NVMe options.

I have been using the solution for a few months.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten for stability.

The transactions of more than 1,00,000 customers are running on this solution.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten for scalability.

We have previously worked with several store systems like Pure Storage, HPE, and NetApp storage. We switched to IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe because of its performance.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for the ease of its initial setup.

The solution’s deployment took around two days.

The solution has good pricing, but it is not cheaper.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The general use cases depend on the size of a company. I work with the commercial sector, the FlashSystem 5000 and its different models. It suits the small to medium, or SME, companies. The FlashSystem 9200 goes mainly to big enterprises, like banking or governmental sectors. The 7200 plays sometimes in SME and sometimes in bigger enterprises. 

One of the most valuable features is that it's very easy to use and configure. It used to be more difficult, but now it's almost flawless. 

The pricing could be improved, but I think it's getting better and better with each version. 

IBM needs to implement NAS storage again, as this is a big flaw. Dell EMC is very good at this and if you compared them based on NAS storage, Dell EMC would win right away. IBM's solution for NAS storage is very complicated. We don't have a storage box that provides file sharing from itself, we have to put software on it and go through a whole complicated process. It should be simplified. 

I have been working with IBM FlashSystem for around seven years. 

It's really stable, and many customers have experienced this as well. 

It's easy to scale, but it depends on the model. The 5100 is obsolete, but the 5200 has line expansions, up to two controllers, and can scale out both ways. The 7000 and 9000 can scale to 20 expansions and four controllers. It's very scalable, both horizontal and vertical. 

I believe the second line and third line are very responsive here. It depends on the customer's warranty level, if it's 9x5—it can't be like 24x7, which is immediately. 

IBM has some features that don't exist in other brands. External virtualization, for example—Dell EMC has the same feature, but it's applied differently. IBM's approach is to make it usable in many different scenarios so that the customer can work with multiple vendors under the IBM controller. Dell EMC can't do that. The external virtualization stacks with Dell EMC, and the features stack to every box. If I have a main box with high specs and I virtualize another box with minimum specs, that means I'm stuck with the minimum specs. With IBM, if I'm working with the virtualization engine with higher specs, I get the benefits from these higher specs, even if the virtualized box has minimum specs.

The initial setup is very straightforward and user-friendly. The FlashSystem 5000 can be deployed in around 20 to 30 minutes, but it depends on the number of volumes and the tools we set up afterward. On average, it can be installed and initiated within an hour, including microcode updating. If you calculate from the time I begin unpacking to the time I start to configure volumes, it will not exceed around 45 minutes. 

I implemented myself. 

The pricing may be a bit higher than other brands. If you compare the IBM FlashSystems in midrange with Dell EMC in midrange, IBM costs a bit more, but I prefer IBM because it has more specs that I can benefit from. 

Two years ago, we had all features installed in the midrange box without any need for extra licensing. However, lately we have features like Easy Tier and FlashCopy, which need extra licensing. We can purchase it with the box or afterward, and it's a smooth process. 

In my experience, IBM doesn't need maintenance at all. Every year, there is a microcode update to get a new feature or fix a bug, but I know some customers who have had the box for more than five or six years without updating it and it still runs well. 

To anyone who's looking into implementing IBM FlashSystem, I would advise you to read the instructions on the box. If you follow the instructions, implementation will be very smooth and easy, even if you're not a professional. 

I would rate this product a ten out of ten. 

We are using IBM FlashSystem for data storage at the hospital I work at.

IBM FlashSystem has benefited our organization because we can mix solid-state drives with spinning drives.

IBM FlashSystem is a flexible solution with plenty of features.

I have been using IBM FlashSystem for approximately one year.

The solution is stable and has good performance.

IBM FlashSystem is highly scalable.

We have approximately 5,000 people using the solution. We plan to continue using this solution in the future.

The support could improve by allowing you to speak to someone when you call rather than them calling you back. However, once we do have contact with one of their technicians they are excellent.

We previously used HPE and we are slowly moving towards having them switched with IBMFlashSystem. We have found the IBM FlashSystem to be more flexible.

The installation was a moderate level of difficulty and it took approximately one week.

We do the implementation and maintenance of the solution using our in-house team.

The cost of the IBM FlashSystem is lower than the HPE solution.

IBM FlashSystem provides a very good value.

I rate IBM FlashSystem a nine out of ten.

We use it for our databases.

The speed, performance, and stability are the best features of IBM FlashSystem.

It would be good to have historical graphs showing data for a month. Right now, only live graphs are available.

Space reclamation also needs to be improved.

If you want to expand, you cannot expand the disc enclosure. You have to buy a total individual node. Sometimes, this is difficult because we are just looking for capacity and not a node.

I've been using this solution for the past two years.

It is a stable solution, and I would give the stability a rating between eight and ten.

I would rate the scalability at seven out of ten.

IBM's technical support has been good, and I would rate them at nine on a scale from one to ten.

Positive

The initial setup is easy, and I'd give it an eight out of ten. It took about half a day to set up IBM FlashSystem.

I would highly recommend IBM FlashSystem and would rate it at nine out of ten. It is definitely worth the cost.

Storage virtualisation: Use o storage pool to spread I-O load across as many disks as possible, reduces “hot spots”.

Ability to manage third-party arrays and virtualise them: One screen to control multiple arrays. Simplified administration.

Auto-tiering with Easy-Tier: High usage volumes and parts of volumes are automatically moved to high performance disks in manageable “chunks”. This means volumes with heavy I-O usage are are moved to SSD for the best response. Zero admin overhead.

Using V7000, the storage administrator has complete visibility into the I-O load and response times of the volumes, storage pool. Together with “Easy Tier”, this means volumes with high workloads are automatically moved to the highest performing disks (SSD) in the array. There is almost zero administration required once the storage pool is established.

Data migration: The migration wizard made migration from old to new an absolute doddle. Something that historically had been “hard and difficult” became a background task, once the old array was managed by the V7000.

The replication of data between IBM Storwize arrays in V1 of the product had some major limitations. A lot of the limitations were overcome in V2 of the product. Some improvement can still be made in scalability using clustered V7000 nodes.

One area for improvement is in the GUI, where host clusters are not properly dealt with. With Hypervisor host clusters, all hosts must see the same volumes in the same order. Using the concept of a “host-group” has been around (even with IBM) for many years, so why not with the V7000?

Four years.

Some isues were encountered during upgrades in the early firmware versions. This has now been resolved.

The V7000 can scale up to 10 enclosures (disk shelves), each up to 24 disks per enclosure. A cluster of 2 x V7000 has twice the capacity.

Using the V7000 you must be careful not to overload the CPU and disk backplane. When planning to implement any storage array, you must plan your workload carefully. IBM have a superb tool, Disk Magic, that predicts the I-O performance of the array configuration you have selected. This is an invaluable tool in planning any IBM storage array.

I was lucky to have a very good relationship with the local IBM storage support experts. The implementations were done under IBM guidance and, knowing this, any issues that came up at my sites were quickly dealt with. The support staff knew the arrays had been installed with expert guidance and had no inherent issues in design.

Previous storage solutions included the HPE 3PAR array family. We switched to IBM for 3 reasons:

• Upgrade cost
• Complexity with administration tasks and day-to-day running
• Support costs

The IBM V7000 initial setup was straightforward, as I had engaged IBM support early on and was given very good advice on how to size, configure and implement the array(s), including data migration from the old to the new.

It pays to go back and get the best price you can from your supplier. The first offer is not always at the best discount.

Ensure that all the features you need (including replication) are included in the license options.

Several vendors were evaluated in addition to IBM: HPE, NetApp, EMC.

1. Download the IBM Redbook on best practices to implement.
2. Engage IBM support or your integration partner/reseller at a detailed level.
3. Know what you want to do and document your requirements.
4. Investigate upgrade costs and five-year maintenance options.