IBM FlashSystem Reviews

We are living in IBM FlashSystem. We have more than eight flash storage devices deployed in our environment for different kinds of workloads such as applications, core systems, core banking applications, et cetera. 

Overall, the product is good. 

We've been using it for the last five years, and we haven't had any issues at all. 

The power systems are very reliable if you are running 24/7 operations. For ongoing mission-critical applications, it's the best solution. 

We have been using the V9000 storage for the last five years. It's been very reliable. It's robust from a redundancy and reliability point of view. 

Recently, we deployed SS9100. At the core level that is deployed on that storage, it is not stable. We had an incident not too long ago. Both controllers rebooted simultaneously, within 15 seconds. There was some threshold value defined in the core level, and the system exceeded that threshold value. 

We logged the case to IBM. IBM did internal checks, which we deployed. The permanent fix will be available in the first quarter of 2021. It seems to be an issue on IBM's side. Obviously, we were surprised by how both controllers rebooted. We faced downtime on our applications and on our services. 

The issue which we had recently faced relates to the core level. It should be first tested at IBM labs and then introduced for general release.

IBM should improve its data reduction development.

Overall, I have 14 years of experience in implementing enterprise solutions, and also managing them. We've been using IBM Flash Storage for the last five years.

While the 9000 series has been robust and reliable, the SS9100 hasn't been so stable. IBM is currently working on a patch that should be out soon to handle the issues we've had.

The solution is quite scalable. A company can expand it if they need to.

We are a financial institution with two million customers. This is the storage we use behind all of our solutions.

While we don't plan to expand usage in the near future, we have recently acquired new storage solutions for an upcoming upgrade.

I have experience with a variety of other solutions. On storage, I have experience with IBM FlashSystem, IBM block storage, Dell EMC, block storage VMAX, VNX5600, and unified storage. Also, I have experience with Huawei storage, like Dorado and OceanStor. I've also worked on HPE Enterprise Virtual Array.

If you're talking about flash storage, we have FlashSystem IBM V9000, SS910091, 9200. On cloud storage, we have VMAX 10K, 20K. On unified storage, we have VNX5600 EMC.

We required a homogenous environment that's end to end. We chose to use IBM. 

The initial setup is not overly complex. IBM makes the process very smooth. It's very straightforward and quite easy to accomplish. A company shouldn't have any issues with the setup process.

A company could benefit from bringing on a reseller or consultant. They could help with the process.

When we procure enterprise storage solutions, the license is always be bundled with the deal. There are different licenses for encryption, replication, deduplication, data reduction pools, et cetera, and all should be included in one bundle when we buy a new solution. It's part of that deal.

We are a customer and end-user.

We are using the V9000, and currently, we have deployed SS9100.

This is a financial Institute. As per regulatory compliance, we cannot share our customer data. We keep our confidential customer data on the cloud that is deployed on-premises.

Overall, we have been happy with the solution. I would rate it at a nine out of ten.

We are running private clouds for various customers on top of VMware with IBM on the storage layer

Performance is not a problem anymore and the space available is enough for about 5 years of operations. Wa are now busy with cross dc failover which will use the capabilities of this system extensively.

A valuable feature of this solution is the metro/global mirror for synchronous/asynchronous copying of data between data centres.

ISCSI/ISER Bandwidth is at 25gbps. Would be nice if that can keep track with the bandwidth currently available in new dc networking deployments.

We are a 100% satisfied with the stability of the solution.

The system can be expanded with additional trays. Current we have about 2,000 users on the system. They are mostly end users, database administrator, and developers. 

We are happy with the technical support.

We used hyper-converged storage in the past and the reason we switched was because the reliability was not as good as we had hoped with the bigger workloads.

The initial setup was straightforward and it took us about two days to implement it. We did everything ourselves.

The biggest lesson we've learned so far is that hyper-converged storage is good for smaller workloads, but the re-syncing after a failure will be a problem for big workloads.

The IBM System is top-notch and offers all the features we need to keep going for another 5 years.

Our primary use case for the solution is virtualization.

The most valuable feature of the solution is compression.

The marketing could be improved. Additionally, awareness in the marketplace could be improved.

We have been using the solution since it was introduced and currently use the latest version.

The solution is stable. I rate it an eight out of ten.

The solution is scalable, and approximately 100 clients are utilizing it. I rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

We have had a good experience with customer service and support, but it sometimes takes a while to resolve an issue. I rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward and took three days. I rate it an eight out of ten.

We implemented it with a vendor team and in-house staff.

I rate the pricing an eight out of ten.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. The solution is good, but its marketing awareness can be improved.

The valuable features are high availability, compression, and a failover mechanism. It's a very highly available storage solution.

It can virtualize external rewrites and you have a single pane of management. Instead of having multiple managements for different storage products, you can have a single pane to manage everything. The external virtualization is a really good feature.

High Availability – any server, physical or virtualized accessing the IBM Storwize can be in a high-availability configurations. This will make applications available all the time to provide service to the end users.

Real-time Compression – it reduces storage costs by compressing it up to 80%, therefore saves rack space and power consumption.
Storage Virtualization – it can virtualize different storage from different vendors, thus helps ease of use by providing single pane of management and device drivers.

Storage Tiering – automatically migrates data between different storage tiers depending on the usage of the data. This will help reduce costs by avoiding to purchase dedicated SSD or Flash drives to applications that needed performance.

It allows the company to be highly available and be able to recover the storage if there are some issues.

I would like to see the snapshot management embedded within the GUI. Right now, the snapshot management, if you want to schedule, or do multiple scheduling in a day, you have to use scripting. Customers are not highly technical, and they really cannot do scripting. If IBM could include the snapshot management within the interface, then that would be good.

I know they have a flashcopy manager, but it is extra software, an additional license, and some customers don't like to add addition costs to their infrastructure. If IBM could create, or include snapshot management within the GUI, that would really be helpful.

I have a lot of customers who are really interested in the Storewize product and they are using snapshot management. It's really good to have this kind of investment, because this product is really good.

It's a very stable product. I like it, and I have a lot of customers using it.

Storewize is scalable, especially the V-7000. The GEN-28 can scale up to 20 expansions. It's highly scalable and you can have a maximum of 8 nodes.

I have used the technical support on occasion, but not a lot. It's good. As long as you provide them with the correct information about the problem, they will respond very quickly.

The initial setup was easy, very easy.

I highly recommend it.

The most important feature that our customers are very interested in is the virtualization. Being able to have the flexibility as they grow, without having to just lift and replace everything that they're doing.

Where it's moving into now is a unified set of advanced features that they're able to lay across their enterprise, without it being different in every single product that they're dealing with.

The virtualization, the flattening, and those advanced characteristics of the product are really what our customers have gravitated towards on the V9000.

When it comes to our benefits from this solution, a lot of it comes down to simplicity. If we take a look at a lot of these complex IT solutions today, they're very hard to maintain and to administer. However, the V9000 and the investment that IBM has made to the user experience, makes it very easy for our customers to be able to self-maintain and self-administer their own environment. They don't have to always go to a storage consultant or have to call into support. That's been very beneficial to our clients.

We think that IBM has to continue to invest in additional data reduction capabilities which are on their roadmap. Being able to use flash most efficiently, where the least amount of data is physically being stored on the V9000 is really where IBM needs to make additional investment. They are doing that.

The stability's been rock solid. If we take a look at the V9000 and the base of what it's built on, it is the heritage of IBM Storwize. This goes back to IBM SAN Volume Controller or SVC. We're on a very mature code base and it is a code base that's been very extendable.

So over the years, they've been able to inject new capabilities in the product line while still keeping the product very stable. We've had customers who have been through multiple upgrade cycles over the life of the product with no issues at all.

The scalability of the V9000 product is really where it shines. Being able to add additional capacity to the unit, without having to come up with a different management of lots of separate units, has been very beneficial to clients.

That idea of starting small with their current flash rollout and then being able to grow as the budget allows, has been very beneficial to clients.

We've been absolutely happy with the technical support.

From an IBM perspective for technical support, they really love the V9000, especially when you're going to do some enhanced service offerings that IBM has.

When it comes to using things like the technical advisor, being able to have more of a concierge service with support has been very beneficial to clients.

A lot of our customers were previously using either all disk or hybrid solutions for their storage. Moving towards an all-flash V9000, allowed them to take performance management and stop having to worry about that in their everyday tasks.

Moving to an all-flash array allowed them to spend more time dealing with application integration and dealing with their end users. This is rather than having to do performance management and moving data around. The all-flash array made their life a lot simpler.

We were involved with all aspects:

• Initial design
• Setup
• Rollout
• Integration with the different operating systems and different hosts through the storage fabric

It was straightforward. What we really like about the V9000 is that we're able to take implementation engineers who had experience with other members of the Storwize family.

They are able to take those skills that they learned within other product sets and directly translate those to the V9000.

They are able to very quickly come up to speed on the product without having to learn a brand new skill set.

From a CAS Severn perspective, IBM continues to be our premier supplier of storage. We do have a lot of experience with other vendors in the industry, including Pure Storage, EMC, and HP.

When it comes to recommending a vendor, the entire lifecycle of supporting a system is important. That's everything from design, to implementation, to ongoing support. IBM provides a strong package on all three aspects of the lifecycle of the equipment.

Folks that are looking to implement the V9000 really should take a look at the simplicity that an all-flash array can bring to their environment. They should look at the efficiency of being able to take skills that they might have learned within other Storwize products and be able to directly translate those into the V9000.

To summarize: Similar interface, similar support interaction, and the way they can take knowledge that they previously had and be able to directly translate that to their all-flash array decision.

Storage virtualization. Two Storwize V7000 systems in a cluster configuration serve about 500 servers (physical and virtual).

• Storage virtualization simplifies space management. 
• Thin provisioning saves space.
• Copy services simplify environment replication.
  

Virtualization, because it abstracts hardware and allows to use other storages (old DS series) as unique storage spaces.

The cluster should be improved because non-disruptive failover was supported only on a few operating systems.

The interface management is simple and intuitive. It has been replaced with other arrays successfully, that were larger in size but more slow. We were able to reduce the footprint of space used in GDCS and also the power consumption.

Speed (IOPS/second) – It is most vital for applications that need low latency and high speed for transferring the data. 

We have some large databases that are accessed at the same time by more than 10,000 users. In the past, it was on 15K disks. After we migrated them under the IBM Flash Array, the overall IOPS rate has increased by 30% and its latency is lower. The customers are very happy with the new solution.

The storage size vs the storage price needs to improve. The total storage capacity vs price is still quite high for the IBM Flash Array. It will sound better in the following years, as and when the price will be more accessible/economical.

In our environment we also have the XtremIO All-Flash Storage Array, but it has some scalability issues. That was the main reason why we focused on buying more IBM Flash Arrays.

We also use ServiceNow and SNIA Protocol; it’s present and working good with all the IBM products.

Since we have multiple IBM equipment in use, the installation process was straight forward.

Usually IBM doesn't sell the product directly, so each installation is carried out either with the vendor or via the GDC technicians. We as storage admins configure the storage system.

This product has the best quality, performance and cost.

We have not had a good experience with this platform.

The installation and service was very good. But, the services to help us migrate our NAS data from an existing EMC VNX system has failed once already with ACL permissions issues specifically on how the V7000U NAS works. I have had to involved IBM Global Support by actually contacting high level Vice Presidents. As of January 26, 2016, we have not successfully migrated our NAS data.

It has not improved anything yet within our environment.

They could increase the maximum storage capacity so more disk shelves can be added.

We've had it for eight months, but still have not successfully migrated our NAS data yet. Also, it contains drives for AS/400 system and Exchange Archive data.

Software functionality issues that were not known until our NAS data migration failed. We hit further ACL Permissions issues as well.

We have performance and spiking issues of which IBM applied a work-around patch.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

6/10

It's average.

We switched to Pure Storage because of the way the system performs and does everything in 32K sizing. The IOPS are high and the support and customer server are exceptional.

Fairly simple as it took about two hours to rack and get on-line.

It was installed through one of our partners who did a good job.

We feel that the pricing is fair and the licensing process was easy.

We evaluated EMC (which we already had), DELL and HP.

The sales team was great as was the technical team. I now feel the EMC VNX and NetApp are both better NAS systems. If I had to do it over again, I would stayed with the EMC VNX for NAS.