IBM FlashSystem Reviews

We have some processes in our company that were cut in half by using the FlashSystem.

The most valuable feature is that is supports a high IOPS rate. We have a heavy workload. Some storage systems are not as good in terms of IOPS. We are using just the FlashSystems. It is virtualized using SVCs. We are using normal physical disks like Storwize for not-so-hot data. For hot data, we are using FlashSystems.

I think the performance of most of the application is improving. Our users now say that it's much better than it was before. The storage speed is perfect.

It has room for improvement in the area of stability. The firmware is upgraded frequently. We need to update it maybe three or four time a year because of the new features and bug fixes. On one side, it is good; but, on the other side, it is not good because we need to upgrade within one year or they will not support the firmware. It would be better if they supported what we already have for longer.

We sometimes had a problem with some bugs in FlashSystems. One time, one FlashSystem was burnt up. There was some smoke and the data was damaged. We saved it because we have redundancy in the cluster. At the cluster level, we make copies and replicate to the other site for disaster recovery situations.

We upgraded one FlashSystem two months ago because it was not full. We had to buy two modules, if I remember correctly. This was quite a complicated upgrade. IBM brought us new FlashSystems. Because it is virtualized, we moved the data from this one, upgraded it, and moved the data back; but it was done dynamically without any outage.

With the virtualized FlashSystem, we hope for improved response time, but the availability is improved. It is also flexible in that we could upgrade it dynamically, move the data, and so on.

I think the guys in our country are very clever in this. We can count on them. When we call them, they respond very fast and bring the new parts on time. The repair time is written into the SLA. Support is available 24/7 and I think the repair time is within 24 hours.

Before we were using IBM DS8000s. The application was consuming a lot of IOPS with a lot of hot data.

We needed a higher IOPS rate. We chose the FlashSystem because the response time needs to be very fast. When the people working on the application feel that the response time is not good, or there is not enough storage space for the amount of data they have, then we have a flexible enough infrastructure to dynamically upgrade them to the FlashSystem. We do this planning on a yearly basis. We design the infrastructure solution according to the project requirements. Sometimes, this requires an upgrade to the FlashSystem.

The initial setup we did ourselves because it is very simple. We did the direct mounting of racks and the hardware. The software design is virtualized using SVCs.

We considered other options, but I don’t think there were any other options with such intensive processing as the FlashSystem. We have a lot of tiers; and for other tiers, we have other vendors. I think that the IBM FlashSystem is the highest quality available in the market. For us, considering the whole solution, it was best for us.

We are very satisfied with IBM's prices, I think.

I would advise colleagues to use FlashSystems. It's a very good solution for us to achieve our goals.

When I evaluate vendors, for me, the historical relationship is very important, and definitely the communication. With IBM, we know the vendor well.

We use this solution for application and database coding.

This solution is really user friendly. It also offers good performance and is highly reliable. 

This solution could be improved by offering greater amounts of storage. 

I have been using this solution for three years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution.

We switched to using IBM because we wanted an AI based solution. 

The entire hardware implementation was done by IBM.

I would recommend this solution to others because it is reliable, high performing and user friendly.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

The V9000 incorporates both the Spectrum virtualization layer as well as flash technology. It does it in such a unique manner that it provides super fast response times. There's low latency for the customers. It's very simple and easy. It uses the same interface as all the Storewize products do, so it's a very short ramp-up time for customers.

Speed. I mean it's flash. It's speed. The benefit is to reduce the amount of workload and transaction time. When customers have put data on the V9000, their response times go down and they can do more work within a shorter span of time.

They've already got one. The clustering host came in 7/8 code, so that's coming in. I would like to see deduplication come very soon. That would be really good to have deduplication built in, not only with compression, but also have deduplication with it.

The stability is awesome. It's based off a mature product line, Spectrum Virtualize. It's a long standing product. It's been around since 1999, so that core technology is there.

The flash system has grown from the old TMS days. It's a well-known and proven technology, so they've combined the two well-known and well-proven technologies to form this solution. It's just very solid.

Scalability is also good because you can add an additional FS900 behind it or you can stack in other V9000s and cluster them together. You can either go deeper or wider with your solution set. It really just depends on how much performance or workload insulation you need, whether you go wide or you go deep.

I haven't used technical support and none of my customers have had to call technical support on a V9000 yet. That kind of speaks to the product itself. It is a relatively new product, but the field time is still good. The resiliency is there.

Our customer was a legacy Storewize customer. We knew that when they were announcing their combination of Spectrum Virtualize and flash that it would be a winning combination. You can't go wrong with that kind of combination.

Our company decided that we needed to train up fast and get on top of it quick. Because of that, we were able to turn out some of the first in the Eastern area.

It can be complex if you don't follow the guide. Follow the instructions that IBM sets forth in the Redbooks and make life simple.

The implementation was very easy. It's almost a "set it and forget it" kind of product.

Read the Redbook.

The most important thing when selecting a vendor for me is how well the vendor works with me. It's a partnership, not just a sales, “here's a product” kind of thing. If you partner with us, you really get in, dive deep with us, and work through the solutions if needed. That's what makes a good vendor.

IBM FlashSystem is the best solution for storage virtualization. 

The solution should improve its pricing and the mechanism in the reduction pool. 

I have been using the solution for 15 years. 

IBM FlashSystem is scalable. 

IBM FlashSystem's deployment is easy. You can manage everything from the GUI. IBM provides replacement and spare parts. 

IBM FlashSystem offers easy management and durability. I rate it an eight point five out of ten. 

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.

The solution is like a storage device that is for our old organized cloud infrastructure. We are using it as storage for all our databases, for the data we are preparing for in developing our own applications, or for running some infrastructure services. 

The solution is very flexible.

It's a very fast product. It's not slow in any way.

The product is very, very easy to configure.

The installation is nice and easy.

The stability of the solution isn't great. We have had a lot of issues with discs over the years.

There should be better integration with utilization platforms.

The pricing needs to be more competitive.

I've basically been using the solution for ten years or so.

It isn't really stable per se. We've had some problems over the years. We experienced some problems with the backplane, from what I recall. There were issues switching the discs. We had a lot of issues with discs. Of course, the problems didn't really happen in production.

We have about 100 users on the solution currently.

We've dealt with technical support in the past and we were satisfied with their level of service. However, we no longer pay for support. We have enough knowledgeable people in house to handle everything.

We are actually in the process of changing solutions. We're going to switch to Lenovo's DE4000.

The initial setup was not complex at all. It's pretty straightforward and easy to handle.

The deployment was very fast as well and may have only taken about a day or two.

We had a team of three that handled everything. They don't just handle the storage, however. They're handling the servers and network as well.

We didn't need to use a consultant when we were implementing the solution. We did everything in-house and with our own internal teams.

We initially paid for licenses and support for I don't remember how many years. Later on, if you want to extend the support you needed to pay for the license. However, due to the fact that we are rather experienced, we decided we didn't need to renew the support.

Currently, on the market, I see a lot of different vendors who are offering the same functionalities or even better options for the same or less money. They should try to be more competitive.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a six out of ten. If it was less expensive and a bit more stable, I would likely rate it higher.

We use the FlashSystem to store our company data that is used in production systems.

The maintenance service and support from IBM is very good.

It could be easier to implement.

This is an expensive product and if the price were reduced it would be better.

We have been using the IBM FlashSystem for a few years.

This is absolutely a stable product. However, we will probably not continue to use it in the future. One of the reasons for wanting to switch is the price. Also, technology is evolving and we will probably adopt a hyper-converged solution.

This storage solution is scalable. It is used in production and not directly linked to users. It runs various routines and batches, although the developers and IT interact with this. Together, this is about 50 people.

Technical support from IBM is very good.

We did not use another similar product prior to this one.

The initial setup is quite complex. To get it in place and configured took about one week.

We deployed with the help of an integrator.

There are three administrators who handle the routine maintenance and the hardware is well maintained by IBM.

In summary, this is a good product and I absolutely recommend it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The performance of the All-Flash System is very good. There is more enhanced performance and data production in the solution, which I appreciate.

They should reduce the cost of the solution and offer smaller storage sizes to target small to medium-sized businesses.

The solution is not easy to implement. It takes a lot of time to study the product and it's a little complicated in general.

The solution should offer integration with the cloud on the next upgrade. It might already be there but we have not integrated that, or gone for that upgrade. It would mean we could keep a copy of our data in the secured cloud, whether it's Amazon or Azure. 

So far, stability is fine. It's been almost three years now and it's working perfectly well. I don't have any hardware issues or any other performance issues. I've had only good feedback about the system.

It is scalable, although it's very expensive. In maybe another three or four years we'll be adding more storage space and hard disk flashes to the existing system. Right now, we have between 500-600 end users on the application.

When you buy IBM products you subscribe to the technical support as well, so as long as the technical support and subscription are valid, they will support you. We took a five-year support subscription; we have two more years of the product subscription left. As long as the support and subscription are there, they are happy because if there is any technical issue or some format upgrade, IBM is there to support you.

We previously used DDN storage. 

We switched because IBM has got a good reputation and they gave us a better price. From a technical and reputational standpoint, IBM was superior.

The initial setup was a little complicated, especially the storage part of the implementation. The solution itself is complicated as well. 

There are multiple applications which require better performance as well as space. Both were a big issue. Some features were expensive, but we had to meet the storage requirement as well as the performance for these and had to design a solution to meet these two requirements. 

It was an implementation handled in phases, so it took about four to five months to deploy the complete solution.

We went phase by phase and then we did a performance analysis at the end of each phase to make sure that the storage performance was not going down and we were getting the best performance out of the bots. After every phase we had and throughout each phase, we had multiple performance and penetration tests as well; this was all mandatory.

We had about five people helping with the implementation. For maintenance, as long as you have an experienced person or team, you only need one or two people. 

We had IBM's main partners do the deployment. IBM was also involved in the implementation. 

They were very professional and experienced in these complicated implementations. It was was a very good experience because they knew what they were doing.

We are seeing an ROI. We are getting better performance and all the applications are working fine. Our users are happy, but performance is the key. The All-Flash System was chosen specifically for performance and we are getting that.

In our case, we calculated the storage capacity and performance we would need for five years and we bought the product outright. After five years we might have to scale the product, but then we will need to invest in the upgrade. Right now I'm not paying anything because everything from support to subscription was paid upfront. Their upgrades are free as well, so we are getting new features for the product, from the website.

I didn't evaluate another solution before choosing IBM.

We use the on-premises deployment model of the solution.

In terms of advice, I would give to others, I would say that you need to have the proper training for the solution. You need to train your staff on this product because it's not a straightforward implementation or a straightforward product, so you need to have some knowledge about the storage and how it works. Then plan and size your infrastructure prior to your deployment. We planned for five years in advance, and we are happy with the solution because we did our homework prior to implementation. 

I would rate this solution eight out of ten.