IBM FlashSystem Reviews

I am using the private deployment model. 

The ability to create LUNs and modify them is the most valuable feature of this solution. It has a very good storage system. 

Enterprise data storage needs improvement. They should create a feature for data and file storage. 

It is stable. 

It has good scalability abilities. 

They have good technical support. IBM has offices in Ukraine that have knowledgable engineers. They speak Ukrainian. 

The initial setup was easy, understandable, and straightforward. It's a very good product. 

The price is fair. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten. Engineers think that Dell EMC has better storage than Storwize. 

We have a clustered network using an IBM 3650 for our server. Our environment is entirely in-house, and we are not currently running anything in the cloud.

We are planning to migrate from our current system, as the equipment is getting old.

The support is simply not there, so it needs to be improved.

This solution needs a management console where we are alerted to issues and can report them, or escalate them through email or another method. If something happens to our storage, for example, then we will be notified, and we can report it through the console. 

Stability-wise, this solution is fine. However, we have been having some trouble with our cluster breaking. 

This solution is scalable to an extent. 

We have been facing many issues with support. The main dealer here for IBM is not giving us any support. They are useless fellows, and if you raise any IBM issues they are not serious about them. We are fed up with this situation, which is why we are migrating.

The initial setup of this solution is complex.

We are currently in the stage of migrating our environment to a Huawei solution. It is similar to what we have now, being on-premises and nothing related to the cloud for the time being.

We were having too many support issues with IBM. Within the past couple of months, we were having physical server issues, including problems with the RAM.

My advice to anybody who is considering this system is not to do it. I do not recommend it. It is a big no.

The biggest complaint that I have about this solution is the support. It is important to have responsive support. We had a RAM issue, and the RAM is the heart of the server. I had to escalate the ticket and wait for thirty days. During that time, my server was totally down, which caused our productivity to suffer. It was a big disaster.

The hardware may be good, but I cannot rate this solution very high because of the support.

I would rate this solution a five 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.

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.

In the Unified model it supports SAN and NAS solutions very smoothly. Also, there is a back end command line interface which is very comfortable for scripting, especially for snapshot and business copy solutions.

V7K has better I/O performance than some other storage, such as HPE XP12K, HPE EVA (4K and 8K) and IBM DS (3K and 4K). Because of this, I have seen improvements in long-term business operations (like billing run in a telecom company and end-of-month operations in a financial institution).

It should increase sociability with respect to number of disk shelves and capacity.

Overall, five years.

No.

No.

Eight out of 10.

Switched to decommission older hardware (XP12K and EVA from HPE).

Very simple setup, especially for FC SAN network.

I cannot comment on this as I used it as an IBMer.

I compared the product with IBM DS8K. Due to a huge gap in price, and not having very high-level needs, I selected V7000.

This is highly reliable storage. Other than not having very high IOPS requirements, RAID5 would be good enough for application and database LUN. But before creating the RAID group/array, the implementer should have proper projections.

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.

The most valuable features of all the products are the high performance and micro latency.

I'm a Solutions Architect, so I don't have any from my company, but I do some projects for some clients where the unique performance and micro latency of the flash provides real- time information that is used to make strategic decisions.

Because the product is already mature, it doesn't need any improvement.

From about two years when IBM first bought FlashSystem. I knew some things about it when it was Texas Memory System,

I didn't have issues with models 900 and v9000, but on previous versions, like the 720, I had some questions.

It is stable, because it's use an ASIC in it's development. Therefore, that does the job and it doesn't have software at its core.

It has great scalability.

It's very good because IBM always make sure they have good customer service.

Not so good in my country because they only have a few people with great knowledge about FlashSystem.

I've never used another solution.

The initial setup was very simple, because IBM have a default interface for all their storage systems.

I did the implementation in-house.

It's a little expensive, so it's you need to have a good architect involved to explain it and make sure the project goes well.

Have good knowledge about the clients business.

We use it for data reduction technology. We are using this solution on-premises, and we are also providing services to customers.

I like most of the features. Its speed, performance, and availability are valuable. We are implementing the data reduction technology the most.

Their technical support needs improvement in terms of reachability for the clients and response times. They should be more responsive and have more online platforms for support. 

They should make more technical information available online. There could be some kind of documentation community.

I have been using this solution for three or four years.

It is stable.

We are only using one box or enclosure for now. We don't have experience with scaling the systems. Our companies here don't need big systems for now.

Their technical support needs improvement.

The initial setup is very simple.

Its price is very good.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate IBM FlashSystem an eight out of ten.