IBM Spectrum Scale Reviews

I am a pre-sales engineer in an IT company and we provide a variety of solutions to our clients. IBM Spectrum Scale GPFS is one of the products that we resell and I have experience with.

We provide IBM Spectrum scale as a high-availability storage solution. One of our customers is in the business of making and transforming videos and they use different platforms such as Linux, AIX, and Windows. Using this solution allows access to all of the files on all of these platforms from a single place.

The most valuable feature is the ability to share files across different platforms. It is platform agnostic and not attached to IBM, AIX, Windows, or Linux.

The pricing and licensing model for this solution are complex and it is sometimes difficult to explain it to customers.

It is not always easy to sell this product because certain aspects seem complicated for the customer.

I have between ten and fifteen years of experience with this product.

This is a stable solution.

Scalability is very important and it is one of the reasons that we chose to sell and market this product. Our clients vary in range from small companies to big banks that have a lot of servers, so this solution works regardless of the company size.

I do not speak with technical support, although I am close to the installation process and I do not recall any problems that required contacting support for help.

I have not personally installed this solution but it is my understanding that it is pretty simple. There have been no problems that I have heard of.

The deployment can take a few days. It depends on different phases because you have to meet with the customer and it may influence what you are going to do. Installing it is very quick and then you move into the testing phase, which takes a little longer.

We provide our customers with assistance during the deployment by way of knowledge transfer. This can last a few days. If they ask questions then we give them support.

The licensing model is complex and depends on factors such as the number of processing cores and the amount of storage.

This is a very powerful product. It can be optimized for performance, although our clients do not use it with this aspect in mind. Over the past five or ten years, IBM has developed this solution and it has improved a lot. With the latest release, I think that this is a very complete product.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use it for distributed file systems.

We use it primarily in our SAP organization. It allows us to have a centralized location where we can put our files and distribute them among different applications.

We can have multiple systems within the same file system. The performance right now on the file system is better than NAS.

Overall, the stability is pretty good. We do have some issues where Spectrum Scale does not work as expected. We have seen our Spectrum Scale servers go down unexpectedly, but because we have a cluster, it does not take out the entire organization.

I do not think it is applicable.

Technical support has been very helpful. They provide us with pretty good solutions that we can implement moving forward.

We were not using anything before this solution.

It was implemented before my time at the company.

We also evaluated a NAS solution.

We primarily use the solution for a parallel file system. I have one big file system for a thousand or so users.

The high performance of the solution is its most valuable aspect. If you compare it to other storage solutions, it's much better.

The pricing is pretty good.

The solution would benefit from being simplified.

The scalability could be a bit better. It needs to be more flexible when it comes to expanding.

It would be helpful if there was a graphical user interface that could walk you through the deployment process. The instructions surrounding setup aren't the best. They need to be more step-by-step.

We've been working with the solution for a couple of years at this point.

The solution is pretty scalable. I'd rate it a ten out of ten for scaling. 

I've contacted technical support in the past. I've had a couple of cases that I've had to pass to them to assist with, and they were great. They are knowledgable and responsive.

They are also really helpful with a variety of things. I remember once I had to download some software to demo, IBM technical support gave me a demo without charging me. It was a very nice gesture.

The initial setup is pretty complex. It's not too straightforward. 

To deploy it, it takes about one week.

I'd rate the deployment process at a six out of ten. 

I didn't need a consultant or reseller to assist in the initial setup. I handled the implementation myself.

The pricing isn't too expensive. It's reasonable.

We're partners with IBM.

We use both on-premises and hybrid deployment models.

I'd rate the solution overall at eight out of ten.

I don't know too many other products, however, I'd recommend either IBM or NetApp to others to use if they need a similar solution for their company.

I use IBM Spectrum Scale to improve performance in data processing tasks. I have employed it in various projects, including a major project at Leading German Bank focused on the improvement of the FDW (Finance Data Warehouse). The primary goals were to reduce elapsed time and costs for regulatory reporting.

I find IBM Spectrum Scale to be an excellent product known for its fast parallel file system. It achieved the best results when integrated with IBM hardware. Even though it is complex, it provided significant performance advantages in large-scale data management. Its fault tolerance mechanisms and integration capabilities make it popular for extensive AI initiatives and data processing tasks for organizations like Daimler Benz and Bosch.

There can be improvements in fault tolerance and making erasure coding faster. 

Additionally, it would be beneficial to have example configurations or applications that assist in setup and configuration.

I have used it for nearly four years in various projects.

I find it stable, however, erasure coding can slow down the file system.

It scales well, however, it requires significant resources to avoid slowdowns from erasure coding.

I received excellent technical support. Customer service in my projects, particularly with the Leading German Bank project, was excellent.

Neutral

Previously, I evaluated and used Hadoop with Leading German Bank from 2016 to 2019, along with other products like Apache Spark. 

However, I found IBM Spectrum Scale gives better performance results.

The initial setup is complex, especially if trying to avoid erasure coding, as it requires more discs. Avoiding erasure coding can significantly increase costs.

IBM Spectrum Scale is very expensive with complex pricing models usually based on the amount of storage used or the number of servers. Using Excelero for mirroring storage helped reduce Spectrum Scale licensing costs by about half during the Leading German Bank project.

I evaluated Weka and Apache Spark, however, I found IBM Spectrum Scale to offer better performance for large-scale installations.

Although I used to be a big fan of Weka, due to recent limitations and lack of product improvements, I prefer to recommend IBM Spectrum Scale over others. 

I rate this product ten out of ten.