IBM Spectrum Virtualize Reviews

Benefits for us are pretty much the simplicity, ease of implementation, and the ease of maintenance. Flexibility and responsiveness to customer needs are key. They are the things that allow for ease of disaster recovery with global mirror, which we use. So it's just flexibility and ease of use which are the key things that I like about it.

It helps us to reduce time, reduce complexity, and be more responsive to requests instead of taking an hour to do one volume. Now I can do one volume in less than two minutes. So that keeps the business moving forward and keeps up with the pace.

The most valuable features are the simplicity of use, the flexibility, and the options included. I mean, it's just a big time saver.

I already discussed possible improvements with some of the guys from Hearnsley. One of our frustrations is when you go to expand volumes in a global mirror environment, you have to stop everything in order to expand. So that's one of the things.

It's on their roadmap to do, but as I understand, it's very complex. So that's one of the big features that we would like to see. And I'm sure other customers have been asking for it for years and years. That's probably the biggest thing that we can see.

Stability has greatly improved since day one. It's much easier to implement. It's not so white knuckle when you're doing upgrades and things like that. So they have come a long way.

There's a lot of flexibility to it, especially with the new hardware coming out. Software always comes out with new and improved options, features, or fixes. So they're doing a real bang up job.

Overall, technical support is good. It is sometimes frustrating when you supply all the information you think they need upfront and they come back and say, "Hey, we need this." So, there's some frustration to it.

We used to have the Shark ESS, where you had to actually go in through their GUI manually to apply and create volumes at that level. You then had to have them mapped. It was more cumbersome and time consuming.

The initial setup was overall pretty easy. And that was years ago, pretty much when it first came out. Overall, it was pretty easy to set up.

We didn't really consider any alternatives. We're pretty much an IBM shop, so it was like the leader when it came out. We value compatibility and price, obviously.

I'm a technician. I don't care about price per se. I am more involved in the technical advantages, ease of implementation, and stability. They are probably the key factors for me.

I would absolutely recommend it. I would ask them, "Why are you waiting?"

• Reducing our costs: We used to have all tier DS8 storage. Even though we had Spectrum Virtualize in front of almost all of that, we still had almost all DS8.
• We've been able to bring in multiple tiers, flash systems, and V7000s

• We can migrate that data, watch it with the tool, and know that the data is not on the right tier.

• We can migrate that data again, place it in the right tier, and reduce our overall cost.

The most valuable feature is probably data migration so we can bring in back-end systems and swap data out. Our end-users, and even our other system administrators, don't have any idea that we've moved storage around.

It's got full features, so we can compress volumes. We can do thin volumes and we can change them on the fly.

Nobody knows that we've migrated that data around. We can ship it off to our DR site. This is all under the hood of Spectrum Virtualize.

We don't have to worry about what type of block is underneath it at the time. It's all being done at that layer.

A feature that is already there, if I remember correctly, is encryption. I think it is coming out, or it is already there.

That is a key management piece. Right now, we're doing an encryption on the back-end flash systems on the V7000s. It's simple, with just a USB key into the controllers.

The integration would be an option that we would like, but I understand that's not how it's going to be implemented.

NPIV is also coming. I'm not exactly sure what benefit it will bring. Initially, that sounded like that was going to be kind of cool. Even though we can migrate data without our end users really knowing it, they do see a path failure, and NPIV would take care of that for us.

The feature that's kind of missing is getting us up to the point where we can help the application owners see where their data is at, understand it, and potentially help us breakout.

We've used easy tiered functions in the pools, so we're trying to help step that storage down. If they can get visibility somehow into that data, help us further break that down, or better tier and separate out their data, that would be helpful.

I know that VMWare has that function, where they are taking multiple tiers themselves and placing subsets of data, as opposed to whole blocks.

For the most part, stability has been really good. Like anything else, the more you use it, the more times you're going to run into a bug. We've certainly done that.

It seems like scalability is OK. I mean, it's kind of hard for us. We're on a four year refresh cycle. So we stay pretty current with the hardware itself. We are adding in things like compression accelerators, and now with the new SV1 nodes, more cache, and we are going to more adapters. Of course, we're always willing to split out workloads onto separate stacks. So it scales pretty well.

Support has been pretty responsive. Software is coming out all the time with PTFs to fix, so staying on top of that is important.

We've run into the seven three code. Specifically, we hit the cache performance bug. We were right on top of that and had to do another upgrade to clear that.

We've also had a bug with the fiber channel cards. Again, by the time we were implementing, it was a known issue. It was not anything that we've really had to wait on, but not something that we were aware of at the time of implementation.

Get a demo of it. If you haven't seen the product and you have not had somebody step you through all of the features and all the things that you can do with it, then I think it would be really tough to see where adding another set of controllers in front of your storage is benefiting you.

You might be thinking, that's just another hop and it's another delay in getting to my data. I think you will see the value of this solution once you:

• See it plugged in
• Understand what's going to come with being able to move, compress, and virtualize your data in one interface

• Are able to manage all the data there, and not worry about the back end-stuff
• Are able to carve up volumes very quickly to the end users

Integration with Spectrum control and a kind of self-service provisioning is good. It is something we're looking at turning over and then deciding about all the data migration that can happen in the back-end. We can look at that request, and then decide. Perhaps we didn't have enough information when we started, and then we can move it on the back-end. We don't have to worry about getting into the weeds, necessarily, from day one.

• Capability of putting lots of heterogeneous storage systems all in one management pane
• Being able to substitute them out and move between them
• The ability to put it all in one management and fix them into something that's much more usable.

It's just been handy with a lot of customers that have, over the years, developed a mess of storage.

It's all about manageability. The product lets you manage:

• Different sorts of systems
• The same host multi-pathing driver
• The same feature set: snapshots and replication, regardless of what system it is

Spectrum Virtualize gives you the same functionality and all the same management through the same GUI, regardless of whether you are using EMC storage, Hitachi storage, or IBM storage.

I’d like to see deduplication. IBM announced during Tech U that Storwize is adding it in the upcoming Q3 2017 code update-- same as what exists on the A9000. Duplicate blocks of data write references to pre-existing block of data, instead of re-writing the same data multiple times, thereby saving storage capacity.

For the vast majority of the time, it's absolutely awesome. I had a couple isolated problems with reliability, mostly related to replication, but I have been able to work through them.

The scalability is actually one of the great things about the product. It is designed to be able to give you scalability with the virtualization of multiple storage systems. It's very easy to scale.

I've had to use tech support quite a lot of times, because I support a lot of customers. Consultants support a lot of customers. Once you get past Level-1 support, it's generally top notch.

Good luck finding anything that does half of what it does. When looking for a vendor, I look for reliability. I've had lots of good experiences with it. It's been a very reliable product and the feature set is something you can't get anywhere else.

The most valuable features are disaster recovery, replication, and multi-site setup. Being able to quickly recover in a disaster and knowing that your data is protected across multiple sites is important.

The benefits are protection of data, usability, and performance speed in a high capacity setup.

We found a gap for smaller clients. Right now, the only offering is a huge, rack-sized storage device, and no more. There was nothing that came after the DS-1600. I'd like to see a smaller form factor for smaller clients.

The product is very, very stable. It is much more stable than the open system configurations that we've worked with. It has the highest stability that we have seen.

The scalability is very good. It is about even with the open system offerings.

I have used technical support. The process to open problem management requests should be faster. Especially in a high pressure situation when things are going wrong. It would be good to just have a quicker way to get the problem out there and get a response.

The initial setup was complex, but that's what keeps me employed. So, it's quite all right.

It's the best mainframe storage available. It is much better than EMC and other competitors.

My advice would be to familiarize yourself with the levels of virtualization and understand how the product works at a lower level in order to implement it.

It's flexibility. It gives us the ability to move the data across multiple storage devices. That makes our lives as the implementers easy during data migration.

It makes data migration straightforward. And on the customer side, there is downtime, but it is very minimal.

I would like to see some features from the Spectrum Control, such as long term reporting. Right now, the reporting on the Storwize and Spectrum Virtualize is only for a few days. You really need another plug-in, like in Control, to get the historical performance data.

The only thing I really don't like about Spectrum Virtualize is the application area. But it has nothing to do with the product. Most application issues come from the link provided by the telecoms.

If they could make the application much easier, that would be great. But it's okay.

The stability is fine. I've been working with Spectrum Virtualize for two years. I saw them encounter problems and those problems are minimal. It's pretty much stable.

It is scalable, especially the VH8 and the SV1. You can locally attach storage to the SVC nodes. It's now more like Storwize. The scalability is head-on.

I have been working with technical support. Before moving to a business partner, I worked with IBM. There were good times and there were bad times. But pretty much, they delivered.

I have had this storage platform for 10 years. I saw the progress of IBM stepping away from conventional hardware storage and going to software. IBM did pretty good research and development on it.

When selecting hardware, I look for technical experience.

I was involved in the initial setup. Most of the time, I dealt with the planning. I start with the planning rack and stack configuration, teaching the customers and then do documentation. The implementation was easy.

I did not look at any alternatives.

I would recommend it. IBM is not the best in the disk storage industry, but they pull out some good tricks.

The product is very flexible, and it is very easy to add any additional product from the background; so we can use any multi-vendor backend storages and virtualize the product. It becomes a powerful virtualization engine for migrating data, for provisioning data and any type of data migration is easy.

As I have mentioned, the benefits of this solution are that it reduces time.

Basically, we can clear the storage for faster/medium/slower access. We can make three-tiers and migrate the data easily.

The IBM Easy Tier works on different pools of disks and flash. Going forward when everything is Flash storage and no more spinning disks, the Easy Tier is not required. After attending the IBM Tech U, IBM is focusing on all flash storage devices. This is good and hopefully IBM pricing will have an edge over the competition.

Stability is awesome; it's very stable.

The scalability is absolutely outstanding and we can scale as much as we want.

IBM technical support is awesome.

Basically, we had different islands of storage from different vendors. We wanted a product to integrate all of them together. So that is why we found, IBM Spectrum Virtualize, as the product.

They come to us every time when there is an initial setup, they help us with the process. The setup is very straightforward.

We have another EMC brand storage product also, but we are using both of them.

Of course, the product is the most important criteria for vendor selection.

This is an absolutely outstanding product and anyone can use it with ease. It can do everything.

To be able to seamlessly migrate storage sub-systems underneath Spectrum Virtualize.

Being able to migrate storage without impacting the client.

The ability to migrate between clusters, like between Spectrum Virtualize clusters, seamlessly.

Very good. Very stable.

Scalability needs some work in some areas. The number of volumes needs to be increased drastically.

Technical support is very good.

We were using Direct Attached DS8000 before and we switched for scalability.

It was pretty straightforward.

Don't go with EMC. Go with IBM. Go with this product. Absolutely. It's a very good product compared to the competitors.

The most valuable feature is the abstraction layer. Basically, it gives us a single pane of glass between our host and our back-end storage, regardless of what the back-end storage actually is.

Beyond that, I would also add the flexibility of the management itself.

It has significantly lowered management cost, overhead, and everything else. We now have better performance as well.

There is third site replication. Right now, we're limited in our ability to migrate data between clusters. Like I said, we had to scale wide rather than tall and continue to protect our data while we migrate. Additionally, if we wanted to set up a third site for additional DR, we don't really have a good option for that.

Overall, I would say that stability is very good.

There are some caveats with scalability, such as volume count. We are highly limited by volume count at this point in time. We have to grow wide rather than grow tall.

There are some caveats here, too. Sometimes it's been very, very good. Sometimes we have had sessions where we're beating our heads against the wall. It depends on the call. Part of it is has do with us getting better with the technology.

It would be really nice to be able to escalate faster. By the time I'm calling IBM, it's already become such an issue that their Level-1 and usually their Level-2 people can't help me.

We did not use any previous solutions that I am aware of, but this one has been lacking since we first brought it in. It's a wide matrix of considerations. Performance, price, support, availability, and scalability. It's a wide matrix.

The initial setup was a bit of a paradigm shift. Once we got past that, it was very straightforward.

We looked all over the place. But we found what we wanted with this solution.

Absolutely. Period. Do it.