IBM Spectrum Virtualize Reviews

My view of how the product has aided my customers varies. The replication functions have assisted in the relocation of whole data centres from one site to another, the snapshotting is of value in providing several versioned recovery points for some other customers. The virtualisation of the back end storage gives performance improvements over the direct attachment of the back end storage, as storage pools spanning a large number of drives can be configured, along with the caching algorithms. The migration capability across back end storage appliances has been of particular importance to some of my customers.

There are several good features, many of which have similarities to that of competitive offerings from other vendors (replication, snapshot). Compression is quite useful, but for me the most useful has been the virtualisation of back-end SAN disk systems, from almost any vendor. This enables easy upgrading and updating of storage, across vendors, by moving the storage pools between the back end disk systems. Migration from configurations where servers have storage provisioned from older SAN disk systems to newer storage systems is almost seamless using image mode migration techniques, with only a short outage of the servers. The hybrid storage pools, with SSD and the hard-disk drives, together with the Easy Tier feature, give high IOPs performance for most loads, without the customer needing to purchase all flash storage solutions.

Adding features for data deduplication is one area of improvement.

I have encountered stability issues in situations when the customer-provided AC power has defects. A newer version of the firmware resulted in storage nodes not updating or starting.

No issues with scalability encountered.

Currently, support is generally good, as there is an IBM support web interface to lodge calls. Once the call has been initiated, responsiveness depends on the support contract conditions. The technical expertise, once reaching level 2 or higher, is good.

Going back to the SVC edition of Spectrum Virtualize, I do not recall any comparable alternative storage virtualisation solution.

Like any storage implementation, the details of the complete setup of this solution requires a good understanding of the customer requirements. The base setup of the product itself has varied over time, but has always been fairly straightforward.

Generally the bundled licensing is more cost effective and gives flexibility to the solution. Linking into the Spectrum Suite can also be advantageous, but depends on the scale of the enterprise.

Recently with the many storage virtualisation solutions now available, consideration of other products depends on the size of the customer and their requirements, and what vendor/technology provider may already exist in their organisation.

Spectrum Virtualize has a long history, with the original SAN Volume Controllers (SVC) using early versions of the software. The software on these appliances has had several name changes over the years. I have worked on and been involved with pre-sales, design and implementation on the early SVCs from 2005, and more recently the Storwize implementation, V7000s, 5000s and 3700s. So, product 2145-xxx, 2076, 2077, 2072 and so on. These are all IBM appliances, with their Spectrum Virtualize software running on them.

Obtain a well-qualified technical specialist/architect to review the design and setup if many features such as replication, snapshotting and compression are part of the solution.

• The ability to use different storage products in the back-end
• Having only one code base for mirroring and all other enterprise features

When you use different storage vendors, you may not get what you want. With this solution, you can put these solutions under Spectrum Visualize and use them, because they will look the same in IBM storage.

I would like to see data obligation which I think is already on the road map.

We have been using this product for eight years.

Stability on our side is very good.

Scalability is also good. It could be improved, but we will see if they will improve it.

Technical support is sometimes good and sometimes it is low.

Eight years ago, we had a different product that was not very well designed. It is no longer on the market. It was LSI Storage, but we switched.

We had a business partner doing the setup for us, but it is complex. This is a special product. It's not a standard storage product, so you have to know a lot about your environment.

We evaluated FalconStor and DataCore. This was based on installing software somewhere on the server. This was software for storage from a very early version in 2008/2009. We don't trust them, so that's why we chose an appliance level from IBM.

When looking at vendors, we look at their ability to perform and give good support.

Difficult question. You have to look at your environment and what you need to do there. I think Spectrum Visualize is a very good product to address a lot of problems.

It is easy to deploy and use. It's very calm. The GUI goes right across the entire platform.

I would like to see more information about the heat map. That would give us an easier view from an architect's standpoint in terms of:

• A better idea of where we have to put data
• What we have to build-in with virtualization
• The ability to grow it
• The ability to make it more scalable.

Stability has been good. Stability has been high, actually. We've had some minor issues, and IBM has been quick to fix those. I don't have any issues with the stability.

Scalability is good. And of course, it works across multiple, different technologies including flash and regular drives. Scalability is definitely good.

Technical support at IBM is actually not as great as it used to be. It seems like IBM has decreased the number of people who can support this environment. We find that locating someone who knows the product line, or more of that product line, is becoming limited.

I'm not the one who invested in this solution, but multiple clients have invested in it. There were business requirements from a technology standpoint, there was performance that they needed, and there were different degrees of availability that they needed.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy.

We deal with multiple vendors. We go from Cisco, to IBM, to EMC when we talk about clients. But I don't know how to answer this question from the perspective you are asking about. It is from a different point of view.

I'd recommend it, for sure. It offers supportability, reliability, and some scalability. The vendor is there as a partner.

The most valuable feature for sure is the abstraction of the storage. In this way, we can basically stick any storage solution that we want on the back-end. Then we've got a rich feature set above that. We can basically move the data where we need it to be. We have a lot of control. It's a good product.

We're a fairly small shop, as far as the number of IT people that we have. The tool allows us to basically multiply our staff to be able to get our work done. We don't have to rely on consultants. The feature sets are usually ahead of where we need to be.

There's always room for improvement. A little lower price would always be nice. Otherwise, nothing major.

Stability has been very good. We're more on the conservative side, in that we are not going out and downloading the latest and greatest code. We are a couple of releases behind, but it's been very stable.

Scalability has been really great. We've done refresh cycles every three years and the technology is usually ahead of where we need it to be, as far as scaling up is concerned.

Technical support has been pretty good. Maybe sometimes we don't get responses back as fast as we would like, but they have always been very professional and they follow through. No major issues. It's been good.

The initial setup was very easy.

For one, there are very few vendors that actually offer this product on the market. And nobody has the quality feature set that IBM has.

We were looking for quality, support, and service. These are all the normal things most companies look for.

I'm not sure. I'd ask them why they haven't done it already.

The simplicity of the product makes IBM Spectrum Virtualize a pleasure to use. With numerous islands of storage arrays, this allowed the company to effectively "pool" all the numerous storage arrays and encouraged a tiered storage approach. The speed at which snapshots can be created are impressive with clones copies taking longer due to the nature of a clone (VM) vs snapshot (copy of VM disk file). Google it. With all flash becoming the new standard, the IBM Spectrum Virtualize nodes boast an array (pardon the pun) of flash technology providing the performance where and when it is needed.

Where does one begin? Although the GUI from the XIV was used (in my view), IBM has polished and refined the GUI providing a pleasant and easy to navigate GUI experience. The IBM Spectrum Virtualize has gone from strength to strength but at the same time setting the bar for what's possible in the storage virtualization market. IBM have just recently released the new SV1 nodes which boasts integrated flash and processor power, thus providing far better response times overall.

Cheaper pricing and GUI should be developed in HTML5 as opposed to Java.

No issues at all.

IBM Spectrum Virtualize loves scalability.

Customer Service:

IBM service is good with no language challenges when speaking to call center agents from different countries and cultures.

Technical Support:

On a scale of one to five (one: terrible to five: excellent): four.

No previous competing products. The challenge was to consolidate islands of storage arrays.

The most challenging parts of the implementation were the initial cabling configuration. With many storage arrays needing cabling and multiple paths needing to be cabled using fibre optic LC cables, zoning also proved to add significant effort but this is to be expected and is a once-off exercise. Although regular commissioning/decommissioning of server/backup infrastructure is part of storage administration duties, the initial setup was far more intensive as an entire storage infrastructure needed to be redesigned. Once the hardware infrastructure was in place and the software configured to best practice (IBM implemented in order to ensure best practice was adhered to).

Combination of onsite and vendor team.

Vendor team was professional and well-skilled.

Not applicable.

Liaise with both the vendor and their partners. You'd be amazed at how much you can score.

No. Competitor products just did not offer the features we required.

HTML5, please.

It gives us a lot of flexibility and ease of management. We have all the tools in one place. We pretty much do all our storage using the Spectrum Virtualize. It makes it really easy for us to manage all our storage.

We have a lot of different tiers of storage. We have enterprise all the way down to applications that don't need that much performance. It gives us the flexibility to move things in between these. I think a lot of the benefit is just the ease of use of the tool itself.

We are pretty happy with the roadmap that we've seen with the stuff that is coming.

In more recent years, we've been very happy with stability. We went through a lot of bumps with the earlier releases of code.

We've also been very happy with the scalability.

We are not happy with the technical support.

In the last seven or eight years, I honestly think that IBM's technical support has gotten way worse. It's so hard to get hold of someone. There's no more live troubleshooting. In the old days, we used to have live troubleshooting. Now it is a matter of sending them logs and "we'll get back to you. Send us logs and we'll get back to you". It gets pretty frustrating, especially when you're supporting applications that are 24/7.

All they can do is say "send us logs and we'll get back to you". So we are not happy with the support at all.

This solution was actually chosen before I got there. I wasn't a part of the decision making. I was a part of the implementation, but not the decision making.

I was involved with the initial setup. It was pretty straightforward.

We've compared it to other platforms like EMC. This product is really intuitive. It is really easy to use. So from that point of view, it's really good.

I would say, definitely give this a look.

In the past, we've also looked at other solutions. So far, especially from the management point of view, being the administrator for the systems, it can't be beat. I think the tool itself is really intuitive. It's really easy and has a lot of features. Ease of management is the biggest thing. We've been pretty happy with the performance.

Probably the biggest hit, though, is the support.

The most valuable feature for is its ease of use.

I have nothing to suggest regarding improvements. It's fine.

Stability is pretty good.

Scalability is good.

Technical support is sometimes good and sometimes okay.

Give it a try.

Not having to take any kind of outage to do a storage data migration.

It improves a lot of functions for our clients. The high availability is the best thing. I have been working with it for 15 years, and it's one of the most stable products that IBM has.

There are a few little GUI issues and stuff like that, but nothing major. I would like to see better layout of some stuff. They kept on moving things around from version 7.4 to through version 8. They've made it a little difficult for some customers to find things.

The stability is good.

The scalability is great too. It scales from a single I/O group to up to four.

Technical support has been great. I've been using it for 15 years.

Next to the DSA1000, it's the most enterprise thing that IBM has for storage.

Make sure that it really has all the things that Spectrum Virtualize has, where you can upgrade the hardware and the software and everything without taking any kind of outage. And that's for infinity, not just for the life cycle with that version of the product, but for each subsequent version. It's all done on the fly.

When choosing a vendor, I look for support.