What is our primary use case?
The solution is primarily used to monitor storage systems and Fibre Channel switches and report on their performance, availability, and general health.
What is most valuable?
The ease with which you can drill into whatever individual component, or overall system that you want to look at in terms of performance, that's, to me, the most valuable aspect.
If there are performance problems you can drill into it and look at every single grueling detail. If you need to, you can export the raw data and look at it in whatever other way you may wish to look at it.
Technical support is quite responsive and helpful.
For the most part, the solution is stable.
What needs improvement?
The pain points were, and may still continue to be, the fact that there are multiple components of the product which are installed, you might say, somewhat individually. There's an overarching package that says, "Install this. Install that." However, it's got a database which is, of course, Db2 for IBM. It's got other facilities that are used in the product, for example, to generate reports and what have you. Instead of pushing a button and wait and you're done, there's a lot of effort to get it right.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've probably been using the solution for 15 years at this point. It's been well over a decade. I've used it for a while now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I couldn't really gauge it against any others. There is no software that's stable enough for me. Software should just be written well enough so that it doesn't fail, however, that's an impossibility. Today, you have Android or Apple that are just constantly flaky, and it seems like people don't develop code with the same rigorous results as they used to. When you pay a million dollars for a piece of code, you expect it to work.
That said, even if their programs of products break, they will be there to fix it with you. It is somewhat laborious sometimes to get from there from here, however, as far as the stability and what have you for that product, I would say it's stable. Every product has a few bugs here and there. I haven't run into them personally very frequently at all even though I know they do exist.
How are customer service and technical support?
You don't have to wait for some kind of service pack or whatever. You can get a fix for it if they can identify what the problem is, of course.
Their principles are, "If you've got a problem, we will fix it." They are very responsive and helpful.
How was the initial setup?
Both installing and applying maintenance to it can get a bit complex. It's not exactly straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
I am capable of installing the solution for my clients.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The licensing is expensive. That said, they offer a product that is the same code but it's running in a cloud environment, however, most of my customers are federal customers, and the federal government doesn't want their data to egress their site and go into the cloud uncontrolled. Even though there's no personal information or anything that a cybersecurity issue would be concerned with, still, it's frowned upon.
What other advice do I have?
We're a business partner with IBM. I used to use it as a customer, however, now, I'm not a user of it anymore. I sell it and I install it, or I'm an engineer that works for an IBM business partner at this time.
Originally, it was a lot of IBM products - a number of features and functions and facilities that were brought together under the umbrella of a single product, however, it has matured and grown over the years. When I first started using it, it was not even a product, per se, it was a couple of products, and now it's a single monolithic product that's an umbrella under which a number of other things exist. And then there's also a cloud-based variant of this code, as well, known as Storage Insights and Storage Insights Pro, one of which is freely offered by IBM.
The product suite does support a number of different software and hardware vendors as far as being able to monitor them. However, if you have supported systems and you don't plan to purchase any other systems and you need the functionality, it's great.
I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.
