IBM FlashSystem Reviews

For me and for the operations team, the ease-of-use of the GUI is the most valuable feature. It's really easy to understand. It's really easy to do tasks. That's what I like most. The performance is really good. From an operations perspective, definitely the ease-of-use stands out. Compared to other products and other vendors, it's much, much easier.

Time to value. You finish things a lot quicker. I can provision the storage a lot faster and find problems a lot quicker. The fact that I can SSH in and do CLI commands where some of these other vendors don't let you do it is a big deal. I can write custom scripts and do things a lot quicker. The ease-of-use is a lot better with this product.

There's always room for improvement. Adding deduplication would allow us to get more bang for our buck, basically.

Overall, stability is really, really good. We ran into some issues with compression, but it was because we were trying to overload it. So if we don't do that, it runs really, really well.

We have it architected to keep it at a certain level. But if we needed to, we could scale it pretty easily because it's virtualized storage. There's a lot of flexibility with it.

Technical support is really good. Because we're a bigger company, they get to us a little bit quicker. There's more on the line for IBM, so they really treat us well. It's been pretty good. We get good feedback quickly.

We needed the performance of the applications. Payroll applications are very I/O intensive and flash systems are a perfect fit. It makes sense.

I was involved in the setup and it was easy. I've done those for years.

We looked at pretty many vendors. Anybody you could name, we looked at them. We have multiple vendors in the environment, not just IBM. But for our really critical, high performance apps, we put it on the V9000.

Just be careful if you're going to try to use compression, because of the specific issues we've had. If it's a high performance computing environment, just keep it thick provisioned. Get the best performance from it. Don't try to save and then screw up the user experience.

If something fails, it's not going to bring down the application. V9000 is redundant through and through, so it's a great product.

When selecting a vendor, stability, ease of use, and resiliency are the most important things.

The ease-of-use and scalability are the most valuable features.

The common interface has improved the way we work. We don't have to learn more than one interface to manage the storage arrays.

So far, it seems pretty stable. We haven't had any major issues.

We find the product very scalable. We've been able to implement many storage arrays in our environment with very little effort.

We have used technical support. So far, we haven't had any bad experiences with them. We have been able to get the proper support we needed.

When selecting a vendor, I want stability, years in the industry, and overall stability.

The setup was straightforward.

Make sure you look at a wide variety of products. That way you can come to an intelligent decision on what platform you are going to go with.

The V9000 incorporates both the Spectrum virtualization layer as well as flash technology. It does it in such a unique manner that it provides super fast response times. There's low latency for the customers. It's very simple and easy. It uses the same interface as all the Storewize products do, so it's a very short ramp-up time for customers.

Speed. I mean it's flash. It's speed. The benefit is to reduce the amount of workload and transaction time. When customers have put data on the V9000, their response times go down and they can do more work within a shorter span of time.

They've already got one. The clustering host came in 7/8 code, so that's coming in. I would like to see deduplication come very soon. That would be really good to have deduplication built in, not only with compression, but also have deduplication with it.

The stability is awesome. It's based off a mature product line, Spectrum Virtualize. It's a long standing product. It's been around since 1999, so that core technology is there.

The flash system has grown from the old TMS days. It's a well-known and proven technology, so they've combined the two well-known and well-proven technologies to form this solution. It's just very solid.

Scalability is also good because you can add an additional FS900 behind it or you can stack in other V9000s and cluster them together. You can either go deeper or wider with your solution set. It really just depends on how much performance or workload insulation you need, whether you go wide or you go deep.

I haven't used technical support and none of my customers have had to call technical support on a V9000 yet. That kind of speaks to the product itself. It is a relatively new product, but the field time is still good. The resiliency is there.

Our customer was a legacy Storewize customer. We knew that when they were announcing their combination of Spectrum Virtualize and flash that it would be a winning combination. You can't go wrong with that kind of combination.

Our company decided that we needed to train up fast and get on top of it quick. Because of that, we were able to turn out some of the first in the Eastern area.

It can be complex if you don't follow the guide. Follow the instructions that IBM sets forth in the Redbooks and make life simple.

The implementation was very easy. It's almost a "set it and forget it" kind of product.

Read the Redbook.

The most important thing when selecting a vendor for me is how well the vendor works with me. It's a partnership, not just a sales, “here's a product” kind of thing. If you partner with us, you really get in, dive deep with us, and work through the solutions if needed. That's what makes a good vendor.

For me, it's the redundancy that the machine provides as that's the most value that I get from this product.

One of the benefits is that when it's doing data extents, it moves them faster than what I was being able to move previously, i.e., by using a flash system.

There is a need for more help with the commands because, from version to version, they change; so what I used to use back in the different version, I can't use now. Thus, it would be helpful if they improve that aspect.

For me, it's stable.

The product is scalable.

I don't use the technical support as much because it's quite stable and scalable.

We weren't using any other solution. Our storage architect is the one who decided for us to have it.

The setup was straightforward, it is pretty easy and I can do it with my eyes closed, if I wanted to.

Reliability is the most important aspect while selecting a vendor.

I would recommend to use it.

The valuable features are snapshots and snap logs. We only use those on our flash system. We value the performance of the system.

Our automatic banking systems have become twice as quick with flash storage.

I don't know about improvements. Maybe having independent snapshots. For now, when we make snapshots one by one, they depend on each other. If we delete the first snapshot, then we can lose the others. We really need functional snapshots which are independent of each other.

The stability is not very good. Over the course of the last two years, we had two incidents with flash storage when we lost our data. We have three flash storages and we lost all the data on two of them. That was not very good.

Scalability is good.

Technical support is good enough. Their advice was mainly to upgrade our firmware and restore our backups.

Test all of the products as you evaluate them.

The valuable features for us are the extra add-ons, such as the FIM provisioning, the compression, the disaster recovery capabilities, and the storage pooling functions.

Most of my customers love it because it's easy to use and easy to manage. They can get their applications up and running very fast. They can buy it at a good price.

I would like to see the connection to cloud service providers, although I think that's already there. There's not much more that I can tell you. There are some issues on a firmware level. It's not very transparent. The option to connect to a Cloud storage provider seems to be available but there is not much detail on how it's implemented.

As a field engineer I’m used to how the systems work. Some customers however have expressed to me , well for lack of better word “anxiety” at not being able to see more of what goes on in the background (as an option). They would like a more detailed progress of the firmware upgrade process. (i.e. NVRAM,controller, etc…).

AHV is Acropolis Hypervisor – A relatively new Hypervisor, robust and stable as VMware vSphere, has built-in advanced analytics and powerful operations, Self Service Portal and components for DevOps included, managed by a single pane of glass (Prism) via HTML5 and it is free of charge – That is why Nutanix is so advanced and revolutionary.

The challenge here is in order to replace massively Install base of VMware vSphere they need to expand their ecosystem with ISVs (i.e. F5, PaloAlto, Citrix, TrendMicro etc.) to provide a wider range of solutions running as a virtual appliance (vApp) just like VMware did years ago.
Currently there is an ecosystem but I think it is around 30-40 providers.

So far, it's been a very stable platform. There have been some issues lately with some bad codes, but for the most part, it's been very stable. It is something that I can recommend at any time.

Scalability has improved so far. It seems like every year there are more and more expansion added to that.

I have used the technical support and so far it has been very good. The response was a little bit lacking last year, but it looks like it's been improving.

Just buy it. Support for sure is important when considering which vendor to go for, as well as ease of use and the track record of the code base.

The benefit to our organization is primarily the capacity savings. It compresses the data so we can see something like a four to one compression.

The most valuable features are, of course, the virtualization of the storage, the performance, and the compression.

With regards to the IBM V7000 storage system, where we have multiple tiers of storage, a heat map would show I/O distribution across the tiers of storage. I'd like to see some type of heat map reporting on the management console. It would be nice to see something like that. It may already be in the new release, but I'm not sure. The current release may have that already.

We had no major issues with stability. It's pretty stable.

We actually upgraded it, adding expansion shelves. It was fairly simple.

I can't remember what I called the technical support for. Generally, I think their support gets the job done. It's sufficient. We have a premium support account with IBM, so we have a dedicated support person to help us get it through.

I was involved in the initial setup, but we had a business partner that did the actual physical connections. I helped with some of the configurations. It was pretty straightforward.

Our shop historically had been an EMC shop. We had the IBM storage put in just a couple of years ago. I believe management brought it in based on price, in order to get price competition between the vendors. We were primarily looking at considerations of cost, reliability, and customer service.

I would just tell them to give it a try. Benchmark it and compare it with the other vendors. Talk to some customers about their experiences.

It allows our organization to provide a more timely response to our customers.

The speed of the unit is its best feature. It performs very well.

I would like to see bigger modules. That's about the only thing that needs improvement.

So far, it's been very stable. There have been no issues.

It is very scalable.

I have used technical support and they have been very good.

We were having performance issues. We decided to find the lowest latency device and this was it.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was very straightforward.

We only evaluated EMC. This was a better performing product.

This is probably the best unit you're going to find out there.