IBM FlashSystem Reviews

We do replication and other things. For us, compression, deduplication, and the space saving features are important to us. The price to value ratio, for us, was good.

We are using replication for our backup solutions and it costs us less compared to other solutions. For space saving features, it definitely saves us in a virtual environment in terms of space and money.

There is a limit on the flash memory for fresh copy, i.e., a memory limit. So there are limits within the software, for buffering and then caching. We want to see those items increased.

There are a lot of bugs and they are still adding features in the product. The system has matured from 6.X to 7.X. It has improved a lot, but it still has room for more improvement.

This is not an enterprise solution, and our team doesn't sell that. That's how it is. So we shouldn't expect an enterprise level solution. Whatever is marketable for the segment serves a purpose.

You can scale out as much as you want. We use up to four in a cluster, four to six nodes, so it's working fine for us.

Other than bug fixes, the technical support is really good. If you actually hit a bug in your environment, it's definitely going to take time. It has to be escalated all the way to the third level and then to the engineers. It's a little bit challenging over there. But overall, it's okay.

We were using SVC and DS83. We are actually using that app, but for us, IBM Storwize V7000 was more cost effective in our environment. That's why we chose that specific product.

The setup is straightforward if you want to do a basic setup. But if you want to do customization specific to your environment, then you need to be more intimately involved with it.

We are not, at this point, considering other vendors. These days, it's specifically cost which is more important when selecting a vendor. We are not part of a financial environment or something like that where we would have a lot of penalties. So for us, as long as it is stable enough, we are okay. So for us, it is stability and then cost.

If they are cost conscious and have a release table solution, this is probably the best solution available.

The hardware is the best feature of the product. We have not seen many drive failures. The V9000 all-flash is constructed well.

It has not made us more efficient from a deployment standpoint. That is why we have been migrating to a hyper-converged solution.

• The overall code.
• The ability to have built-in reporting to understand the health of the array.
• Stability within the code.
• Clear upgrade paths for the code.
• Support is horrible. It takes weeks to get simple answers. We had a LUN down and support refused to get on a WebEx without the array being completely down.

We have had the system for over two years.

We currently have about 1PB worth of storage that spans IBM Storwize V5000, V7000, and V9000. This is across two datacenters.

We had stability issues as stated elsewhere.

The V9000 can only hold two shelves of flash, at which point you need new controllers.

Technical support is the worst in the industry, as mentioned elsewhere.

We previously used EMC. We switched based on cost.

Setup is not difficult.

Not worth the money.

EMC was evaluated.

There are far better products with better support for less cost.

The hardware itself is good, but the code that runs on it is not good at all. We have LUNs that will just go offline, and support has no clear answer. Each result is a code upgrade that does not resolve the problem. There is no built-in historical reporting. That is a costly add-on for an already overpriced system.

The cost was low when we purchased it.

It has not improved how we function.

ACLs should be more compatible with other NAS-based platforms. Some of the platform limitations need to be addressed.

I have used this product for two years.

We have had to bounce services several times over the past two years.

Technical support is horrible. IBM doesn't have much expertise with the product.

We were using EMC VNX.

The initial setup was fairly simple.

We migrated from EMC VNX.

We performed a new enterprise storage refresh and kicked out EMC.

We moved from EMC VMAX to Pure Storage All-Flash, and then got this product to replace EMC VNX.

DON'T use it unless you have a new and small NAS environment.

The easy GUI is the most valuable feature.

As I said When you Sync V7000 to Another V7000 that are located in my case more than 10km and with DWDM as dark fiber , first you need license for long distance from brocade.
Than you can change the buffer credit on the SAN switch to at least 49 . the point is that you need to test the parameter to get the best value .
This depend on the line you have and also check if there is any limitation from your DWDM Provider.

The problem is that if the buffer is not configured correctly this increase the latency because of this delay and the retransmit .

I have been using it for four years.

Remote copy performance impacts latency on the local storage: Must be configured with the correct buffer credit.

Customer service is very good.

Technical support is very good.

We previously used a different solution. We switched because Storwize v7000 is easy to manage.

A vendor team implemented it.

It has helped us to achieve a good response time for users.

The latency and speed of the array and also its ease of management were beneficial features.

The most valuable features were the performance of the array, i.e., very low latency and high IOPS. Plus, the management interface is very easy to use.

The several major crashes resulted in the entire weekends being lost in rebuilding the array and then for restoring the data. This was caused each time by a memory card failure and the array's inability to use a spare card. The array level RAID does not seem available.

It was great with TMS, however it has been terrible ever since IBM took over.

On one occasion our support renewal had not been processed, which we found out when we tried to get support during an array failure.

Previously, it was a great experience with RamSan-400.

The setup is very easy.

We implemented it in-house. It is very straightforward.

Since the takeover by IBM, the prices are much higher.

For resilience, you need to buy two of these devices per site as RAID only applies within in each memory card, i.e., the whole array is not resilient if a card fails. Failover would only be possible for a standby device.

The interface management is simple and intuitive. It has been replaced with other arrays successfully, that were larger in size but more slow. We were able to reduce the footprint of space used in GDCS and also the power consumption.

Speed (IOPS/second) – It is most vital for applications that need low latency and high speed for transferring the data. 

We have some large databases that are accessed at the same time by more than 10,000 users. In the past, it was on 15K disks. After we migrated them under the IBM Flash Array, the overall IOPS rate has increased by 30% and its latency is lower. The customers are very happy with the new solution.

The storage size vs the storage price needs to improve. The total storage capacity vs price is still quite high for the IBM Flash Array. It will sound better in the following years, as and when the price will be more accessible/economical.

In our environment we also have the XtremIO All-Flash Storage Array, but it has some scalability issues. That was the main reason why we focused on buying more IBM Flash Arrays.

We also use ServiceNow and SNIA Protocol; it’s present and working good with all the IBM products.

Since we have multiple IBM equipment in use, the installation process was straight forward.

Usually IBM doesn't sell the product directly, so each installation is carried out either with the vendor or via the GDC technicians. We as storage admins configure the storage system.

This product has the best quality, performance and cost.

We have some processes in our company that were cut in half by using the FlashSystem.

The most valuable feature is that is supports a high IOPS rate. We have a heavy workload. Some storage systems are not as good in terms of IOPS. We are using just the FlashSystems. It is virtualized using SVCs. We are using normal physical disks like Storwize for not-so-hot data. For hot data, we are using FlashSystems.

I think the performance of most of the application is improving. Our users now say that it's much better than it was before. The storage speed is perfect.

It has room for improvement in the area of stability. The firmware is upgraded frequently. We need to update it maybe three or four time a year because of the new features and bug fixes. On one side, it is good; but, on the other side, it is not good because we need to upgrade within one year or they will not support the firmware. It would be better if they supported what we already have for longer.

We sometimes had a problem with some bugs in FlashSystems. One time, one FlashSystem was burnt up. There was some smoke and the data was damaged. We saved it because we have redundancy in the cluster. At the cluster level, we make copies and replicate to the other site for disaster recovery situations.

We upgraded one FlashSystem two months ago because it was not full. We had to buy two modules, if I remember correctly. This was quite a complicated upgrade. IBM brought us new FlashSystems. Because it is virtualized, we moved the data from this one, upgraded it, and moved the data back; but it was done dynamically without any outage.

With the virtualized FlashSystem, we hope for improved response time, but the availability is improved. It is also flexible in that we could upgrade it dynamically, move the data, and so on.

I think the guys in our country are very clever in this. We can count on them. When we call them, they respond very fast and bring the new parts on time. The repair time is written into the SLA. Support is available 24/7 and I think the repair time is within 24 hours.

Before we were using IBM DS8000s. The application was consuming a lot of IOPS with a lot of hot data.

We needed a higher IOPS rate. We chose the FlashSystem because the response time needs to be very fast. When the people working on the application feel that the response time is not good, or there is not enough storage space for the amount of data they have, then we have a flexible enough infrastructure to dynamically upgrade them to the FlashSystem. We do this planning on a yearly basis. We design the infrastructure solution according to the project requirements. Sometimes, this requires an upgrade to the FlashSystem.

The initial setup we did ourselves because it is very simple. We did the direct mounting of racks and the hardware. The software design is virtualized using SVCs.

We considered other options, but I don’t think there were any other options with such intensive processing as the FlashSystem. We have a lot of tiers; and for other tiers, we have other vendors. I think that the IBM FlashSystem is the highest quality available in the market. For us, considering the whole solution, it was best for us.

We are very satisfied with IBM's prices, I think.

I would advise colleagues to use FlashSystems. It's a very good solution for us to achieve our goals.

When I evaluate vendors, for me, the historical relationship is very important, and definitely the communication. With IBM, we know the vendor well.

We used to provision storage from different devices. This requires a lot of manual effort to synchronize all hosts with each storage unit in an environment. IBM SAN Volume Controller helps manage all storage units from a single interface; while IBM FlashSystem provides high performance for our Tier 1 applications.

IBM FlashSystem has an easy to use GUI, similar to the IBM Storewize family, which make it one of the best flash storage systems in the market.

We use the IBM SAN Volume Controller to provide a single management interface for virtualized storage. It is easy to manage many storage devices from a single controller.

The two products should be unified and have a service processor to restart devices remotely. For example, NetApp has devices which include a service processor in nodes, which could be used to restart the nodes remotely. IBM should implement something like this.

Both products are basically for block-level access. There should be a series that also has a file level and block-level access together, which would make it unified.

The stability of the system is fine.

We did not have any problems with scalability.

We receive excellent technical support.

I currently use both NetApp and IBM. NetApp storage is cost efficient, but IBM is way ahead of NetApp in terms of block-level access.

The initial setup was easy.

Pricing can be considered as per market competition. As I am seeing less projects using IBM storage these days, the only reason seems to be the cost of support.

We had a contract with IBM, and now we are also using NetApp storage.

Go ahead and implement it. IBM storage provides you everything that you’ll need for a block-level architecture, as they have many different products which provides you with a variety of options to meet your needs.