IBM FlashSystem Reviews

We use this solution for application and database coding.

This solution is really user friendly. It also offers good performance and is highly reliable. 

This solution could be improved by offering greater amounts of storage. 

I have been using this solution for three years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution.

We switched to using IBM because we wanted an AI based solution. 

The entire hardware implementation was done by IBM.

I would recommend this solution to others because it is reliable, high performing and user friendly.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

Our primary use case of this solution is deduplication.

The feature I find most valuable is the deduplication because the nature of the data that we are using in our current environment has a lot of replicated data. You tend to create a copy of the same system multiple times for different reasons. So if you use a flash system that is deduplication-enabled, you end up using less capacity. 

I would like to see an improvement in the handling of large amounts of rights. An automatic flash system that doesn't do compression or deduplication will flush through the rights directly from the host to the flash modules. It doesn't keep them in the cache. For compression and deduplication systems, they have to do compression, deduplication and the memory and cache for the controller. So they have to keep the data there otherwise you will find yourself stuck with performance issues.

The solution is currently hosting our core banking system and we haven't faced any stability issues, so it is very stable.

I have only four boxes now, so it's not the best scalability you can get, but it is still acceptable. Since we are hosting our core banking on it, we have about 20,000 employees working on it.

I will rate their technical support an eight out of ten. If you send them a question, it takes them ten days to come back to you with an answer. But besides this, we've had no other issues. 

We use EMC devices and IBM FlashSystem concurrently, but we have a different evaluation for these products. They are not the same because our critical applications are hosted on IBM FlashSystem. The less critical applications are hosted on VMAX.

The setup of the IBM devices is really straightforward. The actual deployment for the IBM FlashSystem took about seven hours. One of our partners was responsible for this, and we are very satisfied with his performance.

My advice to others would be to go for the big one, the A9000. It is a little bit more expensive but it offers a better total cost of ownership.

In the next version, I would like to see external virtualization. We are currently using LVC for external virtualization, and then we are using the boxes under LVC. If IBM embeds the LVC feature inside the box, I will only need to use the box and then virtualize the smaller boxes behind it. It will simplify my issues.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use it for our databases.

The speed, performance, and stability are the best features of IBM FlashSystem.

It would be good to have historical graphs showing data for a month. Right now, only live graphs are available.

Space reclamation also needs to be improved.

If you want to expand, you cannot expand the disc enclosure. You have to buy a total individual node. Sometimes, this is difficult because we are just looking for capacity and not a node.

I've been using this solution for the past two years.

It is a stable solution, and I would give the stability a rating between eight and ten.

I would rate the scalability at seven out of ten.

IBM's technical support has been good, and I would rate them at nine on a scale from one to ten.

Positive

The initial setup is easy, and I'd give it an eight out of ten. It took about half a day to set up IBM FlashSystem.

I would highly recommend IBM FlashSystem and would rate it at nine out of ten. It is definitely worth the cost.

We usually use Storwize for SMB customers, when they need small but reliable storage and fast response times. The performance is great.

The virtualization feature shortens the time to convince customers, to sell the solution, and to implement it.

From the moment we first see a customer and tell him that we are capable of doing this, until we do it, is a relatively short time. It's not going to be a long-term project, one that is going to take time for migration.

The user interface is very mature and it's becoming more mature all the time. They made it very easy for the user, very friendly to work with.

They have a virtualization feature and, even if you do not want to buy that feature, you can have it as a trial for two to three months. If you have another brand of storage from another company, you can use this tool to transfer all your data from the old system to the new Storwize system, which really shortens the migration time. This feature makes it much easier for us, as a business partner, to convince the customer that it can be done in a very short time, without any concerns about losing data or something breaking. That's one of the main features, and it works.

It helps me a lot when talking with potential customers who are stuck with all this data and, when they think of moving on to new systems, the first thing that bothers them is how to migrate all this information to a new system.

The other stuff that everybody sells today like tiering, which IBM calls Easy Tier, and FlashCopy, they have been around for years with the other vendors as well.

IBM gets a lot of input from the field, from system engineers, regarding what needs to be done and I believe they have a roadmap to try to constantly make the user interface more mature, as well as the options and tools. I trust they are doing good job on this.

I have looked at a few pages of a report I download and I saw a graph there regarding software-defined vendors. IBM is not in a good position on this graph. I know that they are working very hard on this, to make it much better and to get to a level where it's not only hardware but also software to provide a complete solution.

It's very stable as a single system or you can have it as a cluster for redundancy. We haven't had any issues, as far as I know, of it crashing or something that might make you suspicious about the reliability of the system. It is really reliable. The system engineers we work with have no doubt regarding any stability issues.

The scalability is fine, but it also depends on the type of customer. If they are a lower-level SMB and we can find out what their growth would be over the next year to two years, the availability of different models from Storwize makes us comfortable in telling customers that they can expand, without any doubt, for another three to four years. They don't need to worry about having to buy a new system in two years. Just upgrade and expand, that's all.

We have our own engineers trained by IBM and they are certified. I don't really recall many real issues. As I think back, there has been nothing critical where we had to ask IBM to contact their own labs to find a solution. Day-to-day, we have almost no need for IBM to show up for any problem or technical issues.

We are not in a good position to answer this question because we have worked with IBM for all these years. But I believe the way it came about was that we had a situation where we moved a customer from the competition to IBM Storwize. When we looked at the space it took, the performance, the pricing, the ease of working with it, and the migration - especially the migration, because when you want to move somebody from a different vendor to Storwize, people know it's hard work - it was easily done by Storwize and the software that comes with it.

As a business partner, when selecting a vendor the important criteria are the terms and conditions under which you can work with your supplier. In addition, it's the level of availability of the vendor when you need them, that they will respond immediately and are with you in the problem, hand-in-hand, to go solve the issues. One of the main issues is that you don't feel alone in the field, you have somebody with you. That is very important. If there is a problem, the customer also needs to be confident in who we are. We have a name and we are a business partner, but who is backing us up? When you go with a company like IBM, with all its experience, and with your own experience over all these years, that's a huge advantage.

I'm not involved in installation but, as far as I know, it's very straightforward, it's very easy. The main issue is that if you spend enough time on design, to find out what the customer really wants, that makes the implementation easier. That's where the emphasis should be. But as far as the system itself, the installation and putting it up, it takes no time. As far as I know, it's so easy.

The pricing has been very competitive for the last few years. IBM got to the point where they changed the pricing model and we feel very comfortable with the pricing. It's very competitive.

Over the last two years, IBM has been coming up with all kinds of interesting promos, especially for the SMB systems. That makes it very competitive price-wise and in terms of performance to help convince customers. It benefits both the customer and us.

We also do sell HPE if we have to, but IBM is usuall the first choice because of the pricing and performance.HPE has tried to work with us a lot and we tried to work something out with them, but each time we went back to Storwize, as it fits our needs and it's much easier to work with.

There really aren't any others really on our list. The Infinidat we have in our data center is for our own usage and our own services that we have in the cloud system. It's not something that we go out and install.

IBM is really open and available to those who want to find out what kinds of solutions will fit their needs. More than that, if it becomes more serious, with potential, IBM can provide you almost everything you need to see in its labs, to show you that the numbers they talk about are not only on paper but in real life. They are real and they can get to these performance levels.

IBM does a lot of customer setups in their labs and they invite the potential customers in and show them. But it's not for everyone. When we have a real potential customer and they demand it, that's what we do for them.

There are no 10s in the market right now. Everybody is evolving. As far as where we see storage going, it's not only hardware, it's also software-defined, and everybody is trying to reach a higher and very comprehensive level. And that takes time. It's not IBM, they need others to get to that higher level so we can have a comprehensive solution. It's not because IBM is an eight out of 10 and somebody is a nine or 10. It depends on the solution and application. In some cases, they would rate a 10, in others you might only give them seven.

The solution has good performance and the highest throughput ratio in a single enclosure. The most valuable feature of the solution is SCM (Storage Class Memory), which has the lowest latency value in the storage industry.

The solution's infrastructure technology level could be PCI Express 5 instead of PCI Express 4 for the next version.

In addition to SaaS-based enclosures, the solution's expansion options must include NVMe options.

I have been using the solution for a few months.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten for stability.

The transactions of more than 1,00,000 customers are running on this solution.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten for scalability.

We have previously worked with several store systems like Pure Storage, HPE, and NetApp storage. We switched to IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe because of its performance.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for the ease of its initial setup.

The solution’s deployment took around two days.

The solution has good pricing, but it is not cheaper.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Our entire company uses the solution for block storage. The solution is easily administered and maintained by four technicians. 

The solution has a very compact physical footprint that is high performance and easy to administer.

The solution allows for easy migrations from previous products or vendors via its embedded storage virtualization function.

The solution has a low number of NVME host attachments at 16 per IO group over the fiber channel. This is magnitudes lower than competing products. 

The 8.5 release for the 7300 and 9500 Flash Systems no longer allows IO group migrations. The replacement volume mobility is not as seamless as IO group migrations.

The Kubernetes CSI driver and the open-stack cinder driver still rely on SSH instead of native APIs for configuration changes. This reduces the limit of outstanding configuration changes that can be submitted to storage in bulk. 

The solution has not yet adopted Swordfish APIs and its SMI-S APIs are legacy and depreciated. Swordfish's are vendor-independent APIs made by the Storage Industry Association that allow you to manage storage no matter your vendor. These new generation APIs were released after ten years but IBM has not yet jumped on board. With a multi-vendor environment like ours, implementations are easier with universal APIs. 

Redhat Enterprise Linux clones such as CentOS, AlmaLinux, or Rocky Linux are not supported. All are binary compatible and should be supported because they are fundamentally the same product with different branding. 

It would be helpful to have a public page listing the minimum supported firmware levels for HBAs from different vendors. We have run into bugs with fiber channel cards that were solved with firmware updates. It was a laborious process to cross-reference vendor information so it would be helpful for IBM to provide recommended baselines for firmware. 

I have been using the solution for four years. 

The solution is scalable within reason. We lease it based on a four-year forecast and then return it when the lease term ends. The solution can scale up a bit but we haven't really changed configurations during our lease terms. 

Technical support is very proactive and we receive alerts when they are visiting the data center or asking for permission to change a part. We are alerted to part failures before we even have a chance to find them in logs. 

I rate technical support a ten out of ten. 

Positive

The setup is quite straightforward and easy. 

The rack mount took thirty minutes because we had to cable the device. Deployment took about ten minutes. 

I implemented the solution because it is an easy product to set up. It is a pleasure to occasionally get out of the office and assist the data center. 

Previously, integrators helped with installations but weren't utilized much. 

The pricing is competitive in our country. In some countries, IBM is the most expensive vendor but that is not the case for us. 

We also negotiated a 60% discount directly with IBM because we are the largest consumer of enterprise hardware in the country. 

Each solution has its pluses and minuses. Pure, Dell EMC, and all other products have room for improvement. 

IBM is a good vendor with an excellent product, but the software side of the company still needs improvement. 

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. All top-tier solutions have room for improvement so I never rate them higher than a seven. 

The most valuable features of IBM FlashSystem are performance and security.

The interface could improve in IBM FlashSystem.

I have been using IBM FlashSystem for approximately four years.

IBM FlashSystem has high availability.

The scalability of IBM FlashSystem has been good.

The technical support from IBM FlashSystem is very good.

We have not used other solutions other than IBM FlashSystem.

The initial setup of IBM FlashSystem was easy.

The price of IBM FlashSystem is a little high because you pay a premium because the solution is from IBM. We had paid for the SLA prior to using the solution.

If someone wants a robust, scalable, and consistent behavior for their site, then they should use IBM FlashSystem.

I rate IBM FlashSystem a nine out of ten.

We use IBM FlashSystem as part of our core system to enhance performance.

This product will improve your performance and it has helped us with that.

Also, in prior systems where we had mechanical drives, there would have been at least a couple of drive failures. With this solution, no drive failures have been experienced so far.

Compare to our previous system, space utilization has definitely been reduced. Our old system used two racks, whereas this solution sits in a single rack and initially took up 2Us. Post-upgrade, it is 8Us but even so, compared to what we had, it is a considerable energy saving. Also, when we upgraded, it helped us to mitigate a lot of our legacy issues present with the old hardware.

The performance is very good and we use this product to enhance our core system.

The reliability is better than it is with mechanical drives.

This is a compact system, and it has a lot of pieces built into it. For everything is included for us to be able to replicate to a DR site. 

This product lacks some of the options we wanted. For example, expansion was difficult and it required a lot of patching to be done. It's not a seamless process because you need to do multiple modifications or alterations. There is a lot of effort required by the customer in order to expand the hardware.

Further expansion of our model is not feasible. As new models are released, expansion becomes difficult and you have to switch to a new model when you want to upgrade. This means that you have to migrate data between models. We want something where you can use for at least five years, where you can expand the hardware without the inconvenience of changing models. Ideally, the operating system and other applications would not be affected when expanding.

It would be helpful if the solution had built-in safeguards against security threats and malware, such as ransomware. Anything that can be utilized to enhance data integrity would be helpful. 

I have been working with IBM FlashSystem for three years.

The stability of the IBM FlashSystem is excellent.

There was no downtime when we patched the system, which is good because we wouldn't want our core system to go down.

In our experience, scalability is not very easy. This may depend on our systems so it might not be universally true but definitely, for us, scalability was a problem. IBM came out with a newer version and told us that "To scale, you'll have to either switch over to a new version or buy an additional controller."

So, scalability on that particular model was not feasible. There may be better models but the model that we purchased was not easily scaled.

We have 800 users and there are four engineers who manage our IT products.

We do not plan on expanding our use of this product in the future because our plan includes moving to the cloud.

The IBM technical support is excellent. When we had a hardware issue, they were able to fix it within the SLA period. They have back-to-back support for resolving any hardware problems.

When it comes to managing hardware, they're excellent.

We have worked with systems from Dell and HPE and we have found that more maintenance and patching needs to be done on products by those vendors, as compared to IBM.

This is important to consider because if you don't have a high-availability system then you are going to end up with downtime when patches are implemented.

The initial setup was complex because we had to move a lot of data from our old system to the new one. It wasn't difficult because of the hardware, but rather, due to our pre-existing setup. The fact that we had to migrate a lot of data was the source of the complexity.

It took at least one and a half years because we had to deploy while the system was still running. At the same time, the deployment was dependent on the systems that we had running. This is why it took so long to complete.

An integrator assisted us with our deployment and our experience with them was excellent. They've been supportive and they successfully helped us to migrate all of our data.

This product is part of our core systems, and we have definitely seen a return on investment.

The cost is pretty high in terms of licensing. We pay at least $100,000 USD in licensing fees for the storage. We have multiple types of storage, not only flash. We have the older versions of other storage and other versions of IBM flash as well.

In addition, we have a maintenance contract for this product when the warranty support period expires.

This is definitely a product I can recommend based on its performance and reliability. I don't know whether it is cost-effective compared to other similar products because we are an IBM shop from end to end. We chose IBM because the products have been well suited for our setup, and the performance and reliability are excellent.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.