IBM Spectrum Virtualize Benefits

MD
Senior Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

It enabled us to build an infrastructure and replace storage with no disruption to our hosts whatsoever. It's an amazing capability, and we stayed with it. I loved the product so much that while I had learned about several other products, none of them compares unless you're looking for a precise capability. This is a general-purpose but very high-performance system when it comes to flash systems. There are cases where you need more performance than possible with the system's design, but you always have to pick your top requirement.  Most people have similar requirements. They want decent response time, decent costs, a plethora of functionality, including remote and local copy services. It addresses all of those concerns, but it has to sacrifice resources here and there to be that capable. You can't get 32 petabytes running 20 million IOPS at .07 microseconds. Generally, there are limitations to everything. Some systems could offer that, but of course, it'd be memory-based only, and they wouldn't have any storage and cost 1000 times what this solution costs. So there are limitations to everything.

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KV
Systems Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We can failover easily, because a lot of our data is replicated from family to the second replication.

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it_user672432 - PeerSpot reviewer
Media Storage Services Manager at a media company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I think probably one of the biggest benefits of this solution is that it is relatively easy to use and easy to understand. It's intuitive. The front interface is very intuitive. I can have any of my administrators know what to do with it with a very small learning curve. I know that it's going to be static across the board, whether I'm using the store wide systems, or if I'm using Spectrum.

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it_user868239 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Storage Engineer at ADT Corporation

ADT acquires companies (and things), so we end up with odd hardware. We bring it behind the SVC and it allows us to migrate stuff off of it seamlessly. SVC can also cover up a host of defects of the underlying storage.

Dell Compellent, which maybe was good at one time, but is no longer ready for prime time, SVC made the Compellent look good. The other thing, because services are licensed at the SVC level, it does not matter what the underlying capabilities of the other storage is. 

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it_user12768 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Technical Specialist at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It has the ability to seamlessly move hardware in and out as we refresh technology. It provides transparency, because of its advanced copy features. 

Our disaster recovery has also improved drastically because I am able to use a lot of the Spectrum Virtualize features to create multiple copies that we use to test and do development. Our disaster recovery plan tests are always successful, which is good. I have had zero downtime in the last three years.

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LH
Solutions Architect at ABF Data Systems, Inc.

It is a single pane of glass management interface, so once the storage is allocated to SVC, they only have one place to go to manage it for everything. Then, my Power customers using Power VC can allocate storage themselves from Power VC, because it has integrated with SVC, so AIX admins do not have to know anything about storage. It is very powerful.

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it_user672360 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage administrator at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

The benefits are that it speeds up provisioning of the storage across different tiers and allows a small team to manage that function, for many petabytes of data.

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MD
Enterprise Architect at QCM Technologies

It lowers cost. It does so by getting more efficient use out of the technology behind it. 

It also simplifies access. You set it and forget it for a lot of things.

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CO
Storage/SAN Administrator at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Benefits for us are pretty much the simplicity, ease of implementation, and the ease of maintenance. Flexibility and responsiveness to customer needs are key. They are the things that allow for ease of disaster recovery with global mirror, which we use. So it's just flexibility and ease of use which are the key things that I like about it.

It helps us to reduce time, reduce complexity, and be more responsive to requests instead of taking an hour to do one volume. Now I can do one volume in less than two minutes. So that keeps the business moving forward and keeps up with the pace.

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it_user672423 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

As I have mentioned, the benefits of this solution are that it reduces time.

Basically, we can clear the storage for faster/medium/slower access. We can make three-tiers and migrate the data easily.

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it_user674250 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The benefits are protection of data, usability, and performance speed in a high capacity setup.

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KC
Storage Architect at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

It is easier for management with end of life erase. It now takes us less than two-three days to decommission the erase. It has given us an increase in the usage rate on the SVC. It has gone up from probably 30-40% on the silo erase to about 85%.

We have reduced a lot of power and cooling requirements in the data center. We have optimized as much as possible. Right now, it's running very smoothly.

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it_user672420 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Storage Analyst at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Being able to migrate storage without impacting the client.

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it_user672438 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

It makes data migration straightforward. And on the customer side, there is downtime, but it is very minimal.

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it_user672414 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Admin at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

It has significantly lowered management cost, overhead, and everything else. We now have better performance as well.

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it_user672399 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

It's all about manageability. The product lets you manage:

  • Different sorts of systems
  • The same host multi-pathing driver
  • The same feature set: snapshots and replication, regardless of what system it is

Spectrum Virtualize gives you the same functionality and all the same management through the same GUI, regardless of whether you are using EMC storage, Hitachi storage, or IBM storage.

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it_user672333 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Admin Analyst at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

It has been integrated into our production systems, thereby not having as much online storage. We're using the archiving functionality. When I say reliability, I mean that we are operating 24/7. The product enables us to retrieve our client data at any given point in time.

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it_user672330 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator at a university with 10,001+ employees

There's a little bit of performance benefit. The flexibility that we get from being able to have different vendors' storage arrays presented as one homogenous unit to our hosts has been the main benefit.

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it_user672417 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical analyst 3 at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Reducing our costs: We used to have all tier DS8 storage. Even though we had Spectrum Virtualize in front of almost all of that, we still had almost all DS8.
  • We've been able to bring in multiple tiers, flash systems, and V7000s
  • We can migrate that data, watch it with the tool, and know that the data is not on the right tier.
  • We can migrate that data again, place it in the right tier, and reduce our overall cost.
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it_user868257 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The versatility is the main benefit. Since it virtualizes everything, they use it for so many different things. 

It is also good for them when we do upgrades, etc. When we add storage behind it, the product is also good for the customers because their customers do not notice that anything is happening due to the virtualization.

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it_user694704 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Specialist and Solution Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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it_user672342 - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead for Storage and Backup at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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it_user674247 - PeerSpot reviewer
Database Administrator at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user187272 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager of Infrastructure at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user672411 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user672372 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Storage Consultant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user672429 - PeerSpot reviewer
Archiect at Gulf Business Machines

Some of the benefits of this solution are that the customer need not go and manage multiple systems. They can only go and manage a single management view, for all these sorts of systems.

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it_user672426 - PeerSpot reviewer
Client technical architect at Gbm

It is all about the ease of management and better utilization of the storage capacity. It is about the dynamics of the storage. You can move one storage tier to another storage tier.

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it_user674235 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT System Architect at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

It helps us with the management of automation and migration between other vendors for storage.

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Buyer's Guide
Software Defined Storage (SDS)
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, DataCore, Dell Technologies and others in Software Defined Storage (SDS). Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.