The tool is pretty much up to date with industry standards. I’m not into pricing and budget. However, when I was a customer, we used to receive offers for different storage options. I will definitely recommend the solution to others. I may be biased, but it fits well with me. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I would recommend IBM Spectrum Virtualize because it is very robust, stable, and affordable. It has a very good performance and it is relatively easy to implement and use. I would rate IBM Spectrum Virtualize a nine out of ten.

My advice would be to talk to someone who knows the product and learn it well enough. It is such a capable product that a sales, five minute or 30-minute brief could not possibly do it justice. The way they should approach looking for a product if they're looking for storage is to indicate what they need the product to achieve exactly. That's how you determine whether the product is suitable or not. Of course, consider your budget. It is best to have all your requirements available upfront. This product operates in the old legacy world where you have data centres and servers on your floor with racks in your data centre. It operates in a containerized world that began in 2014 with Kubernetes, and it operates flawlessly and seamlessly in all those environments. It even has a component, which I would say is a bit lacklustre. I'm not sure I understand how much people would need it, but it even has a component that will operate in a cloud environment. So in an AWS or Azure, or Google cloud, the spectrum virtualize component actually works there. It's a bit less capable in the cloud because it has limitations in that environment, but it enables you to move between those environments if you wish seamlessly. 

I'd rate this product a 9 out of 10.

I would recommend this solution.

Main criteria when selecting a vendor: Upgrading our systems and migrating to newer storage products, as we are always on a time crunch.

It fills the use case quite well. I would recommend it.

I love the SVC. I would recommend it.

Main criteria when selecting a vendor: extraction. It was to reduce the complexity of the drivers that we had to deal with. Because at the time we brought it in, we had SSA, DS8100s, Compellent, and a couple of weird little EMC boxes that someone had brought in on us. Therefore, they wanted the ability to move stuff around at will, and SVC was the perfect solution for this.

My advice to those wanted to implement this solution would be it is very useful and will give you all the details you need; how to set up the data movers, make sure they are balanced so that the load is distributed evenly, how to set it up and get all the documents in place once you log in.

I rate IBM Spectrum Virtualize an eight out of ten.

I would absolutely recommend this solution for any big company that has storage devices and is moving towards things like software-defined storage. It is definitely a key tool to have, but you need to make sure that you can afford it, and you do it right. Otherwise, you will not get any sleep.

You have to get it right from the word go, and that is important. Once you get it there, it just runs, and you can forget about it. According to me, this is the leading exporting storage utilization engine in the world. There are only a few solutions that can do what this solution does. Most of the other solutions are years behind this solution. 

I would rate IBM Spectrum Virtualize a nine out of ten. The only issue in this solution is related to the firmware that is released. 

We use Commvault and also have some NetBackup in our environment for our backup software. We are moving primarily to Commvault right now from NetBackup.

I love Spectrum Virtualize. It is my favorite. I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

Customers' most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Price
• Performance
• Stability
• Supportability.

In regards to the vendor selection, it's a price versus reward scenario. We have to be very conscious of what we spend and we have to make sure that the company is spending their money well. So, we're able to buy the products that allow us to have uptime.

If you can afford it, get it. It's great.

I would recommend Spectrum Virtualize. Across the industry, nobody matches it.

Do your homework and architect the solution upfront. The technology will stand by itself if you have done it right.

Customers' main criteria when selecting a solution: Most of my customers buy it in the appliance format, whether it is a Storwize product or something else. They are competitively shopping products, so cost is important along with scalability and usability. They typically start to believe once they see the interfaces, and they like the usability side of it. A lot of my customers have been dissatisfied with other vendors, so this is a rallying point for them. I do not have anybody who has been sorry.

I would absolutely recommend it. I would ask them, "Why are you waiting?"

This is an absolutely outstanding product and anyone can use it with ease. It can do everything.

My advice would be to familiarize yourself with the levels of virtualization and understand how the product works at a lower level in order to implement it.

If you're going to implement this, we have a highly technically skilled team. We hired them and put them together for this purpose. So, if you're in a traditional environment without this, either hire a service like us to come in and help you get started and get “flying lessons”.

Once you're good and once your team is good, once your staff is up to speed, then they can take over if they want. This usually takes about a year. We offer a one year set of services. Afterwards, they can take over if they want to, or they can keep the service there. Once they're there, they'll never look back. It's one of those kinds of things and it's very good the way it works.

It's easy to implement. Just become a partner with IBM and you will be successful.

Don't go with EMC. Go with IBM. Go with this product. Absolutely. It's a very good product compared to the competitors.

I would recommend it. IBM is not the best in the disk storage industry, but they pull out some good tricks.

Absolutely. Period. Do it.

Good luck finding anything that does half of what it does. When looking for a vendor, I look for reliability. I've had lots of good experiences with it. It's been a very reliable product and the feature set is something you can't get anywhere else.

We look for reliability of the product itself. It's an excellent product. I would not be penny wise and pound foolish, though.

I would honestly utilize as much IBM as I could. I'm an old system manager in multiple, prior jobs. I would always stick with IBM across the board, especially if you look at the high-end tape units. They will get around to the correct drivers and everything. It's much easier to use all IBM.

If you use someone else's server, whether it is an X86 or whatever, you get finger pointed if something doesn't exactly work right. This is especially the case with tape drives, and especially if you were using Jaguar, which was the old type. They came off mainframe. It was very high end, very costly. I would stick with using IBM servers, even IBM storage like XIV if you want to go with something less costly than a DS88.

Make it correct. Make it easy on yourself. Use HPE storage, disc storage, or Dell storage and you will get finger pointing. It always happens. No one's wrong. Even if you get IBM, sometimes they are also wrong.

We had all IBM and we did have an issue when we upgraded our tape libraries, i.e., we had the wrong firmware. That was with IBM. Imagine if we had someone else. It would be a long, drawn-out process.

You may have one or two issues at the same time, and one can mask another issue. Don't go cheap. Have a test system. Never, ever, put something straight into production. I don't care how many things they swear on, or whatever.

You never know because everyone's environment is different. That's the other thing. I don't care if it was AIX, and it's just moving into Linux, you still need to test it. Put it up for a few weeks, if not for a few months. Don't ever go cheap on a test system. If you can have it separate, have it separate from your other actual production servers. In some places, we actually had it in a different machine.

Have a different machine. Never combine. Keep it simple.

I'd tell them that it's a good product and they should implement it. They probably should not run the latest code and they should look very carefully at advanced features.

When selecting a vendor, honesty is one of the first things to consider, and then stability and resiliency of the products. Performance is nice, but the applications that I support need bullet-proof stuff behind it with no down time.

Get a demo of it. If you haven't seen the product and you have not had somebody step you through all of the features and all the things that you can do with it, then I think it would be really tough to see where adding another set of controllers in front of your storage is benefiting you.

You might be thinking, that's just another hop and it's another delay in getting to my data. I think you will see the value of this solution once you:

• See it plugged in
• Understand what's going to come with being able to move, compress, and virtualize your data in one interface

• Are able to manage all the data there, and not worry about the back end-stuff
• Are able to carve up volumes very quickly to the end users

Integration with Spectrum control and a kind of self-service provisioning is good. It is something we're looking at turning over and then deciding about all the data migration that can happen in the back-end. We can look at that request, and then decide. Perhaps we didn't have enough information when we started, and then we can move it on the back-end. We don't have to worry about getting into the weeds, necessarily, from day one.

I would recommend IBM Spectrum Virtualize.

Mainly, our customers are IBM friendly and have mostly IBM equipment.

Customers' most important criteria when selecting a vendor: cost.

Spectrum Virtualize has a long history, with the original SAN Volume Controllers (SVC) using early versions of the software. The software on these appliances has had several name changes over the years. I have worked on and been involved with pre-sales, design and implementation on the early SVCs from 2005, and more recently the Storwize implementation, V7000s, 5000s and 3700s. So, product 2145-xxx, 2076, 2077, 2072 and so on. These are all IBM appliances, with their Spectrum Virtualize software running on them.

Obtain a well-qualified technical specialist/architect to review the design and setup if many features such as replication, snapshotting and compression are part of the solution.

Difficult question. You have to look at your environment and what you need to do there. I think Spectrum Visualize is a very good product to address a lot of problems.

I'd recommend it, for sure. It offers supportability, reliability, and some scalability. The vendor is there as a partner.

I'm not sure. I'd ask them why they haven't done it already.

HTML5, please.

I would say, definitely give this a look.

In the past, we've also looked at other solutions. So far, especially from the management point of view, being the administrator for the systems, it can't be beat. I think the tool itself is really intuitive. It's really easy and has a lot of features. Ease of management is the biggest thing. We've been pretty happy with the performance.

Probably the biggest hit, though, is the support.

Give it a try.

Next to the DSA1000, it's the most enterprise thing that IBM has for storage.

Make sure that it really has all the things that Spectrum Virtualize has, where you can upgrade the hardware and the software and everything without taking any kind of outage. And that's for infinity, not just for the life cycle with that version of the product, but for each subsequent version. It's all done on the fly.

When choosing a vendor, I look for support.

I shall definitely recommend it.

Close your eyes and go for it.

They should test the solution before starting the implementation. Sometimes IBM documents something, but in the real world, it doesn't work. It depends on the brand or the version of the software. So they should test it and then go to the client to make sure that it works there.