Our clients use the product for block storage and workloads.

The primary use case with IBM Spectrum Virtualize for us is in relationship to databases.

We use it for all our block storage requirements. I was a user of the storage between 2004 and 2017, i.e. 13 years. We sell service, assist others with storage. We have been using it since 2004, and we have used all versions of the product. It is currently up-to-date. We are a platinum business partner of IBM, but we also have competing business partnerships with other companies, such as Dell. It is a product line as opposed to a singular product. There are entry mid-level and enterprise-level tiers of products, the lowest end entry, which is comprehensive in terms of being able to deliver millions of IOPS and microsecond latencies all the way up to the upper level of that product line. All the products have high availability. My clients are generally government agencies. We also have some commercial businesses, and they range overall categories, but mostly it's used by the government. However, even in government situations, there are ranges of business in terms of small, medium and large business size, given the environment we are deploying into. Some agencies have minimal budgets, and I would classify that as a very small business, but some are large. We deploy it both on the cloud and on-premise.

We use it to virtualize some different storage units. It can virtualize and provide some good migration and disaster recovery options.

Our infrastructure is on-premise. We have two POWER8 systems. For the storage, we have FlashSystem 900s, FlashSystem 820s, and Flash V7000s behind the SVCs.

The main reason for our utilizing the product: 

1. The abstraction flair and the abstraction layer. We had a mixture of different storage arrays, and the wonderful thing about SVC is is that it normalizes all it into a single driver. A single view that all hosts see simultaneously. 
2. The mobility that it gives us to move around to different performing storage arrays, depending on their load. 
3. The ease of the mobility, the flash copy product, and the copy services.

We use this solution to run our virtual machines.

It is used for continuity, protecting stuff in the cloud, and migrating data from a legacy device to a new device. 

The big solution that I last implemented was called IBM HyperSwap on SVCs. It is now called IBM Spectrum Virtualize. The solution we build was basically a high availability data center. I replicated all my data with IBM HyperSwap so that if a data center gets destroyed, you can fire up everything on the other side in minutes. It was very fast.

I manage the storage environment. In most of the storage environment, we use IBM products: Spectrum Virtualize, Spectrum Control, Spectrum Scale, and StorWize and SVC products with FlashSystem behind it.

Primarily, our customers use it to manage a bunch of different storage devices. It works really well, and it is a great platform to migrate data. I am currently helping a customer to migrate off of an HPE storage array to Pure Storage, and we are using SVC as the platform to move that data.

Our customers are mostly enterprise in size.

It provides a control plane for the data plane. With Spectrum Virtualize, you can extract the physical storage, then hide it and give it flexibility.

Most of my implementations have been on-premise. We could stand up a software instance someplace else and connect to it. However, most people that I work with get it in an appliance format. They use it to migrate off of existing storage. When lease expiration of something is occurring, they will use it to save value and migrate everything. Then, I will see them in a traditional Fibre Channel, a SAN connected to server architecture, or both in virtualized servers as well as standalone.

I do not personally manage any instances, but I have several dozen customers that I have deployed this solution for, so it is up and running in their production.

We have a lot of different customers, such as banks and retail customers. In banks, it is mainly used for open environment testing. We have some retail customers, and they use it mostly for their test environments. Retail customers also use the DS8000 for production, because it is a more robust platform.

It is performing well in most cases. The disk reliability is not that good, not as good as with some of these products.

Most of our customers run their solutions via on-premise instances.