IBM Spectrum Virtualize Reviews

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.

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.

The SVC gives excellent performance with tiered storage behind it, and the Spectrum Control suite. The newest versions that I have now are very useful in terms of managing, monitoring, and alerting. The full suite handles everything I need. We have had a lot of success through the years with Virtualize, which was originally just SVC, and we use it heavily. My environments are extremely large and busy, and it does the job without any problems. So, we are very happy with it.

It has been very stable. I am pushing a very heavy workload, a couple million I/Os at peak times. I have very heavy throughput with a lot databases: a lot Oracle, a lot of VMware and virtualization, and a lot of midrange virtualization. So, it is handling every platform.

I could scale out really easy with the virtualized product in terms of how I do the tiering behind it. 

We will never probably have everything in the cloud at this point, not until technology can catch up on the from a telecommunications perspective. We have a hybrid type of environment. Right now, we have an on-prem cloud that manages our VMware environment, so the orchestration is centered around that. It's a VMware product, but we anticipate seeing cloud handle a lot of our needs from a file share perspective and collaboration. There are some Microsoft initiatives going on at the moment, and we use cloud for that. 

We are waiting to see where we might be able to fit in with some cloud alternatives, e.g., backup archiving. We are looking at a IBM's cloud products which handle the archiving side of things. 

We are not looking at platform as a service and infrastructure right now. We just have too much load and heavy workload that we just could not get the performance that we would want there yet. 

Technical support has been excellent for all products: SVC, Storwize, DS8000, and FlashSystem. Every one of the different hardware products that I have, I have always had good support. They are very reliable. Therefore, I have been happy with the support.

I set up, bought, designed, purchased, and implemented all of the storage myself.

There were some complex technologies. I learned to go take classes and educate myself, as it is always straightforward when you read the red books. If you follow the best practices and do all the things IBM told you to do, it is always easy. If you do not, you can get in trouble. So, I found it to be very straightforward.

EMC originally was on my list when we were refreshing again six years ago. I decided to introduce EMC back into the fold to create competition. The reason IBM Storage won out over EMC and Hitachi was just performance. It scaled and performed better in our tests and PoCs. There was not enough of a business reason for me to completely change vendors. 

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.

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 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.

1. The virtualization layer
2. Easy tier
3. The ability to have a feature-rich software set which extends the capabilities of the back-end storage arrays.

Occasionally, there are issues with a node or something, but because it is a clustered system, it is stable. Overall, it does not go down. I do not know if IBM has ever had a system which has ever caused any loss of data. Therefore, I am very confident in recommending it to my customers.

It is fantastic. It scales great.

Technical support is mostly good. Most of the time, especially at the Level 2 support and above, it is really good. The guys in Austin are fantastic, plus ATS, Lab Services, and the people from Hursley put out stuff which allows us to better understand the product and support it. That has been great. 

For Level 1 support, I have been trying to decide if it is AIX Level 1 support that I have the problem with or SVC. I probably deal more with Level 1 support for AIX than I do with SVC. Though, nothing really stands out for the support problems from SVC.

Nine times out of 10, customers are looking to invest in a new solution because their previous/existing solution is at the end of life of its existing storage.

The initial setup is totally straightforward. With Storwize products and SVC, it is super simple.

We have struggled with Pure Storage, but people are understanding that much of Pure has been consumer grade SSDs. Therefore, when the customer is really understands what they are getting, they realize that IBM presents the same sort of value as existing vendors.

The typical three competitors that I hear about nowadays:

1. EMC has always been a strong one, but they have faded a little bit.
2. Pure has come on strong.
3. Hitachi seems to have gained some traction recently. 

Customers chose Spectrum Virtualize because of the features that SVC has and its maturity. The product has been around for so long, plus I get involved with customers that select SVC. They can buy a cheap storage system and not invest as heavily in the software layer. However, from the SVC level, they get the whole storage virtualization and whatever they feel is the top tier storage behind the SVC realizing the best of both worlds.

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.

The product helps us to manage our storage in a way that allows us to put different frames inside or out of our storage infrastructure and migrate.

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.

I think they are doing a good job with the features that are there. I don't really have that much to add for the next release. I like what we see.

Stability has been outstanding. There are failures, but they are designed to have failures, and we have not had a single data loss incident, even throughout some pretty funky upgrades.

We are SVC customers and we would like to see the ability to add more nodes. After some sessions that we've had this morning, now we're understanding why this hasn't happened, but we still have hope that it will happen. We will be able to go from an 8-node cluster up to maybe a twelve or fourteen. It would make us really happy.

For this platform, the technical support has been great. We have had very few issues that haven't been resolved, in a timely fashion.

The expense for support and maintenance is a little bit on the heavy side.

I have been involved in the initial setup process. We have production in the DR clusters, some of the production clusters have been in place prior to my arrival, but we have done the same thing in DRs.

The setup was very straightforward. We also have a guy who we call as “our good luck charm”. He is our reseller who comes to help us out; when he is not there things don't go as good, but when he is there he doesn't do much besides bring us the food and gives us great advice. They provide good, reliable support and he is a great guy.

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.

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.

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.

• Ease of use
• Scalability 
• The product comes in hardware, software, and appliance models, so I have a lot of choice on how we deploy it and its interoperability.

Tighter integration with cloud storage might be useful as a target for a variety of use cases. 

Stability is very good. I have been working with the product for probably 15 years. I have put it in production during critical workloads without a problem.

The scalability is very good. It can handle anywhere from very small to large enterprise class.

It can handle our customers' future growth. The hardware behind it may get more commoditized, but the capabilities of Spectrum Virtualize remains the same. It still provides value.

Technical support is very good. Most of the support personnel that I have talked to were very knowledgeable, which has always been good.

Originally, it was probably complex. Now, it is straightforward. It is pretty easy to deploy, and with a basic understanding, it comes together easily.

Our customers usually evaluate Dell EMC and Hitachi, but also some of the other newer flash environments, like Compellent. 

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.

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.

The most valuable features are the simplicity of use, the flexibility, and the options included. I mean, it's just a big time saver.

I already discussed possible improvements with some of the guys from Hearnsley. One of our frustrations is when you go to expand volumes in a global mirror environment, you have to stop everything in order to expand. So that's one of the things.

It's on their roadmap to do, but as I understand, it's very complex. So that's one of the big features that we would like to see. And I'm sure other customers have been asking for it for years and years. That's probably the biggest thing that we can see.

Stability has greatly improved since day one. It's much easier to implement. It's not so white knuckle when you're doing upgrades and things like that. So they have come a long way.

There's a lot of flexibility to it, especially with the new hardware coming out. Software always comes out with new and improved options, features, or fixes. So they're doing a real bang up job.

Overall, technical support is good. It is sometimes frustrating when you supply all the information you think they need upfront and they come back and say, "Hey, we need this." So, there's some frustration to it.

We used to have the Shark ESS, where you had to actually go in through their GUI manually to apply and create volumes at that level. You then had to have them mapped. It was more cumbersome and time consuming.

The initial setup was overall pretty easy. And that was years ago, pretty much when it first came out. Overall, it was pretty easy to set up.

We didn't really consider any alternatives. We're pretty much an IBM shop, so it was like the leader when it came out. We value compatibility and price, obviously.

I'm a technician. I don't care about price per se. I am more involved in the technical advantages, ease of implementation, and stability. They are probably the key factors for me.

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

The product is very flexible, and it is very easy to add any additional product from the background; so we can use any multi-vendor backend storages and virtualize the product. It becomes a powerful virtualization engine for migrating data, for provisioning data and any type of data migration is easy.

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.

The IBM Easy Tier works on different pools of disks and flash. Going forward when everything is Flash storage and no more spinning disks, the Easy Tier is not required. After attending the IBM Tech U, IBM is focusing on all flash storage devices. This is good and hopefully IBM pricing will have an edge over the competition.

Stability is awesome; it's very stable.

The scalability is absolutely outstanding and we can scale as much as we want.

IBM technical support is awesome.

Basically, we had different islands of storage from different vendors. We wanted a product to integrate all of them together. So that is why we found, IBM Spectrum Virtualize, as the product.

They come to us every time when there is an initial setup, they help us with the process. The setup is very straightforward.

We have another EMC brand storage product also, but we are using both of them.

Of course, the product is the most important criteria for vendor selection.

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

The most valuable features are disaster recovery, replication, and multi-site setup. Being able to quickly recover in a disaster and knowing that your data is protected across multiple sites is important.

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

We found a gap for smaller clients. Right now, the only offering is a huge, rack-sized storage device, and no more. There was nothing that came after the DS-1600. I'd like to see a smaller form factor for smaller clients.

The product is very, very stable. It is much more stable than the open system configurations that we've worked with. It has the highest stability that we have seen.

The scalability is very good. It is about even with the open system offerings.

I have used technical support. The process to open problem management requests should be faster. Especially in a high pressure situation when things are going wrong. It would be good to just have a quicker way to get the problem out there and get a response.

The initial setup was complex, but that's what keeps me employed. So, it's quite all right.

It's the best mainframe storage available. It is much better than EMC and other competitors.

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.

One of the main features of Spectrum Virtualize is it virtualizes the servers from the storage. We have a very large infrastructure. A major advantage is when you get the aged storage arrays and you have to replace all of those. Last summer, we replaced four petabytes of aged storage arrays. They were old and past end-of-life. But we did that seamlessly, without affecting any of the server applications. There were no system admin times; nothing required at all. It was really quite good for our client. That was perfect for them.

Our team operates four 8-Node IBM Spectrum Virtualize (SVC) clusters (32nodes total), two clusters at one site and two at a sister site with replication between the two sites.

These four clusters have a number of storage arrays behind them to yield a total storage capacity across the four cluster of approximately ~6 petabytes of Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze Data Classes. The Storage Cloud uses IBM's EasyTier feature to create different performing storage classes and uses Thin Provisioning to lower our clients requested 8 petabytes of capacity to a much less costly 5 petabytes of consumed capacity. The remaining ~1 petabyte is elasticity which is built into the Cloud.

Our client does not have any classical maintenance windows where systems or storage can be taken down for upgrades, repairs, expansion, or replacement. Servers require 24x7x365 data access (actually 4 days are planned power outages for power testing - but no IT changes are permitted).

So when I say our storage services to our client were provided continuously - non-stop - for 12 months, it means that all customer servers had 100% uninterrupted, online SAN access to their data 24x7x365 (minus the power down). During that time, our team provided on-demand capacity provisioning of about 700TB of new client growth and expansion, updated all cluster softwares, decommissioned ~4 petabytes of aging storage arrays, installed ~5 petabytes of new replacement / expansion arrays, and repaired a couple failed components. It really shows the power, utility, versatility and availability of our Cloud Storage design.

The second feature that it is software-defined. Every year, we select a new release and we get new features. This gives us time to test them out. It's just very amenable to our type of delivery of services to the clients that use storage.

In addition to that, they've been able to add some really cool functions. It started out with the usual stuff, such as thin provisioning. Then they added features like compression. Now they're actually adding transparent cloud tiering, so they can put data up in the cloud, just by taking it off of the SVC and sending to the cloud. This is very, very good for us in being able to put together a roadmap for functions for our clients of what they can do with their data.

There are things that occur when you get to this size and capacity. We're very large, i.e., petabytes. When you get to that sheer volume of the numbers of things, it is too big for people to keep track of. So, it's okay if you have 50 volumes, and I can watch them. I can assign people to watch them. But when you have 5,000, it's not possible anymore. So you need capabilities within the products that would do what that person would've done watching the 50. So, they have this “cognitive IT” sort of thing going for them.

I don't think they've realized they can apply that cognitive concept to that. It is like, "Okay, I'm going to use software to watch all that." Now, they have some of that already with Easy Tier that automatically moves data around. It is perfect. Now I need that same concept extended into other areas.

The stability is very good. We just finished running non-stop for one year. It was perfect, with no down-time at all. Zero. 100% availability.

Scalability is perfect. We're at the top of their scale though. Right now, the largest cluster they use is eight. We have eight very high performance servers running the software. That is good, but we added a second cluster to do more, which has worked quite well. You sort of wonder, “Would it be better to have a 10 node, a 12 node, or a 16 node?”

We do use technical support. They do very good work. Because we're so big, they have a little bit of trouble tracking all the products and making sure we get connected with the reports, but, in general, they are very good.

We did a fairly extensive industry search about five years ago, when we were deploying this call initially. We were not using a different product. It was a new offering; Greenfield. We looked at all the major players in the industry and selected IBM.

When selecting a vendor, first the product has to meet future functionality. It needs to have some stability in the industry. It needs to have some past performance proof-points. Our client is somewhat risk averse, so they don't want to be first. That's very important.

I was involved with the initial setup. It was very straightforward. Delivery of all the services has been very methodical and well defined.

We looked at Hitachi, EMC, and NetApp. The major boys.

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.