IBM FlashSystem Previous Solutions

Mike Bellemans - PeerSpot reviewer
Project manager at Sopraco NV

We previously used Dell VPLEX. FlashSystem is a lot cheaper and less complex. VPLEX is more of a black box, so you don't know what the system is doing. FlashSystem gives you more control. 

View full review »
CM
Web Operations Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

We previously used EMC. We switched based on cost.

View full review »
Raanan Sitton - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President Sales at BELOCAL LTD

I sold other solutions apart from IBM FlashSystem, but the price for IBM FlashSystem was better.

Two of my customers preferred IBM FlashSystem, and the third customer liked Hitachi, but Hitachi was more expensive, so that customer went with IBM FlashSystem.

View full review »
Buyer's Guide
IBM FlashSystem
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about IBM FlashSystem. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
AM
Network and System Administrator at TWD Technologies Ltd.

We previously used Dell EqualLogic. We switched, as we had used it for close to six years and it needed to be replaced. Initially, we thought to replace it with another Dell EqualLogic product, however, after comparing different brands, we landed on this.  

View full review »
Gungor Bingul - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of IT at Korozo

We use a variety of solutions from Hitachi, EMC, and NEC.

We switched to IBM FlashSystem because of the scalability, it was a beneficial option for us, as well as the price-performance ratio and technology.

They compare the IBM features with those of EMC and HP.

View full review »
PS
Storage Infrastructure Engineer at Cambridge Health Alliance

We previously used HPE and we are slowly moving towards having them switched with IBMFlashSystem. We have found the IBM FlashSystem to be more flexible.

View full review »
Storemgr67 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We are a very large bank, and we have a lot of storage devices from multiple vendors. We have devices from Dell EMC, NetApp, and Pure Storage. Every product has its advantages and disadvantages. 

If you are targeting functionality, we get the most functionality from IBM FlashSystem, and then from Pure Storage, and then from Dell EMC boxes. If you are targeting performance, then Dell EMC will come first, then IBM FlashSystem, and then Pure Storage. If you are targeting compression deduplication that will generate more capacity, then Pure Storage will come at number one, IBM FlashSystem will come at number two, and Dell EMC will come at number three.

View full review »
AZ
Infrastructure Architect Supervisor; Solution Delivery Supervisor at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I have used NetApp storage and EMC storage. NetApp storage is very poor and bad. EMC is a good competitor of IBM in the market now, and in terms of the number of customers, EMC is number one. User Interface is the main big difference between IBM and EMC. IBM FlashSystem is very easy and friendly comparatively. EMC is very complicated. 

EMC is also closed, whereas IBM FlashSystem is very open. It provides a lot of communication over the internet for administrating and implementing the storage. I am working on a customer project that has EMC storage, and the customer daily complains regarding EMC Unity or XtremIO.

IBM is integrated with the different operating systems by a native operating system multipath. EMC works with PowerPath multipath. Until recently, EMC didn't have these features in the box, and you had to pay for a multipath license. In new technology and operating system versions of EMC, a separate multipath license is not required.

View full review »
AANKITGUPTAA - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at Pi DATACENTERS

We previously used HP three Power and DX four hundred and ten storage. We needed the virtualization feature and IBM FlashSystem was the only one that offered that.

View full review »
Janith Ranasinghe - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager - IT at LankaClear

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

View full review »
Storemgr67 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

View full review »
HB
COO at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

View full review »
IA
IT Manager at Def Industry

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.

View full review »
Aamir Jameel - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Manager at Tapal tea

We have not used other solutions other than IBM FlashSystem.

View full review »
SM
Head of IT Infrastructure at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

View full review »
Isanka Attanayake - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager - Information Technology Infrastructure and Development Support at Royal Ceramics

We previously used Dell EMC and switched to this solution because the support, product and performance are of a higher standard. 

View full review »
GM
BT Area Champion/Trainer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

I have experience with a variety of other solutions. On storage, I have experience with IBM FlashSystem, IBM block storage, Dell EMC, block storage VMAX, VNX5600, and unified storage. Also, I have experience with Huawei storage, like Dorado and OceanStor. I've also worked on HPE Enterprise Virtual Array.

If you're talking about flash storage, we have FlashSystem IBM V9000, SS910091, 9200. On cloud storage, we have VMAX 10K, 20K. On unified storage, we have VNX5600 EMC.

We required a homogenous environment that's end to end. We chose to use IBM. 

View full review »
Usman Rasool - PeerSpot reviewer
VP - Head Enterprise Technology Infrastructure at MCB Islamic Bank Ltd.

This is the first flash storage system that we have used. Prior to that, we were using a hybrid Dell EMC storage.

View full review »
MN
Infrastructure Solutions Architect at areebah

IBM has some features that don't exist in other brands. External virtualization, for example—Dell EMC has the same feature, but it's applied differently. IBM's approach is to make it usable in many different scenarios so that the customer can work with multiple vendors under the IBM controller. Dell EMC can't do that. The external virtualization stacks with Dell EMC, and the features stack to every box. If I have a main box with high specs and I virtualize another box with minimum specs, that means I'm stuck with the minimum specs. With IBM, if I'm working with the virtualization engine with higher specs, I get the benefits from these higher specs, even if the virtualized box has minimum specs.

View full review »
it_user674244 - PeerSpot reviewer
Design Engineer at a recruiting/HR firm with 10,001+ employees

We needed the performance of the applications. Payroll applications are very I/O intensive and flash systems are a perfect fit. It makes sense.

View full review »
it_user736929 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer & Support Contracts Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

No, I have only used used IBM solutions.

View full review »
MB
Chief Technology Officer at Inovo

We used hyper-converged storage in the past and the reason we switched was because the reliability was not as good as we had hoped with the bigger workloads.

View full review »
it_user672375 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at CAS Severn

A lot of our customers were previously using either all disk or hybrid solutions for their storage. Moving towards an all-flash V9000, allowed them to take performance management and stop having to worry about that in their everyday tasks.

Moving to an all-flash array allowed them to spend more time dealing with application integration and dealing with their end users. This is rather than having to do performance management and moving data around. The all-flash array made their life a lot simpler.

View full review »
it_user533121 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage & Backup Transition Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

In our environment we also have the XtremIO All-Flash Storage Array, but it has some scalability issues. That was the main reason why we focused on buying more IBM Flash Arrays.

We also use ServiceNow and SNIA Protocol; it’s present and working good with all the IBM products.

View full review »
it_user211857 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Program Manager at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We switched to Pure Storage because of the way the system performs and does everything in 32K sizing. The IOPS are high and the support and customer server are exceptional.

View full review »
it_user211857 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Program Manager at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We were using EMC VNX.

View full review »
DP
General Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

We have just purchased Lenovo FlashSystem this week for our clients.

I worked with Storage-Tech, IBM Sharks, EMC Clariion, and other similar products.

View full review »
ST
Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

We used IBM FastT/DS Storage (LSI Logic) with/without IBM SVC and IBM v7000 Gen1/Gen2/Gen3, shifting from legacy/traditional storage to storage virtualization.

View full review »
GA
IT Manager at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

This is the first time we are using a Flash System. In the past, we were using traditional hard disk drive (SAS and SATA) storage systems. We needed to increase the capacity and didn't want to invest in an old technology and slower systems.

View full review »
it_user672393 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

We're an IBM shop, so we've always been on some kind of IBM platform.

View full review »
it_user523167 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Specialist at Slovenská sporiteľňa

Before we were using IBM DS8000s. The application was consuming a lot of IOPS with a lot of hot data.

We needed a higher IOPS rate. We chose the FlashSystem because the response time needs to be very fast. When the people working on the application feel that the response time is not good, or there is not enough storage space for the amount of data they have, then we have a flexible enough infrastructure to dynamically upgrade them to the FlashSystem. We do this planning on a yearly basis. We design the infrastructure solution according to the project requirements. Sometimes, this requires an upgrade to the FlashSystem.

View full review »
BB
Deputy Chief Technology Officer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

We are actually in the process of changing solutions. We're going to switch to Lenovo's DE4000.

View full review »
PV
Senior System Administrator at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We did not use another similar product prior to this one.

View full review »
it_user730569 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Consultant at a tech services company

Previous storage solutions included the HPE 3PAR array family. We switched to IBM for 3 reasons:

  • Upgrade cost
  • Complexity with administration tasks and day-to-day running
  • Support costs
View full review »
it_user732744 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at Dhaka Bank Limited

Switched to decommission older hardware (XP12K and EVA from HPE).

View full review »
it_user264465 - PeerSpot reviewer
Arquiteto de Soluções at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I've never used another solution.

View full review »
it_user674226 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Our customer was a legacy Storewize customer. We knew that when they were announcing their combination of Spectrum Virtualize and flash that it would be a winning combination. You can't go wrong with that kind of combination.

Our company decided that we needed to train up fast and get on top of it quick. Because of that, we were able to turn out some of the first in the Eastern area.

View full review »
LS
Systems integrator at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees

We were having performance issues. We decided to find the lowest latency device and this was it.

View full review »
it_user671418 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

I actually performed a PoC of multiple flash system products and found IBM FlashSystem to be the fastest one out there.

View full review »
it_user672396 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator at Sprint

We weren't using any other solution. Our storage architect is the one who decided for us to have it.

View full review »
it_user671433 - PeerSpot reviewer
Programmer Analysts at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

We don't really have a choice of vendors because we are public sector. To me, it's history. Our trusted partner is Horizon, and they're great people to work with. When I work with someone else, I'm not sure if they can deliver what I want. But Horizon goes the whole nine yards.

View full review »
it_user671412 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

We had a few customer requests for it. I attended conferences and they showed me that they have really put a lot of time and effort into this. It's a good solution. It was worth our time to push it for our customers.

View full review »
it_user671409 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

It's been well established in the market for probably over 10 or 11 years now. This was one of the first solutions available.

View full review »
MN
Software Developer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Before using this solution, we used Storwize 5000. It was okay, but it's very old, and it's out of the support. So, we are looking for some support.

View full review »
it_user672354 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

No previous solution was used.

View full review »
it_user738690 - PeerSpot reviewer
Gestor de Capacidad at a logistics company with 10,001+ employees

I have used many solutions, having mounted many projects with storage (NetApp, HPE, Clarion, etc.) but if I had to choose one based on value for money, I think I would stick with V7000.

View full review »
it_user583515 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Director Of System & Security Dep at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We previously used a different solution. We switched because Storwize v7000 is easy to manage.

View full review »
ST
Senior System & Storage Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
IBM SVC -> HP 3PAR -> Storwize v7000f View full review »
it_user674229 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Admin at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We were using SVC and DS83. We are actually using that app, but for us, IBM Storwize V7000 was more cost effective in our environment. That's why we chose that specific product.

View full review »
it_user526413 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior UNIX Systems Administrator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Previously, it was a great experience with RamSan-400.

View full review »
it_user739677 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Integration Expert & IT Consultant at a tech services company

Yes, IBM DS5300. We switched because of the external storage virtualization.

View full review »
it_user531666 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Analyst at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I currently use both NetApp and IBM. NetApp storage is cost efficient, but IBM is way ahead of NetApp in terms of block-level access.

View full review »
MD
Storage Administrator at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I've previously used NetApp FAS, which is a bit difficult to use compared to FlashSystem.

View full review »
it_user541197 - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager Information Technology Department at a university with 501-1,000 employees

No, it was our first experience with any kind of SAN.

View full review »
it_user672369 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect tct at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Regarding previous solutions, this was more of a technology refresh decision. A customer was heavily invested in an older technology that they were very satisfied with, but they wanted to continue to make the move to flash technology. This was the next logical era of evolution.

View full review »
it_user671430 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Architect at Horizon

When selecting a vendor, the support mechanism and the reliability are the most important elements.

View full review »
KV
Director Technical at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Previously, I had experience with Hitachi SAN.

The suitability of either solution depends on the use case. If you talk about modular storage virtually from any company, they will have solutions which more or less do the same thing. 

There will be a competing model at each bracket of requirements. When you talk about storage hardware, you can't really say which is better, or which is worse. 

You can talk about reliability and support, or you can talk about how good it is in a particular geography. But, this is not like Mercedes Benz is a good car and the Fiat is not, it doesn't work like that.

View full review »
AJ
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

We previously used DDN storage. 

We switched because IBM has got a good reputation and they gave us a better price. From a technical and reputational standpoint, IBM was superior.

View full review »
it_user674238 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

When selecting a vendor, I want stability, years in the industry, and overall stability.

View full review »
it_user693222 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Specialist / IBM Software and Hardware support at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

No, this is my first experience with a 100% SSD solution.

View full review »
it_user672357 - PeerSpot reviewer
Tactical Expert at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

We are a business partner and what we sell are IBM Storwize products. That's our main focus, we don't sell any other vendors. So, it was a pretty straightforward decision to invest in this solution. But according to what I have seen in the past and worked with than this is without a doubt the most user friendly product.

View full review »
SY
Technical Manager at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees

We previously used free CSS Storage.

View full review »
it_user732741 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sistem Yönetimi Uzman? at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Yes, I myself have used. The customer decided to switch.

View full review »
CC
Technical Head at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

We were using a V7000 before, so only upgraded.

View full review »
Buyer's Guide
IBM FlashSystem
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about IBM FlashSystem. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.