Likelihood to Recommend Reliable data storage and access is a big challenge in AI applications and IBM ESS is a service you need to solve the problem. If you are building an AI service and you already use the IBM ecosystem for AI compute requirements, ESS can serve as an excellent software based storage solution. Integration with other platforms such as EMR/Databricks is still a challenge and should be improved.
Read full review Now that you have virtualized your server's CPU and memory resources, you should look to do the same for your storage. Separation of hardware and software has many added benefits not only for CPUs and memory but for storage as well. Without this solution, we would not have been able to afford black-box type SANs at every location. This allowed us to virtualize over 90% of the server environment saving costs and power consumption/cooling and provides all the features costly black-box SANs, including true-HA (which most SAN vendors don't have). Migration from variant SAN storage and using mixed back-end storage solutions is as easier than ever before because the storage being virtualized.
Read full review Pros Powerful processing power, literally support unlimited scale out storage capabilities well integrated and supported with multi flavor environment and file systems. Huge capacity with in a very reduced form factor of disks/enclosures Read full review Fast pools should go to your most used data, and not static files. Redundancy is a must for all aspects of our IT jobs. Who wants to explain when there's no data? Works on Windows server 2012/2016 much better. Solid stability. Read full review Cons Integration and configuration need a bit more technical expertise which is I guess expected. There can be some improvement in integration with Legacy applications. Read full review Our needs are very small when compared to what this product can do. We don't use all of what it is capable of doing. Honestly, I have no cons. Read full review Likelihood to Renew I'm currently in the process of renewing my support.
Read full review Support Rating In the 3 years I have been running this, I have contacted support around 4 or 5 times and that was for minor questions with exception of one time when I was performing an update on the system. And in that one time, they were very timely in assisting me with correcting the problem. Top notch customer support!
Read full review Alternatives Considered IBM ESS is optimized for AI and Big Data usecases while S3 is a general purpose storage solutions. EMR and Databricks have lakehouse/data warehousing solutions for distributed computing but are more optimized for just the big data pipelining solutions and not essentially for AI usecases, especially for inference, when you need to load model artifacts really quickly.
Read full review DataCore is far easier to manage as well as deal with when it comes to hardware (as DataCore works with any hardware). It also seems way more affordable.
Read full review Return on Investment When the cost and price dynamics comes into account, we have replaced age old traditional arrays with almost negligible cost with ESS able to extend the capabilities of global teams to work and share their experiences and knowledge with other teams. Read full review More uptime - Typical SANs have redundant controllers, redundant power supply's and can make the drives redundant by leveraging RAID-0, 5, 6, and 10. The claim to be HA but they are not. That is because if I spay water all over them or catch the SAN on fire, the storage will go down. With DataCore's solution we have identical systems (maybe even at different datacenters connected with long-haul-fiber) including duplicate storage. So one side of the solution can totally be taken offline by water, fire, etc. and the other side will remain up providing true-HA storage. Because of this, we can upgrade the SANs during the day and still keep storage services running (zero-downtime). Lower Costs - Ability to use 3rd party hardware which lowers the costs, not only for the initial investment but as storage capacity grows. All the features one can want - High Availability, Thin Provisioning, Asynchronous and Synchronous mirroring/replication, snap-shotting, continues data protection, deduplication, storage reporting, trending with graphs, centralized console for easier management and many more. Read full review ScreenShots