For environments where high IO and read writes are performed the flash storage is very well suited . We also use this for another customer as a back end storage for high performance backups where we run multi stream data writes to it via 100G interface.
It is very easy to use with NFS. Creating new volumes and mounting to servers such as ESXi or Linux is a breeze. It does also support CIFS but it is far less intuitive and requires much more effort. Replicated data is also very simple and robust in the form of SnapVaults or SnapMirrors. This data is either immediately or periodically replicated to a peer FAS in the cluster for retention.
Cyber resilience with the new functionality of immutable copies called sfaguarded copies
With the IBM FlashCore modules it allows us to have good levels of online compression of the information, besides that it is a hardware compression that would not affect the performance of the equipment
the virtualization of other storages that can be IBM or other brands
As flash technology evolves rapidly, vendors should [adapt] to the changes and onboard them in their products. IBM is a bit slow in adopting advanced technology in [its] portfolio. Even though the current product is good, my decision is purely based on how the transformation of the product [is] being produced and supplied to [the] end-user.
The low latency for best performance and improve productivity. This is very much suitable for all the usecases where data intensive processing need to be performed. The administration is very easy and logical. It helps to run the infrastructure at optimial cost and optimal performance. It offers great deal of virtualisation featurs and they are indeed very much powerful.
It does have a really nice and easy to use web interface to do pretty much anything you need with it. It was very simple to configure our volumes and luns and connect them to our VMWare environment using the interface. It has options to rename, shrink, grow, and other things with our luns and volumes. It was nice and easy to read graphs to see where you stand on your storage usage at a glance.
Even though the model is suited towards smaller or medium sized businesses, the speeds and performances seen via our benchmarks exceeded any requirements we initially had. The setup was quite simple and the additional features such as allowing for better hyrbid storage and containerization has improved the backend performance of our company immensely.
IBM support ecosystem is robust and well organized, due to the advent of Watson based case management system IBM offers a decent support system for the customers and the users of its products.
NetApp support in Brazil is managed by its partners. We know in other countries, such as the US and NO, they have support directly from Netapp. We have a very good NetApp partner working with us since the beginning, on both the implementation and daily support. Very few cases needed to be escalated to NetApp support, most of the cases are handled and satisfyingly closed by the partner.
I was amazed by the way IBM Flash storage provides a huge amount of storage within the limited footprint, it helped us to replace big fat storage arrays, which aided in the process of moving towards lower hardware, carbon, and energy consumption footprint. We can comfortably say that Flash helped us to host applications fast with a blazing speed and user transactions are quite quick.
For the past six months, we have been utilizing this technology in our projects to manage a massive workload and produce swift business outcomes on a crucial production database. The IBM FlashSystem 7200, which offers high performance and compression, has so far been a great experience for us. The results and functionality of this product have delighted our consumers.
NetApp stacked nicely and gave enterprise-level usability for snapshot-based backups. Our previous RPO was several hours. It was selected prior to me arriving at the company, but It was selected for the hardware refreshes due to its compatibility with several other vendors, like CommVault and VMware.
