IBM Storwize is a family of recognized all-flash and hybrid storage solutions designed to support the virtualization needs and application workloads of mid-sized enterprises.
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NetApp FAS Storage Arrays
Score 9.5 out of 10
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NetApp's FAS series systems offers a storage array system for enterprises.
This stuff runs! Hot, cold not wet, but you know where your data is. Reliably in the cabinet turning your data for the next customer request. You need dedupe, get the flash drive models. Long archives with spinning disks can help with all the data modeling the analysts do. Keep up with the dba’s constant need for speed with all-flash! You will get what you pay for.
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.
Data processing and IO. The Storwize devices are very resilient in how they process data and do not have a drop in IO when errors occur (common errors such as disk failures and lost paths).
Storage efficiency management. We are able to use multiple efficiency techniques such as thin provisioning and data reduction to reduce our budget footprint.
Easy to use interfaces. Creating a volume and mapping to a host has proven to be a very easy process and makes onboarding less stressful for our team.
As a business partner looking to provide services to keep the uptime of the Storwize, I would like to have the capability to pull reports from IBM Storage Insights to assist my clients in managing their system through it's lifecycle.
More knowledge out there for partners to best integrate IBM Storwize with IBM Power i. This seems to be lacking in communication from IBM.
It just works! We've used NetApp FAS Storage Arrays systems since 2011 and have had fantastic results, in particular since 2016 as performance has drastically improved. Tools are great/user friendly, command line capabilities are very strong ... it is simply very effective at what it does!
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.
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.
Our initial deployment was handled by pro services. Most later deployments were handled in-house. All went very smoothly. Documentation made it relatively easy to set up new systems which allowed us to do it in-house. When using pro services they were professional and comprehensive.
IBM Storwize is a part of a family that is complemented by the products listed. In many negotiations, involving storage is our workhorse to ensure several businesses thanks to its balanced cost and all the benefits that we offer.
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.
I would like to highlight the most positive aspect I have seen in the products of the IBM Storwize family, and it is the ROI that we can choose when we offer real-time compression with the IBM V7000 family. In truth, this feature is excellent, and we have seen how customers save storage resources, rack space, power and management.
