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Overview
What is IBM Storage FlashSystem?
IBM's FlashSystem is a flash array storage option.
Recent Reviews
How IBM Storage FlashSystem Differs From Its Competitors
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Popular Features
- Flash Array Performance (108)8.989%
- Simplicity (110)8.989%
- Flash Array Integration (109)8.383%
- Data Compression (107)8.383%
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What is IBM Storage FlashSystem?
IBM FlashSystem is an all-flash storage portfolio that promises the following benefits and capabilities:
Engineered to meet modern high-performance application requirements
Ultra-low latency, cost-effectiveness, operational efficiency, and mission-critical reliability are built in to every all-flash storage solution and all-flash array
A comprehensive all-flash storage portfolio
IBM is able to deliver all-flash solutions tailored to the user's storage environments and workloads. IBM financing and payment options are available.
Technology supported by guarantees
IBM states they guaratee endurance, performance and compression are guaranteed, and they offer extended support and maintenance
IBM Storage FlashSystem Features
- Supported: FlashCore Modules
- Supported: FCM inline compression
- Supported: high performance deduplication
IBM Storage FlashSystem Screenshots
IBM Storage FlashSystem Competitors
IBM Storage FlashSystem Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux |
| Mobile Application | No |
| Supported Languages | English |
Frequently Asked Questions
IBM's FlashSystem is a flash array storage option.
HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray, and Dell PowerMax NVMe are common alternatives for IBM Storage FlashSystem.
Reviewers rate Flash Array Performance and Simplicity highest, with a score of 8.9.
The most common users of IBM Storage FlashSystem are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Reviews and Ratings
(257)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-24 of 24)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
September 23, 2023
IBM Storage FlashSystem is a soldi product at a great pricepoint for SMB high end storage needs.
We use IBM Storage FlashSystem as our primary storage array for our virtualization environment. It provides storage for our main 5 host cluster via 16Gb fiber channel. The hosts support roughly 100 virtual machines. The business problems that the unit addresses are providing very fast VM storage with extremely low latency. The array contains 12 NVME storage modules in a ~RAID6 level setup, so that we can lose 2 drives without impacting uptime.
- Low latency
- Storage DRS is supported
- Ease of expansion
- Drive firmware updates are a bit clunky, the update files have to be sourced manually
- IBM has separate storage monitoring you need to set up to get good historical statistics.
- If you need 8 16Gb ports you will not be able to expand with a SAS connector.
September 19, 2023
Reliable and cost effective Flash of IBM
It is mainly targeted to cater to the needs of high-end IOs from different applications across the organization. Mainly focused on delivering mission-critical servers with low latency disk access. This helps us to reduce a significant amount of time while running jobs on various applications across different domains. The storage has been deployed to use across different divisions in the company.
- Performance is the crucial element to be highlighted, as it delivers the best in class industry performance.
- Guaranteed compression ratio, one of the leading in [the] industry we got a 2:1 guaranteed and it achieved as per the commitment.
- Reliability is one of the main elements which works really well, even being a storewide family product it delivers [the] best reliability features.
- [The] footprint is key, as it helped us to reduce our organization's 2 racks storage capacity into a 2U rack space.
- Better GUI interface
- Currently, [the] performance of FS7200 can't be monitored through TPC/SC, this should be considered to include in [the] future.
- IBM primarily lacks in designing its products physical looks, should have designed more intrusive and attractive design. A first impression of the product creates [an] impressive opinion.
April 25, 2023
IBM Storage FlashSystem use it to believe it.
Currently I am using FS5000 for my company's AI solution and image storing. Production images from certain tools will be transferred and safe keep in this storage for future reference. It is also used by an AI solution to store, scan, process and return the result before the next production process can proceed.
- Fast
- Easy to manage
- Easy to deploy & configure
- cheaper cost
July 07, 2022
high-performance system over fibre channel.
The IBM FlashSystem 7200 was employed in our project for six months in critical production situations to accomplish the desired business outcome. This software provides the best repository system and great performance to manage the corporate workload. This gadget offers good system performance and is dependable and stable.
- Getting over a tragedy.
- Data replication and migration.
- The IBM FlashSystem 7200 is capable of supporting iSCSI Extensions for RDMA.
- Training for initial implementation and configuration is somewhat expensive.
May 28, 2022
Over fibre channel, high-performance system
To achieve the business outcome, IBM FlashSystem 7200 was used in our project [for] six months in key production environments. To manage the corporate workload, this software offers the best repository system and high performance. This device is dependable and stable, and it provides excellent system performance.
- Recovering from a disaster
- Replication and migration of data
- iSCSI Extensions for RDMA are supported by the IBM FlashSystem 7200.
- Initial deployment and configuration training is a little pricey.
March 21, 2022
It's Reliable and Easy to Use
To achieve the business result, IBM FlashSystem 7200 has been implemented in our project for [six months] for critical production environments. This product offers the best repository system as well as high performance for managing business workloads. This product is dependable and stable, and it provides the best system performance.
- Reconstruction after a disaster
- Advanced SAS Connectivity Training is required for initial deployment and configuration.
- iSCSI Extensions for RDMA are also supported by the IBM FlashSystem 7200.
January 24, 2022
Manages the Management
I worked as a designer and also on animations. We used to face issues with data on day to day basis. How would I explain this product? Let's say the IBM FlashSystem 5000 is a family of all-flash and hybrid-flash solutions that simplify data delivery, enable real-time analytics, accelerate virtualization and cloud deployments, improve disaster recovery time and reduce IT infrastructure costs. The FlashSystem portfolio combines enterprise-class reliability with built-in data services to achieve the best balance of performance, capacity, cost efficiency, and data services for your most demanding workloads.
- Content Catching
- Data Services
- Data Management
- Smooth Storage
- Data caching can be improved a bit.
January 13, 2022
A fantastic business outcome
To automate and [optimize] our business processes, we employ the IBM Flash System 7200. It's a fantastic storage repository that all of our company's IT departments rely on. Its quick performance helped us compress data, and it's also useful for storage efficiency. VMware integration is also possible, which is perfect.
- Its user interface is simple.
- Reduce storage latency to boost application performance.
- Initial setup and deployment.
January 04, 2022
It gives an excellent performance
We utilized IBM Flash System 7200 in our project for important production conditions to meet the business goal. This software provides the best repository system and great performance for managing corporate workload. It reduced the amount of effort required to complete assignments and duplicate data. Its AI is the most important factor, as the decisions made are more accurate and effective at work.
- The amount of power [consumption] is reducing.
- NV Memory Optimized From Start to End
- friendly to the user.
- Need some training for Initial deployment.
- The cost is a little more.
December 24, 2021
IBM Flashsystem 5000, a winning bet
As system integrators, deploying [IBM] FlashSystem 5000 series on our customers is a cost/benefits decision in [the] first place. This product range of the series has a very accessible entry point (5015) and can scale up to the NVMe technology (5200) with fantastic performances still in a no-cost solution. We think these series are, with no doubt, the best in [a] class of the current market offering. We implement most of these systems at the production sites replacing older arrays while some of them are deployed at Disaster Recovery locations. Indeed, we configure some of these systems as backend storage of backup specialized virtual appliances in order to make them more flexibles in scalability terms. Also, the arrival of isolated snapshots this last year has become the most valuable feature on the 5x00 series of the range.
- Super simple administration across the full product line: no other vendor has the same interface for the FULL product line, which is just unbelievable from the storage admin point of view.
- The most flexible configurations capabilities of all the top storage arrays sellers. Usually, other vendors impose strong configuration restrictions sizing the arrays and combining different disk types, this is not the case with the FlashSystem products.
- Full line replication capabilities: believe it or not you can replicate data not only between [the] same range models but between any model within the full product line, from the modest FS5015 to the high-end storage virtualizer SAN Volume Controller.
- Currently, the protected snapshots are scheduled from the external software Copy Services Manager. That’s great when you have several machines but for customers, with just one storage array an internal scheduler will be a more practical option.
- There is a wide number of entry-level FS50xx (5010,5030,…) out there. These machines currently lack the protection capability and will be great to do whatever IBM can to give them at least a minimum possible protection feature.
- We think that the Data Reduction Pools have to improve [the] performance of entry-level arrays. Currently, we prefer standard pools in these machines that lack the hardware compression of her bigger sisters.
December 07, 2021
IBM FlashSystem 7200 Great Business Result
IBM FlashSystem 7200 has been implemented in our project [for] six months for critical production environments to achieve the business result. This product provides the best repository system and high performance to manage the business workload. This product is reliable and stable with the best system performance.
- Disaster recovery
- Data Migration and replication
- End to End NVMe Optimized
- IBM FlashSystem 7200 also support iSCSI Extensions for RDMA
- Bit costly
- Training are required for initial deployment and configuration
- Advanced SAS Connectivity
December 01, 2021
Happy review of IBM FlashSystem 5000`s
These are the go-to storage systems for our small ESX deployments. Allowing 4 direct attached FC hosts means they are a perfect match of size and performance
- Price to performance. Our clients are always looking to cut margins and still expect top performance. The IBM FlashSystem 5000 series enable us to give a great bang per buck ratio
- With hybrid flash we get the performance we need and the right capacity maximizing the ROI
- Simple to manage interface and commonality across the IBM range
- Like all the Storwize product range the snapshots can be a little confusing especially if coming from other IBM arrays like XIV
- Max speed on image mode migrations needs to be increased
- Maybe increase the default replication bitmap space I have run out and needed to expand it from time to time
November 13, 2021
Review for IBM Flash
One of the departments has deployed this Flash System as a POC for hybrid cloud so this system can provide six nines” (99.9999%) data availability.
- (SDS) for storage management.
- Support for host-side virtualization solutions, including VMware virtual machines.
- Easy Tier automated tiering functionality.
- Auto Tiering with Cloud.
- AutoScale feature.
November 12, 2021
An experience beyond expectations.
I've used FS7200 at my previous job. The data warehouse department needed a lot of IOPS for their finance business. We tried many products/models for 4 months and finally decided on FS7200. In addition to its performance, both ease of assembly and simplicity of initial setup led us to choose the FS7200.
- I have not seen any better in terms of ease of use. All terms are pretty self-explanatory and helpful.
- It has consistently exceeded our expectations in our performance tests.
- In my personal view, more advanced integrations are required for next-generation VM architectures across all storage technologies.
August 16, 2021
IBM FlashSystem 5000 - One of the best flash memory indeed!
IBM FlashSystem 5000 is being used in my organization by different project teams for medium and large applications which require high-performance memory for their applications and data. It has helped in improving the overall speed and performance of the critical applications and helped us meet the client expectations for better business delivery.
- It provides continuous high performance for all the critical applications.
- We are able to ensure 24/7 uptime for the system
- Excellent resource distribution
- High performing storwise system
- Options to align deployments and resources in a hybrid model based on the requirements
- [The] Team needs [a] good amount of training and knowledge as the initial setup is somewhat complex.
August 09, 2021
A tool that provides maximum availability and is reliable.
IBM Flash System 7200 is being used in our company to streamline and uplift our business process. It is an outstanding storage repository and is used around all of our organization's IT departments. Its high performance helped us in compression and it is highly beneficial in storage optimization and it allows integration with VMware and it is perfect.
- Its high-speed performance helps streamline our business process.
- Its integration is astounding, most specifically with VMware.
- It allows replication and DRP compression.
- Its interface is quite simple with so many enormous features.
- Its subscription rate is unfair and is highly expensive.
- Reports should be elaborative probably with more insight and should inform about the performance.
- Deployment of this tool is quite complex and tricky.
August 04, 2021
IBM FlashSystem 5000 delivers on its promise
We use IBM FlashSystem [5000] to tier out block storage and ensure that our most accessed applications have access to best in class flash storage while our test applications mainly reside on HDD (easy tier) and can burst to flash for preproduction testing. We also serve out content via SMB shares for document storage/retention purposes.
- Ability to thin provision storage helps us maximize the capacity of the array
- Mission critical applications have access to low latency storage
- NVMe accelerated storage is ahead of the competition
- Installation can be tricky — you might be in for a do over if you get the settings wrong on your deployment
- Slow adoption of bleeding edge storage technologies
- Not a good fit for every use case
December 14, 2020
Super fast storage for mid-size businesses
With a limited IT budget, but with a requirement for a very fast storage that would have great performance for our data warehouse needs, we went with IBM FlashSystem and we couldn't [have] been more happy. Great solution that has provided us the capability to run some 21th century technologies, like AI and ML solutions.
As our group policy rejects any cloud based solutions, we are still dependent on a modern data centre solutions that would provide as same performance and reliability that would cloud based solutions do.
As our group policy rejects any cloud based solutions, we are still dependent on a modern data centre solutions that would provide as same performance and reliability that would cloud based solutions do.
- Performance.
- Great stability close to 100% uptime.
- Management is a bit difficult.
December 10, 2020
Storwize V7000 robustness and seamless integration
We use it as out backbone storage solution, it addresses all the IBM Power environments we currently have and the VMware vSphere infrastructure at our organization, it's been rock solid to say the least, never break a sweat on supporting all our infra, so I personally think is the best core component we have as of today.
- IT supports all the VMware Infrastructure we have.
- It's the backbone for our IBM's power business.
- We use it for our backup repository.
- Getting spares sometimes it's very expensive.
- Backup batteries sometimes have swell.
- If you don't have a support contract you're so out of luck.
December 10, 2020
IBM FlashSystem 7200 (formerly Storwize V7000) - a good storage alternative to midsize enterprises
[IBM FlashSystem 7200 (formerly Storwize V7000)] is our current storage system for the entire company. It provides the disk space that our applications and users need. We have been using it more than 3 years and increased the capacity as needed without any issues. It gives a solid performance which helps you feel confident for the business continuity
- Good performance
- Ease of management and automated reporting features
- Security and policy usage
- Maintenance is not cheap
- Implementation could be difficult
- Comes in block
December 08, 2020
The V7000 is a Work Horse with Great Features available at a price and Great customer support, also at a price.
The IBM [FlashSystem V7200 (formerly Storwize V7000)] is being used across the whole organization. It originally provided storage for the VM's that ran our ERP system but now hosts our QA and Development environments. It has been a workhorse and hasn't had any significant performance or reliability problems. Drives have failed more recently but mostly due to age.
- The phone home system is great, if there is a drive failure a tech is out same day to replace(Dependent on support Level)
- Firmware upgrades while we never did during work hours could have been done during work hours, had one issue with a firware upgrade but the system remained operable and the bricked controller was replaced the next day.
- The spare drive system hasn't failed me so far. It will take the spare put it in an array and make the replacement drive the spare.
- The V7000 used old raid systems this could be fixed and use a smarter redundancy.
- Features like dedupe and compression cost extra, this is not so standard anymore.
- Maintenance is expensive and really tries to push you to buy new.
December 07, 2020
A performance centric storage
IBM Storwize V7000 was procured for the production environment to cope up with the high input/output operations (IOPS) for our OLTP system. The system was mission critical as it was providing Inter-Bank switching for ATM and Funds transfer transactions having load of more than 100 transactions per second. I am feeling proud that it was good decision as after go live in production almost all the data processing related issues were resolved.
- High IOPS Support.
- State of the Art FLASH technology.
- Awesome 24 x 7 x 365 customer support with less than 1 hour response time.
- Tight integration with Power Series.
- After initial 3 - 5 years support and warranty the cost of SLA is high (HIGH OPEX).
- The initial discount does not apply on later upgradation.
April 30, 2019
A9000 for fun and profit
The FlashSystem is being used as storage for one of our ERP systems. It addresses DR, BC and performance and allows the system to scale further.
- Performance is incredible.
- Initial set up was relatively easy.
- For basic tasks, the management interface is easy to use.
- The HSM has some shortcomings in capacity reporting.
- Setting up mirrored relationships is a lot more hassle than it should be.
- The errors returned are sometimes not very useful.
February 14, 2019
FlashSystem remain competitive despite strong market competition
IBM FlashSystem is being used for verification testing and competitive analysis so we can help our partners/ customers make the right decision for their business
- It has sufficient availability
- It has a comprehensive service/ support
- It offers clients a solution from an established vendor they feel they can trust
- It has a well-known brand
- Price and cost are major concerns and can be significantly improved
- Its brand in developing countries/ lesser know parts of the world isn’t as strong as others
- Improved openness and compatibility with other platforms is always a major plus