IBM System Storage DS8900F (formerly DS8000) Reviews

Our customers use the product for various purposes from mainframe to open systems uses.

The GUI and CLI are both effective in managing copy services for the DS8000. The CLI hasn't changed over the years, but the GUI has changed tremendously, and improved the overall intuitiveness of the process. For best results, customers still use Copy Services Manager, an optional software product that further simplifies, automates and manages the process.

We use the DS8000 at many of our customers. I have several of them installed at customers who work in financial markets. Typically, I see it used in Mainframe only environments, due to the relative cost of the DS8k compared to the variety of platforms available for open systems environments. However, even now I have some customers who have open systems environments connected to DS8000 when it is an extremely high priority environment that cannot afford downtime.
Primarily I see it used for FICON attachment. The reason for that is pretty simple -- IBM works very closely between their storage and z groups to maintain "synergy". But it's also just a rock solid highly available platform that's become more reliable with time.
Additionally, when it comes to business continuity functions it can be pretty incredible. Its Global Mirror function particularly impresses me. It's able to deal with exceptionally high latency and still deliver single-digit seconds of RPO (in extreme cases this might require development to use "pokeables"). When combined with Copy Services Manager or GDPS, it really brings disaster recovery functions to a very usable level for the enterprise.

Well, logically partitioning the storage hasn't existed since the DS8300... very few customers used that.

Copy Services on the other hand are wonderful. Global Mirror, as I mentioned previously, can handle even extreme latency with the data having to take some very strange paths around the world. The developers might need to dial in to modify some "pokeable" values, but that's not a big deal and it can still manage very tight RPOs

We use our DS8882F for our mainframe infrastructure across the whole organization. It addresses the business problem of providing CKD storage in a rack mounted system that can fit in our data center. Its all-flash configuration enables us to run mainframe workloads with the lowest possible latency, helping us establish a testing environment for the setups we implement at other clients.

We have benefitted from CSM by using it to manage our flashcopy backups and DR replication sessions. I have also implemented it at various clients who manage their replication across their entire infrastructure.

IBM System Storage DS8000 is used for both z/OS and z/VM to store all back end data and for all online and mobile servers.

We do use BM Copy Services Manager to manage our global mirroring. We have a separate server for this, but it works extremely well to manage all of our replication.

We are replacing EMC storage with IBM storage. It's used company wide. Will be looking to implement FlashCopy for database backups.

We currently have vendor tool that does this for our storage technicians. I'm not sure how they intend to administer this new storage. They probably would like to continue using the tools we have - and know.

We use IBM DS8000 to support all of our mortgage servicing customers on the mainframe. The DS8K was chosen for its performance, reliability and synergy with IBM zSeries. The DS8k is also important in reducing risk. The capabilities in replication and disaster recovery are unmatched in the industry and allow us to utilize complimentary technologies such as GDPS for resiliency.

DS8000 provides the reliability for mission critical applications and un-surpassed speed. It allows our DB2 and IMS systems to run without interruption with the speed needed to meet customer expectations. By providing a highly available system combined with disaster recovery, we never worry about missing a sale.

The Admin functionality has greatly improved over the years. But it is still difficult to manage individual volumes from the Admin GUI. At that point, it is still better to fall back to using the CLI in such situations, due to the limited amount of volumes that can be displayed at a time on the GUI.

It is being used by my customers with iSeries, mainframe and open systems with a need for always on high availability for business critical applications.

It can be an expensive tool but when managing lots of flash copies or multi site replication it takes away complexity

We uss DS8000 for our storage solution in our IT department. It's very flexible for adding new LUNs to our system and works very well as well with our SVC solution that we have.

The GUI is very easy to use. You can use it for information data or LUN creation very easily and setting up new hosts is also very easy and flexible.

We use the DB8886 to house our system z data. This meets our business needs by providing fast and secure data storage.