FlashSystem 5030: full of features at a great price
December 11, 2020
FlashSystem 5030: full of features at a great price
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Modules Used
- IBM Flashsystem 5000
Overall Satisfaction with IBM FlashSystem
An IBM FlashSystem 5030 is the main storage system for our company. It provides the storage for our in-house VMWare servers and to our customer's hosted IBM POWER Systems.
- It provides a very good balance of price and benefits.
- Easy migration from older systems using virtualization.
- IBM FlashSystem 5000 allows the customer to balance performance vs capacity (Data Reduction Pools in the FS5030 have a performance impact due to not having hardware accelerators).
- Allowing the system to cluster with older Storwize code levels / different machine types would allow for a seamless migration.
- Data Reduction Pools still do not show the per-volume capacity savings, only per-pool.
- It consolidated an 8U storage system into 2U, reducing power and cooling requirements.
We have used several Storwize storages and implemented most of the family on different customers. It is an incremental improvement on older hardware but most of the improvements are in the Spectrum Virtualize code, hardware-wise the 5030 is not really different from other SAS-based Storwize devices, but since the older ones cannot be upgraded to the newer Spectrum Virtualize code (8.4 and up), the FlashSystem 5030 will only get better compared to them.