Item: IBM Storage FlashSystem
Rating: 10
Author: Chris Short

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We currently use two V7000 storage systems to run our customer facing infrastructure. The V7000 pair supplies storage to a two Cisco UCS chassis with 8 blades and more than 40TB of storage. The V7000s allow us to use a mix of flash and spinning storage to provide tiered storage to allow for performance and cost savings. We migrated to this stack from an older iscsi san with all spinning disks and the difference was amazing!

Pros and Cons

Easy tier storage
Great compression levels
Easy administration
rock solid stability

Maintenance costs are high, especially with SSD

Return on Investment

We were able to meet our performance SLAs
We were able to reduce CAPEX spend by using tiered storage

Likelihood to Recommend

The [IBM FlashSystem] V7200 (formerly Storwize V7000)] is a mid-sized business environment SAN which excels when you have exceeded the capacity of less enterprise grade SANs. The compression and deduplication ratios have given us the ability to save a good amount of money over our old system for the same amount of storage. It might be overkill for smaller footprints with only a few servers and for storing items like PDF documents or encrypted databases will not give you much compression savings.

IBM FlashSystem (Storwize V7000) has been great for us! and it can be for you too.

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with IBM FlashSystem

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros and Cons

Return on Investment

Likelihood to Recommend

IBM Storage FlashSystem Feature Ratings