Item: IBM Storage FlashSystem
Rating: 9
Author: Tatiana Lazo Sarmiento

Usability

It is very flexible, it allows us to hire capacity on demand and also allows IBM to manage my storage, it is a highly recommended product for current needs such as the cloud and containers, without compromising security and performance

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I now use IBM Flashsystem, what we called IBM Storwize, these IBM products have helped me for more than 10 years to keep information safe, now with the new functionalities for the hybrid cloud I can make copies, migrations very easily.They have always been a family of very reliable products that allow us to optimize storage and optimize administration with their management software.

Pros and Cons

Cyber resilience with the new functionality of immutable copies called sfaguarded copies
With the IBM FlashCore modules it allows us to have good levels of online compression of the information, besides that it is a hardware compression that would not affect the performance of the equipment
the virtualization of other storages that can be IBM or other brands
binary replication works great

I don't really like how the compression software works, especially when we configure the pools with data reduction, you need to have enough free space available to handle the delete operations, if you don't have that free space in the pool, the storage performance decreases in a very notorious way that directly affects the performance of access to information from the servers

Return on Investment

the compression in line means the IBM flashcore allow us to store much more information with less capacity, we can store much more with fewer disks
virtualization allows us to extend the useful life of old equipment that we already had separated, as I said, I use them as a repository for backups
With the implementation of the new functionality of immutable copies with SafeGuarded Copies, the information is much more secure for possible attacks

Performance

Under normal conditions the performance of the storages is very good, the only thing that can vary the performance is when we use pools with data reduction and the stored space of the pool exceeds 90%, in these cases the performance is very bad

Alternatives Considered

Dell/EMC CX4 series (Clariion)

the ease of administration with IBM Spectrum visrtualize, the functionalities that allow us to virtualize other storages, hardware compression, replication and security functions

Likelihood to Recommend

One of the most important scenarios for the use of IBM Flashsystems is the possibility of virtualizing other Storage, this allows us to use equipment that we have not been using perhaps for years and now we can virtualize and use as backup repositories or evidence. A scenario in which visualization can also be used is if we have a storage that does not have some functionality that is only available in a higher-end storage, we can virtualize it and therefore it would inherit all the functionality, I will use this when virtualize an old storage under an IBM Flashsystem 7200 to use this old storage as a repository for immutable copies that are only available on storage like the 7200

I blindly trust IBM

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Storage FlashSystem