IBM Storage FlashSystem- A MUST have all rounder

We use IBM Storage FlashSystem 9500 for our mission critical ERP SAP Landscape. It addresses the main issue of latency as it sustains sub-millisecond response times for our massive OLTP/OLAP Oracle Database which has grown over the years to +-40TB. The main feature we use and love is the Advanced Copy Services made possible by a very smart new feature called Policy-Based Replication. With this we clone our Production data every 2 weeks(planned) and on-demand with no performance degradation on Live Hosts. It's very intuitive and simple to use GUI helps us achieve our objectives instantly as the learning curve is very minimal. The powerful CLI helps us automate with shell scripts and/or Ansible which make Operational efficiency a breeze as we now have our SAP developers and Basis doing their own refreshes at the click of a button. Finally the system is so robust and highly available, very fault tolerant and even when a bug is detected it is self-healing and off course fixes and patching has never let us down as it deploys seamlessly.

Volume Groups, Volume Group Snapshots, Policy-Based Replication, Provisioning Policies, Upload software to ECUREP, Download software from Fix Central, Cloud Call Home, Remote Support, Remote Code Load and all the autoprovisioning and automatic configuration that the FS9500 does for you under the covers. These are time consuming actions Storage admins had to do in the past.

It allows us to do seamless firmware upgrades. We do not need to worry about missing out LUNs that have been added to a Host later but are not replicated since Volume Groups take care of this for us automatically. Restore a snapshot by a click of a button in v8.7. It takes care of the autoprovisioning and automatic configuration especially in the case of mirroring.