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IBM FLASHSYSTEM A9000R

Mfg # 9837-415-0000 CDW # 4198100

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This item was discontinued on January 17, 2020

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IBM FLASHSYSTEM A9000R is rated4.71 out of5 by7.
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Provides our customers with virtualization and flattening.What is most valuable?The most important feature that our customers are very interested in is the virtualization. Being able to have the flexibility as they grow, without having to just lift and replace everything that they're doing.Where it's moving into now is a unified set of advanced features that they're able to lay across their enterprise, without it being different in every single product that they're dealing with.The virtualization, the flattening, and those advanced characteristics of the product are really what our customers have gravitated towards on the V9000.How has it helped my organization?When it comes to our benefits from this solution, a lot of it comes down to simplicity. If we take a look at a lot of these complex IT solutions today, they're very hard to maintain and to administer. However, the V9000 and the investment that IBM has made to the user experience, makes it very easy for our customers to be able to self-maintain and self-administer their own environment. They don't have to always go to a storage consultant or have to call into support. That's been very beneficial to our clients.What needs improvement?We think that IBM has to continue to invest in additional data reduction capabilities which are on their roadmap. Being able to use flash most efficiently, where the least amount of data is physically being stored on the V9000 is really where IBM needs to make additional investment. They are doing that.What do I think about the stability of the solution?The stability's been rock solid. If we take a look at the V9000 and the base of what it's built on, it is the heritage of IBM Storwize. This goes back to IBM SAN Volume Controller or SVC. We're on a very mature code base and it is a code base that's been very extendable.So over the years, they've been able to inject new capabilities in the product line while still keeping the product very stable. We've had customers who have been through multiple upgrade cycles over the life of the product with no issues at all.What do I think about the scalability of the solution?The scalability of the V9000 product is really where it shines. Being able to add additional capacity to the unit, without having to come up with a different management of lots of separate units, has been very beneficial to clients.That idea of starting small with their current flash rollout and then being able to grow as the budget allows, has been very beneficial to clients.How is customer service and technical support?We've been absolutely happy with the technical support.From an IBM perspective for technical support, they really love the V9000, especially when you're going to do some enhanced service offerings that IBM has.When it comes to using things like the technical advisor, being able to have more of a concierge service with support has been very beneficial to clients.Which solutions did we use previously?A lot of our customers were previously using either all disk or hybrid solutions for their storage. Moving towards an all-flash V9000, allowed them to take performance management and stop having to worry about that in their everyday tasks.Moving to an all-flash array allowed them to spend more time dealing with application integration and dealing with their end users. This is rather than having to do performance management and moving data around. The all-flash array made their life a lot simpler.How was the initial setup?We were involved with all aspects:* Initial design* Setup* Rollout* Integration with the different operating systems and different hosts through the storage fabricIt was straightforward. What we really like about the V9000 is that we're able to take implementation engineers who had experience with other members of the Storwize family.They are able to take those skills that they learned within other product sets and directly translate those to the V9000.They are able to very quickly come up to speed on the product without having to learn a brand new skill set.Which other solutions did I evaluate?From a CAS Severn perspective, IBM continues to be our premier supplier of storage. We do have a lot of experience with other vendors in the industry, including Pure Storage, EMC, and HP.When it comes to recommending a vendor, the entire lifecycle of supporting a system is important. That's everything from design, to implementation, to ongoing support. IBM provides a strong package on all three aspects of the lifecycle of the equipment.What other advice do I have?Folks that are looking to implement the V9000 really should take a look at the simplicity that an all-flash array can bring to their environment. They should look at the efficiency of being able to take skills that they might have learned within other Storwize products and be able to directly translate those into the V9000.To summarize: Similar interface, similar support interaction, and the way they can take knowledge that they previously had and be able to directly translate that to their all-flash array decision.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2017-06-01T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Decreased the run time of batch jobs from an hour to minutes but more granularity is needed in the software features.What is our primary use case?The product is used as a central storage system. All live and test environment data, except for periodic data backups and centralized log management system data, is stored on the IBM Flash system.How has it helped my organization?As a result of the accelerated read and write operations from disks, productivity across the enterprise has increased in daily work.What is most valuable?Ability to compress the data at the NVMe disks is valuable as it is off-loading the process from the storage controller units. Hyperswap feature is valuable as it is increasing the availability without an intervention in the server operating system.What needs improvement?Deduplication feature is not mature and it is significantly increasing the latency. Additionally, the product has limitations in the software features and granularity. For example, data reduction feature cannot be aligned at the logical unit (LUN) level. It is aligned at the pool level. However, I expect to create some LUNs with deduplication and HW compression while some other LUNs with HW compression only. The other limitation is available at the remote copy feature. You can not create one-to-many scenarious for the LUNs which is created as the Hyperswap LUN.For how long have I used the solution?I've been using the solution for three months.What do I think about the stability of the solution?The product has been stable for the last three months.What do I think about the scalability of the solution?It is scalable enough.How are customer service and technical support?We recently contacted the technical support and received prompt response. IBM Company has a strong customer service and support organization in my country.If you previously used a different solution, which one did you use and why did you switch?This is the first time we are using a Flash System. In the past, we were using traditional hard disk drive (SAS and SATA) storage systems. We needed to increase the capacity and didn't want to invest in an old technology and slower systems.How was the initial setup?The initial setup was really straightforward. It was not complex. Initial setup, data migration from the old products and the remote copy synchronization between Primary DC and DRC was completed in one month period.What about the implementation team?We worked together with a local partner of IBM for the setup of the product. They showed satisfactory performance. Data migration was achieved by our own team.What was our ROI?We didn't buy the product for any specific purpose like increasing the number of such transactions for completing more deal in a day. Therefore, I am not sure how can I say the ROI is but it was pretty big investment for us.What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?Licensing is very straight forward for IBM Flash System and the warranty includes highest level of support conditions. The initial setup was very easy and smooth. The cost was higher than some other competitors.Which other solutions did I evaluate?We chose this solution among 6 solutions from different vendors. Local support organization, performance test results, cost and the technology of the product were the key parameters in the comparison.What other advice do I have?Almost all vendors are offering data reduction functionalities (deduplication, compression, thin provisioning etc.) in their newest products. Reduction techniques are offering up to 10 times reduction in data but this ratio is not more than 2 or 3 in real life for mixed type of data. Therefore, customers should test the products with their real and different type of data to measure the reduction rates properly.Otherwise, vendors may offer smaller sizes in their proposal and there might be conflict in between two parties after setup of the product in the live environment.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2019-07-18T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Good deduplication features and stabilityWhat is our primary use case?Our primary use case of this solution is deduplication.What is most valuable?The feature I find most valuable is the deduplication because the nature of the data that we are using in our current environment has a lot of replicated data. You tend to create a copy of the same system multiple times for different reasons. So if you use a flash system that is deduplication-enabled, you end up using less capacity.What needs improvement?I would like to see an improvement in the handling of large amounts of rights. An automatic flash system that doesn't do compression or deduplication will flush through the rights directly from the host to the flash modules. It doesn't keep them in the cache. For compression and deduplication systems, they have to do compression, deduplication and the memory and cache for the controller. So they have to keep the data there otherwise you will find yourself stuck with performance issues.For how long have I used the solution?I've been using the solution for four years now.What do I think about the stability of the solution?The solution is currently hosting our core banking system and we haven't faced any stability issues, so it is very stable.What do I think about the scalability of the solution?I have only four boxes now, so it's not the best scalability you can get, but it is still acceptable. Since we are hosting our core banking on it, we have about 20,000 employees working on it.How are customer service and technical support?I will rate their technical support an eight out of ten. If you send them a question, it takes them ten days to come back to you with an answer. But besides this, we've had no other issues.If you previously used a different solution, which one did you use and why did you switch?We use EMC devices and IBM FlashSystem concurrently, but we have a different evaluation for these products. They are not the same because our critical applications are hosted on IBM FlashSystem. The less critical applications are hosted on VMAX.How was the initial setup?The setup of the IBM devices is really straightforward. The actual deployment for the IBM FlashSystem took about seven hours. One of our partners was responsible for this, and we are very satisfied with his performance.What other advice do I have?My advice to others would be to go for the big one, the A9000. It is a little bit more expensive but it offers a better total cost of ownership.In the next version, I would like to see external virtualization. We are currently using LVC for external virtualization, and then we are using the boxes under LVC. If IBM embeds the LVC feature inside the box, I will only need to use the box and then virtualize the smaller boxes behind it. It will simplify my issues.I rate this solution a nine out of ten.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2019-09-16T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from It allows our organization to provide a more timely response to our customers.How has it helped my organization?It allows our organization to provide a more timely response to our customers.What is most valuable?The speed of the unit is its best feature. It performs very well.What needs improvement?I would like to see bigger modules. That's about the only thing that needs improvement.What do I think about the stability of the solution?So far, it's been very stable. There have been no issues.What do I think about the scalability of the solution?It is very scalable.How is customer service and technical support?I have used technical support and they have been very good.Which solutions did we use previously?We were having performance issues. We decided to find the lowest latency device and this was it.How was the initial setup?I was involved in the initial setup and it was very straightforward.Which other solutions did I evaluate?We only evaluated EMC. This was a better performing product.What other advice do I have?This is probably the best unit you're going to find out there.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2017-06-02T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from The valuable features are snapshots and snap logs.What is most valuable?The valuable features are snapshots and snap logs. We only use those on our flash system. We value the performance of the system.How has it helped my organization?Our automatic banking systems have become twice as quick with flash storage.What needs improvement?I don't know about improvements. Maybe having independent snapshots. For now, when we make snapshots one by one, they depend on each other. If we delete the first snapshot, then we can lose the others. We really need functional snapshots which are independent of each other.What do I think about the stability of the solution?The stability is not very good. Over the course of the last two years, we had two incidents with flash storage when we lost our data. We have three flash storages and we lost all the data on two of them. That was not very good.What do I think about the scalability of the solution?Scalability is good.How is customer service and technical support?Technical support is good enough. Their advice was mainly to upgrade our firmware and restore our backups.What other advice do I have?Test all of the products as you evaluate them.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2017-06-02T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Provides data reduction for many workloads.What is most valuable?This was a great step forward from the XIV in next generation hardware for the customer. We're seeing tremendous data reduction for many workloads. It's not a 100% move from XIV for all workloads, however, but the customer is very pleased, for the most part, in their environment.How has it helped my organization?Benefits for us include lower overall cost, higher density, lower data center costs, and reduced total TCO, as well as moving to an all-flash solution versus a flash/spinning disk solution.What needs improvement?The HSM management console GUI still need some enhancements. It is still a bit awkward in navigation, and some functions/features are not yet fully integrated into the GUI support, but only via CLI. We also need to get reporting down to individual pool and volume levels, rather than just overall system levels. Customers need a more granular view of their individual business usage as well.What do I think about the stability of the solution?We've had some issues with stability, such as a couple of hardware failures and a couple of code bugs. They were addressed, but they caused initial customer concern.What do I think about the scalability of the solution?Scalability is quite nice, with being able to support over 1.5TB effective in one rack is a nice selling feature. One of the early issues was that they weren't at a code release where we were able to add new elements right away in a non-disruptive fashion. We had to wait for a couple of code releases for that. We've gone beyond that now. At this point, scalability is no longer an issue.How is customer service and technical support?Technical support has been great. They have been engaged from start to finish.Which solutions did we use previously?Regarding previous solutions, this was more of a technology refresh decision. A customer was heavily invested in an older technology that they were very satisfied with, but they wanted to continue to make the move to flash technology. This was the next logical era of evolution.How was the initial setup?The initial setup was a little more difficult than the predecessor XIV, but it's a new product, so a learning curve is to be expected. As it is becoming more common in the field, it should be getting better documented and more straightforward to deploy. We are seeing new and continual updates to Red books and best practices documents now.Which other solutions did I evaluate?We didn't really consider alternative solutions, mainly because there aren’t any out there that can touch the A9000 family. From our standpoint, we're an IBM business partner. We value reliability and performance above everything else. Price is a close second, but reliability is key.What other advice do I have?Read anything and everything you can, such as documentation manuals and best practices that are coming out. Stay plugged into the IBM communities and leverage services if this is your first engagement for capacity and sizing.Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:We are an IBM business partner.
Date published: 2017-07-20T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Incorporates both the Spectrum virtualization layer and flash technology.What is most valuable?The V9000 incorporates both the Spectrum virtualization layer as well as flash technology. It does it in such a unique manner that it provides super fast response times. There's low latency for the customers. It's very simple and easy. It uses the same interface as all the Storewize products do, so it's a very short ramp-up time for customers.How has it helped my organization?Speed. I mean it's flash. It's speed. The benefit is to reduce the amount of workload and transaction time. When customers have put data on the V9000, their response times go down and they can do more work within a shorter span of time.What needs improvement?They've already got one. The clustering host came in 7/8 code, so that's coming in. I would like to see deduplication come very soon. That would be really good to have deduplication built in, not only with compression, but also have deduplication with it.What do I think about the stability of the solution?The stability is awesome. It's based off a mature product line, Spectrum Virtualize. It's a long standing product. It's been around since 1999, so that core technology is there.The flash system has grown from the old TMS days. It's a well-known and proven technology, so they've combined the two well-known and well-proven technologies to form this solution. It's just very solid.What do I think about the scalability of the solution?Scalability is also good because you can add an additional FS900 behind it or you can stack in other V9000s and cluster them together. You can either go deeper or wider with your solution set. It really just depends on how much performance or workload insulation you need, whether you go wide or you go deep.How is customer service and technical support?I haven't used technical support and none of my customers have had to call technical support on a V9000 yet. That kind of speaks to the product itself. It is a relatively new product, but the field time is still good. The resiliency is there.Which solutions did we use previously?Our customer was a legacy Storewize customer. We knew that when they were announcing their combination of Spectrum Virtualize and flash that it would be a winning combination. You can't go wrong with that kind of combination.Our company decided that we needed to train up fast and get on top of it quick. Because of that, we were able to turn out some of the first in the Eastern area.How was the initial setup?It can be complex if you don't follow the guide. Follow the instructions that IBM sets forth in the Redbooks and make life simple.What about the implementation team?The implementation was very easy. It's almost a "set it and forget it" kind of product.What other advice do I have?Read the Redbook.The most important thing when selecting a vendor for me is how well the vendor works with me. It's a partnership, not just a sales, “here's a product” kind of thing. If you partner with us, you really get in, dive deep with us, and work through the solutions if needed. That's what makes a good vendor.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2017-06-04T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from I can provision the storage, find problems, and I can SSH in and do CLI commands.What is most valuable?For me and for the operations team, the ease-of-use of the GUI is the most valuable feature. It's really easy to understand. It's really easy to do tasks. That's what I like most. The performance is really good. From an operations perspective, definitely the ease-of-use stands out. Compared to other products and other vendors, it's much, much easier.How has it helped my organization?Time to value. You finish things a lot quicker. I can provision the storage a lot faster and find problems a lot quicker. The fact that I can SSH in and do CLI commands where some of these other vendors don't let you do it is a big deal. I can write custom scripts and do things a lot quicker. The ease-of-use is a lot better with this product.What needs improvement?There's always room for improvement. Adding deduplication would allow us to get more bang for our buck, basically.What do I think about the stability of the solution?Overall, stability is really, really good. We ran into some issues with compression, but it was because we were trying to overload it. So if we don't do that, it runs really, really well.What do I think about the scalability of the solution?We have it architected to keep it at a certain level. But if we needed to, we could scale it pretty easily because it's virtualized storage. There's a lot of flexibility with it.How is customer service and technical support?Technical support is really good. Because we're a bigger company, they get to us a little bit quicker. There's more on the line for IBM, so they really treat us well. It's been pretty good. We get good feedback quickly.Which solutions did we use previously?We needed the performance of the applications. Payroll applications are very I/O intensive and flash systems are a perfect fit. It makes sense.How was the initial setup?I was involved in the setup and it was easy. I've done those for years.Which other solutions did I evaluate?We looked at pretty many vendors. Anybody you could name, we looked at them. We have multiple vendors in the environment, not just IBM. But for our really critical, high performance apps, we put it on the V9000.What other advice do I have?Just be careful if you're going to try to use compression, because of the specific issues we've had. If it's a high performance computing environment, just keep it thick provisioned. Get the best performance from it. Don't try to save and then screw up the user experience.If something fails, it's not going to bring down the application. V9000 is redundant through and through, so it's a great product.When selecting a vendor, stability, ease of use, and resiliency are the most important things.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2017-06-04T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from The FlashSystem 900: A Powerful Building Block for Flash InfrastructureWhat is most valuable?The most valuable feature is the continuity of the user interface. Many of our customers leverage Storwize and XIV storage subsystems. That continuity in look and feel has likely helped the FlashSystem because transitioning to using this new product doesn't require any additional training or familiarization time. Instead, customers leverage their experiences to perform 90-95% of the tasks necessary to get a new FlashSystem 900 running.It's especially important to be able to walk into a customer site and say, "Hey, you have access to the same user experience that you have with your Storwize system, and/or a very similar user experience to your XIV."How has it helped my organization?Having a consistent user experience and user interface has helped save our customers' time: we don't have to retrain them for a new user interface, and they don't have the learning curve associated with understanding the nuances of a new interface.The FlashSystem has really helped improve our customers' I/O intensive workloads. Many of our customers leverage Flash for database workloads and appreciate the extra performance boost it gives.What needs improvement?A lot of the beauty of the FlashSystem 900 is that it's very, very focused on what it does, and it does it well. I don't really think there are additional features required.What do I think about the stability of the solution?The FlashSystem 900 is a relatively stable platform. While any codebase will have some issues and require patching (nothing is perfect), the codebase on which the FlashSystem 900 is built is solid.What do I think about the scalability of the solution?As a building block, the FlashSystem 900 isn't really intended to scale out to a large degree. Instead, it's intended to be used as a block with which to build out a scalable solution (such as with an A9000/A9000R or a V9000).How is customer service and technical support?Customer Service: IBM's support for storage hardware is usually excellent.Technical Support: IBM's storage technical support is usually excellent.How was the initial setup?I have been involved in the initial setup with a number of customers. It's very straightforward. It's a lot easier than the old days.What other advice do I have?If you are looking for a great flash solution that can be virtualized or utilized as a building block for a scalable flash solution, or if you're looking for flash for a very specific workload, then you may want to consider a FlashSystem 900.It's probably the most straightforward piece of hardware you can get. The user experience from the interfaces and the price points for the performance a really solid.I'm an IBM Business Partner, so there's really only one vendor that we go to for our storage. However, even if I weren't an IBM Business Partner, having a pretty stable track record with their products, ease of use, and value delivered for price -- I would probably still recommend a FlashSystem 900 for the use cases I stated earlier.Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:We are IBM business partners.
Date published: 2017-06-01T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Consistently delivers performance below 1ms for read/writeWhat is our primary use case?We are using the IBM FlashSystem 900 in a tiered storage environment virtualized behind the IBM SAN Volume Controller in a stretched-cluster topology.How has it helped my organization?The FlashSystem 900 consistently delivers performance below 1ms for read/write. This performance is essential for an effective SVC stretch-cluster configuration across two datacenters, and presenting active-active storage to the customer.What is most valuable?The performance monitoring feature is useful as it can report in 15 minute intervals by hour, day, week, month, or by a custom date range. Version 1.5.0.0 also has a useful feature which allows for IBM to provide remote support directly into the FlashSystem 900.What needs improvement?Include an option to upload the support package to the IBM ECuRep when opening an IBM PMR.For how long have I used the solution?Three to five years.How is customer service and technical support?The initial customer technical support was efficient and effective.Which solutions did we use previously?No previous solution was used.How was the initial setup?The initial setup is very similar to setting up the IBM family of enterprise storage products (V7000, V9000, SVC, etc.).What about the implementation team?We implemented with a business partner and IBM.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2018-03-07T00:00:00-05:00

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