IBM Storage FlashSystem

The purchased FlashSystems were fully loaded with innovative FCM4 drives that allowed for immediate space reduction with inline compression as well as providing live anomaly detection such as ransomware detection to better protect our environments. The included replication and snapshot licensing was of great use, building our redundancy and protection, and the ease of integration with our backup system was a great plus. Implementing the system was quite a simple task which allowed for a quick migration from our older infra into the new. The reduced size of the new storage array allowed us to save quite a bit on the electrical and cooling portions as well, freeing up rack space considerably, again without losing functionality or performance, but gaining some.

Price was attractive. for the proper use case (lab) it will do OK.

It uses IBM's Spectrum Virtualize software to help enable advanced data services such as data migration, replication, encryption, and compression. It supports NVMe Support, which is a high-speed storage protocol that offers high performance over storage protocols like SAS or SATA. It supports integration with both public and private clouds. It provides high availability that includes dual active controllers, redundant power supplies, cooling, and mirrored storage, ensuring that the system offers service without any outage. It supports synchronous and asynchronous replication, which means we can mirror our data over distributed locations. End-to-end data encryption is available.

The GUI can be a bit annoying with certain tasks. We've personally reported a few times to IBM support that the GUI will refresh its tables at the worst time, for example when looking for specific LUIDs in the table. Your best bet is to use the filter option to limit the table to as few rows as possible without compromising what you are looking for to limit the refresh annoyance. We would also love for IBM to integrate a quorum type of security to allow role based permissions to be very specific instead of just being members of a specific group of administrators.

Reliability was unacceptable, especially for a product that should have reliability as the #1 feature. Eventually IBM management got involved in some of my open tickets and offered apologies but nothing more. Most interactions with support required multiple iterations until they got it right. Getting the correct firmware and instructions for my specific model was always a 2 week saga of back and forth with support.

setup and configuration process is very complex for businesses who do not have a technical team. It is a very expensive storage solution for smaller organizations who have limited budgets. Limited documentation for complex issues.