After a few years of being an IBM storage customer, running an inventory of older storage arrays virtualized under their SVC platform across different sites, we were reaching a point where we felt the systems could no longer deliver on their promise, being somewhat from an older generation and starting to show their limitations in performance and costs (hardware support, licensing etc). We embarked on a storage revamp project to simplify our infrastructure and reduce our licensing costs, making sure though that we did not lose any functionalities, but that we in fact gained new functionalities and saved money in the long run. We went through a list of requirements and through a list of possible vendors and solutions and chose the IBM FS9500 and IBM FS5200 to fully meet our requirements and then some. FlashSystems provided instant performance improvements in a condensed, fully redundant system, allowing us to perform a quick, seamless migration across all sites.

Reliability is below any reasonable expectations from a storage device. On 1 system I had minimal failures and on another unit I had so many failures it is difficult to keep track. disks went bad and got replaced time after time. controller nodes went bad twice!! may good for a lab which is physically close and accessible to you.