IBM System Storage DS8900F vs. StorPool

It's a qualified 10. If it's a mainframe environment I wouldn't think twice. An open systems environment I would ask many questions to make sure that it's not going to be a bad decision. The open systems environments would need to have requirements to drive the DS8000. It would work for any environment in the interop matrix, but I'd just want to make sure that it's the right fit.

Incentivized

We do recommend StorPool.

• Allows us to use GDPS for our disaster recovery solution. This is a strength because it enables us to meet our DR requirements.
• Allows us to have encryption of our data at rest. This is a strength because it enables us to meet our security requirements.
• Allows us to have a stable and reliable disk storage. This is a strength because it enables us to meet our data availability requirements.

Incentivized

• Simplicity and compatibility - StorPool is intuitive and can be managed with minimal training.
• StorPool also proved to be very scalable and easy to deploy.
• StorPool has a great technical support team - quick and professional. In many cases, they walk the extra mile to advise us on all aspects of our cloud - from hardware selection to soſtware solutions.

• I have seen the GUI say that the storage facility is inaccessible, even when getting a clean health check from IBM. Typically rebooting the HMC fixes this.
• When decommissioning a box, you cannot delete arrays until ranks are done formatting. This adds a lot of time to the decomm process
• IO ports do not have a topology by default

Incentivized

• Cons - Support for VMware is with iSCSI at this point. This is fine, but we're waiting for the full VMware integration they are working on.

Other vendors lack many of the mainframe functions provided by DS8k. SInce IBM is the most prominent maninframe vendor support is unmatched.

Incentivized

Along with StorPool, we also considered CEPH, LizardFS and some others. However the best price/performance ratio was delivered by StorPool.

• The DS8000 helps my customers meet their overall business objectives by providing a bulletproof platform for the most critical enterprise environments

Incentivized

• At this moment we haven’t yet calculated exactly the ROI. Our main focus is to secure the best performance on a reasonable price and that's exactly what we got when we started working with Storpool.