IBM System Storage DS8900F Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 8 out of 10

Score

8 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for IBM System Storage DS8900F are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Reliability and High Availability: Users have consistently praised the IBM DS8000 family for its reliability and high availability, with no reported outages during usage. This reliability instills confidence in users, ensuring uninterrupted operations and data accessibility.

Ease of Management: Reviewers appreciate the ease of management offered by the Hardware Management Console, making tasks more manageable and efficient. The intuitive interface of the HMC simplifies complex processes, allowing users to navigate system configurations effortlessly.

Excellent Performance: The platform's performance has been highlighted as excellent by users, providing high levels of service and steady performance even as operations scale up. This consistent performance ensures smooth workflow efficiency without compromising on speed or quality.

Reviews

10 Reviews

DS8000 Family - the most resilient storage for the most critical applications

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

October 22, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our customers use the product for various purposes from mainframe to open systems uses.

Pros

The IBM DS8000 family is the leading, most-trusted platform for IBM mainframe
The IBM DS8000 family is the leading, most-trusted platform for IBM i.
The IBM DS8000 family has time-proven hardware and software contributing to unparalleled availability.

Cons

The DS8000 family still lacks deduplication and compression algorithms.
For best results on replication enablement, optional Copy Services Manager is suggested.

Likelihood to Recommend

<div>If you're looking at the IBM DS8000 you have a special use-case. It's either IBM Mainframe, IBM i or another enterprise environment that requires the most resilient storage technology available. The DS8000 family is a great choice for these highly-critical environments.</div><div>

</div><div>It offers some of the most mature and well-thought copy services available in the industry. This includes synchronous and async options. </div><div>

</div><div>It's also available either pre-racked or rack mountable to suit your use-case.

</div>

Rusty Beard

Storage Architect in Sales at Sirius Computer Solutions (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

17 years of experience

View profile

IBM System Storage DS8000 User Review

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 13, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM System Storage DS8000 is used for both z/OS and z/VM to store all back end data and for all online and mobile servers.

Pros

It's very good at mirroring the data between our 2 sites (Production and DR).
Its high availability means that we've never had an outage the entire time we've been using it.
Management is easy through the HMC.

Cons

Since the DS8000 can use SMS to now archive HSM data directly to the TS7700, maybe add an interface to the tape system?

Likelihood to Recommend

It is very well suited for z/OS CKD formatted devices.

Dave Newman

System Programmer in Information Technology at Penfed Credit Union (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

View profile

Use of sharks

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 10, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is being used by my customers with iSeries, mainframe and open systems with a need for always on high availability for business critical applications.

Pros

Mainframe integration
iSeries native attachment
Multi-site replication

Cons

Smaller high capacity drives
USB encryption

Likelihood to Recommend

It’s hard to justify the cost of the system for small capacity requirements of open/distributed workloads.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

6 years of experience

DS8882F - CKD Storage in a Manageable Footprint

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 3, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use our DS8882F for our mainframe infrastructure across the whole organization. It addresses the business problem of providing CKD storage in a rack mounted system that can fit in our data center. Its all-flash configuration enables us to run mainframe workloads with the lowest possible latency, helping us establish a testing environment for the setups we implement at other clients.

Pros

Copy Services
Disaster Recovery
High throughput

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited for CKD mainframe workloads and legacy support. Less appropriate for situations where FS9100 is more appropriate, such as needing external virtualiztion.

Tom Corrado

Storage Specialist in Information Technology at Vicom Infinity (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

7 years of experience

New Storage for USAA

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

May 1, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are replacing EMC storage with IBM storage. It's used company wide. Will be looking to implement FlashCopy for database backups.

Pros

Hopefully it won't have the internal problems like EMC that caused a major data issue last year.
I'm too new to have a good comparison of how this storage works.

Cons

Unknown.

Likelihood to Recommend

Hopefully it will be well suited for all our storage needs. From a database perspective, we will need storage for all our DB2 and IMS data. We currently use DASD storage for our virtual tape (image copies) also.

Timothy Choina

Sr. Database Administrator in Information Technology at USAA (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

DS8K for my Enterprise

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

May 1, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use IBM DS8000 to support all of our mortgage servicing customers on the mainframe. The DS8K was chosen for its performance, reliability and synergy with IBM zSeries. The DS8k is also important in reducing risk. The capabilities in replication and disaster recovery are unmatched in the industry and allow us to utilize complimentary technologies such as GDPS for resiliency.

Pros

Performance, the DS8k has provided excellent levels of service levels. I/O response time is no longer a concern.
Scalability - as we grow the platform, performance has been steady.
Replication - copy services capabilites are vast and ensure data integrity and consistency.
Ease of use, the latest GUIs have vastly improved over the last 5+ years. The GUI is a great learning tool for support teams not familiar with the DS8k.

Cons

Ability to use advanced features on HMC (for customers).
Provide better integration with GDPS - for example GDPS GUI hosted on DS8k HMC
Allow customers to install firmware

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited for mainframe CKD based applications. There is unmatched synergy with IBM zSeries when compared to the competition, for example zHPF, SUPERPAV, zHyperLink, cache management and replication technologies. For distributed, the fact that Copy Services Manager comes with the box is a great move on IBMs part to provide replication capability no matter what the applicaiton. I think the DS8k is less suited for smaller distributed environments. I think product overlap with V9000 in this case.

Verified User

Professional in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

16 years of experience

DS8000 value

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 1, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use the DS8000 at many of our customers. I have several of them installed at customers who work in financial markets. Typically, I see it used in Mainframe only environments, due to the relative cost of the DS8k compared to the variety of platforms available for open systems environments. However, even now I have some customers who have open systems environments connected to DS8000 when it is an extremely high priority environment that cannot afford downtime.

Primarily I see it used for FICON attachment. The reason for that is pretty simple -- IBM works very closely between their storage and z groups to maintain "synergy". But it's also just a rock solid highly available platform that's become more reliable with time.

Additionally, when it comes to business continuity functions it can be pretty incredible. Its Global Mirror function particularly impresses me. It's able to deal with exceptionally high latency and still deliver single-digit seconds of RPO (in extreme cases this might require development to use "pokeables"). When combined with Copy Services Manager or GDPS, it really brings disaster recovery functions to a very usable level for the enterprise.

Pros

Remote Copy -- The DS8k has decades of excellent code built to handle the most demanding environments for mainframe or open systems and can be combined with automation solutions like GDPS or Copy Services Manager
Reliability and Availability -- This is the platform that gets used for the most demanding environments, even when FICON attachment isn't required
Continued enhancement -- IBM continues to put resources into the DS8k and the platform has advanced with the technology from z and power
Mainframe synergy -- Poughkeepsie communicates and works very closely with the DS8k developers

Cons

Data Reduction -- DS8k doesn't do any. If you're running a mainframe with pervasive encryption turned on, that's not an issue but it could be for many distributed environments
FlashCopy -- based on Copy on Write. It works well, but it would be nice to see it move to something like Redirect on Write
Expense -- What can I say? It is more expensive than most people in an open systems environment are willing to pay when compared with offerings that don't have FICON

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Ian Wright

System Engineer in Sales at Various customers (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

15 years of experience

DS8000 Disaster Recovery

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 1, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

DS8000 provides the reliability for mission critical applications and un-surpassed speed. It allows our DB2 and IMS systems to run without interruption with the speed needed to meet customer expectations. By providing a highly available system combined with disaster recovery, we never worry about missing a sale.

Pros

Disaster Recovery
Response Time
HIgh Availability

Cons

Configuration menus

Likelihood to Recommend

With any mission critical application, the uptime and DR capabilities of the DS8000 are with equal in the industry. Choosing less is risking your data.

Verified User

Technician in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

DS8000 A great Storage tool with a very flexible GUI

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 30, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We uss DS8000 for our storage solution in our IT department. It's very flexible for adding new LUNs to our system and works very well as well with our SVC solution that we have.

Pros

Very flexible with SVC or standalone
Very reliable - never goes down

Cons

Not as fast as our flash system

Likelihood to Recommend

Big data LUNs with minimal writes and read

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Store data for days on DS8800 series

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

February 14, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use the DB8886 to house our system z data. This meets our business needs by providing fast and secure data storage.

Pros

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.

Cons

The hardest thing for us is the storage server software for configuring the storage. We find that the previous GUI interface is easier to use.
Being able to utilize some of the GDPS functions that need all flash to use.
The order process could be improved by telling the customer which additional cables/network requirements are needed.

Likelihood to Recommend

The DS8000 series meets all of our processing needs. Our DB2 colleagues are very impressed with the speed of this new DASD. We have just fully installed our new DS8886, so I am sure that other units will be greatly impressed with the speed and availability of this new DASD.

Verified User

Analyst in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

Loading Reviews List....

DS8000 value

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 1, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Remote Copy -- The DS8k has decades of excellent code built to handle the most demanding environments for mainframe or open systems and can be combined with automation solutions like GDPS or Copy Services Manager
Reliability and Availability -- This is the platform that gets used for the most demanding environments, even when FICON attachment isn't required
Continued enhancement -- IBM continues to put resources into the DS8k and the platform has advanced with the technology from z and power
Mainframe synergy -- Poughkeepsie communicates and works very closely with the DS8k developers

Cons

Data Reduction -- DS8k doesn't do any. If you're running a mainframe with pervasive encryption turned on, that's not an issue but it could be for many distributed environments
FlashCopy -- based on Copy on Write. It works well, but it would be nice to see it move to something like Redirect on Write
Expense -- What can I say? It is more expensive than most people in an open systems environment are willing to pay when compared with offerings that don't have FICON

Likelihood to Recommend

Ian Wright

System Engineer in Sales at Various customers (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

15 years of experience