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IBM Elastic Storage Server

Score8.3 out of 10

4 Reviews and Ratings

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What is IBM Elastic Storage Server?

IBM Elastic Storage Server (IBM ESS) is a software-defined storage option.

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Reviews

What users are saying about IBM Elastic Storage Server.
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IBM ESS for AI and Big Data storage solution

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Elastic Storage is a highly available and highly scalable software based storage system for AI and Big Data. We had high performance use cases for our AI applications for an AI based product that we were building and IBM Elastic storage looked like a perfect solution.This service simplified the storage for Data and Model management and we were easily able to storage huge multiple types of data include images, natural language as well as structured datasets using this solution.

Pros

  • Very High Availability and Scalability
  • Works particularly well for AI and Big Data usecases
  • Easily unifies all sorts and types of Data

Cons

  • Integration with other Big Data Platforms like EMR and Databricks needed
  • May not be suitable for non AI related/Legacy usecases
  • Native support for structured relational datasets

Most Important Features

  • High scalability for AI and Big Data usecase
  • Integration with IBM Data platform

Return on Investment

  • Faster read/write data pipeline workloads
  • Faster time to load models from Storage
  • Improved inference time for models

Alternatives Considered

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Databricks Lakehouse Platform (Unified Analytics Platform) and Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)

Other Software Used

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Databricks Lakehouse Platform (Unified Analytics Platform)

global scalable file systems

Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ESS is a robustly articulated architecture built mainly focusing on file sharing and reliability. We could able to overcome some major challenges like sharing files across multiple teams located in different GEOS and seamlessly copying/migrating data across multi-site environments. In addition, we overcome one of the major hurdles of multiprotocol access and a perfect stack of affordable distributed storage array

Pros

  • Powerful processing power, literally support unlimited scale out storage capabilities
  • well integrated and supported with multi flavor environment and file systems.
  • Huge capacity with in a very reduced form factor of disks/enclosures

Cons

  • The maintenance procedure is not straight forward, needs lots of steps/dependency on spectrum scale software
  • Should have an option to deliver as an bundled components under IBM, instead of individual components from different vendors

Most Important Features

  • Erasure Coding
  • Policy based tiering
  • Cyber secure lockable data and audit trailsGlobal sharing and collaboration
  • Global sharing and collaboration

Return on Investment

  • When the cost and price dynamics comes into account, we have replaced age old traditional arrays with almost negligible cost with ESS
  • able to extend the capabilities of global teams to work and share their experiences and knowledge with other teams.

Alternatives Considered

Dell PowerScale

Best cloud storage solution for Big Data and AI

Incentivized
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Elastic Storage Server or IBM Elastic Storage Server is one of the best scalable, high-performance storage appliances available in the market. We are using IBM Elastic Storage Server for Big Data Application storage which needs on-demand scalability and high performance. IBM Elastic Storage Server is best suited for such purpose as it has reduced our maintenance and operational issues with the traditional on premise storage solution.

Pros

  • On demand high scalability
  • High performance specially for Big Data and AI Applications
  • Less operation and maintenance cost

Cons

  • Integration and configuration need a bit more technical expertise which is I guess expected.
  • There can be some improvement in integration with Legacy applications.

Most Important Features

  • Scalability
  • Reliability
  • High Performance
  • Better integration with other Appliances

Return on Investment

  • On demand scalability helped us in better projection of storage requirement
  • With reduced human resource for operation and maintenance of storage, ROI has been increased a lot.
  • High performance of Big Data applications using IBM Elastic Storage Server has improved the business.

Alternatives Considered

Cisco Cloud Object Storage (COS)

Other Software Used

Cisco Cloud Object Storage (COS), Dell ECS, Storage as a Service from Hitachi Vantara (STaaS)