Here are some recent customer case studies
Dedicated to our "FLASH for i" product
We are very proud to have over 600 end-customers using M81 products;
thanks to our partners!
Here are some of their words and case contexts …
PDF Download
Click on the link
This case is one of our best testimony:
The system administrator of one of the largest foundry plant in Europe writes us:
« Working with M81, in short, is absolute happiness! Our first need was to reduce the duration of weekly system backups. By performing backups (Save21) on a ‘secondary’ partition driven and managed by Flash for i, the availability of our systems has increased in a single fast action! The relative complexity of understanding how FlashCopy works on our disk arrays was quickly offset by the ease of implementation and configuration of Flash for i.
We then used this solution to create an UAT (User Acceptance and Test) partition. After a few internal configuration and automation stumbles, we now have a beautiful test partition equivalent to the production one: our developers and key users are having a great time!
We are very satisfied with M81’s competence and responsiveness, so we have also chosen their Control for i product for optimizing and automating the controls of our IBM i partitions.
Furthermore, the products are easy to update and M81 is always listening and open to all evolutions in order to benefit the whole community… ».
The system operation manager of a Life Insurance company in New-York writes us:
« I have been using Flash for i in production since June 2021 with my existing Virtual Tape Library and the two together make backups very painless. Flash for i is working great and I am more than happy to give a recommendation if other customers in the US are interested.
I saw M81 product presentation at IBM TechU (Oct 2020). This got me excited because we have been using the IBM Flash Toolkit for over 2 years. Nothing wrong with it which works but was very basic in what it did in reporting and logging. It also required a controlling LPAR which I saw as a waste of resources.
M81 Flash for i product addressed both of these issue, is easier to use and has a nicer Green Screen command set. Support is excellent . It was easy to install and configured by myself within less than a day. After one or two trials copies I ran into production ».
The system and network manager of a small service cooperative (35 people) made up of livestock and milk producers in deep central France is adopting Flash for i. He writes us:
« Our objective: no longer stop our processing during the 6 hours of our backup. Previously equipped with external disks, we would never have imagined the possibilities offered by an external disk array associated with Flash for i: since its installation, we have been able to offer a service that is accessible 7 days a week and 24 hours a day! Our users have been able to use this freed up machine time to carry out statistical processing that never had time to run before.
We now use Flash for i every day, exclusively saving21 of the PROD partition but also of our development partition. Since 2016, no more backups are made outside of Flash for i ».
The System Engineer of a private Belgian bank, writes on the open chat, during our product presentation at the ‘virtual’ IBM TechU (2021):
«The efficiency of their product is great and their level of support and reactivity is high… You can trust them! ».
Note: the bank is using the clone partition to provide part of their application to specific high demanding users during all the long duration of End Of Day batch jobs.
The System i Administrator at one of the top five Logistic company in Europe (30,000 people) explained during a testimony session at 2020 Common Europe ‘virtual’ Conference:
« The night was becoming too short for all the jobs to do, taking in account our 7×24 operation needs… We successfully and easily implement Flash for i on 13 LPARs. We reduced drastically our backup windows including the Save21 full backup windows! And the reliability of the backups was at the top. We have reach a 100% serenity concerning the backups.
We will continue deployment on more LPARs and implement Flash for i for new usages: generate regularly clones from the ‘PROD’ to be used as Test or Pre-prod partitions, rather than to refresh data… ».
The IBM i Technical leader of one of the biggest Worldwide insurance company, using Flash for i in Canada, UK and USA with IBM storage and EMC storage, wrote us:
« I’m happy we are working together. I believe you have a very good product and you are quite flexible with your customers. Product works nice, without any issues at all ».
The company is now also using the Control for i product.
The IBM i Technical manager from a Cloud provider in the Netherlands told us:
« I just discussed with Tonny Bastiaans (Worldwide Offering Manager Power Virtual Server at IBM) and I told Tonny that we have several instances running Flash for i and we are very happy with the product and the support ».
