We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and IBM FlashSystem based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, IBM FlashSystem came out ahead of Dell PowerMax NVMe. Although both products are set up similarly and are described as high-end, Dell PowerMax NVMe has a licensing model that most users dislike and requires improvements in its support response times.
"We're getting good performance, and the compression ratio is also very good in Pure Storage FlashArray."
"The stability and performance are the best things about the solution."
"It is pretty much just plug and play. There is not that much to do with it. It is very easy to use."
"The amount of data that I have moved to it from legacy storage has enabled us to retire units that are three or four times the physical size."
"It helps to simplify storage. For most of our customers, when they move to Pure Storage, storage becomes an afterthought."
"It has good stability for our company."
"Very stable; no worries about how much it can handle."
"We can store more for a cheaper price as opposed to paying for larger devices and larger rack spaces which get outdated sooner and which we'd have to change every two years. It simplifies storage for us."
"It is a true, stable product."
"The stability is great. It is five nines."
"The number one most valuable feature is reliability. I want to go home at the end of the day and come in the next day knowing it works, especially since we have storage offshore."
"The performance is very good on our servers. It's superior. And the QoS capabilities for providing work congestion protection are also important because about 99 percent of our servers are production servers."
"The most valuable feature is the performance and compression. The most useful tool is CloudIQ."
"Dell PowerMax NVMe's tech support is good."
"We removed the need to observe whether we ran into issues with the performance of disks or number of IOPS. Previously, our Oracle Database would throw us performance errors. Now, with PowerMax, everything runs smoothly."
"Uptime by far is the most important thing, and also the replication ability (SRDF). Most of the customers who need this type of availability also want the protection of multiple data centers, and it is able to easily switchover workloads to their other data centers."
"The storage system is one of the best in the world."
"IBM FlashSystem is a stable solution."
"The initial setup is straightforward and can be done in an hour and a half by one person."
"One of the most valuable features is that it's very easy to use and configure. It used to be more difficult, but now it's almost flawless."
"The Flash core models offer amazing performance."
"The performance is very good and we use this product to enhance our core system."
"This solution is convenient, user-friendly, convenient and reliable."
"The power systems are very reliable if you are running 24/7 operations. For ongoing mission-critical applications, it's the best solution."
"I would like to see more cloud integration."
"In the next release of this solution, we would like to see automated copy data management for SQL Server."
"I'd like to see a move towards individual VMs for what the performance of each VM is in a VD infrastructure. I can see the overall volume, but I would love to see things in a more granular level on the VM side."
"It was a little costly. The price was ultimately higher than both of the other solutions that we evaluated. I'd say that's the only downside."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features."
"Going forward, don't complicate things for the customers."
"I would rate this solution an eight because we have had outages. The commit times went very high in the database. The whole array went down so our customers were down for around eight hours. This was a very big outage which could have been our fault because we didn't do the upgrade in time."
"A year ago they promised that they would be able to read through the database encryption with more metric and they have not delivered on that patch, which is significant because it gives us back so much more storage room. We want to be able to read through the encryption."
"The price cap of Dell PowerMax NVMe is very high."
"The technical support is lacking. We are working with Dell EMC to get some better understanding of this."
"I would like the scalability to improve, as it requires additional footprints."
"Support of the product can be slow and an administrative challenge: planning, scheduling, and overseeing data center access for a Dell EMC rep. One improvement could be to enable a self-maintenance option. The requirements that we go through to get Dell EMC onsite to replace failed drives, power supplies, and other small redundant parts can be unnecessarily complex. If simplified, they could send us the parts, then we could replace them much faster, more easily, and truly within the SLA parameters."
"Remove the need for physical or hardwired virtual servers to run consistency groups, instead make the expensive array controllers handle that."
"Firmware updates are a bit painful because you have to involve their support, as opposed to having the ability to do it yourself."
"The initial setup was complex. ESRS is a very complex solution to put into our environment, because it requires external access to the Internet. That's a very tough thing for us to do, because we are a PCI and PII company. We store a lot of data for people which is personal. Therefore, going out to the Internet is not our preferred path."
"The initial setup could be easier."
"GUI interface should be enhanced more as there is some issues in copy services."
"The GUI for monitoring performance metrics could provide better visibility. For example, it doesn't let me segregate the IOPS per volume."
"The support could improve by allowing you to speak to someone when you call rather than them calling you back. However, once we do have contact with one of their technicians they are excellent."
"The solution is not easy to use and could improve."
"I would like to have a larger disk. Right now, you can get 57 terabytes in a shelf. Once they get the larger disk and you get larger capacities, it'll be even better."
"They can include Amazon file system S3 protocol in the upcoming releases. It is a cloud file system. IBM FlashSystem doesn't have this feature in the box for high-end or mid-range. We have got requests for this from customers because we need to use S3 for EDI application storage. At the beginning of every year, IBM releases firmware. When I find any bugs in the firmware during the year, I am unable to find any information from IBM regarding the bug. I need to open a ticket, and the IBM engineering team makes a patch only for me. This patch is not public. By creating a customized patch for a client, they don't really solve the issue for everyone. If multiple users have the same bug, IBM should upload the patch on the official website so that we can download it. IBM FlashSystem has a monitoring tool in the box, but it is not advanced. I need a more advanced tool for more advanced equations and monitoring. All top three storage vendors, that is, EMC, IBM, and Pure Storage, don't have a powerful monitoring tool. To monitor our box to show the statistics for I/Os and latency, I need to pay for extra software. The built-in monitoring storage is not mature enough to handle all requests and generate all reports that I need. They can include the functionality to stretch a cluster natively without using any additional boxes. In addition, there are some features that EMC has integrated with the box. These features are not available in IBM FlashSystem."
"I know they have a flashcopy manager, but it is extra software, an additional license, and some customers don't like to add addition costs to their infrastructure. If IBM could create, or include snapshot management within the GUI, that would really be helpful."
"The array level RAID does not seem available."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 106 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "Simplified storage provisioning for us, enabling us to assign any volumes in two to three minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM FlashSystem writes "An easy GUI and simple provisioning but our model does not support compression". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor Dorado, Dell XtremIO and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, whereas IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, Dell Unity XT, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and Huawei OceanStor Dorado. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. IBM FlashSystem report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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