We performed a comparison between Dell SC Series and IBM FlashSystem based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."We like the data reduction rates. That has been really helpful. You get 4U of Pure storage replacing something like two racks of spinning disks. One of the things that has contributed to that are the data reduction rates."
"All our junior partners can administer the storage arrays. It is simple and easy to use. We don't have to dedicate a whole team of full time people to work on it."
"The technical support is very good."
"Performance, dedupe, and that it works well with database workloads are its most valuable features."
"The most valuable feature is replication."
"It upgrades in place which means we'll be using it well into the future."
"As soon as we introduced our first Pure Storage FlashArray, the first benefit was at least twice the performance increase. Our production databases simply ran twice as fast with no other change."
"Technical support is excellent. I've had very good responses from technical support. We had a couple of cases where we needed support. Some of the communications were purely over email and some has been an actual call to the service desk."
"A valuable feature is the performance of the auto-tiering. It will move hot data up to your fastest Tier 1 or move your slow data down. Data progression is what it's called. With the auto-tiering you can have multiple tiers, you can have your Tier 1 be either spinning or flash, all the way down to 7.2K. It will change the RAID on the fly so your writes come in at RAID 10. After they sit for a while, they get converted to RAID 5, then they'll cool off and move down the tiers. Your performance is kept going, while the cold data is moved to your slow, non-performance tiers."
"One of the most valuable features is the capability to switch between all-flash to hybrid, which have have actually done for one of our arrays. We started with the hybrid, with the limited if I'm not mistaken, and then over a period of time, we swapped all the hybrids with the SSDs. This was one of the big features because it gave us the capability to not stick with just one kind of media. Secondly, since it has sorted clustering, we were able to bring in the newer boxes and have it all clustered together. These were the two main features that we really looked into, which benefited our use case from an expansion/growth perspective. Another valuable feature is the ease of management."
"I think that Dell EMC is one of the best technical support services in Ukraine."
"The product offers good performance and is quite powerful."
"They have a feature called Live Migrate; it's been very, very useful."
"It's very scalable, especially with federation. If you outgrow the number of spindles that a unit can support, depending on the model, you can go into federation."
"The most valuable features are the with back-end dedupe, and the thin nodes. For a 20TB or 60TB, we're using almost a one-to-two ratio."
"The process of reallocating data from fast disks (SSD or SAS) to slow disks (SATA) gives you better performance and better use of resources."
"This solution is really user friendly. It also offers good performance and is highly reliable."
"The technical support for this solution is good. They used to help us when the motherboard of Power Systems broke. Their response times are really fast."
"The valuable features are high availability, compression, and a failover mechanism. It's a very highly available storage solution."
"The most valuable features of IBM FlashSystem are performance and security."
"It's very easy to manage."
"The most valuable features are deduplication and compression, which together, enable you to have more space."
"The performance of IBM FlashSystem is very good. The new technology and high throughput have given us more confidence in the solution. The management of the system has improved and we can control the monitoring system alerts and multiple FlashSystems with the Enterprise Cloud Edition, which is free. The migration of recently stored data to a new flash is much easier. You can move your data because you can utilize it externally."
"IBM FlashSystem is a powerful effective storage solution. Additionally, it is user-friendly, anyone can use it."
"We would like to see better troubleshooting aspects. It helps us if we can find out where the problem is. Right now, it's difficult. Sometimes it's difficult to pinpoint the issue. If they had more visibility and more troubleshooting feature built into the tool that would really help."
"I would like to see them lower the costs."
"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."
"Had some issues with Purity not being entirely compatible with VMware ESXi."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve by being more secure."
"The backend of this solution utilizes an Active/Passive architecture, rather than an Active/Active architecture, which is a disadvantage, when compared to some of its competitors. Its storage capacity should be expanded in the next release."
"Its price needs improvement. Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution."
"The price should be lower."
"There's always room for improvement in the operating code."
"The SC Series doesn't support NVMe storage."
"While the price is competitive, in the next release it would be better if they could reduce the fees."
"The lower model, the 3000, should have duplication. It doesn't right now. It's only from 5000 that this is offered, but it depends on the performance. It could be they don't offer it on lower models because the duplication is too much of a burden to the performance."
"From a performance point of view, it's getting a bit old."
"The configuration could be easier in Dell EMC SC Series."
"An issue we had was that the controller went down during an upgrade because of their upgrading the code. One side of the switch was down."
"The lack of reporting would be the main issue."
"The solution is not able to replicate data in one-to-many scenario."
"The design is a little old-fashioned and could be updated. The rack is very primitive and designed in an older style."
"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."
"Include an option to upload the support package to the IBM ECuRep when opening an IBM PMR."
"They can improve its initial configuration. The initial configuration is currently very difficult. There are multiple choices or alternative ways to configure based on the use case and what you are targeting out of the device, that is, more capacity or more performance. These multiple alternatives cause a lot of confusion. They should increase the processing part of the nodes. Currently, you can cluster up to eight nodes. From my experience and the workload that I am facing in my environment currently, I would like to see either a bigger or stronger node or a larger number of nodes that can be clustered together. We formally communicated to them that we need to see either this or that, and they are working on something."
"The solution is not easy to implement. It takes a lot of time to study the product and it's a little complicated in general."
"IBM should improve its data reduction development."
"Enterprise data storage needs improvement. They should create a feature for data and file storage."
Dell SC Series is ranked 24th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews while IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 106 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.4, while IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "Automated architecture that proactively optimizes your database ". 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 SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor, HPE Nimble Storage and NetApp AFF, whereas IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, NetApp AFF, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and HPE Nimble Storage. See our Dell SC Series vs. IBM FlashSystem report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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