We performed a comparison between Dell EMC PowerStore and IBM FlashSystem based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: When compared, both solutions received similar ratings in all categories except for service and support. Users of IBM FlashSystem were more satisfied with the service.
"PowerStore is easy to use. All the drives use soft encryption. To upgrade it, you download the app, and it runs by itself. It's very easy to deploy, share, and create volumes."
"I have found the most valuable part of Dell PowerStore is the price."
"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is the all-NVMe flash storage. This is the most powerful feature of this series. It supports compression and duplication leads."
"Currently, the features of replication and deduplication have been very important to us."
"Overall, we're quite happy with the product because we can move the data that is stored on more than 10 of our current storage devices to a single PowerStore."
"The supportability of SCME drives for faster data access from the PowerStore and is the most valuable feature."
"Pricing is very good. It's very competitive against those of all the others that I looked at in the marketplace, such as Hitachi, IBM, HP, and Pure. Dell is right there in the mix as far as providing the best price point as well as meeting the performance requirements that we have."
"For access from virtual machines, iSCSI, and NFS, it is very good. It helps increase performance."
"The Flash core models offer amazing performance."
"The power systems are very reliable if you are running 24/7 operations. For ongoing mission-critical applications, it's the best solution."
"The performance is very good and we use this product to enhance our core system."
"It's very easy to manage."
"IBM FlashSystem is flexible, quick, and has a solid design."
"Installing FlashSystem is very easy. It takes less than half an hour, and I can handle it all myself."
"It's a mature product. It's like a BMW that evolves consistently."
"The most valuable features are flexibility and performance."
"It's also only supported with a limited amount of switches."
"The setup process could be improved. We had some issues regarding configuration and the time it took to do things. It wasn't specifically the people we worked with, but more the process and how it's done. They can work on that."
"The upgrades themselves are running fine, but after the upgrade is when we have a problem. With the update to 1.4, we had a head crash. They told us, 'This is a known issue. Please upgrade to 2.' We upgraded to 2 and, one week later they told us, 'Yeah, there are some issues in 2.0.0. You can lose data. Please upgrade to 2.0.1.' Overall, they need to make the system stable."
"The price is on the higher side."
"Could be improved by including a synchronizing feature for the file systems."
"Many customers are looking for a cyber recovery feature included in PowerStore. We would like to see this added in a future release."
"Reporting is an area that could be improved. It's very simplistic sometimes, and some of the very technical guys on my team want to see more of the details and be able to massage the report a little bit better."
"There is no Synchronize replication feature on the storage."
"The deduplication and compression ratio is not very good. It's not reaching a very high ratio."
"We use some open-source tools for monitoring, such as Grafana and it should be bundled along with IBM FlashSystem."
"The storage capacity of this solution could be improved."
"IBM FlashSystems is lagging in optimizing storage technologies."
"The solution is not easy to use and could improve."
"The GUI for monitoring performance metrics could provide better visibility. For example, it doesn't let me segregate the IOPS per volume."
"They don't offer subscription-based payments."
"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."
Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 20 reviews while IBM FlashSystem is ranked 7th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 36 reviews. Dell PowerStore is rated 8.6, while IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell PowerStore writes "Saves us power and floor space, and we can quickly assign new data stores for our developers' VMs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM FlashSystem writes "Reliable and easy to configure with simple data migration capabilities ". Dell PowerStore is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell PowerMax NVMe, HPE Nimble Storage and NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS), whereas IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Pure Storage FlashArray, HPE Primera, HPE Nimble Storage, NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) and Dell Unity XT. See our Dell PowerStore vs. IBM FlashSystem report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.
We monitor all All-Flash Storage Arrays reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
