"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."
"I like the performance of the PowerStore. When you talk about PowerStore, it's mainly about flash systems and high-end IOPS. The 1000T is a midsize box, in terms of the way the vendor positions it, but it is more than enough for our needs."
"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."
"For access from virtual machines, iSCSI, and NFS, it is very good. It helps increase performance."
"The supportability of SCME drives for faster data access from the PowerStore and is the most valuable feature."
"The administration tools take advantage of machine learning and make recommendations to the admins, and that makes the administration easier."
"Gives us flexibility, performance, and ease of use. It also has some very good compression capabilities. We were looking for a solution that was easy to install in our VMware environment, that was flexible. PowerStore X is a type of a VMware cluster that you install inside your environment. If you have a VMware environment, like we have in production, it's easy to install and use."
"The most valuable feature is that it is easy to use this frame. I am a SAN administrator, but I was able to train my colleague, who had only been a VMware administrator, on the PowerStore in about half a day. Now he's autonomous in assigning volumes and creating data stores..."
"A key feature is that compared to storage systems that we've been familiar with over decades, IBM simply does not fail. The reason is that IBM is the only manufacturer that engineers its own flash module, and there is a key architectural difference from everything else that we have seen in the market. The difference is that the flash module has the computational capability, which allows reliability and capacity enhancements to be uploaded from the main controllers and run in each module. So, each of the flash drives becomes its own little storage system, and that is extremely effective architecture. In this field, with this type of system, IBM has made a statement. They've never had one of these modules cause an outage. So, the failure rates on these things are just in a whole different universe from what we were accustomed to."
"It's easy to use, has good stability, and many features."
"The most valuable feature is the speed."
"The high performance and high availability improved our overall processes."
"I do not like having to use VPLEX for synchronous replication, as opposed to having the store software built-in."
"Many customers are looking for a cyber recovery feature included in PowerStore. We would like to see this added in a future release."
"The price is on the higher side."
"It was very new when we first deployed it a year ago. Even the upgrade processes and knowing what to expect, as well as documentation, could be more robust."
"The NAS part is very poor. It's very basic. Even Dell EMC has said that to us. We are waiting for version 3 of PowerStore for that. This must be improved and it is in the roadmap."
"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."
"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."
"I'd like to be able to connect to tape drives behind the storage device to back up the tape if need be. We have all of our storage running in all-flash, and we make a copy on tape. Currently, when we want to hook up tape drives, we have to add some extra equipment, which is a little bit complex. We want IBM to add a feature where we could install a tape into the storage so that we can connect it through a single pane of glass. We'd like to have a feature in the IBM flash storage system so that we can connect backup tape drives through the IBM storage system and we can manage the backup tape from the storage system."
"I would like to have replication functionality built directly in the product, rather than having to use a separate device for this."
"Other vendors have included a block and file system. IBM doesn't include a file system. And yet, it's very necessary for all organizations' networks to have file systems. We have other systems for the file system, however, ideally, we would like to have one system with these features."
"IBM's support is not good. I experienced a big problem where I opened the console IBM Storage and would see that something was broken. I called the call centers, and I said, "I have a problem. My drive is not working." They want me to give them the serial number, I gave it to them and they told me "I cannot find your product. Your product is not here.""
"The pricing should be more competitive."
Dell PowerStore is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 15 reviews while IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is ranked 20th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 5 reviews. Dell PowerStore is rated 8.8, while IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe 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 9100 NVMe writes "A game-changer product that doesn't fail, and as compared to the prior generation products, takes about 20% of space and uses about 85% less energy". Dell PowerStore is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Dell PowerMax NVMe, Pure Storage FlashArray and IBM FlashSystem, whereas IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is most compared with HPE Primera, Dell PowerMax NVMe, IBM FlashSystem, Pure Storage FlashArray and NetApp NVMe AFF A800. See our Dell PowerStore vs. IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors, best All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors, and best NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.
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