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."The solution helps to simplify storage."
"The most valuable feature is how it simplifies the management of the SAN."
"The amount of throughput that we're getting is really nice."
"Data deduplication features make it easier to manage storage and forecast growth."
"Lone segmentation is simpler and more agile. It's improved the velocity in overall provisioning from project to operation."
"My rating of Pure Storage is a ten out of ten because of the price for performance and footprint - the overall value."
"The code upgrades are very smooth."
"At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way."
"It is just as stable as any other high-end solution."
"The user interface is good, I would rate it a nine out of ten."
"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."
"We see very low latency with very high IOPS for mixed workloads."
"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 most valuable feature is the no-forklift upgrade. While the thing is running, I can change out the controllers one at a time and keep the customer up and running. I can add shelves and storage and SSD drives or spinning drives to the system, while it's running. I can bring all that in and rebalance the load across the new disks or, if we take disks away, rebalance the load across what's remaining, and it just works."
"The setup is straightforward."
"The process of reallocating data from fast disks (SSD or SAS) to slow disks (SATA) gives you better performance and better use of resources."
"The valuable features are high availability, compression, and a failover mechanism. It's a very highly available storage solution."
"IBM FlashSystem is a stable solution."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is SCM (Storage Class Memory), which has the lowest latency value in the storage industry."
"IBM FlashSystem has an easy to use GUI, similar to the IBM Storewize family, which make it one of the best flash storage systems in the market."
"The most valuable features in IBM FlashSystem are IOPS, performance, duplication, and compression."
"User friendly management interface."
"The compression and deduplication features are the most valuable."
"The most valuable features are flexibility and performance."
"We did have one hiccup with the integration of vCenter. When we were installing Pure Storage, we were using vCenter 6.7, which defaults to the HTML5 Web Client. The current plugin for Pure Storage doesn't show up in that client at all. You have to go and use the legacy FlexFlash client to see the Pure Storage plugin in vCenter."
"The scalability of the solution is not as good as it probably could be."
"Pricing could be better in comparison to other solutions."
"The data reduction that we had initially anticipated when we bought Pure and we move over, is way lower than the expected reduction. It depends on the workloads, of course. But that has been a challenge at times."
"In the configuration, which we brought in or tested it in, it has a very limited config as far as the array goes. That said, it still did more than our anticipation."
"I would like to see them develop the ability to integrate with more AWS services. There are increasingly more and more services coming out from AWS but there are also certain constraints where we can't move everything over to a cloud as well. We would like for things that are on-premise to be easily integrated with AWS."
"I would like to see data tiering to AWS."
"It was not proactive communication."
"Dell could improve the upgrading process."
"We have seen some degraded throughput with mixed workloads. We have been working with Dell EMC to correct some of these latency issues."
"From a performance point of view, it's getting a bit old."
"What I understand is that this is a 13 year old architecture, so it has lived its life and they're phasing it out. Honestly, we were initially struggling with the integration with VMware (but it was fixed with the VMware 6.5) and, then, it was around a 10GB network. At that time, it had the longevity to go to 100GB as well. It got us thinking about, when we go into the containerized architecture, what do we need to do to fix the infrastructure?"
"The interface could be improved. It should have an application point of view."
"This solution could be improved if overall performance was improved and operated with a higher speed and supported a higher volume of RAM."
"In terms of additional features, I would like to see some kind of I/O meter, to indicate what we are using in terms of performance. I would like to see automation with that, where it would give me the trends. I want to know those things easily, to help me know where issues are going to occur."
"While the scalability is good, there are certain limitations."
"The solution's infrastructure technology level could be PCI Express 5 instead of PCI Express 4 for the next version."
"We use some open-source tools for monitoring, such as Grafana and it should be bundled along with IBM FlashSystem."
"Our customers have raised concerns about the limitations of the FlashSystem 5200 and 7300, which only offer a 32-gigabyte connection."
"The solution is quite expensive. That's one of the downsides to using it."
"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."
"This solution needs a management console where we are alerted to issues and can report them, or escalate them through email or another method."
"Their technical support needs improvement in terms of reachability for the clients and response times. They should be more responsive and have more online platforms for support. They should make more technical information available online. There could be some kind of documentation community."
"If you want to expand, you cannot expand the disc enclosure. You have to buy a total individual node. Sometimes, this is difficult because we are just looking for capacity and not a node."
IBM FlashSystem products are enterprise computer data storage systems that store data on flash memory chips. Unlike storage systems that use standard solid-state drives, IBM FlashSystem products incorporate custom hardware based on technology from the 2012 acquisition of Texas Memory Systems. This hardware provides performance, reliability, and efficiency benefits versus competitive offerings.
Dell SC Series is ranked 24th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews while IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 105 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 IBM System Storage DS8000 Series, whereas IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, Dell Unity XT, 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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