We performed a comparison between IBM FlashSystem and NetApp AFF 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 initial setup is very straightforward. You simply plug it in and turn it on."
"The product cheaper compared to other solutions concerning the technology that they are using."
"This solution has helped my organization by cutting down on provisioning time. I used to have to provision a VM and it would take ten minutes. Now, it takes thirty seconds."
"It helps us maintain uptime much better than other solutions we've used in the past, and the support is extremely quick and responsive."
"The connections are a lot faster than what we had in the past. One InfiniBand does what we did on all of our Fibre Channels."
"Pure Storage is extremely reliable — it's never failed."
"The deduplication and compression meet all of our system requirements."
"The most valuable features in Pure Storage FlashArray are deduplication and active cluster."
"The most valuable features in IBM FlashSystem are IOPS, performance, duplication, and compression."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is replication...Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"Flash disk with Easy Tier option"
"The most valuable features are deduplication and compression, which together, enable you to have more space."
"Data deduplication is one of the most valuable features of this solution."
"We've found the solution to be very stable so far."
"IBM FlashSystem is flexible, quick, and has a solid design."
"High availability and enhanced security; Proven dependability; Data compression with hardware acceleration; Advanced copy services features are all in this product."
"The overall latency in our environment is very low because it's All Flash and we've got 10 Giga dedicated to the storage network"
"I think that the DR applications are the most valuable, including Snapshots and SnapMirror."
"It is stable. In my three years working with the storage, I haven't seen any issues with our NetApp product."
"We can go through and do an upgrade without worrying about any issues with the process"
"The performance is outstanding when it's all Flash. That's the biggest bang for the buck that we get."
"We have had issues before on our infrastructure where 20 to 30 percent of the people would come to us pointing the finger at the storage technology or storage back-end. That is now virtually zero."
"The speed of data retrieval is the most valuable feature. We mostly use it for our SAP database and we are getting good IO from the hard drive."
"The most valuable features for AFF are the speed, durability, back up, the time, the workloads that we are using currently are much faster than what they used to be. We're getting a lot of different things out of All Flash."
"Storage. There could be better storage."
"It is a bit expensive."
"The file functionality could be better."
"One thing I'd like to see in a future release is integration between their main storage array and what they call their FlashBlade product; to be able to snapshot directly from the primary array into multiple different backup copies on FlashBlade."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve some aspects. There are certain features that are good and there are some features that I see some issues with at the technical level. Those issues are related to replication. They need to resolve those issues, which I have already highlighted to the Pure team. Additionally, there are some issues in the active cluster that could improve."
"The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations."
"Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."
"I feel like there is too much automation; the user doesn't have any manual input."
"I have looked at a few pages of a report I download and I saw a graph there regarding software-defined vendors. IBM is not in a good position on this graph. I know that they are working very hard on this, to make it much better and to get to a level where it's not only hardware but also software to provide a complete solution."
"Sometimes the performance is effective but it gets resolved in the process."
"The Data Reduction Pools (DRP) support could be better."
"The installation is not easy. You need to have extensive knowledge to handle it."
"Include an option to upload the support package to the IBM ECuRep when opening an IBM PMR."
"The security features can be improved such that the encryption does not affect performance in any way."
"The price is very costly."
"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."
"The price of NVMe storage is very expensive."
"I don't like the newest GUI. It needs more options. Some features have been removed. Oversight is not as good in the new GUI compared to the previous version. Though, it might be something that we just need to get used to."
"Implementation needs to be improved."
"I would like to see more frequent updates at a faster pace."
"I would like to see better tutorials available, beyond the basics, that cover subjects like MetroCluster and automation."
"When you look at the competitors, they have some features available, for example on the deduplication side."
"Additional performance, additional data efficiencies, that's what everybody wants right now."
"One of the areas that the product can improve is definitely in the user interface. We don't use it for SAN, but we've looked at using it for SAN and the SAN workflows are really problematic for my admins, and they just don't like doing SAN provisioning on that app. That really needs to change if we're going to adopt it and actually consider it to be a strong competitor versus some of the other options out there."
IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 106 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews. IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of IBM FlashSystem writes "An easy GUI and simple provisioning but our model does not support compression". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, HPE Nimble Storage and Dell PowerMax NVMe, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and NetApp ASA. See our IBM FlashSystem vs. NetApp AFF report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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