"There's lots of flexibility in how we use the resources while also maintaining a small footprint."
"The high performance is very valuable, as well as the enterprise reliability features."
"We have been able to consolidate storage into Pavilion. Pavilions are our only SANs because it is a bring your own disk solution. When new drives come out, we are able to take out half of the drives in the system, put in new drives, move our VMs over to the new drives, take the other drives out, and populate those with new drives. Then, we are suddenly twice as dense as we were before. NVMe flash is only going to get denser and cheaper so we can make use of that every couple of years by just throwing newer disks into it at a fraction of the cost of a new SAN."
"IBM FlashSystem is a powerful effective storage solution. Additionally, it is user-friendly, anyone can use it."
"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 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."
"One of the most valuable features is that it's very easy to use and configure. It used to be more difficult, but now it's almost flawless."
"The initial setup is straightforward and can be done in an hour and a half by one person."
"IBM FlashSystem is flexible, quick, and has a solid design."
"Over the years, it has become increasingly user-friendly."
"The performance is very good and we use this product to enhance our core system."
"We're getting good performance, and the compression ratio is also very good in Pure Storage FlashArray."
"Processes that used to take 40 minutes to two hours can be completed in five minutes."
"Technical support is good."
"One of the features that my customers are really interested in is immutable snapshots. There are immutable snapshots to which your applications can be reverted back if you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or malicious attack. That's kind of a key deal, and it is one of the selling points I use to point out to my customers the value and the features that Pure Storage brings to the table."
"This solution is very scalable."
"It's very fast and very easy to use. It performs well and is both flexible and compatible. We like it because it's easy to use."
"The code upgrades are very smooth."
"The management features are well organized and they have a very good dashboard."
"In our current configuration, we can only run the line controllers in high availability, active-standby mode, whereas we would like to see active-active implemented."
"The rail system that Pavilion uses to mount up into a standard Dell or APC cabinet extends further back than normal rails, and they cover up the zero PDU slot. So, I don't like the rail system that comes with the device. That is my biggest complaint."
"I would like to see the management layer improved."
"They don't offer subscription-based payments."
"The design is a little old-fashioned and could be updated. The rack is very primitive and designed in an older style."
"The price is very costly."
"The solution is quite expensive. That's one of the downsides to using it."
"This product lacks some of the options we wanted. For example, expansion was difficult and it required a lot of patching to be done."
"We had issues when attempting to do a flash, we hope to resolve it soon."
"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 pricing needs to be more competitive."
"The price could be better."
"CIFS and SMB Shares cannot be mounted directly."
"A minor issue that comes to mind is that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad."
"We would like to be able to connect to data tape for backup, specifically to the LTO backups."
"The solution is not cheap."
"The integration capabilities could be improved."
"I feel like there is too much automation; the user doesn't have any manual input."
"The file functionality could be better."
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IBM FlashSystem is ranked 7th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 28 reviews while Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 33 reviews. IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.4, while Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of IBM FlashSystem writes "Good performance, energy efficient with a small form factor, helpful support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Provides protection against ransomware threats with immutable snapshots, and it is well known for its scalability, ease of use, and non-disruptive upgrades". IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell EMC PowerStore, Dell EMC Unity XT, HPE Nimble Storage, NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) and HPE StorageWorks MSA, whereas Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS), Dell EMC PowerStore, Dell EMC Unity XT, HPE Nimble Storage and VMware vSAN. See our IBM FlashSystem vs. Pure Storage FlashArray report.
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