We performed a comparison between IBM FlashSystem and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Nasuni and others in NAS."The Flash core models offer amazing performance."
"Ability to manage third-party arrays and virtualise them: One screen to control multiple arrays. Simplified administration."
"I like most of the features. Its speed, performance, and availability are valuable. We are implementing the data reduction technology the most."
"The initial customer technical support was efficient and effective."
"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."
"User friendly management interface."
"They have a virtualization feature and, even if you do not want to buy that feature, you can have it as a trial for two to three months. If you have another brand of storage from another company, you can use this tool to transfer all your data from the old system to the new Storwize system, which really shortens the migration time."
"Speed (IOPS/second) – It is most vital for applications that need low latency and high speed for transferring the data."
"vSAN provides default HA configurations, where if any host goes down, the VM moves around within the host. Even though the disks are local, the VMs moves around with the vSAN disk and vSAN provides a high availability on its own."
"The solution's technical support is good."
"The ability to have a disaster recovery option for our end-users by being able to use VDI and the vSANs, and the ability to do replication across multiple data centers, are valuable to us."
"Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier."
"In my opinion, vSAN is the most natural way to migrate to a fully hyperconverged solution. If a customer needs a more scalable solution with consolidated management, vSAN is excellent."
"vSAN is very integrated."
"The valuable features are its scalability and the standardization - one size fits all. It's also intuitive and easy to use because one size fits all. Obviously, it scales out, but it's the same solution at every physical location I manage."
"The valuable feature of the solution is the total hyperconverged facility."
"The only issue my team faced was transferring the data from the old system to IBM FlashSystem, which is an area for improvement in the solution."
"The array level RAID does not seem available."
"One area for improvement is in the GUI, where host clusters are not properly dealt with. With Hypervisor host clusters, all hosts must see the same volumes in the same order. Using the concept of a “host-group” has been around (even with IBM) for many years, so why not with the V7000?"
"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."
"There could be some extra features added."
"The solution should improve its pricing and the mechanism in the reduction pool."
"IBM FlashSystems is lagging in optimizing storage technologies."
"It has room for improvement in the area of stability."
"I would like to see the availability of more template based VMware systems. Combined with the ability to check and measure multiple and converging data segments. Another issue I've seen is that the tool seems to be slow when first starting up."
"The price can be reduced. Small businesses cannot afford this solution."
"We plan to switch products since the hardware nowadays is a little bit outdated and we need to scale up a bit."
"On the DevOps side, if there could be more automation it would be more helpful."
"They should provide Deduplication and Compression over the hybrid drives."
"There is a lot that VMware could improve from a marketing perspective. The cloud is still new for many people, so extending storage should be effortless. It shouldn't be so complicated to extend the storage so workloads can access it no matter where they go."
"The only negative point relates to the licensing. If you want multiple, different servers, it costs money, but you have all the capacity for vSAN. You do not reach the data, but the processor arrays and the current architecture."
"The server files are larger than before."
IBM FlashSystem is ranked 4th in NAS with 106 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 reviews. IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. 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 VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell Unity XT, NetApp AFF and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI).
We monitor all NAS 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.
