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IBM PureSystems vs VxRail comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM PureSystems
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Converged Infrastructure (9th), Converged Infrastructure for SAP HANA (2nd)
VxRail
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
135
Ranking in other categories
HCI (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Solutions solutions, they serve different purposes. IBM PureSystems is designed for Converged Infrastructure and holds a mindshare of 5.6%, up 4.1% compared to last year.
VxRail, on the other hand, focuses on HCI, holds 9.6% mindshare, down 16.1% since last year.
Converged Infrastructure Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM PureSystems5.6%
FlexPod XCS12.7%
HPE ConvergedSystem11.1%
Other70.6%
Converged Infrastructure
HCI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VxRail9.6%
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)8.9%
VMware vSAN7.7%
Other73.8%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

it_user6186 - PeerSpot reviewer
Independent Analyst and Advisory Consultant at Server StorageIO - www.storageio.com
PureSystems, something old, something new, something from big blue
PART I For a certain generation of IBM faithful or followers the recently announced PureFlex and PureApplication systems might give a sense of DejaVu perhaps even causing some to wonder if they just woke up from a long Rip Van Winkle type nap. Yet for another generation who may not yet be future…
John Kevin - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Director at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Automation has streamlined lifecycle management and improved ongoing operational efficiency
For the first three years, I have a combo pricing policy. For the fourth year and fifth year, I have to buy separately for the licensing from VMware and from VxRail, so I think the combo cost for the fourth and fifth year is huge and does not make sense. Due to the pricing policy, I would not like to see additional functionalities at this time as it is not in my strategy. I would rate VxRail an eight out of ten because of the pricing.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The strengths of the system is how the Flex scales from a very powerful, next generation BladeCenter all the way up to an IaaS platform."
"The most valuable feature is that it is VMware-embedded. VxRail HCI is on VMware, and we can use VMware vCenter and vSphere. Our infrastructure consists of servers and VMware, and by using VxRail, our experience and familiarity have not changed because VxRail HCI is on VMware."
"The initial setup is simple."
"We have a customer, for example, that has a factory; before they used the VxRail solution, tasks would take hours, and with VxRail, a comport starts working in 30 minutes, saving so much time and giving a competitive gain for the organization."
"The most valuable feature in the VxRail solution is the software that binds the management portal and its ease of use of managing the environment. The guys don't have to worry about getting multiple solutions specialist. You can have one person looking at and managing the whole environment."
"VxRail has high performance and has great efficiency. There is a single place for us to manage all of our virtual machines. The ability to right-size instead of overcommit VMs is a large benefit."
"I like that there is a dependency on the storage controller."
"Being able to perform upgrades and check the system through the VxRail Manager has been very helpful."
"The product allows us to have the capacity for the future to be able to add applications to help us better serve our customers."
 

Cons

"The FSM does not quite deliver in the areas it plays too. A fairly sluggish interface that is more complex and less streamlined than it perhaps could be, holds it back and deployment of certain functionality from the switches requires more user intervention than feels necessary."
"We believe Dell's vShpere support falls short of the mark."
"Right now, it's difficult for a non-technical person to participate in using the product. It could be made more consumer-friendly."
"Its price needs to be improved. It is very expensive."
"There are multiple things that have space for improvement. The most important are the features related to VMware, vSphere, vCenter, etc."
"The agility of the support team to provide you with better solutions should be improved. VxRail also has to be improved in terms of simplicity. Adding a simple node seemed like quite a project."
"Its price could be better."
"Lifecycle management (LCM) should be enhanced"
"VxRail should try to improve the pricing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It is reasonable. Compared to the legacy hardware that we had so far, we are not paying way more, but we have very good performance. Its price is good."
"It varies. It could be $100,000 at the smaller end and millions and millions of dollars at the higher end."
"The license is a bundle with the hardware. It comes with the license and five-year support."
"We most likely pay yearly for support. The cost was justified by now because it stays up and I don't have to constantly open tickets. I probably rebooted the system once or twice. We haven't replaced any discs in the storage, we haven't had to do any disc replacements, so it just runs. You pay a little more but you cut down on the maintenance."
"The price of VxRail highly depends on your design and your configuration. For example, if I connect Pure Storage directly to ESXi hosts and bypass Fiber Channel switches and I will save on money. However, it reduces my redundancy and makes it not as robust of deployment and easy to manage. An HCI environment, it's more cost-effective than utilizing a traditional SAN. With storage and computing altogether, you don't necessarily have to involve the networking team as much. I don't necessarily need somebody that understands Brocade's or Cisco Fiber Channel Switches, because I have it all right there."
"The price point needs improvement, certainly for smaller SMBs. The cost of it is still quite painful. I think all vendors should do a product which is capped either by terabytes, IOPs, or VM instances. It should be an SMB solution that's going to make hyper-converged solutions easier for SMBs to get hold of. It's fine for those big guys that have billions of dollars of budget, but not for customers who have barely a 100,000 dollars or pounds in budget."
"We made a one-time purchase of the solution and the price is expensive."
"At about $200,000, this solution is a little bit pricey but it is more economical than others such as Nutanix or Cisco Hyperflex."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Manufacturing Company
13%
Government
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business42
Midsize Enterprise43
Large Enterprise57
 

Questions from the Community

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What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?
While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an engineered system. The choice to choose which technology depends on two major fac...
What are the major differences between VxRail and Dell EMC PowerFlex?
VxRail vs. Dell EMC PowerFlex VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being too expensive for a company to invest in. Even if the user is working with a l...
 

Also Known As

PureSystems
VCE VxRail
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ABT Online, Ascent Solutions Inc., Desert Research Institute (DRI), Reflexis, Esri, Avcilar Municipality, ValeCard, Computer Gross Italia S.p.A., DynaFront, Silvermoon Business Systems, Diasoft, BPTP, Temenos, Innovation Group, OneTree Solutions
World Wide Technology Inc, Renault Sport Formula One Team, 8x8 Inc, Brownes, Canadian Pacific, Canopy, Denton, EDF, Unilin, Xerox
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Rackspace Technology and others in Converged Infrastructure. Updated: August 2026.
912,565 professionals have used our research since 2012.