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 solution is very easy to configure and use."
"IBM FlashSystem is a powerful effective storage solution. Additionally, it is user-friendly, anyone can use it."
"The speed of the unit is its best feature. It performs very well."
"The most valuable features are deduplication and compression."
"The solution allows for easy migrations from previous products or vendors via its embedded storage virtualization function."
"User friendly management interface."
"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 GUI is very easy and performance is also good."
"This product has very good performance when it comes to virtualization storage and works well with solutions such as SAP HANA, Exadata, Hadoop, and Big Data Analytics."
"Very good VCG notification feature."
"The most valuable feature is the simplification of storage. We no longer need to deal with Fibre Channel and the external storage arrays."
"I think vSAN's stability is good. It's an underlying solution for both on-prem and in the cloud, especially the VMC on AWS stuff too. VMware has been around for a long time, so it's pretty stable."
"vSAN is integrated into VMware."
"High availability is a valuable aspect of this solution."
"Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier."
"I like the orchestration feature."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I know they have a flashcopy manager, but it is extra software, an additional license, and some customers don't like to add addition costs to their infrastructure. If IBM could create, or include snapshot management within the GUI, that would really be helpful."
"The product needs to improve their scalability."
"Additional licenses might be added for the fundamental licenses, such as those for copying and flash copies."
"The ease of installation should be improved. We had issues with the configuration model."
"I would like to see an improvement in the handling of large amounts of rights."
"VMware vSAN needs to improve its features because other solutions have more advanced features."
"They should provide Deduplication and Compression over the hybrid drives."
"The only thing I can think of at this time is to improve the performance monitoring and performance visibility within the GUI."
"We are facing some problems with updates with the VMware vSAN. When we upgraded from version 6.5 to 7, we have been faced with many problems. They have been deploying many hotfixes for this version, and they need to continue to improve this version."
"We would really like them to look at what Nutanix did for day-one/day-two operations deployment: Bringing in the equipment, getting it deployed, getting it setup, and ease of use of one-click for deploying our 30-node solution. With vSAN we had to go into each one individually and set it up."
"The quality of the customer service and support depends on the vSAN case. For example, if I open ten cases, maybe two or three get resolved quickly. But the other cases have a slow response."
"I see room for improvement for vSAN just around general hardware compatibility and expanding that sort of matrix."
"Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget."
IBM FlashSystem is ranked 4th in NAS with 106 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 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 Dell PowerFlex.
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