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."FlashSystem offers proven technology in a compact package."
"The GUI is very easy and performance is also good."
"The initial customer technical support was efficient and effective."
"I like most of the features. Its speed, performance, and availability are valuable. We are implementing the data reduction technology the most."
"The FlashSystem 900 consistently delivers performance below 1ms for read/write. This performance is essential for an effective SVC stretch-cluster configuration across two datacenters, and presenting active-active storage to the customer."
"IBM FlashSystem is the best solution for storage virtualization."
"The storage system is one of the best in the world."
"No queuing and high ops, speed, and performance."
"The migration of servers feature makes server rack maintenance easy."
"The vSAN features we've found most helpful are live application migrations and storage policies. It has storage, policies, application, and DRS policies. Automation is there."
"The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is you do not have to use additional hardware for storage. The operation of VMware vSAN does not take a lot of effort. If you have VMware technology on your site, then it's easy for the operational support of the system."
"vSAN Health is a feature designed to monitor the health and performance of the vSAN environment. It's crucial for us and our customers to frequently check on this to ensure everything is operating smoothly."
"The valuable feature of the solution is the total hyperconverged facility."
"We are finding that vSAN is a lot more scalable and adaptable, because we can go in with hybrid arrays for our lower-end storage needs or with all-flash versions of vSAN for places where we need more performance, and it's coming in at a lower cost point than an actual traditional array."
"As a function of our core business, it's a sought after tool that helps us provide analytical support across a wide spectrum of client needs. It's allowed us to test out in our connected restaurant - "TheWorks" - a fully-functional restaurant experience center that allows our clients to discover the value of our connected solutions firsthand. We deploy vSAN in this customer-like environment within a hyperconvergent infrastruction (HCI) to give our clients a better understanding and help optimize data and the end-users' experience."
"The most valuable features are Erasure Coding, Deduplication and Compression, and the advancement in stretching regarding replication."
"AHV is Acropolis Hypervisor – A relatively new Hypervisor, robust and stable as VMware vSphere, has built-in advanced analytics and powerful operations, Self Service Portal and components for DevOps included, managed by a single pane of glass (Prism) via HTML5 and it is free of charge – That is why Nutanix is so advanced and revolutionary."
"The data reduction pool feature sucks and is not recommended for use with heavy workloads."
"In IBM FlashSystem, data reduction is an area with shortcomings where improvements can be made in the future."
"Replication features need improvement. Currently, they are there in the product, but I'm not sure as to how it works exactly."
"I would like to see an improvement in the handling of large amounts of rights."
"Our model does not support compression or deduplication."
"The customer's expectations are what they get on the cloud, they're expecting even in the on-premises deployments, going forward."
"This solution could be improved by offering greater amounts of storage."
"I would like to see it be more hardware-agnostic. Other than that, the only other complication is - and it has gotten better with the newer versions - that lately, once you're running an all-flash, if you need to grow or scale down your infrastructure, it's a long process. You need to evacuate all data and make sure you have enough space on the host, then add more hosts or take out hosts. That process is a little bit complex. You cannot scale as needed or shrink as needed."
"The main problem we had was hardware compatibility, finding the right hardware that was certified."
"One of the things that we've had challenges with are when we place hosts into maintenance mode. Sometimes doing so triggers large re-sync processes which can be time-consuming and which have, at times, pushed the capacity to the threshold. I definitely think making some changes in that area would provide some big improvements."
"It can be very expensive."
"I would like to see replication as part of it. I would also like to see direct file access, being able to run SIF shares and NFS and the like. I think that would be critical to continuing the use of it going forward."
"Integration could be better."
"One thing in vSAN that I would like to improve is using vSAN as a repository for files or other things. For example, with Horizon, maybe we can save profiles with UEM on there. That would be a good feature that I would like."
"I would like for the next release to be a bit cheaper."
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.
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.
