We performed a comparison between Dell EMC PowerStore and IBM FlashSystem based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: When compared, both solutions received similar ratings in all categories except for service and support. Users of IBM FlashSystem were more satisfied with the service.
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"The duplication algorithm allows us to get a lot more use out of less storage. We're running a five terabyte array right now and we're running probably about 30 terabytes on it. So the duplication rate is pretty phenomenal, without a cost to performance. It still runs pretty smoothly."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."
"I find all of the Dell PowerStore features to be valuable."
"This solution is very useful to us as we use it internally for all of the services that we need. We use it as a lab and we showcase new technology to the customers and how it can help them going forward."
"There is no complicated configuration for queries and calls. You just create a model and go."
"It has its own file formatting protocol, which saves a lot of space."
"When compared to Pure Storage, Dell PowerStore's cost was quite attractive."
"The main feature of Dell PowerStore is its support for NVMe as well as hybrid solutions."
"Gives us flexibility, performance, and ease of use. It also has some very good compression capabilities. We were looking for a solution that was easy to install in our VMware environment, that was flexible. PowerStore X is a type of a VMware cluster that you install inside your environment. If you have a VMware environment, like we have in production, it's easy to install and use."
"The way you're able to manage all your PowerStores as one solution is very good for us. PowerStore enables you to federate or cluster multiple appliances with automated load balancing. In terms of management, it's helpful that we can do it from a single interface where we're able to manage multiple PowerStores. When you have multiple PowerStores it works intelligently by running the workloads based on the needs of the infrastructure."
"The performance is very good and we use this product to enhance our core system."
"The most valuable features are deduplication and compression."
"The compression and deduplication features are the most valuable."
"The solution is scalable and has varying degrees of scalability."
"High availability and enhanced security; Proven dependability; Data compression with hardware acceleration; Advanced copy services features are all in this product."
"This solution is really user friendly. It also offers good performance and is highly reliable."
"The initial customer technical support was efficient and effective."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"We need better data deduplication."
"The upgrades themselves are running fine, but after the upgrade is when we have a problem. With the update to 1.4, we had a head crash. They told us, 'This is a known issue. Please upgrade to 2.' We upgraded to 2 and, one week later they told us, 'Yeah, there are some issues in 2.0.0. You can lose data. Please upgrade to 2.0.1.' Overall, they need to make the system stable."
"Many customers are looking for a cyber recovery feature included in PowerStore. We would like to see this added in a future release."
"The only area I can highlight for improvement is that the 4:1 data reduction target has not been reached. This may be due to an issue with Dell EMC's initial analysis of data compression. As a result, we have had to add new physical disks to reach our goal of total available disk space."
"The support team doesn't always provide adequate assistance. So, there is room for improvement in the support."
"There are certain shortcomings with the technical support team of Dell PowerStore, where improvements are required."
"There is no Synchronize replication feature on the storage."
"The UI should be a little more user-friendly to manage."
"It's also only supported with a limited amount of switches."
"The ease of installation should be improved. We had issues with the configuration model."
"We use some open-source tools for monitoring, such as Grafana and it should be bundled along with IBM FlashSystem."
"The pricing could be improved, but I think it's getting better and better with each version. IBM needs to implement NAS storage again, as this is a big flaw. Dell EMC is very good at this and if you compared them based on NAS storage, Dell EMC would win right away. IBM's solution for NAS storage is very complicated. We don't have a storage box that provides file sharing from itself, we have to put software on it and go through a whole complicated process. It should be simplified."
"The basic setup can be challenging when it comes to certain IP addresses and the configuration of the IP. You have to go in to different menus to makes changes and ensure it is stable."
"The solution's pricing is a bit high so there is room for improvement."
"The data reduction pool feature sucks and is not recommended for use with heavy workloads."
"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."
"The solution is not able to replicate data in one-to-many scenario."
Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage with 47 reviews while IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 106 reviews. Dell PowerStore is rated 8.6, while IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Dell PowerStore writes "It has a very strong NAS that can support a lot of big, heavy environments". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM FlashSystem writes "An easy GUI and simple provisioning but our model does not support compression". Dell PowerStore is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray, NetApp AFF, Dell PowerMax NVMe and Huawei OceanStor Dorado, whereas IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell Unity XT, NetApp AFF, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and Huawei OceanStor Dorado. See our Dell PowerStore vs. IBM FlashSystem report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
We monitor all All-Flash Storage 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.