We performed a comparison between Dell SC Series and IBM FlashSystem based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."
"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."
"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."
"The solution is scalable."
"We replicate between SAN to SAN for a lot of features and supportability. It also helps us when we want to upgrade to a newer SC Series or move the data from one data center to another."
"The Dell support is helpful and the response is quick. The agents' knowledge is very good."
"I've found the stability to be very good."
"The user interface is good, I would rate it a nine out of ten."
"It is fast and performs well."
"The product offers good performance and is quite powerful."
"The solution is stable."
"There's some new stuff coming with 7.3, which just got released, where they're spreading the sparing across the whole array, rather than having a dedicated spare disk, and have it sit there and do nothing until one of them dies, and then it kicks in - and having to rebuild all of that. Now, they'll do the sparing across all the disks and they say that is going to add not only space but performance to the array, with 7.3."
"IBM's technical support do excellent work."
"The storage system is one of the best in the world."
"The most valuable features of IBM FlashSystem are performance and security."
"Most of the features for the reduction in data compression are useful. It is also very easy to use and administer. Its performance is also good."
"The all-flash storage has tier replication capabilities."
"The GUI is very easy and performance is also good."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is compression."
"One of the valuable features is the performance, it is one of the best in the market."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better."
"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."
"Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services."
"From a performance point of view, it's getting a bit old."
"The cost of the solution could be better."
"The price could be improved."
"While the scalability is good, there are certain limitations."
"I don't think the solution is very scalable."
"An issue we had was that the controller went down during an upgrade because of their upgrading the code. One side of the switch was down."
"Snapshots in VMware. You can’t do snapshots since the storage itself does that. Therefore, some apps (Veeam, for example) don’t work well with this kind of tiering storage."
"It would be helpful if the solution offered higher performance, at least on the back end."
"A big area for improvement is that the data reduction pool feature is not recommended for use in a production environment because it has stability and performance issues."
"I would like to see an improvement in the handling of large amounts of rights."
"Cloud file sharing is an area that needs improvement."
"The array level RAID does not seem available."
"IBM FlashSystems is lagging in optimizing storage technologies."
"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 pricing needs to be more competitive."
"The solution should improve its pricing and the mechanism in the reduction pool."
Dell SC Series is ranked 25th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews while IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 106 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.4, while IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "Automated architecture that proactively optimizes your database ". 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 SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor, NetApp AFF and HPE Nimble Storage, whereas IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Pure Storage FlashArray, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, Dell Unity XT and NetApp AFF. See our Dell SC Series vs. IBM FlashSystem report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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