We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and IBM FlashSystem based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, IBM FlashSystem came out ahead of Dell PowerMax NVMe. Although both products are set up similarly and are described as high-end, Dell PowerMax NVMe has a licensing model that most users dislike and requires improvements in its support response times.
"Performance, dedupe, and that it works well with database workloads are its most valuable features."
"The predictive performance analytics are good."
"Most of the problems that we had in the past with the performance in IOPS have disappeared. It has been a great improvement for our customers' services."
"Having fast storage allows actual servers to perform in high capacity so we don't have slowdowns on our applications."
"Cost, racial per terabyte, and speed is why we chose PureStorage. It was no brainer."
"The stability of Pure Storage is very very good."
"This solution is very scalable."
"The solution helps to simplify storage."
"We find the service level option to provision storage very valuable. The ability to define different service levels for storage groups helps us in prioritizing our workload at the infrastructure level."
"Key features include performance, replication time, and dedup and compression."
"The best feature is the protection - PowerMax NVMe is volume-based and replicates data, so it's very comfortable for us to use."
"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerMax NVMe is its replication feature."
"Uptime by far is the most important thing, and also the replication ability (SRDF). Most of the customers who need this type of availability also want the protection of multiple data centers, and it is able to easily switchover workloads to their other data centers."
"The performance is very good on our servers. It's superior. And the QoS capabilities for providing work congestion protection are also important because about 99 percent of our servers are production servers."
"CloudIQ has become an optimal tool for us to get the full picture of all the different arrays, from mid-tier all the way up. It gives us that single view and the ability to launch the Unisphere. That is really is powerful in being able to manage the array."
"It has dramatically cut down the footprint in our data center and reduced the amount of raw disk capacity that we needed to purchase."
"The solution is very easy to configure and use."
"The most valuable features of IBM FlashSystem are performance and security."
"The speed, performance, and stability are the best features of IBM FlashSystem."
"IBM FlashSystem has been stable in our operations."
"The speed of the unit is its best feature. It performs very well."
"One of the valuable features is the performance, it is one of the best in the market."
"The power systems are very reliable if you are running 24/7 operations. For ongoing mission-critical applications, it's the best solution."
"IBM FlashSystem is a stable solution."
"I would like to see a Nagios monitoring plugin which watches the health and performance of the system. The only one available just checks volume capacity."
"A three wave application or multi wave application synchronization would be an improvement."
"Part of our company works on Dell EMC because Pure Storage did not have synchronous applications when we were purchasing our products."
"It would be good to have metrics of the box's performance so we can see what it delivers, but currently, I can't see what it's actually doing."
"It would be nice to have a better view of the allocated capacity on their Platform as a Service solution because we have to do some manual calculations to understand how much we are going to pay every month to use the storage that is allocated."
"The problem is that we can only make a few groups, around five or six groups. I like groups and we need a lot of them. We had to put all the information in only a few groups and cannot make a more detailed separation of them."
"There was some complexity in the initial setup."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could be better."
"They should work with the storage engineers to better tweak the management tools to give them improved visibility into their data."
"I would like the scalability to improve, as it requires additional footprints."
"If you go to Pure or you go to NetApp, they deliver in one month. If you go to Dell or HP, they will take up to six months for delivery. This is not a business model for today."
"If the solution had more power-saving capabilities, it would be quite nice."
"Dell can improve the Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance. Sometimes, when we need to replace a component, the SLA says four hours, but for some reason, the technician doesn't arrive until the next business day or even six to eight hours later before the case is placed. So, focusing on respecting the SLA is where Dell could improve."
"The tool needs to improve its performance. Today's applications are demanding a response rate of one millisecond or below. The product should also look into AI integration."
"Although they call it unified storage where you have SAN and NAS, with a NAS implementation on top of a SAN, the NAS implementation is a little complicated and clumsy. As SAN, as block storage, it is very powerful... If they could provide a very good NAS implementation, it would be better, so that customers don't have to look for other simple solutions for NAS."
"There are some stability issues that we just recently experienced. We hope the next release will solve these problems."
"The customer's expectations are what they get on the cloud, they're expecting even in the on-premises deployments, going forward."
"The marketing could be improved."
"It has room for improvement in the area of stability."
"It could be easier to implement."
"The solution's pricing is a bit high so there is room for improvement."
"IBM could do more marketing and improve brand awareness. I had never heard of this product until a colleague told me about it. FlashSystem could add a few features, but it would probably increase the price. For example, Pure Storage offers instant snapshotting and partitioning. That would be nice to have, but I think the cost would go up."
"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."
"This solution needs a management console where we are alerted to issues and can report them, or escalate them through email or another method."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 106 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "Simplified storage provisioning for us, enabling us to assign any volumes in two to three minutes". 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 PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor Dorado, Dell XtremIO and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, whereas IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, NetApp AFF, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and Huawei OceanStor Dorado. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe 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.