We performed a comparison between IBM FlashSystem and Pure Storage FlashBlade 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."The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are the management view of the solutions, ease of provision, and deprovision, it is fantastic."
"NVMe data storage platform that's easy to set up and easy to use. It's stable, with a lower response time, and quick technical support."
"I like its speed. It has all the features that I need."
"The code upgrades are very smooth."
"They are quite responsive and our local team was pretty good."
"Their support system has insight into errors on our SAN fabric that we can't see. They've brought attention to and raised awareness for us about things that we couldn't see, when we were experiencing problems."
"We like the speed. It's very low latency. In virtualization, you can mask lots of problems, and even in code you can mask lots of problems, with low latency. It's just pure speed and low latency."
"Performance, deduplication, compression, and fast response time for requests from servers and applications."
"The performance monitoring feature is useful as it can report in 15 minute intervals by hour, day, week, month, or by a custom date range."
"The speed, performance, and stability are the best features of IBM FlashSystem."
"The initial setup was really straightforward. It was not complex. Deployment took one month, due to the data migration duration."
"The technical support for this solution is good. They used to help us when the motherboard of Power Systems broke. Their response times are really fast."
"Installing FlashSystem is very easy. It takes less than half an hour, and I can handle it all myself."
"Speed (IOPS/second) – It is most vital for applications that need low latency and high speed for transferring the data."
"IBM FlashSystem is a powerful effective storage solution. Additionally, it is user-friendly, anyone can use it."
"The GUI is very easy and performance is also good."
"The solution provides many controllers."
"Pure Storage FlashBlade is user-friendly. It's replication feature is great because it has active replication and active DR. That's the beauty of the product. It's a perfect solution for block storage."
"It has also helped to simplify storage for us in the way that it's easy to manage. Their automatic monitoring really helps when things break or are about to break. They see a problem coming and alert us even before our own system does."
"It has absolutely simplified our storage because the dashboards on the consoles show a clear understanding of where you are, and it is also very easy to provision. This been a big help for our teams."
"We have integrated it with VMware. The integration process is pretty good. Especially with VMware, it helps with the capacity of it."
"It performs well and it is also very fast."
"The tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is cost-effective."
"The snapshots, replication, and the ability to have immutable blades are the most valuable features. You're putting data snapshots out in those blades, and they cannot be touched. Its performance is great."
"Its price needs improvement. Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution."
"Some services could be inserted directly into the SAN, so Pure Storage could complete with the HyperFlex."
"Storage. There could be better storage."
"It is way in excess of what we need. If anything, we could see a bit more speed. I'm just comparing it with what some of my colleagues who are implementing their own systems do."
"The higher education moves slowly. We are still looking forward to implementing the full list of existing features."
"The initial setup of the product is complex."
"There was some complexity in the initial setup."
"I would like to see them develop the ability to integrate with more AWS services. There are increasingly more and more services coming out from AWS but there are also certain constraints where we can't move everything over to a cloud as well. We would like for things that are on-premise to be easily integrated with AWS."
"We had issues when attempting to do a flash, we hope to resolve it soon."
"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 quite expensive. That's one of the downsides to using it."
"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."
"Their technical support needs improvement in terms of reachability for the clients and response times. They should be more responsive and have more online platforms for support. They should make more technical information available online. There could be some kind of documentation community."
"The solution's pricing is a bit high so there is room for improvement."
"The only issue my team faced was transferring the data from the old system to IBM FlashSystem, which is an area for improvement in the solution."
"The ease of installation should be improved. We had issues with the configuration model."
"It usually comes down to just what you hit and the value you're getting when you spend the money and license the products. I would always go, "If you want to make things better, lower your price and make your licensing simpler." There's always an opportunity around that."
"Pure Storage FlashBlade should improve on more cloud integration."
"It would be beneficial if the layer could support the S3 protocol and be container ready in the next release."
"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."
"I would also like to see better support for CIFS workloads."
"There could be improvements in public cloud integration."
"They need better integration with public clouds along with a better hybrid solution."
"There is some room for new features related to authentication and integration with Kubernetes, and other solution using S3 Bucket."
IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 106 reviews while Pure Storage FlashBlade is ranked 16th in All-Flash Storage with 31 reviews. IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2, while Pure Storage FlashBlade is rated 8.8. 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 Pure Storage FlashBlade writes "A high-performing and scalable solution that improves data performance for S3 workloads". IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, NetApp AFF, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and HPE Nimble Storage, whereas Pure Storage FlashBlade is most compared with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), VAST Data, MinIO, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell ECS. See our IBM FlashSystem vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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