We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT 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."I have seen a huge increase in speed and performance on our databases."
"The best feature is consistently lower latency, even when IOPS crank up to over 75K. The product maintains submillisecond response time, which is incredible."
"Pure Storage FlashArray has significantly improved our data center performance. It handles high workloads efficiently, providing better performance in the environment. With increased storage capacity, it has led to improved overall system performance. The tool's technology is a standout feature. It has helped me reduce storage costs by 15 percent."
"The job of support for the storage engineers dramatically changed. We know more quickly the automation of the provisioning. We can now focus on things that bring more value to the company than just managing storage."
"Having an intuitive user interface to get things running is great."
"Very stable; no worries about how much it can handle."
"Our storage phones home. It is smart and intelligent in that aspect, which has been huge for us. We don't have to be storage administrators."
"It simplifies the overall management. We don't have to worry about storage anymore."
"The product has helpful local technical support."
"It is easy to manage. Managing it, I get alerts if there are any type of issues. I had a hard drive go bad, which had never caused any issues. Dell EMC contacted me, and said, "We are a shipping a new one out." My response was, "Why?" He told me that hard drive was bad. So, I went and looked, and it was. This was almost immediate. I never even knew anything had happened."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is the unified storage. Also, its capabilities for block-access, file access, and the center box."
"The Unisphere management interface: We are very familiar with it. It manages all the EMC devices that we have. Management is easy because it is part of Unisphere, which is self-learning."
"We run about 100 virtual servers on it. We have about 100 users accessing the file shares from there, and I've seen no problem with that. We have about a 10GB backbone. Whatever we throw at it, it hasn't shown any sign of weakness or anything. It's been really good."
"It's unified, it does block and file, so that is pretty important to my customers who might have file servers around their environment. I can roll them all up into a single array, as well as provide block storage for them on one array."
"Provides good provisioning, allowing us to save space."
"I like how it separates the iSCSI drives from the standard shares. It has two different routes to it. I know most of the other solutions do this, but I just like the way that Dell EMC does it."
"The most valuable features of IBM FlashSystem are performance and security."
"One of the valuable features is the performance, it is one of the best in the market."
"The GUI is very easy and performance is also good."
"IBM FlashSystem has been stable in our operations."
"The maintenance service and support from IBM is very good."
"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 solution is scalable and has varying degrees of scalability."
"At the FlashSystem level, customers are especially fond of multi-tier and distributed rate systems, particularly the dynamic rate six arrays."
"We would like to be able to connect to data tape for backup, specifically to the LTO backups."
"We haven't seen ROI yet."
"I would rate this solution an eight. There's always room for improvement, nobody is perfect to get a ten out of ten. They do what they do well. It's not cheap but we it's for uses that we needed."
"I would like to see more detailed reporting on the data. However, it would be nice to know what are the exact VMs usage after deduplication and/or what that VMs actual latency and bandwidth is, outside of VMware."
"Storage. There could be better storage."
"The number of Filesystems is limited, which it is not on the EMC VNX."
"There are scenarios with very specific functionality around VMware integration particularly to do with the way we'd like to manage LUNs in VMware. The tools are pretty good but there's room for improvement there."
"The price should be lower."
"There's always room for improvement with the UI. That can be a little cumbersome at times."
"It could go faster. Make it bigger, better, and faster at a lower price, and I am there."
"I would like to have secure mobile connectivity going forward. This would help me be more proactive."
"We've also encountered an issue when it comes to migrating to compressed LANs on the Unity, and during the Storage vMotion. It appears that the compression algorithm is overwhelmed, and when it becomes overwhelmed it just stops compressing and writes the raw data to the destination. We later copied internally another Storage vMotion to another compressed LAN and achieved much higher compressions on that internal copy. It would be really nice if there was a way to automatically throttle, as a part of a Storage vMotion, to say, "I want to gain the maximum benefits from the compression algorithm, so throttle back the Storage vMotion to implement 100 percent compression.""
"Replication with VMware - it's called the vSphere Metro Storage Cluster - is lacking in the Unity and is present in Compellent."
"Scalability of this solution could be improved."
"They can certainly improve in terms of monitoring."
"I called about an issue where I couldn't get VVOLs registered. It turns out it is a bug in the code and that there is no information about when it will be fixed. It's just not going to work. I was a little miffed about that."
"The initial setup is complex."
"The design is a little old-fashioned and could be updated. The rack is very primitive and designed in an older style."
"The installation is not easy. You need to have extensive knowledge to handle it."
"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."
"We use some open-source tools for monitoring, such as Grafana and it should be bundled along with IBM FlashSystem."
"It is slightly more expensive, however, it all depends on your supplier."
"The solution is not easy to implement. It takes a lot of time to study the product and it's a little complicated in general."
"The GUI for monitoring performance metrics could provide better visibility. For example, it doesn't let me segregate the IOPS per volume."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 189 reviews while IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 106 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Dell Unity XT writes "Easy to set up with good data compression technology and useful deduplication". 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 Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, HPE 3PAR StoreServ and Dell PowerMax NVMe, whereas IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and HPE Nimble Storage. See our Dell Unity XT vs. IBM FlashSystem report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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As with any engineered solution, it depends on your needs.
However, the bottom line is that for their target markets Dell EMC Unity will generally have a better price at parity performance over IBM's FlashSystem.
Both are focused on All-Flash arrays and Dell EMC Unity is where I start with VMWare. If I have a dedicated IBM DB2 application, I would lean toward the IBM FlashSystem.
The problem in the VMWare environment is that IBM has done a poor job prioritizing this area and has several I/O bottlenecks and interface driver issues. I expect future resolution, but does that happen before current platforms evolve?
Depends what you're expecting. Full compatibility with VMware environment - DellEMC only, IBM FS has problems with iSCSI connections to vsphere 7.02 - it's not supported (FS5200 and vsphere 7.02 server with Intel cards - doesn't work fast (10Gbe - 300MB/s instead of 1,1-1,2 GB/s), no solution for now from IBM and VMware (08/2021). Integration - DellEMC and VMware are one company - everything goes smoothly. Space reclamation didn't work well on IBM systems when connected to vsphere (vsphere 6.5 and V7000 models). When using Microsoft virtualization - no difference - it's more complex to start system but when properly configured - it runs well (fast). But of both of them I would choose HPE systems,:-) (Nimble or Primera):-)