We performed a comparison between IBM FlashSystem and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Nasuni and others in NAS."The initial setup is straightforward and can be done in an hour and a half by one person."
"The solution is scalable and has varying degrees of scalability."
"The most valuable feature in demand is virtualization and its support storage of virtualization features."
"The performance of the All-Flash System is very good. There is more enhanced performance and data production in the solution, which I appreciate."
"The initial customer technical support was efficient and effective."
"The compression and deduplication features are the most valuable."
"The performance of IBM FlashSystem is very good. The new technology and high throughput have given us more confidence in the solution. The management of the system has improved and we can control the monitoring system alerts and multiple FlashSystems with the Enterprise Cloud Edition, which is free. The migration of recently stored data to a new flash is much easier. You can move your data because you can utilize it externally."
"The most valuable feature is that is supports a high IOPS rate."
"It completely removes the need for a storage network and for a storage administrator and all of that infrastructure and the costs that are involved with them."
"It is more stable now than it was before. It's not like it was in the first year. Now it is stable, and we trust it more."
"The most valuable features of VMware vSAN are that it receives updates frequently, has good compression, optimized storage, and they provide webinars on what is new. Additionally, the integration with third-party products is good and it is easy to manage."
"The most valuable features are its price point and that you can use existing storage; no specific storage requirements are needed."
"It's very scalable. I like that. Adding a node is easy. Adding a disk group is easy."
"Provides good performance as well as integration with deployment tools."
"Overall the solution is very good."
"One of the valuable features for us is the ability to restrict the performance capacity per client. Other solutions don't have this feature."
"We use some open-source tools for monitoring, such as Grafana and it should be bundled along with IBM FlashSystem."
"Replication features need improvement. Currently, they are there in the product, but I'm not sure as to how it works exactly."
"Our customers have raised concerns about the limitations of the FlashSystem 5200 and 7300, which only offer a 32-gigabyte connection."
"With regards to the IBM V7000 storage system, where we have multiple tiers of storage, a heat map would show I/O distribution across the tiers of storage."
"The array level RAID does not seem available."
"The deduplication and compression ratio is not very good. It's not reaching a very high ratio."
"The interface of this solution could be improved."
"GUI interface should be enhanced more as there is some issues in copy services."
"I lose a node in a cluster vSAN, which is also used as a cluster HA. I lose not only the storage part, which is not necessarily serious (depending on the configuration of the vSAN cluster), but on the other hand, I lose also a node of Compute, which can make things complicated quickly."
"I'd like to see better integration with the Update Manager, with respect to firmware updates for hardware."
"I would like to see better performance graphs, maybe something that you can export outside to a different console, and maybe a little bit longer time period. The 18-hour maximum, or 24-hour maximum, is kind of short. Also, the hardware compatibility limitations are a little frustrating sometimes, but as everybody's starting to adopt vSAN more, you get more options for hardware."
"I would like to see replication as part of it. I would also like to see direct file access, being able to run SIF shares and NFS and the like. I think that would be critical to continuing the use of it going forward."
"I would like to be able to limit IOPS."
"The solution could maybe improve failure protection."
"vSAN itself is a great storage platform, but one of the issues with it is that you have to be fully locked into the VMware package to use it. We're going to be deploying 72 Kubernetes nodes, and we're not going to buy VMware licenses for 72 of them, just so they can access vSAN. That's what we're using the Pure for. Opening it up so you could have vSAN as a data store, use it as a data lake, hit it with an NFS, S3 from outside the VMware ecosystem, would be great."
"It doesn't seem like it gives the performance that an actual SAN would give for heavy IOPS, read/writes."
IBM FlashSystem is ranked 4th in NAS with 106 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews. IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. 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 VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell Unity XT, NetApp AFF and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell PowerFlex.
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