We performed a comparison between IBM FlashSystems and Pure Storage FlashArray based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: PeerSpot users find Pure Storage FlashArray easy to use and say it offers very low latency and excellent efficiency of their deduplication technology. The features in data protection, snapshotting, and replication between data centers and sites are better than many other solutions in today’s robust marketplace.
"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."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."
"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."
"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 feature I find most valuable, is the deduplication, because the nature of the data that we are using in our current environment, has a lot of replicated data."
"The most crucial feature of IBM FlashSystem is compression."
"The initial setup is straightforward and can be done in an hour and a half by one person."
"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 most valuable features in IBM FlashSystem are IOPS, performance, duplication, and compression."
"IBM FlashSystem is a stable solution."
"At the FlashSystem level, customers are especially fond of multi-tier and distributed rate systems, particularly the dynamic rate six arrays."
"The first year, we started out with one or five terabytes and it took what was 20 terabytes of storage down to less than one terabyte."
"Scalability is one of the best features. You can quickly add more. You can swap out the drives with larger sizes, you can add more shelves. All of that is perfect - the whole concept of keeping it modular..."
"Processes that used to take 40 minutes to two hours can be completed in five minutes."
"On a scale of one to ten, where ten is the most comfortable pricing, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"One of the lesser sung advantages was when we started running our interface engine on Pure Storage. The ability to process messages and pass them through in our organization skyrocketed purely because of a disk that I owned which we were getting out of Pure Storage."
"It worked flawlessly."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the all-flash storage performance, low latency, and efficiency of their de-duplication technology. Additionally, the ease of use is good compared to other storage systems. The features in data protection, snapshotting, and replication between data centers and sites are superior to other solutions."
"Having an intuitive user interface to get things running is great."
"It is on the expensive side."
"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"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."
"Sometimes the performance is effective but it gets resolved in the process."
"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."
"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."
"The marketing could be improved."
"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."
"Include an option to upload the support package to the IBM ECuRep when opening an IBM PMR."
"Our customers have raised concerns about the limitations of the FlashSystem 5200 and 7300, which only offer a 32-gigabyte connection."
"I can't see where they can make anything better, unless, of course, they lower their prices even more."
"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."
"I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers."
"It goes at about 95 percent, so we have had some performance issues. It is hard to clear them."
"The initial setup of the product is complex."
"We need to add more storage in Pure Storage FlashArray with the cluster mode activated for us to have better performance."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features."
"I would rate this solution an eight because we have had outages. The commit times went very high in the database. The whole array went down so our customers were down for around eight hours. This was a very big outage which could have been our fault because we didn't do the upgrade in time."
IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 106 reviews while Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 174 reviews. IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2, while Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2. 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 FlashArray writes "Effective provisioning, helpful support, and reliable". IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, NetApp AFF, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and Huawei OceanStor Dorado, whereas Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, VMware vSAN and Dell Unity XT. See our IBM FlashSystem vs. Pure Storage FlashArray report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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