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.
"Has also helped simplify storage for us. The other person we put in there, took about a week to implement. And we had both arrays set up within around four hours with a thirty minute drive time between the two locations."
"It is an SSD array that has awesome performance, low submillisecond latency, and does what it is supposed to do. It just works, which is difficult for things to do anymore."
"The speed is one of the most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray."
"Performance is the most valuable feature."
"Technical support is excellent. I've had very good responses from technical support. We had a couple of cases where we needed support. Some of the communications were purely over email and some has been an actual call to the service desk."
"The mobile app is very helpful."
"It worked flawlessly."
"The stability is perfect. The reliability is 100% and the latency is always lower than 1 millisecond."
"It is a very stable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten."
"We were able to move away from a middleware solution for high availability, going right to snapshots and data replication on arrays."
"PowerMax NVMe has made it a lot easier to understand how much we are able to provision. It has made it a lot faster to provision new things. 90% of my time for provisioning has been reduced. Also, it has made it very easy to understand and see everything behind it versus the older heritage, where Dell EMC was very convoluted and hard to get working. Things that used to take an hour, probably now take five to 10 minutes."
"We like the compression, dedupe, and I/O on the PowerMax. They are better than on the XtremIO."
"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 product is very fast and reliable."
"It's faster and more resilient."
"The PowerMax software and CloudIQ let us get an inside view of our compression and compaction, as well as our usage of the storage."
"The ability to create LUNs and modify them are the most valuable features of this solution."
"They have a virtualization feature and, even if you do not want to buy that feature, you can have it as a trial for two to three months. If you have another brand of storage from another company, you can use this tool to transfer all your data from the old system to the new Storwize system, which really shortens the migration time."
"The most valuable feature is reliability."
"The GUI is very easy and performance is also good."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The storage system is one of the best in the world."
"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."
"I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers."
"I would like to see some improvements on the FlashBlade side around the CIFS space support. I am not super familiar with all the different NAS protocols that they run on their box, but there could be some improvements made on SMB CIFS side."
"The price of this solution could be improved."
"The scalability of the solution is not as good as it probably could be."
"Storage. There could be better storage."
"We would like to see more cloud support, which we know is coming, although it's not out yet. It's going to be released in the next versions. That would be the biggest win, if additional cloud support is built into the array."
"I had to contact customer support when a drive failed as I was doing a couple of OS upgrades."
"They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet. This might be an area for additional focus as it would play into scalability, because the very nature of object storage is that it's infinitely scalable."
"We are very interested in NVMe over Fibre Channel, which I understand is on the horizon. We would like to see that come to fruition."
"It's a relatively new product, but for the next release I would like to see higher bandwidth on the front-end adapters. This would allow even greater scalability for critical workloads and consolidation for non-critical workloads. The hosts may not require that level of I/O performance today. However, it allows us to scale physical non-cloud environments without large investment."
"The GUI interface is very complicated and could be improved by streamlining the number of steps in the process."
"The initial setup was a little bit complicated."
"We would like more documentation, a guide to the features of the PowerMax."
"Dell PowerMax NVMe is costly compared to other solutions."
"I believe it would be of great benefit to work on the customization of the pricing structure for different enterprises and their specific needs."
"There is also room for improvement in the PowerMax architecture and hardware itself. They should design the PowerMax on the basis of PCIe 4.0. I would like to see the possibility of an NVMe drive that operates on PCIe 4.0 and not PCIe 3.0."
"They don't offer subscription-based payments."
"The marketing could be improved."
"The installation is not easy. You need to have extensive knowledge to handle it."
"This solution could be improved by offering greater amounts of storage."
"The storage capacity of this solution could be improved."
"The GUI for monitoring performance metrics could provide better visibility. For example, it doesn't let me segregate the IOPS per volume."
"The design is a little old-fashioned and could be updated. The rack is very primitive and designed in an older style."
"In the next release having the next level of high-speed performance would be great."
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.
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