We performed a comparison between Dell SC Series 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.
"Support has been helpful."
"It's just very easy for general block storage."
"The most valuable feature of the Pure Storage Flash Array is the blazing fast monitoring."
"The ease of management is one of the most valuable features of this solution. I would have also said that it's pretty fast but now our SQL servers are starting to beat it up pretty bad."
"It has been very stable. I have not seen or heard of downtime storage issues after moving over to it."
"Lone segmentation is simpler and more agile. It's improved the velocity in overall provisioning from project to operation."
"I find two features of Pure Storage most valuable. The first is the "safe mode" function, and the second is its simplicity."
"It's simple, powerful, and ready to use."
"It has been one of the most stable products in our data center."
"We see very low latency with very high IOPS for mixed workloads."
"Most valuable features have been the system customization with it, the performance you receive, and their CoPilot Support (or Dell EMC Storage Support)."
"Performance-wise it's high speed. It's also more stable and scalable."
"I've found the stability to be very good."
"It has good dedupe and compression. Also, the built-in data migration capabilities are pretty good, as is the federation. When we started migrating the workloads from different storage platforms, like NetApp and XtremeIO, it helped us in moving to that direction."
"It's very scalable, especially with federation. If you outgrow the number of spindles that a unit can support, depending on the model, you can go into federation."
"In terms of stability, it's good enough. It's okay."
"IBM FlashSystem has been stable in our operations."
"I like most of the features. Its speed, performance, and availability are valuable. We are implementing the data reduction technology the most."
"The FlashSystem 900 consistently delivers performance below 1ms for read/write. This performance is essential for an effective SVC stretch-cluster configuration across two datacenters, and presenting active-active storage to the customer."
"The most valuable features are deduplication and compression, which together, enable you to have more space."
"The speed and the ease of installation are the most valuable features."
"Installing FlashSystem is very easy. It takes less than half an hour, and I can handle it all myself."
"The GUI is very easy and performance is also good."
"The most valuable feature is that is supports a high IOPS rate."
"The initial setup of the product is complex."
"I would like the ability to swap out the network adapters into it. So, without taking out the whole controller, I would like to be able to swap adapters. This would make things easier."
"This product has only two active controllers, whereas other solutions can have more. This is something that needs to improve."
"In the next release of the solution I would like to see Vormetric native block encryption."
"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."
"Its price could be cheaper. It is not the cheapest one out there, but I'm not directly involved in the figures and negotiations."
"We would like more extended historical data to help with some of the capacity planning. This is something that we are asking for all the time. E.g., what was the historical performance of this particular volume? So, we would like more historicals."
"Just some nit picky stuff, like allowing servers and volumes to be grouped. Therefore, it would easier to work with them in the GUI."
"This product should be a lot more user-friendly."
"This solution could be improved if overall performance was improved and operated with a higher speed and supported a higher volume of RAM."
"From a performance point of view, it's getting a bit old."
"I don't think the solution is very scalable."
"It would be helpful if the solution offered higher performance, at least on the back end."
"An issue we had was that the controller went down during an upgrade because of their upgrading the code. One side of the switch was down."
"While there's always room for improvement in everything, I can't really think of a specific feature of the solution that requires immediate attention."
"The configuration could be easier in Dell EMC SC Series."
"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 GUI for monitoring performance metrics could provide better visibility. For example, it doesn't let me segregate the IOPS per volume."
"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."
"Our customers have raised concerns about the limitations of the FlashSystem 5200 and 7300, which only offer a 32-gigabyte connection."
"The price is very costly."
"Additional licenses might be added for the fundamental licenses, such as those for copying and flash copies."
"The solution is quite expensive. That's one of the downsides to using it."
"We had issues when attempting to do a flash, we hope to resolve it soon."
Dell SC Series is ranked 24th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews while IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 106 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.4, while IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "Automated architecture that proactively optimizes your database ". 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 SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor, HPE Nimble Storage and NetApp AFF, whereas IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, Dell Unity XT, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and HPE Nimble Storage. See our Dell SC Series vs. IBM FlashSystem report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
