We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe 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."Data deduplication is one feature I found to be the most valuable in the tool...Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The top-tier support and reliable storage are the most valuable features of this solution."
"Before we used Pure Storage it took 93 days of employees who run the database to back up and restore databases. The scale of deployment basically went from several days to a few minutes."
"Their support system has insight into errors on our SAN fabric that we can't see. They've brought attention to and raised awareness for us about things that we couldn't see, when we were experiencing problems."
"There was a dramatic improvement in operating costs just as a result of the environmentals and space, let alone the cost of the unit itself."
"The scalability options are very nice because you can scale it much better and faster. The scalability was there in the previous environment also, but this is far better than what we had before. It basically helps the user in case they are looking for more storage. We can scale it much faster."
"It's easy to use, and the maintenance upgrades to get free controllers work really well."
"The most valuable features are extremely low latency, high IOPS with VMware, inline deduplication and compression."
"The best feature is the protection - PowerMax NVMe is volume-based and replicates data, so it's very comfortable for us to use."
"It significantly simplifies storage."
"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."
"The number one most valuable feature is reliability. I want to go home at the end of the day and come in the next day knowing it works, especially since we have storage offshore."
"The tool is a fast-performing asset. It can perform millions of transactions within a second. I like the tool's architecture as well."
"The response time, compared to XtremIO, is far better."
"It offers a high level of availability, so pretty much near zero downtime."
"The compression and deduplication are the most valuable features because of the cost savings."
"IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is easy to use and comes with good performance."
"It is a very stable solution."
"It's easy to use, has good stability, and many features."
"The solution is more available for IOPS warehousing, resolving issues, and reporting than other products."
"The most valuable features of IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe are its steady performance and usefulness in high-traffic environments."
"IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is one of the leading storage systems in the world...I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten."
"A key feature is that compared to storage systems that we've been familiar with over decades, IBM simply does not fail. The reason is that IBM is the only manufacturer that engineers its own flash module, and there is a key architectural difference from everything else that we have seen in the market. The difference is that the flash module has the computational capability, which allows reliability and capacity enhancements to be uploaded from the main controllers and run in each module. So, each of the flash drives becomes its own little storage system, and that is extremely effective architecture. In this field, with this type of system, IBM has made a statement. They've never had one of these modules cause an outage. So, the failure rates on these things are just in a whole different universe from what we were accustomed to."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its upgrades, as we don't have to do much homework because of its different controllers."
"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."
"I would like some form of QoS implemented. As a service provider, it would be beneficial to have it."
"It's too early to tell if we've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership. The solution is expensive."
"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."
"It would be good to have metrics of the box's performance so we can see what it delivers, but currently, I can't see what it's actually doing."
"A three wave application or multi wave application synchronization would be an improvement."
"I would like to see active replication. I know that it's available now but I haven't tried it yet. I hope that it works."
"I can't see where they can make anything better, unless, of course, they lower their prices even more."
"I would like the scalability to improve, as it requires additional footprints."
"The initial setup process is difficult."
"There is room for improvement in terms of integration with various service providers for public clouds."
"We had challenges again with the initial setup. I don't know if there was a gap during the requirement-collection phase, but the box was partially delivered to us with missing parts and it delayed the implementation by about 60 days. It was not as smooth as I would have hoped."
"Although they call it unified storage where you have SAN and NAS, with a NAS implementation on top of a SAN, the NAS implementation is a little complicated and clumsy. As SAN, as block storage, it is very powerful... If they could provide a very good NAS implementation, it would be better, so that customers don't have to look for other simple solutions for NAS."
"I would like to see continued visibility and analytics in the platform."
"We would like more documentation, a guide to the features of the PowerMax."
"We've had a couple of little things come up, but for the most part, they've been pretty stable."
"The solution's compression feature could be better."
"The storage system itself should have built-in capabilities for different ransomware attacks."
"IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is currently at the end of its lifespan and will soon become obsolete in the markets."
"IBM is currently not offering volume-based encryption or compression, while other brands or IBM's competitors are doing it."
"In the future, the limitation is upgrading the same storage by adding a shelf to the desk. There is a limitation in the backend connection between the storage and extended shelf."
"The efficacy of the GUI in IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe could be enhanced, and it would be beneficial to include a feature that can prevent ransomware attacks."
"The tool's architecture is complex. It also needs to add data utilization reports."
"Other vendors have included a block and file system. IBM doesn't include a file system. And yet, it's very necessary for all organizations' networks to have file systems. We have other systems for the file system, however, ideally, we would like to have one system with these features."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is ranked 13th in All-Flash Storage with 19 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is rated 8.8. 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 9100 NVMe writes "Steady performance, responsive support, and high availability". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and Dell XtremIO, whereas IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, IBM FlashSystem and HPE Primera. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors and best NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.
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