We performed a comparison between Dell PowerStore 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."The mobile app is very helpful."
"It worked flawlessly."
"It simplifies building out the storage."
"I find two features of Pure Storage most valuable. The first is the "safe mode" function, and the second is its simplicity."
"The predictive performance analytics is a very good feature, as our system is performing better than before."
"The most valuable feature is its speed."
"It helps to simplify storage. For most of our customers, when they move to Pure Storage, storage becomes an afterthought."
"It has been very stable. I have not seen or heard of downtime storage issues after moving over to it."
"The solution's technical support is excellent. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten."
"This solution is very useful to us as we use it internally for all of the services that we need. We use it as a lab and we showcase new technology to the customers and how it can help them going forward."
"Typically, high-performance and high-availability features, such as application snapshots and remote and local replication, are highly valued."
"The solution is stable."
"The product's initial setup phase was very easy."
"For access from virtual machines, iSCSI, and NFS, it is very good. It helps increase performance."
"When compared to Pure Storage, Dell PowerStore's cost was quite attractive."
"It provides a big benefit when upgrading a new VMware environment. For example, in a big environment with 10 to 30 ESXs, you can take everything and put that into PowerStore. So, it is cost-effective, which is very important and has been massive for us. You reduce almost 80% from the hardware and work directly from PowerStore. Building hardware, especially in a big VMware environment, is a big issue for my organization."
"There are many valuable features of IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMele I have found to meet my needs. Specifically, the maintenance cycle is a standout feature of this solution. The main component of the IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is the maintenance of the batteries, which have a predetermined and reliable four-year life cycle. This is in stark contrast to other solutions that may use spinning disks, which can fail unexpectedly, causing unwanted downtime and maintenance. Having a predictable maintenance cycle is a significant advantage and has made this solution a preferred choice for me."
"It is a very stable product. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten because we did not face any issues in the last three years."
"Good performance with a user-friendly UI."
"What I like about the product are its high availability, maximum efficiency in performance, and its ability to handle a high level of I/O operations."
"It is a very stable solution."
"The most valuable feature is the speed."
"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 features of IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe are its steady performance and usefulness in high-traffic environments."
"The technical support is okay, but could be improved."
"The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations."
"As partners, we should have the option to download the software, rather than have to go back through Pure to obtain it."
"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."
"Its price needs improvement. Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution."
"The number of Filesystems is limited, which it is not on the EMC VNX."
"The backend of this solution utilizes an Active/Passive architecture, rather than an Active/Active architecture, which is a disadvantage, when compared to some of its competitors. Its storage capacity should be expanded in the next release."
"Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."
"It doesn't support SSD or Flash."
"The price is on the higher side."
"We are happy with the service in general. The only thing would be the price of the platform."
"During the installation phase, the licensing part was not straightforward. It was very difficult for the technicians, who are not trained Dell EMC technicians, to do the licensing because the information on their website is not straightforward... Eventually, I had to pass this task to our business partner and they did it for us."
"When it comes to Dell PowerStore, I would like to see more integration and more security features included. It's unfortunate that the solution does not feature Flash trace."
"The solution only does thin provisioning."
"The only area I can highlight for improvement is that the 4:1 data reduction target has not been reached. This may be due to an issue with Dell EMC's initial analysis of data compression. As a result, we have had to add new physical disks to reach our goal of total available disk space."
"I would like to see a Snapshot feature. Currently, it is unable to occupy the capacity."
"Deduplication and compression should be improved."
"I'd like to be able to connect to tape drives behind the storage device to back up the tape if need be. We have all of our storage running in all-flash, and we make a copy on tape. Currently, when we want to hook up tape drives, we have to add some extra equipment, which is a little bit complex. We want IBM to add a feature where we could install a tape into the storage so that we can connect it through a single pane of glass. We'd like to have a feature in the IBM flash storage system so that we can connect backup tape drives through the IBM storage system and we can manage the backup tape from the storage system."
"I would like to have replication functionality built directly in the product, rather than having to use a separate device for this."
"There is a tool provided by IBM for repairing batteries which can only be utilized by those who have an IBM technical advisor under service contract. However, for individuals who do not have such a contract, the tool can be difficult to use and requires a zip file copy. I believe that it would be greatly beneficial if the tool were made more user-friendly and accessible for all individuals who need to repair batteries."
"There could be a possibility of not requiring to buy a new box while upgrading to a newer version."
"The ZIO interface could be improved."
"The tool's architecture is complex. It also needs to add data utilization reports."
"IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is currently at the end of its lifespan and will soon become obsolete in the markets."
Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage with 46 reviews while IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is ranked 13th in All-Flash Storage with 19 reviews. Dell PowerStore is rated 8.6, while IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Dell PowerStore writes "It has a very strong NAS that can support a lot of big, heavy environments". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe writes "Steady performance, responsive support, and high availability". Dell PowerStore is most compared with Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, NetApp AFF, Dell PowerMax NVMe and HPE Nimble Storage, whereas IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is most compared with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, IBM FlashSystem, HPE Primera and Dell PowerMax NVMe. See our Dell PowerStore 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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