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."All our junior partners can administer the storage arrays. It is simple and easy to use. We don't have to dedicate a whole team of full time people to work on it."
"Cost, racial per terabyte, and speed is why we chose PureStorage. It was no brainer."
"It's extremely stable and has good performance."
"The deduplication and compression rates are beyond impressive."
"Data reduction and compression. Sub millisecond latency."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is test performance. It helps us store large amounts of data along with providing us faster retrieval of data."
"Processes that used to take 40 minutes to two hours can be completed in five minutes."
"The performance benefits weren't surprising, we expected that. What we didn't expect were the densification benefits that we got out of going all-flash. We're able to put more applications on the arrays because of how all-flash performs. The way some of the application profiles have responded to all-flash has been really pleasing."
"One of the most valuable features is the capability to switch between all-flash to hybrid, which have have actually done for one of our arrays. We started with the hybrid, with the limited if I'm not mistaken, and then over a period of time, we swapped all the hybrids with the SSDs. This was one of the big features because it gave us the capability to not stick with just one kind of media. Secondly, since it has sorted clustering, we were able to bring in the newer boxes and have it all clustered together. These were the two main features that we really looked into, which benefited our use case from an expansion/growth perspective. Another valuable feature is the ease of management."
"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."
"Easy management of volumes: You can create volumes and easily assign them to VMware clusters, increasing their size."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to replicate. We are running a financial company and it needs to be available 24/7. We can't afford any downtime."
"The most valuable feature is the no-forklift upgrade. While the thing is running, I can change out the controllers one at a time and keep the customer up and running. I can add shelves and storage and SSD drives or spinning drives to the system, while it's running. I can bring all that in and rebalance the load across the new disks or, if we take disks away, rebalance the load across what's remaining, and it just works."
"The setup is straightforward."
"I find this version to be more budget-friendly compared to products from other vendors. This aspect greatly benefits my customers. It's highly advantageous due to its affordability. The operational aspect is also noteworthy. Additionally, its availability and performance are commendable. The speaker are also equally powerful."
"The solution allows for easy migrations from previous products or vendors via its embedded storage virtualization function."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is SCM (Storage Class Memory), which has the lowest latency value in the storage industry."
"Virtualization of external storage, while adding cache and speed to the external storage."
"This solution is really user friendly. It also offers good performance and is highly reliable."
"This solution is very stable."
"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 speed, performance, and stability are the best features of IBM FlashSystem."
"The solution is scalable and has varying degrees of scalability."
"There are a lot of things to improve."
"The GUI is simplistic and basic. I feel like it's explanatory, but not enough, it needs a little more to it."
"It's not so scalable. It's got moderate scaling capabilities right now. The clustering technology needs a bit of work, they need to improve that."
"It was not proactive communication."
"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."
"As long as they always improve on IOPS speed, that's all we're really looking for. The faster the storage can be the more we can do speed of application and speed of use."
"Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."
"The file functionality could be better."
"Snapshots in VMware. You can’t do snapshots since the storage itself does that. Therefore, some apps (Veeam, for example) don’t work well with this kind of tiering storage."
"The administration and support (on the way that they delivered) was a little bit slow."
"Dell could improve the upgrading process."
"I would like to have 100% functionality through the web app."
"The interface could be improved. It should have an application point of view."
"I would like to see higher compression, dedupe, faster I/O, and bigger drives."
"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."
"The price could be improved."
"If you want to expand, you cannot expand the disc enclosure. You have to buy a total individual node. Sometimes, this is difficult because we are just looking for capacity and not a node."
"The only issue my team faced was transferring the data from the old system to IBM FlashSystem, which is an area for improvement in the solution."
"The GUI for monitoring performance metrics could provide better visibility. For example, it doesn't let me segregate the IOPS per volume."
"The solution is not easy to use and could improve."
"Our model does not support compression or deduplication."
"The installation is not easy. You need to have extensive knowledge to handle it."
"The technical support in my region is satisfactory but it could improve. Support is very important for customers and downtime is very critical for us. We would like onsite or complete technical support which can help us to minimize our downtime or if problems occur."
"GUI interface should be enhanced more as there is some issues in copy services."
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, Dell Unity XT, NetApp AFF, 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.
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