We performed a comparison between Dell XtremIO 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."The solution offers amazing performance."
"The simplicity of it. The performance is good, but the simplicity is the best thing. Storage management is quite complex, but Pure Storage is easy to manage."
"The most valuable features are extremely low latency, high IOPS with VMware, inline deduplication and compression."
"The amount of throughput that we're getting is really nice."
"Support has been helpful."
"The predictive performance analytics is a very good feature, as our system is performing better than before."
"It is noticeably easier to manage than other appliances that we have."
"This is the best all-flash storage array on the market."
"It is great for applications like Microsoft Exchange, ERP, SQL and VDI; basically saved the VDI buy-in from users, as now performance was seamless in comparison to a physical PC."
"The feature I like most about Dell Xtremio is its hardware quality compared to other vendors. It's clear they're continuously improving their research and development."
"Performance and deduplication. This is a very robust block storage option that offers both performance and data optimization."
"Initially, we faced numerous issues with our analytical systems. However, we saw performance improvement after the implementation of the solution."
"Speed and reliability:"
"The solution's most valuable features are the inline data reduction and deduplication."
"The most valuable features are: complete performance and ease of use."
"We've seen great enhancements from the performance point of view. There's good availability, stability, and continuity, but the performance actually has increased by 60 or 70%."
"The valuable features are high availability, compression, and a failover mechanism. It's a very highly available storage solution."
"The technical support for this solution is good. They used to help us when the motherboard of Power Systems broke. Their response times are really fast."
"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."
"User friendly management interface."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is replication...Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"Speed (IOPS/second) – It is most vital for applications that need low latency and high speed for transferring the data."
"The performance of IBM FlashSystem is very good. The new technology and high throughput have given us more confidence in the solution. The management of the system has improved and we can control the monitoring system alerts and multiple FlashSystems with the Enterprise Cloud Edition, which is free. The migration of recently stored data to a new flash is much easier. You can move your data because you can utilize it externally."
"Stability-wise, this solution is fine."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve some aspects. There are certain features that are good and there are some features that I see some issues with at the technical level. Those issues are related to replication. They need to resolve those issues, which I have already highlighted to the Pure team. Additionally, there are some issues in the active cluster that could improve."
"There are a lot of things to improve."
"It would be nice to have a better view of the allocated capacity on their Platform as a Service solution because we have to do some manual calculations to understand how much we are going to pay every month to use the storage that is allocated."
"If they could make it cheaper, that would be something."
"The solution is not cheap."
"From a scalability perspective, it is a very small storage solution, so it's not very expandable."
"We've had it in place for about a year and a half and have had zero complaints, other than that box-to-box replication is not encrypted."
"It goes at about 95 percent, so we have had some performance issues. It is hard to clear them."
"The implementation isn't exactly complex, but the solution should have some enhancements in it to make the process more centralized."
"I would like hardware capacity additions to be a little more flexible. The upgrade path for the existing XTremIO units requires you to purchase 2 XBricks at a time and they need to be the same capacity as the existing XBricks."
"The physical architecture could use some higher levels of redundancy."
"Management: At the time, there was no snapshot scheduler, so I had to write XSnapCourier to address it. The sad thing is that even after the newest release, which includes a native scheduler, most customers using XSnapCourier chose to stick with it due to a more feature-rich experience."
"Sometimes we don't get an immediate response from the support team. The initial POC also took a lot of resources."
"Dell's technical support could be better."
"It needs a way to determine the deduplication of each LUN and what the impact would be if we were to move data from one LUN to another."
"If you are looking at flash storage solutions, XtremIO doesn't offer any unique features. Most of my customers are migrating their workload from XtremIO to other formats because of this."
"They can include Amazon file system S3 protocol in the upcoming releases. It is a cloud file system. IBM FlashSystem doesn't have this feature in the box for high-end or mid-range. We have got requests for this from customers because we need to use S3 for EDI application storage. At the beginning of every year, IBM releases firmware. When I find any bugs in the firmware during the year, I am unable to find any information from IBM regarding the bug. I need to open a ticket, and the IBM engineering team makes a patch only for me. This patch is not public. By creating a customized patch for a client, they don't really solve the issue for everyone. If multiple users have the same bug, IBM should upload the patch on the official website so that we can download it. IBM FlashSystem has a monitoring tool in the box, but it is not advanced. I need a more advanced tool for more advanced equations and monitoring. All top three storage vendors, that is, EMC, IBM, and Pure Storage, don't have a powerful monitoring tool. To monitor our box to show the statistics for I/Os and latency, I need to pay for extra software. The built-in monitoring storage is not mature enough to handle all requests and generate all reports that I need. They can include the functionality to stretch a cluster natively without using any additional boxes. In addition, there are some features that EMC has integrated with the box. These features are not available in IBM FlashSystem."
"The installation is not easy. You need to have extensive knowledge to handle it."
"The basic setup can be challenging when it comes to certain IP addresses and the configuration of the IP. You have to go in to different menus to makes changes and ensure it is stable."
"Events/log analysis tools."
"It has room for improvement in the area of stability."
"GUI interface should be enhanced more as there is some issues in copy services."
"The solution has a low number of NVME host attachments at 16 per IO group over the fiber channel."
"In IBM FlashSystem, data reduction is an area with shortcomings where improvements can be made in the future."
Dell XtremIO is ranked 25th in All-Flash Storage with 48 reviews while IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 106 reviews. Dell XtremIO is rated 7.6, while IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Dell XtremIO writes "Suitable for high IOPS and helps get backup in ten 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 XtremIO is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell PowerMax NVMe, Dell Unity XT 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 XtremIO vs. IBM FlashSystem report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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