We performed a comparison between IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe and SolidFire 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."Having fast storage allows actual servers to perform in high capacity so we don't have slowdowns on our applications."
"The performance and the ever-growing maintenance are the most valuable features of this solution."
"FlashArray has many valuable features. It's very user-friendly and it has high availability, so there is comparatively less downtime. During maintenance, there is no shutdown procedure, so you can directly power off the Array and manage the shutdown process without any data loss, which is a unique feature. Managing replication and data migration is also very easy."
"The most valuable feature is test performance. It helps us store large amounts of data along with providing us faster retrieval of data."
"The security operating system is its most valuable feature because it's very simple, easy to use, and operate. You don't have to do very serious training to operate this equipment. It's user-friendly and pretty straightforward."
"They are quite responsive and our local team was pretty good."
"It simplifies storage."
"Performance, dedupe, and that it works well with database workloads are its most valuable features."
"The solution is more available for IOPS warehousing, resolving issues, and reporting than other products."
"The most valuable feature is the speed."
"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."
"The high performance and high availability improved our overall processes."
"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."
"Good performance with a user-friendly UI."
"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."
"The storage serves the virtual environment. Most of our applications run in the virtual environment, and it serves nearly 30% of the bank's capacity."
"Individual settings you can put on each individual volume, if you want to do that."
"The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance which is particularly valuable for tasks like data mining, where quick results are essential."
"The most valuable feature is the performance, as well as how you manage performance on the system."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its scalability."
"Overall performance of the solution."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"If we get complaints about any kind of performance metric issues, whether it's storage related or something on the virtual side, we use it to pinpoint what the actual issue is."
"The dashboard is such that you don't need to be a storage expert to administer it."
"I had to contact customer support when a drive failed as I was doing a couple of OS upgrades."
"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 to see data tiering to AWS."
"The price of the solution can improve."
"We haven't seen ROI."
"The solution could improve by having a multi-tenant feature."
"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."
"We need to add more storage in Pure Storage FlashArray with the cluster mode activated for us to have better performance."
"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."
"I would like to have replication functionality built directly in the product, rather than having to use a separate device for this."
"Deduplication and compression should be improved."
"IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is currently at the end of its lifespan and will soon become obsolete in the markets."
"There could be a possibility of not requiring to buy a new box while upgrading to a newer version."
"IBM is currently not offering volume-based encryption or compression, while other brands or IBM's competitors are doing it."
"IBM's support is not good. I experienced a big problem where I opened the console IBM Storage and would see that something was broken. I called the call centers, and I said, "I have a problem. My drive is not working." They want me to give them the serial number, I gave it to them and they told me "I cannot find your product. Your product is not here.""
"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 should improve its initial cost which is expensive compared to other products."
"When you set up the nodes, we have to serial into each one of these nodes to configure the IP ranges. It's still very easy, but it's time consuming."
"The scalability of HCI or SolidFire as such isn't a concern, but when you compare it to PowerMax or NetApp AFF series devices, scalability is a concern because it's only the drives that are connected to the nodes. We don't have any shelf connectivity."
"I think there is room for improvement needed with its storage capability. A bigger node is needed."
"We had some false positives, power supplies failing, and that's really been about it. We had a couple of glitches during some upgrade processes but nothing that was really concerning to us."
"We have a large fiber channel infrastructure, and that's one area that we haven't seen implemented in SolidFire, its more iSCSI."
"We are looking for, potentially, on the Active IQ reporting side, to do reporting based on the datastore. Right now, I can report on the whole SolidFire, or I can report on just a certain datastore or a volume. I'd like to take all of my VDI infrastructure, which as an example would be multiple datastores."
"The upgrade process could be better."
IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is ranked 14th in All-Flash Storage with 19 reviews while SolidFire is ranked 19th in All-Flash Storage with 33 reviews. IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is rated 8.8, while SolidFire is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe writes "Steady performance, responsive support, and high availability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolidFire writes "A versatile storage solution suitable for various workloads in cloud environments providing scalable architecture, granular Quality of Service and consistent performance". IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, IBM FlashSystem, HPE Primera and NetApp NVMe AFF A800, whereas SolidFire is most compared with NetApp AFF, Dell PowerStore and VMware vSAN. See our IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe vs. SolidFire report.
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