We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and IBM FlashSystem based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, IBM FlashSystem came out ahead of Dell PowerMax NVMe. Although both products are set up similarly and are described as high-end, Dell PowerMax NVMe has a licensing model that most users dislike and requires improvements in its support response times.
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."
"Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."
"The compression and deduplication are the most valuable features because of the cost savings."
"PowerMax is a compact high-performance appliance. It is one of the best devices in terms of performance specs. It includes an NVMe All-Flash Array."
"Dell PowerMax NVMe's tech support is good."
"It is very stable. We expect superior performance and reliability from this particular storage system."
"The performance is very good. Our predominant workloads are all less than 5 milliseconds and it's most common to have a sub-1-millisecond response time for our applications. In terms of efficiency, we've turned on compression and we're able to get as high as two-to-one compression on our workloads, on average."
"They're basically tanks. You could take a baseball bat to the thing, and it's still going to keep running and doing what it's supposed to do. We've had a couple of part failures, and you can pretty much replace any part on that thing at any time during the day in the middle of production without worrying about anything happening."
"The stability is amazing. Zero downtime reported over the last years."
"We're consolidating two to three arrays down to one which means that our data center footprint has decreased by like 90%. So we're saving 90% of our space, and it also is much better on power and everything else in our data center. And on top of that, the performance is much, much better than our older arrays."
"The all-flash storage has tier replication capabilities."
"No queuing and high ops, speed, and performance."
"The feature I find most valuable, is the deduplication, because the nature of the data that we are using in our current environment, has a lot of replicated data."
"IBM FlashSystem is the best solution for storage virtualization."
"The most valuable feature is reliability."
"At the FlashSystem level, customers are especially fond of multi-tier and distributed rate systems, particularly the dynamic rate six arrays."
"This solution is really user friendly. It also offers good performance and is highly reliable."
"The GUI is very easy and performance is also good."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."
"I would like the scalability to improve, as it requires additional footprints."
"Since the merging of EMC and Dell into Dell Technologies, there has been a hurdle that they've had to overcome, and they're not over it yet. It takes two to three times longer for things to get fixed than it did when they were separate companies. That is something that has to be fixed."
"The price could be lower, and we are unhappy with the price."
"There are some stability issues that we just recently experienced. We hope the next release will solve these problems."
"We have had some trouble with the VMAX-to-PowerMax migration, but the VMAX box will be powered down after the migration. The PowerMax boxes are working fine and we don't have any issues with them."
"The main feature that I personally want to see is the possibility to upgrade to the next generation without changing all the components and just change the engine, relying on the compatibility matrices between two different generations. Meaning that we could just keep the enclosure and upgrade the engine, integrating the enclosure to the existing pool, then adding automation tools for orchestration."
"I would like a more informative CloudIQ for iOS. What you can see via the web UI significantly differs from what you can see via the web application."
"The initial setup was complex, and we had experienced people working on 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."
"The Data Reduction Pools (DRP) support could be better."
"The data reduction pool feature sucks and is not recommended for use with heavy workloads."
"I would like to see an improvement in the handling of large amounts of rights."
"Cloud file sharing is an area that needs improvement."
"GUI interface should be enhanced more as there is some issues in copy services."
"This solution could be improved by offering greater amounts of storage."
"I would like to have a larger disk. Right now, you can get 57 terabytes in a shelf. Once they get the larger disk and you get larger capacities, it'll be even better."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 106 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2. 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 writes "An easy GUI and simple provisioning but our model does not support compression". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and Dell XtremIO, whereas IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell Unity XT, NetApp AFF and HPE Primera. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. IBM FlashSystem report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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