Dell PowerMax NVMe vs IBM FlashSystem comparison

Dell Technologies and IBM are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Dell Technologies is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.5, while IBM is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.6. Dell Technologies holds a 3.8% mindshare in AFS, compared to IBM’s 7.6% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of IBM users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

IBM FlashSystem and Dell PowerMax NVMe are high-performance storage solutions. Dell PowerMax NVMe holds the upper hand due to its advanced features, justifying the higher cost.

Features: IBM FlashSystem’s valuable features include efficient data compression, ease of management, and competitive pricing. Dell PowerMax NVMe features robust data services, high performance, and advanced data replication.

Room for Improvement: IBM FlashSystem needs better scalability, improved integration capabilities, and enhanced user documentation. Dell PowerMax NVMe can improve its initial setup process, simplify user interface, and offer better user documentation.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM FlashSystem is known for straightforward deployment and responsive customer support. Dell PowerMax NVMe has a complex setup but offers comprehensive support once deployment is complete.

Pricing and ROI: IBM FlashSystem offers a cost-effective solution with faster ROI. Dell PowerMax NVMe, despite higher initial costs, provides justified investment through its advanced capabilities and performance gains.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. IBM FlashSystem Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. IBM FlashSystem

October 2024

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Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.7%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerMax NVMe is 3.8%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM FlashSystem is 7.6%, up from 7.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage

Featured Reviews

Paul Pearson

Storage and Backup Architect at Concentrix

Works well, is easy to implement, and has upgrade analysis capabilities

We love the product. Pure Storage works really well. The CAT tool and also the ability to upgrade the unit's place grades are great. It allows for in-place control or upgrades. It's a very simple implementation. They have a good tool to analyze upgrades. The stability is good. Technical support has been excellent.

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Haseeb Khalid Sheikh

Senior Manager Enterprise Solutions at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

End-to-end NVMe capabilities helps improve availability, performance, and capacity

The solution's most valuable feature is the data reduction ratio. You can store a 5:1 ratio of your data in Dell PowerMax NVMe. For example, if you have 200 terabytes of usable capacity, you can save up to five times of data on that capacity. That means you can save one petabyte of data on just 200 terabytes of usable capacity. The solution's end-to-end NVMe capabilities have improved our operations. Everything is fast, and you don't have to map your storage to old hybrid storage technologies. Our organization has experienced positive change, and the solution has improved our uptime, availability, performance, and capacity.

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Abdul-Salam

Sr. Manager - System Analyst (Datacenter Infrastructure) at Sohar International

An easy GUI and simple provisioning but our model does not support compression

Depending on your use case, I recommend looking at models that include compression and deduplication features to ensure the required level of UI performance. We dedicate the solution to one particular application so we do not face performance issues. An environment with a shared storage array across multiple applications or databases may need high performance storage, more memory, and powerful controllers. I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."

"The duplication algorithm allows us to get a lot more use out of less storage. We're running a five terabyte array right now and we're running probably about 30 terabytes on it. So the duplication rate is pretty phenomenal, without a cost to performance. It still runs pretty smoothly."

"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."

"The tool's valuable features are speed, security, data compression, and reliability. Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen. It helps us to save money and resources."

"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."

"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"Dell PowerMax NVMe's tech support is good."

"It is easy to manage and upgrade."

"The SRDF site-to-site replication for the volumes is the most important feature for us. That enables us to do site recovery and replication for our VMware infrastructure."

"We are using the solution's application and snapshot feature."

"This platform is reliable in supporting our data availability. We now have a higher performing platform and have been able to consolidate our workloads into one single platform."

"Key features include performance, replication time, and dedup and compression."

"It is a true, stable product."

"PowerMax NVMe has made it a lot easier to understand how much we are able to provision. It has made it a lot faster to provision new things. 90% of my time for provisioning has been reduced. Also, it has made it very easy to understand and see everything behind it versus the older heritage, where Dell EMC was very convoluted and hard to get working. Things that used to take an hour, probably now take five to 10 minutes."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe pros

"Stability-wise, this solution is fine."

"High availability and enhanced security; Proven dependability; Data compression with hardware acceleration; Advanced copy services features are all in this product."

"The installation is nice and easy."

"One of the valuable features is the performance, it is one of the best in the market."

"This solution is very stable."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is replication...Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."

"The valuable features are high availability, compression, and a failover mechanism. It's a very highly available storage solution."

"This solution is convenient, user-friendly, convenient and reliable."

More IBM FlashSystem pros

Cons

"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."

"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."

"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."

"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."

"Managing data isn't difficult for me. The performance is usually perfect, but we sometimes have capacity problems."

"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."

"It feels more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses rather than enterprises."

"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"They can make the GUI better, especially for the ones that come out of the box. We did encounter a bit of difficulty in setting up the storage. We had to deploy Solutions Enabler on a Linux machine to be able to fully interact with the storage. They need to upgrade the web interface for the management of the storage that comes out of the box. The management interface for NFS is also a bit old and not very intuitive."

"I would like to see more security features and improvements in the platform's ease of management."

"It's a relatively new product, but for the next release I would like to see higher bandwidth on the front-end adapters. This would allow even greater scalability for critical workloads and consolidation for non-critical workloads. The hosts may not require that level of I/O performance today. However, it allows us to scale physical non-cloud environments without large investment."

"We would like more documentation, a guide to the features of the PowerMax."

"Although they call it unified storage where you have SAN and NAS, with a NAS implementation on top of a SAN, the NAS implementation is a little complicated and clumsy. As SAN, as block storage, it is very powerful... If they could provide a very good NAS implementation, it would be better, so that customers don't have to look for other simple solutions for NAS."

"The initial setup was complex, as it is a complex system and you have to learn a lot."

"I'd like to see the dedup and compression improve. Two to one is not very good. We should be getting something like three, four, or five to one."

"Dell needs to offer more midrange storage options with enterprise-class features similar to the PowerMAX."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe cons

"The support could improve by allowing you to speak to someone when you call rather than them calling you back. However, once we do have contact with one of their technicians they are excellent."

"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."

"I know they have a flashcopy manager, but it is extra software, an additional license, and some customers don't like to add addition costs to their infrastructure. If IBM could create, or include snapshot management within the GUI, that would really be helpful."

"The solution should improve its pricing and the mechanism in the reduction pool."

"The customer's expectations are what they get on the cloud, they're expecting even in the on-premises deployments, going forward."

"When you provision a datastore auto-format takes a long time"

"Replication features need improvement. Currently, they are there in the product, but I'm not sure as to how it works exactly."

"I would like to see bigger modules."

More IBM FlashSystem cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."

"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."

"The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits. We don't regret purchasing it."

"The product is expensive."

"The tool's pricing is cheap; I rate it a six to seven out of ten. Most of our sales are not subscription-based. We sell the hardware, and customers keep using it. They only renew the service part annually. The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."

"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."

"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"It is high-end storage and it is a bit expensive, but it is doing what it is meant for: running business-critical applications or latency-sensitive applications..."

"I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe a five out of ten for pricing."

"We hope that with the combination of both NVMe and SCM the next PowerMax will be much cheaper that the one which we acquired."

"Its price is competitive, but they need to have a different price for West Africa. They can do better with the price point to allow us to scale even more. We wanted to migrate our entire storage infrastructure to PowerMax, which would require us to buy more capacity, and from the price point, it didn't attract us."

"In terms of price-performance, it beat out other competitors when we were taking a look and comparing it to the market. That was one of the biggest driving points for us."

"Since Dell PowerMax NVMe is an enterprise storage, its price is premium."

"The pricing might be a bit high for small organizations, so it's more suitable for larger enterprises."

"From reclaiming data center space which is so tightly constrained these days, it will pay for itself in a short amount of time, which is fantastic. Anything we can do to get more out of our current physical data center space helps us a ton, and PowerMax has helped enable that."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe pricing and cost advice

"The solution requires a license and could be less expensive."

"Regarding licensing make sure you add at least three years software maintenance from IBM at the beginning, because you will not be able to download firmware updates or any fixes/patches without this."

"Overall the price of the solution is expensive and this includes the license."

"The tool is cost-efficient."

"I price of IBM FlashSystem is reasonable and competitive."

"Our customers would like IMB FlashSystem to be less expensive."

"The total storage capacity vs price is still quite high for the IBM Flash Array."

"Among IBM, Dell EMC, and Pure Storage, IBM is the cheapest. The price is also based on our location, the size of our entity, and our regular annual purchases from them. We are a very big IBM customer, so we normally get very high discounts. We are not a big customer of Pure Storage. We don't buy that much from Pure Storage per year. Everything is included in the price. There is no extra license for different functions."

More IBM FlashSystem pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

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What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

After implementation, there are limitations, such as the number of paths, file systems, and replication options. It f...

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What's the difference between DELL EMC Powerstore and Powermax NVMe?

Dell PowerStore is an all-solid-state midrange storage system. It has many internal elements taken from other Dell of...

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What do you like most about Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe?

First, it's an enterprise storage solution. This is very important for us. Another important feature is replication.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe?

The pricing was quite competitive and the lowest among the competition.

See all answers

What do you like most about IBM FlashSystem?

It is simple to make an update.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM FlashSystem?

The product is expensive. It costs around 150k for five years.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM FlashSystem?

The product could be cheaper.

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 37% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 12% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 12% of the time

HPE Nimble Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 6% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 25% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 10% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 6% of the time

Dell VMAX All Flash vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 6% of the time

Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 6% of the time

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Dell PowerStore vs IBM FlashSystem

Compared 25% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs IBM FlashSystem

Compared 8% of the time

Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs IBM FlashSystem

Compared 7% of the time

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs IBM FlashSystem

Compared 6% of the time

NetApp AFF vs IBM FlashSystem

Compared 6% of the time

More IBM FlashSystem Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

November 2024

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe

November 2024

Download Dell PowerMax NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM FlashSystem

November 2024

Download IBM FlashSystem product report

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerMax

IBM Storwize

Learn More

Pure Storage

Dell Technologies

IBM

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

Dell PowerMax is the industry’s most secure mission-critical storage platform. With NVMe Dynamic Fabric technology, PowerMax breaks from traditional storage limitations, enabling seamless integration with cloud-native and legacy applications. Designed with a powerful scale-up and scale-out architecture, PowerMax supports mission-critical applications at scale with zero downtime and ultra-low latency. The latest PowerMaxOS 10 release harnesses AI-driven efficiencies for trusted performance, capacity, and security. By choosing PowerMax, you can trust in a secure, intelligent, and always modern storage solution that unlocks the full potential of your data to drive business success.

IBM FlashSystem products are enterprise computer data storage systems that store data on flash memory chips. Unlike storage systems that use standard solid-state drives, IBM FlashSystem products incorporate custom hardware based on technology from the 2012 acquisition of Texas Memory Systems. This hardware provides performance, reliability, and efficiency benefits versus competitive offerings.

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Rackspace, Open Line

Celero, Friedhelm Loh Group, Clarks, Mingkang Natregro Health Food Group, Sofia, Etisalat Fights Fraud, UF Health Shands Hospital, Generali, Elecon Engineering Company Limited, Ventiv , Technology, CPFL Energia, Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., SciQuest, Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated, Paddy Power, Kelsey-Seybold Clinic, Interconnect Services, Severstal IP-Only AB, PVU Group GmbH

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. IBM FlashSystem

October 2024

Free Report: Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. IBM FlashSystem

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. IBM FlashSystem and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.

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