IBM FlashSystem vs SolidFire comparison

"The database workloads are pretty fast because I frequently move data from here to there."

"The solution uses newer technology for deduplication and compression."

"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."

"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."

"The solution is very straightforward to set up."

"Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."

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

"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 most valuable features are deduplication and compression, which together, enable you to have more space."

"At the FlashSystem level, customers are especially fond of multi-tier and distributed rate systems, particularly the dynamic rate six arrays."

"The most valuable feature is that is supports a high IOPS rate."

"IBM FlashSystem is flexible, quick, and has a solid design."

"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."

"It is simple to make an update."

"It's very easy to manage."

"Installing FlashSystem is very easy. It takes less than half an hour, and I can handle it all myself."

"Overall performance of the solution."

"I would say in terms of architecture and in terms of functionality, the product is quite good."

"The dashboard is such that you don't need to be a storage expert to administer it."

"The system efficiency is excellent overall."

"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."

"Templates are already predefined for it. If you're coding it up, it will take two days. You can pick up a template right there from the API, and it just works for you. Implementation done in 10 minutes."

"SolidFire provides seamless performance across your storage system when you need to scale up. Other storage systems do not do that."

"We can just buy them, scale them as we need on demand, and we don't have to spend so many front end cycles on designing the architecture."

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

"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."

"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."

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

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

"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."

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

"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."

"I think the only thing the developers can look at, is that it is limited to 25 gigabytes currently. In the next release they might want to increase that."

"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."

"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."

"Their technical support needs improvement in terms of reachability for the clients and response times. They should be more responsive and have more online platforms for support. They should make more technical information available online. There could be some kind of documentation community."

"There is room for improvement in the troubleshooting part, specifically related to IBM Spectrum for Insight."

"The storage capacity of this solution could be improved."

"The price is very costly."

"We use some open-source tools for monitoring, such as Grafana and it should be bundled along with IBM FlashSystem."

"Though it is a stable solution, its users may face some security issues at times...The security provided by the solution is one area that can be improved."

"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."

"It would be good to provide administrative access at the root level to be able to do things with the system, if need be."

"So feature-wise, I would say more reporting tools that could be merged into it."

"It's a very good Windows-type solution. But we do a lot of legacy systems and the like. So it's getting that incorporated into it that would help us."

"This solution would be improved if it were made to be more compatible with other products."

"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."

"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."

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

"They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."

"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."

"The product is expensive."

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

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

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

"The cost of the IBM FlashSystem is lower than the HPE solution."

"The pricing has been very competitive for the last few years. IBM got to the point where they changed the pricing model and we feel very comfortable with the pricing. It's very competitive. Over the last two years, IBM has been coming up with all kinds of interesting promos, especially for the SMB systems. That makes it very competitive price-wise and in terms of performance..."

"Its price is very good."

"The price is a little bit high so is rated a six out of ten."

"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."

"I find the pricing of the solution to be very reasonable."

"It pays to go back and get the best price you can from your supplier. The first offer is not always at the best discount."

"The tool is cost-efficient."

"We would probably use SolidFire more, except we're getting more bang for our buck with our purchases of ONTAP right now, and the deal we made with NetApp, so it's more of just a cost decision"

"The price of this solution is more expensive than others."

"On a scale where one is a high price and ten is a low price, I rate the solution between three and four. It is an expensive solution."

"It might be considered expensive, but when evaluating performance, it represents good value online because you pay for what you get."

"Based on what I heard from other people, its price was on the higher side."