IBM FlashSystem and StarWind Storage Appliance are both competitive storage solutions. StarWind Storage Appliance seems to have the upper hand due to its superior feature set, justifying its higher cost.
Features: IBM FlashSystem users mention high performance, efficient storage management, and favorable pricing and support. StarWind Storage Appliance users value its comprehensive feature set, synchronous replication, and scalability with extensive features standing out.
Room for Improvement: IBM FlashSystem users suggest better integration capabilities with third-party systems and additional features. StarWind Storage Appliance users desire improvements in automation, monitoring tools, and simplicity in deployment.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM FlashSystem is praised for straightforward deployment and responsive customer service. StarWind Storage Appliance receives favorable reviews for deployment ease despite occasional complexity, and customer service is generally well-regarded but varies more than IBM's.
Pricing and ROI: IBM FlashSystem offers competitive setup costs and strong ROI, making it an attractive option. StarWind Storage Appliance, while having higher initial setup costs, is seen as offering substantial ROI due to its advanced features with superior investment returns.
Rather than Pure just saying it's Cisco's problem, call Cisco, they actually got on with a TAC engineer and talked us through it.
The guys in South Africa, and they're very, very good.
What I like about Pure Storage technical support is that when you enter a request, you immediately get a response.
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've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency.
We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC.
We also have an X90R2 with two petabytes of NVMe in it which fits in about six rack units of space.
We are able to push the X70 way past our current needs from a throughput and IOPS perspective – without any degradation on latency.
We have also performed storage and controller upgrades live with zero downtime.
While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits.
The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there.
We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees.
We have gone through multiple software upgrades, as well as completely non-disruptive hardware upgrades.
During the eight years, there have been no problems such as hardware failure or stopping.
There was one minor issue when the M70s were first released – but they have been 100% stable since.
Going from a legacy vendor to Pure Storage, we saw reductions in MRP reports previously running at six hours going to 30 minutes.
The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance.
The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use.
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.
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.
For SMB and Enterprises who are looking for high performance primary storage for server virtualization, VDI, database and Big Data scenarios, or inexpensive secondary backup tier, our solution is StarWind Storage Appliance. It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, and associated software into an easily scalable storage platform.
Additionally, the appliance features an optional gateway to Azure public cloud, which helps to implement an effective Disaster Recovery plan or meet regulatory requirements. StarWind SA scales up by adding individual disks and flash modules, or JBODs, while adding ready controller nodes allows scaling out.
StarWind SA targets those, who need high-performance primary storage or secondary storage for backup. In case there is a whole virtualization infrastructure to build from scratch, StarWind HCA will come in handy. Otherwise, if all the required hardware is present, StarWind Virtual SAN will be enough to build a high-performance virtualization setup.
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