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.
By opting for the gold subscription every three years, you get a free upgrade to the latest controller release.
If you wait more than seven years to buy another one, you get a return on your investment.
The solution can comfortably be stretched from five to seven years without any failures, ensuring a long-lasting return.
With Pure FlashArray X NVMe, we need to escalate the issue and get an account manager for its resolution.
We also had one outage where a controller of one of the products had failed and had to be replaced on-site.
Customers always have their issues resolved promptly.
Customers of alternatives like Dell and Hitachi enjoy more reliable and comprehensive support services directly from vendors rather than third-party subsidiaries.
I rate the technical support from IBM as a ten.
IBM customer support is responsible, efficient, and responsive, though it is expensive.
You cannot increase capacity if latency is present.
It is highly scalable.
It is suitable for both medium-sized and enterprise businesses.
For larger enterprises, scalability is an issue as the price becomes prohibitive.
The problem arises when migrating data to a later IBM FlashSystem version due to issues with firmware compatibility.
The scalability of IBM FlashSystem is exceptional, and I rate it as a nine.
During the eight years, there have been no problems such as hardware failure or stopping.
I would rate the stability of the solution as a ten out of ten.
I would rate the stability of the product at seven out of ten.
Customers have infrastructure that is 100% stable.
The firmware and software engine have fewer bugs, which enhances operational efficiency.
Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe.
We would appreciate a built-in transparent failover in the next release to eliminate the need for a separate metro cluster.
I'm eagerly anticipating the roadmap's promise of introducing multiple controllers, which could significantly boost scalability and resilience.
Despite marketing promises, these features do not function effectively and can impact performance.
There is room for improvement in the troubleshooting part, specifically related to IBM Spectrum for Insight.
An additional function that could be helpful is reducing the time it takes to delete volumes, especially if they are compressed or deduplicated.
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.
Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products.
To install or upgrade any software features, the cost is high, which makes it challenging for smaller companies who do not require advanced features like deduplication or compression typically needed by larger organizations.
Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator.
The platform's robust features include excellent sustainability tracking, and a comprehensive dashboard offering insights into IOPS, bandwidth, performance, and virtual activities.
Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen.
There is a significant amount of data reduction, achieving a ratio of one to three.
There is built-in compression, a data reduction feature, and artificial intelligence-driven insights that calculate warnings and errors to redirect to customers automatically.
When integrated properly into the environment and configured according to the guidelines, it provides a very solid infrastructure that does the job on demand.
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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