We performed a comparison between Dell SC Series and IBM FlashSystem based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"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."
"The solution is scalable."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"It is just as stable as any other high-end solution."
"With auto-tiering, it's easier to understand than most arrays, knowing that all of your writes go to the tier that you specify, with easy-to-create storage profiles."
"The most valuable features are the with back-end dedupe, and the thin nodes. For a 20TB or 60TB, we're using almost a one-to-two ratio."
"Performance-wise it's high speed. It's also more stable and scalable."
"Most valuable features have been the system customization with it, the performance you receive, and their CoPilot Support (or Dell EMC Storage Support)."
"The flexibility of this solution has been valuable for our business."
"Customers are most impressed with SC's provisioning because you don't need to buy a large amount of storage upfront. It's pay-as-you-grow. It also has solid compression and duplication features."
"The process of reallocating data from fast disks (SSD or SAS) to slow disks (SATA) gives you better performance and better use of resources."
"Speed (IOPS/second) – It is most vital for applications that need low latency and high speed for transferring the data."
"IBM FlashSystem is flexible, quick, and has a solid design."
"The most valuable features are deduplication and compression, which together, enable you to have more space."
"The ability to create LUNs and modify them are the most valuable features of this solution."
"The performance of the All-Flash System is very good. There is more enhanced performance and data production in the solution, which I appreciate."
"The FlashSystem 900 consistently delivers performance below 1ms for read/write. This performance is essential for an effective SVC stretch-cluster configuration across two datacenters, and presenting active-active storage to the customer."
"High availability and enhanced security; Proven dependability; Data compression with hardware acceleration; Advanced copy services features are all in this product."
"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."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"It is on the expensive side."
"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."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"The software layer has to improve."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"We had times that we needed a file service solution. We've used FluidFS, but it's a solution that is being transitioned out."
"The cost of the solution could be better."
"While there's always room for improvement in everything, I can't really think of a specific feature of the solution that requires immediate attention."
"I would like to see an integrated key manager in the controllers. Currently, it's an external product. It would be nice to have the option of having a built-in key for self-encrypting drive features."
"The price could be improved."
"The initial setup is somewhat complex and should be made simpler to do."
"I don't think the solution is very scalable."
"It would be helpful if the solution offered higher performance, at least on the back end."
"I have looked at a few pages of a report I download and I saw a graph there regarding software-defined vendors. IBM is not in a good position on this graph. I know that they are working very hard on this, to make it much better and to get to a level where it's not only hardware but also software to provide a complete solution."
"IBM could do more marketing and improve brand awareness. I had never heard of this product until a colleague told me about it. FlashSystem could add a few features, but it would probably increase the price. For example, Pure Storage offers instant snapshotting and partitioning. That would be nice to have, but I think the cost would go up."
"With regards to the IBM V7000 storage system, where we have multiple tiers of storage, a heat map would show I/O distribution across the tiers of storage."
"This solution needs a management console where we are alerted to issues and can report them, or escalate them through email or another method."
"I would like to see an improvement in the handling of large amounts of rights."
"The installation is not easy. You need to have extensive knowledge to handle it."
"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."
"Sometimes the performance is effective but it gets resolved in the process."
Dell SC Series is ranked 24th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews while IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 106 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.4, while IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "Automated architecture that proactively optimizes your database ". 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 SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor, NetApp AFF and HPE Nimble Storage, whereas IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell Unity XT, NetApp AFF and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform. See our Dell SC Series vs. IBM FlashSystem report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
