We performed a comparison between Dell EMC PowerStore and IBM FlashSystem based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: When compared, both solutions received similar ratings in all categories except for service and support. Users of IBM FlashSystem were more satisfied with the service.
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."
"The solution is scalable."
"The latency is good."
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"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 initial setup was straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is the all-NVMe flash storage. This is the most powerful feature of this series. It supports compression and duplication leads."
"Has a great mapping feature."
"It provides a big benefit when upgrading a new VMware environment. For example, in a big environment with 10 to 30 ESXs, you can take everything and put that into PowerStore. So, it is cost-effective, which is very important and has been massive for us. You reduce almost 80% from the hardware and work directly from PowerStore. Building hardware, especially in a big VMware environment, is a big issue for my organization."
"This solution is very useful to us as we use it internally for all of the services that we need. We use it as a lab and we showcase new technology to the customers and how it can help them going forward."
"There is no complicated configuration for queries and calls. You just create a model and go."
"Reliable, with comprehensive features and a well-established support base."
"Dell PowerStore is an easy and fast tool to work through our company's data."
"IBM FlashSystem is the best solution for storage virtualization."
"The solution is scalable and has varying degrees of scalability."
"They have a virtualization feature and, even if you do not want to buy that feature, you can have it as a trial for two to three months. If you have another brand of storage from another company, you can use this tool to transfer all your data from the old system to the new Storwize system, which really shortens the migration time."
"Stability-wise, this solution is fine."
"The speed and the ease of installation are the most valuable features."
"Ability to manage third-party arrays and virtualise them: One screen to control multiple arrays. Simplified administration."
"The performance of the All-Flash System is very good. There is more enhanced performance and data production in the solution, which I appreciate."
"We are a 100% satisfied with the stability of the solution."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"The software layer has to improve."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"There is no Synchronize replication feature on the storage."
"Many customers are looking for a cyber recovery feature included in PowerStore. We would like to see this added in a future release."
"The solution only does thin provisioning."
"It's also only supported with a limited amount of switches."
"Where the system needs to improve is by adding more enterprise features like replication on other sites. We would also like it to be much more aligned with the VMware version. For example, today we have two different versions of VMware ESXi running to keep the PowerStore online. It would be better if the software cycling was faster."
"There are certain shortcomings with the technical support team of Dell PowerStore, where improvements are required."
"The support team doesn't always provide adequate assistance. So, there is room for improvement in the support."
"It was very new when we first deployed it a year ago. Even the upgrade processes and knowing what to expect, as well as documentation, could be more robust."
"The data reduction pool feature sucks and is not recommended for use with heavy workloads."
"If you want to expand, you cannot expand the disc enclosure. You have to buy a total individual node. Sometimes, this is difficult because we are just looking for capacity and not a node."
"AHV is Acropolis Hypervisor – A relatively new Hypervisor, robust and stable as VMware vSphere, has built-in advanced analytics and powerful operations, Self Service Portal and components for DevOps included, managed by a single pane of glass (Prism) via HTML5 and it is free of charge – That is why Nutanix is so advanced and revolutionary."
"The installation is not easy. You need to have extensive knowledge to handle it."
"When you provision a datastore auto-format takes a long time"
"In IBM FlashSystem, data reduction is an area with shortcomings where improvements can be made in the future."
"This product lacks some of the options we wanted. For example, expansion was difficult and it required a lot of patching to be done."
"A big area for improvement is that the data reduction pool feature is not recommended for use in a production environment because it has stability and performance issues."
Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage with 47 reviews while IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 106 reviews. Dell PowerStore is rated 8.6, while IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Dell PowerStore writes "It has a very strong NAS that can support a lot of big, heavy environments". 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 PowerStore is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray, NetApp AFF, Dell PowerMax NVMe and Huawei OceanStor Dorado, whereas IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell Unity XT, NetApp AFF, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and Huawei OceanStor Dorado. See our Dell PowerStore 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.