Dell Compellent (discontinued) vs. IBM Storage FlashSystem

Dell Compellent has a decent portfolio of products for varying sizes of business. Their licensing model is suited for those not wanting total a la carte fare, and administration is intuitive as compared to other storage arrays. This combined with Co-Pilot support gives Dell a good presence in a vast number of scenarios where networked storage is required over a DAS solution. It's only fallback is its own NAS solution, which itself may be better suited to smaller environments

Incentivized

IBM Storage FlashSystem is very well suited for a small or medium business that does not want to compromise storage performance. Pricing is excellent and transparent on the website. The option to have 8 16Gb FC connectors allows you to forgo expensive and complicated SAN switches if your host count is low enough. Fewer components make the infrastructure more reliable.

Incentivized

• Block level RAID with data tiered based on how often those blocks are read or written.
• You can mix and match different ways of accessing the SAN, FC or ISCSI.
• They offer the ability to mix and match drive speeds and sizes within racks. This provides for larger, slower drives to store old data, while providing fast SSD storage for data that is constantly in use.

Incentivized

• Data Replication over long distances using Policy-Based Replication and maintaining the RPO.
• We use snapshot technology heavily and these snaps are easy to create/automate and instantly available.
• Upgrades/Updates are deployed to the system without loss of data or services.
• Sub-millisecond latency is maintained and spikes are handled and absorbed by the system during peaks.
• When connected to the internet via Storage Insights and Cloud Call Home it makes for proactive problem alerting, monitoring and resolution.
• The fact that Replication and snapshot stuff are hidden under the covers and we no longer have to create mirror pairs or flashcopy pairs ourselves. It does it within the cluster or partnership.

Incentivized

• Reliability. We had several times where VMFS luns would become corrupted and we'd have to move all VM's off to other storage
• Performance. 1g iSCSI performance was abysmal (although the unit we used was an older device)
• Management and Monitoring. Both management and monitoring are pretty primitive. We were never able to integrate monitoring into Nagios.

Incentivized

• I don't really like how the compression software works, especially when we configure the pools with data reduction, you need to have enough free space available to handle the delete operations, if you don't have that free space in the pool, the storage performance decreases in a very notorious way that directly affects the performance of access to information from the servers

Incentivized

We’re unlikely to renew our use of IBM Storage FlashSystem, not because of any shortcomings with the product itself, but simply because it serves a very specific role in our environment, supporting our SAP landscape. For other workloads and broader storage needs, we rely on different platforms that are a better fit for those use cases.
The FlashSystem has performed reliably in its role, but since our future storage strategy involves consolidating platforms and aligning with solutions that cover a wider range of requirements, we don’t plan to renew it as part of that transition.

Incentivized

I think Flashsystem has excellent usability. It is compatible with almost every platform we have at our enterprise. It is compatible with Power HA and VMware SRM. It has very well-suited interfaces, and spectrum virtualization is very easy to use. GUI and CLI are very well done.

Incentivized

IBM Flashsystems is always available for me, it is fiberchannel storage without the fuzz of what iscsi brings. It is a very reliable storage system, I have almost never issues with this system. The only things which go wrong are the updates because the old updates which have been staged on the disks are not properly cleaned in my opinion.

Incentivized

From an integrative view, IBM Storage FlashSystem provided currently the required performance to support our use cases above and beyond. As one of the most performant solutions, we are pleased to have the IBM Storage FlashSystem supporting our needs of performance as well as scalability within the infrastructure. Not surprisingly, we certainly look forward to scale performance further in the future.

Incentivized

This is not solely based on the support engineers themselves but more so that the logging and gotcha's that their array has. There have been multiple times where logs are pulled, but the folder is not large enough, and it crashes the array. Other times there are certain aspects that support either does not know of or isn't knowledgable about how to look at particular issues that could be causing problems.

Incentivized

Sometimes the knowledge of the support agent is quite limited and the support always has to route through the level 1 agent to screen all the informtion provided. Then its esclated to the next level support with the all collected data . The logs are always uploaded along wiht the case but still its reviewed at the lower level and then escalated / handed over to the next level if its complex issue to solve.

Incentivized

THe training is often selfpaced and easy to follow if you have worked previously with other storage products. The content is clear and contains all the information needed for an admin to learn. However the troubleshooting part is not always included and this is dependent on forums or other sources where the information is not accessible very easily.

Incentivized

I was amazed by the way IBM Flash storage provides a huge amount of storage within the limited footprint, it helped us to replace big fat storage arrays, which aided in the process of moving towards lower hardware, carbon, and energy consumption footprint. We can comfortably say that Flash helped us to host applications fast with a blazing speed and user transactions are quite quick.

Incentivized

I have used Dell EMC Unity XT and I will say that the SC Series is better in the areas of the scalability is excellent. If I need more space, it's a no downtime solution. It's harder to get the funding than it is to get the solution itself. In addition, I like the way it integrates with our environment. These features help us use multiple soft applications. They give us an advantage versus traditional storage resources.

Incentivized

IBM Storage FlashSystem is MUCH faster than the options listed above. We were able to remove 12U of Dell equipment and relaced it with a 2U IBM Storage FlashSystem that was faster and had more storage available. The setup was extremely easier than our initial deployment of our Dell systems. Previous to deploying IBM Storage FlashSystem in our environment, we had quite a bit of lag in our user's VDIs leading to a lot of negative feedback on our systems. Since implementing IBM Storage FlashSystem, we've had tons of positive remarks and the number of helpdesk tickets our internal team has received have dropped considerably. We're spending more time on other initiatives with all the extra time we're saving.

Incentivized

We have been able to scale this storage system whenever there has been requirement for additional capacity and performance. with the help of deduplication we have been able to build quite a robust environment.

Incentivized

• This storage array is a middle-range array that brings speed with peace of mind due to the stability.
• The uptime has helped us with making sure the hosts and servers that connect to this array have as much uptime as possible.
• The negative still has to be that these arrays can't seem to handle quick/high I/O usage.

Incentivized

• Easy of use is a key aspect, as we do not have dedicated storage staff.
• Our RPO has lowered near to Zero, using PBR as replication and this is key for us.
• DR plan testing has become easier and less time-consuming, allowing us to conduct tests more frequently.

Incentivized