Dell Unity XT Unified Storage vs. IBM Storage FlashSystem

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Dell Unity XT Unified Storage
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
Dell Unity XT hybrid flash arrays are storage systems for running general purpose workloads that do not require the low latencies and speed of all flash/NVMe architectures. Unity XT hybrid flash arrays balance performance, efficiency, features or outcomes.N/A
IBM Storage FlashSystem
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
IBM's FlashSystem is a flash array storage option.N/A
Pricing
Dell Unity XT Unified StorageIBM Storage FlashSystem
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Dell Unity XT Unified StorageIBM Storage FlashSystem
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Dell Unity XT Unified StorageIBM Storage FlashSystem
Considered Both Products
Dell Unity XT Unified Storage
Chose Dell Unity XT Unified Storage
From my experience, Dell EMC belongs to the second class of storage arrays due to less popularity and performance compared to "the big heads".
Chose Dell Unity XT Unified Storage
I was instructed to buy these arrays, but I was not given the opportunity to evaluate other arrays. We evaluated other products in the market that competed with Unity and found that the younger array built from scratch had far better features, software, and ease of use. The …
IBM Storage FlashSystem

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Dell Unity XT Unified StorageIBM Storage FlashSystem
Enterprise Flash Array Storage
Comparison of Enterprise Flash Array Storage features of Product A and Product B
Dell Unity XT Unified Storage
9.3
15 Ratings
2% above category average
IBM Storage FlashSystem
8.6
111 Ratings
6% below category average
Flash Array Performance9.413 Ratings8.9108 Ratings
Flash Array Integration9.413 Ratings8.3109 Ratings
Data Compression9.712 Ratings8.3107 Ratings
Non-Intrusive Upgrades8.715 Ratings8.3103 Ratings
Simplicity9.015 Ratings8.9110 Ratings
Power Savings9.514 Ratings8.8106 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Dell Unity XT Unified StorageIBM Storage FlashSystem
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 9.2 out of 10
Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 9.2 out of 10
Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Dell Unity XT Unified StorageIBM Storage FlashSystem
Likelihood to Recommend
9.5
(20 ratings)
8.9
(122 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.3
(5 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(3 ratings)
9.0
(11 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(11 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(6 ratings)
9.0
(4 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Dell Unity XT Unified StorageIBM Storage FlashSystem
Likelihood to Recommend
Dell Technologies
Dell EMC Unity is an easy system and very flexible component and very easy to navigate while providing effective services and management of multiple project information management and the data pulling from the supported third-party platform is easy and quick. Excellent reporting features and easy to use and the analytics tools are amazing.
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IBM
For environments where high IO and read writes are performed the flash storage is very well suited . We also use this for another customer as a back end storage for high performance backups where we run multi stream data writes to it via 100G interface.
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Pros
Dell Technologies
  • Enables you to create multiple copies of any database.
  • Data savings feature with compression.
  • Integrity with VMWare, RHEL, Oracle.
  • The best option is a midrange unified storage array in a customer environment.
  • Some models support NMMe.
  • Copy Data Management (iCDM), Data-At-Rest-Encryption (D@RE).
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IBM
  • Cyber resilience with the new functionality of immutable copies called sfaguarded copies
  • With the IBM FlashCore modules it allows us to have good levels of online compression of the information, besides that it is a hardware compression that would not affect the performance of the equipment
  • the virtualization of other storages that can be IBM or other brands
  • binary replication works great
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Cons
Dell Technologies
  • Alerting: receiving an alert when an issue occurs. That is good to know. However, if the alert is cleared, or somehow no longer in alarm, no email is received. At times I will receive the email alert on weekends, not knowing if the issue is resolved or not until Monday when I can access the unit. I have learned in most instances, the alert is a false alarm, which could be a problem.
  • The alerting itself is sometimes not clear. For example, it tells me the link is down, we reset the connection, the link is still down, a tech was dispatched, he troubleshot, and finally the alarm cleared. This incident took almost a week. It went back into alarm after he left, then suddenly it cleared on its own.
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IBM
  • Drive firmware updates are a bit clunky, the update files have to be sourced manually
  • IBM has separate storage monitoring you need to set up to get good historical statistics.
  • If you need 8 16Gb ports you will not be able to expand with a SAS connector.
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Likelihood to Renew
Dell Technologies
No answers on this topic
IBM
As flash technology evolves rapidly, vendors should [adapt] to the changes and onboard them in their products. IBM is a bit slow in adopting advanced technology in [its] portfolio. Even though the current product is good, my decision is purely based on how the transformation of the product [is] being produced and supplied to [the] end-user.
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Usability
Dell Technologies
Very cumbersome compared to other vendors in the same marketplace.
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IBM
The low latency for best performance and improve productivity. This is very much suitable for all the usecases where data intensive processing need to be performed. The administration is very easy and logical. It helps to run the infrastructure at optimial cost and optimal performance. It offers great deal of virtualisation featurs and they are indeed very much powerful.
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Performance
Dell Technologies
No answers on this topic
IBM
Even though the model is suited towards smaller or medium sized businesses, the speeds and performances seen via our benchmarks exceeded any requirements we initially had. The setup was quite simple and the additional features such as allowing for better hyrbid storage and containerization has improved the backend performance of our company immensely.
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Support Rating
Dell Technologies
Not only support for Unity, but for any Dell product, whether for companies or for the end consumer. Support is agile, helpful, and always focused on solving the problem. To date, there has been no problem that Dell's support has failed to resolve and help us with.
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IBM
IBM support ecosystem is robust and well organized, due to the advent of Watson based case management system IBM offers a decent support system for the customers and the users of its products.
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Implementation Rating
Dell Technologies
No answers on this topic
IBM
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Dell Technologies
I was instructed to buy these arrays, but I was not given the opportunity to evaluate other arrays. We evaluated other products in the market that competed with Unity and found that the younger array built from scratch had far better features, software, and ease of use. The Unity system has a unique way of storing the data when compared with other systems.
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IBM
For the past six months, we have been utilizing this technology in our projects to manage a massive workload and produce swift business outcomes on a crucial production database. The IBM FlashSystem 7200, which offers high performance and compression, has so far been a great experience for us. The results and functionality of this product have delighted our consumers.
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Return on Investment
Dell Technologies
  • Less business downtime and reliability is a major business concern. DELL EMC UNITY addresses this concern well and provides robust storage.
  • Investing in UNITY system is less expensive than all-flash storage systems.
  • Managing and provisioning VMware disks became simpler from a single interface in the Vcenter
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IBM
  • Flash System 5000 Built on a software foundation that delivers a 359% ROI.
  • IBM Flash System 5000 Gain the highest levels of availability to support mission-critical applications.
  • IBM Flash System 5000 benefits from [the] integration of modern data protection and rich cyber resiliency features.
  • IBM Flash System 5000 Enhance storage efficiency.
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ScreenShots

IBM Storage FlashSystem Screenshots

Screenshot of IBM-FS-900Screenshot of FlashSystem V9000Screenshot of IBM FlashSystemScreenshot of FlashSystem A9000