Dell PowerScale vs. IBM Storage FlashSystem

EMC Isilon Scale-Out NAS is well suited for larger files (greater the 128 Kb) and where you need to have everything in one common name space. Where it is less appropriate is for many small files (millions of files less than 128 Kb in size) - this causes the protection level to becoming mirroring, which will cost more space.

Incentivized

Top choice for IBMi integration. In general, it's a very good solution for quite a lot of customers. If you need a 3 site replication solution (HA + DR) maybe it's not the best solution, unless you use SVC. FlashCore Modules have very powerful compression rate, while mantaining good performance: high IOPS rate and really low latency

Incentivized

• NAS Storage
• Capacity and Performance details of the array
• Alert and Operations details

Incentivized

• Extremely fast storage
• Scales up as needed. Add flash core modules easily and increase volumes very quickly.
• Applying firmware updates to IBM Storage FlashSystem is very easy to do and can be done without any downtime.
• Replication policies are very versatile and also easy to setup.

Incentivized

• Some upgrades require the entire cluster to be rebooted simultaneously. In this day and age, that should not be necessary. This is my biggest disappointment with Isilon to date.
• When using multiple storage pools you have to be very careful with your capacity management. Filling up one pool can cause an overflow of data to a pool that is less performance driven. Do not underestimate your capacities or you will find yourself in a tight spot.
• Block size is almost always an issue with Isilon. It does not handle all types of data well. In many cases PACS and VNA data is best to be stored on a different storage platform that will utilize the capacity more efficiently that Isilon is capable of.
• Deduplication seems to be less efficient on Isilon than on other platforms for similar types of data.

Incentivized

• Definitely we need to be able to extend a volume that is part of a mirror pair or Policy-Based Replication(PBO) on the fly.
• Expansion of mirrored volumes/volume groups should resynchronise only the changed data (Almost like making use of change-volumes) and not trigger a full resync.
• Please allow us to select downloading drive microcode also from Fix Central directly onto the flashsystem like with updates.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The integration into our SVC and the midrange systems are very well working. We do use cross site replication and global mirror which in turn is easy setup and the consistency groups are well maintained. The storage does global mirroring but also internal cross room replication as well. The integration of cloud object storage also helps in tiering the overall system.

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

Latency and throughput have been excellent. The compression is done natively on the NVME modules so we do not see an impact there. the distributed parity does not seem to impact write speeds at all. We have found database performace has increased quite a bit over our old hybrid storage solution.

Having a single tier of performance makes it easy to set up SLAs for workloads.

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

Raw disk space vs. logical disk space ratio was significantly better on the Isilon. Fast cache using SSD drives for faster searching is available on the Isilon but not available on the Overland solution. Isilon solution included faster backend switching between nodes.

Incentivized

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.

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.

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• Isilon provides very high value for money
• Matches the performance and storage requirements of the arrays
• EMC provides very skillful and high response team in case of any issues in isilon

Incentivized

• the compression in line means the IBM flashcore allow us to store much more information with less capacity, we can store much more with fewer disks
• virtualization allows us to extend the useful life of old equipment that we already had separated, as I said, I use them as a repository for backups
• With the implementation of the new functionality of immutable copies with SafeGuarded Copies, the information is much more secure for possible attacks

Incentivized