EMC XtremIO Flash Storage (discontinued) vs. IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems)

XtremIO would be useful for any production storage environment, or even any staging or development environment where performance mattered. It would not be ideal to use for backup storage.

Incentivized

This stuff runs! Hot, cold not wet, but you know where your data is. Reliably in the cabinet turning your data for the next customer request. You need dedupe, get the flash drive models. Long archives with spinning disks can help with all the data modeling the analysts do. Keep up with the dba’s constant need for speed with all-flash! You will get what you pay for.

Incentivized

• The deduplication and compression is very good. This especially helps for VDI applications.
• It is easy to setup and map hosts to volumes.
• The new HTML5 console is much better than the older Java.

Incentivized

• Data processing and IO. The Storwize devices are very resilient in how they process data and do not have a drop in IO when errors occur (common errors such as disk failures and lost paths).
• Storage efficiency management. We are able to use multiple efficiency techniques such as thin provisioning and data reduction to reduce our budget footprint.
• Easy to use interfaces. Creating a volume and mapping to a host has proven to be a very easy process and makes onboarding less stressful for our team.

Incentivized

• Its expensive but worth it

Incentivized

• As a business partner looking to provide services to keep the uptime of the Storwize, I would like to have the capability to pull reports from IBM Storage Insights to assist my clients in managing their system through it's lifecycle.
• More knowledge out there for partners to best integrate IBM Storwize with IBM Power i. This seems to be lacking in communication from IBM.

Incentivized

This was one area of real disappointment. EMC support was very slow to schedule work like installations and upgrades. Break/fix support was fairly standard. After the Dell merger, things have started improving but there is a lot left to be desired here.

Incentivized

I/O delievered by XtremIO can't be compared with any other flash storage. Existing relationship with vendor and pressure to improve I/O bottleneck was the key objective

Incentivized

IBM Storwize is a part of a family that is complemented by the products listed. In many negotiations, involving storage is our workhorse to ensure several businesses thanks to its balanced cost and all the benefits that we offer.

Incentivized

• Using XtremIO has made our VDI much more palatable for users.

Incentivized

• I would like to highlight the most positive aspect I have seen in the products of the IBM Storwize family, and it is the ROI that we can choose when we offer real-time compression with the IBM V7000 family. In truth, this feature is excellent, and we have seen how customers save storage resources, rack space, power and management.

Incentivized