IBM Cloud File Storage vs. Microsoft Azure

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Cloud File Storage
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
IBM Cloud provides a File Storage service allows the user to deploy and customize flash-backed NFS-based file storage from 25 GB to 12,000 GB capacity with up to 48,000 IOPS.N/A
Microsoft Azure
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.
$29
per month
Pricing
IBM Cloud File StorageMicrosoft Azure
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Developer
$29
per month
Standard
$100
per month
Professional Direct
$1000
per month
Basic
Free
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Cloud File StorageMicrosoft Azure
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsThe free tier lets users have access to a variety of services free for 12 months with limited usage after making an Azure account.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM Cloud File StorageMicrosoft Azure
Considered Both Products
IBM Cloud File Storage
Chose IBM Cloud File Storage
In my opinion, IBM has produced excellent products that have been instrumental in the development of our business. We rely heavily on data to power the programs in our organization. Because our systems can be accessed from various apps without experiencing any downtime, …
Microsoft Azure
Chose Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure outpowers Oracle Cloud. It is way easier to use than Google Cloud which, though proficient, continues to be overly complicated. As for IBM Cloud - Microsoft Azure, I find, is more reliable, efficient and dependable. In general Microsoft Azure is more …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
IBM Cloud File StorageMicrosoft Azure
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cloud File Storage
9.0
39 Ratings
10% above category average
Microsoft Azure
8.6
17 Ratings
6% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime9.737 Ratings8.716 Ratings
Dynamic scaling9.036 Ratings9.316 Ratings
Elastic load balancing9.235 Ratings8.816 Ratings
Pre-configured templates8.731 Ratings7.016 Ratings
Monitoring tools8.337 Ratings8.016 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images8.933 Ratings8.415 Ratings
Operating system support9.636 Ratings9.516 Ratings
Security controls9.737 Ratings9.016 Ratings
Automation7.730 Ratings8.715 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM Cloud File StorageMicrosoft Azure
Small Businesses
Linode
Linode
Score 9.0 out of 10
Linode
Linode
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
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User Ratings
IBM Cloud File StorageMicrosoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(40 ratings)
8.5
(88 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(1 ratings)
10.0
(15 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(27 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
6.8
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(6 ratings)
8.8
(27 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(2 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM Cloud File StorageMicrosoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM
well suited: Enterprise File Sharing and Collaboration: Scenario: our organization has teams working on projects across different geographical locations, and they need a centralized and easily accessible file storage solution. IBM Cloud File Storage can facilitate seamless file sharing and collaboration among team members. less appropriate Highly Transactional Databases: Scenario: Your organization has highly transactional and I/O-intensive database workloads that require low-latency access to data. In such cases, block storage or specialized database services might be more appropriate than file storage.
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Microsoft
In terms of cloud computing, Microsoft Azure is the only comprehensive result the company offers. Regardless of how big or small an organization is, it can make use of this system. As a cyber-security professional, this is your best option for data management. A business that wants to minimize capital expenditures can use Microsoft Azure. Many Microsoft services accept it. People with little or no knowledge of cloud computing may find it impossible. It isn’t the solution for companies that don’t want to risk having only one platform and infrastructure vendor.
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Pros
IBM
  • Simple file system sharing
  • Lots of storage space (up to 12 TB)
  • Choice of performance (up to 10 IOPS/GB)
  • Simple interface to order more storage
  • Quick interface to allow more servers to share the file store
  • Security - only allows access from specified server(s)
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Microsoft
  • Azure simply provides end to end life cycle. Starting from the development to automated deployment, you will find [a] bunch of options. Custom hook-points allow [integration] on-premise resources as well.
  • Excellent documentation around all the services make it really easy for any novice. Overall support by [the] community and Azure Technical team is exceptional.
  • BOT Services, Computer Vision services, ML frameworks provide excellent results as compare to similar services provided by other giants in the same space.
  • Azure data services provide excellent support to ingest data from different sources, ETL, and consumption of data for BI purpose.
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Cons
IBM
  • We have sometimes experienced some outages and hope IBM will fix this soon.
  • Initial trainings are required for the teams to work and do the setup.
  • Support documentation from IBM needs improvement with [the] inclusion of more detailed steps and video tutorials for [a] better understanding of the engineers.
  • The billing process is very complex and you may have to incur additional overhead. Need a simpler approach and clarity on this aspect.
  • Support response from the IBM team is very slow and lacks information.
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Microsoft
  • In our experience, Azure Kubernetes Survice was difficult to set up, which is why we used Kubernetes on top of VMs.
  • Azure REST API is a bit difficult to use, which made it difficult for us to automate our interactions with Azure.
  • Azure's Web UI does a good job of showing metrics on individual VMs, but it would be great if there was a way to show certain metrics from multiple VMs on one dashboard. For example, hard drive usage on our database VMs.
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Likelihood to Renew
IBM
IBM Cloud File Storage is a valuable tool in the arsenal of any small business. It's flexibility combined with its ease of use ensure that there is low operational overhead, combined with a solid return on investment. It's role based access control features combined with sharing capabilities make it a significant win for any business.
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Microsoft
Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.
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Usability
IBM
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
Microsoft Azure's overall usability has been better than expected. Often times vendors promise the world, only to leave you with a run-down town. Not the case with our experience. From an implementation perspective, all went perfect, and from the user-facing experience we have had no technical issues, just some learning curve issues that are more about "why" than "how"
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Reliability and Availability
IBM
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
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Support Rating
IBM
The IBM team provides effective support for all the cloud operations. They tracks operations and database functionalities closely to enhance reliable operations and remove inefficiencies that affect work processes. The support team has prepared video tutorials and manuals that guides our members on how to work with the database systems effectively.
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Microsoft
Support is easy with all the knowledge base articles available for free on the web. Plus, if you have a preferred status you can leverage their concierge support to get rapid response. Sometimes they’ll bounce you around a lot to get you to the right person, but they are quite responsive (especially when you are paying for the service). Many of the older Microsoft skills are also transferable from old-school on-prem to Azure-based virtual interfaces.
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Implementation Rating
IBM
The IBM Professional services provided the re4quired infrastructure for getting the best out of this tool. It offered excellent guidelines that enhanced efficient integrations. The organization was pleased with the setup process that was completed quickly than expected. The application has been operation effectively after deployment. We have continued to get support from the IBM support team when there are challenges.
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Microsoft
As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.
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Alternatives Considered
IBM
IBM Cloud File Storage, unlike other similar products, offers excellent Cloud data security and its overall data management quality on IBM Cloud File Storage is incredible and its data integration support is perfect because it allows big data migration across many Cloud platforms for effective data analytics generation and data visualization tools are great.
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Microsoft
As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.
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Return on Investment
IBM
  • Compared with company datacenter require less maintenance time with an incomparable high availability and business continuity features
  • The possibility to move snapshots on other data centers let this solution super scalable worldwide
  • The price for gb let us pay what we need without a pre commissioned storage buy
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Microsoft
  • Brings down Capex to customers.
  • Some of the built-in security features of DDoS Basic protection that comes with VNET on Azure or even WAF on AGW brings huge advantages to customers.
  • Hybrid benefits for those who have software assurance can save even more costs by moving to Azure.
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ScreenShots