TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Save this comparison

Save this comparison

Add Product

Recommended Comparisons

    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    IBM Storage FlashSystem

    Score9.1 out of 10
    N/AIBM Storage FlashSystem, an all-flash storage array, delivers ~2 PB of effective capacity per single rack unit. Engineered with unique FlashCore Modules, it offloads data services including compression, encryption, deduplication, and ransomware threat detection ensuring optimum performance and resiliency.N/A

    Infor Birst

    Score6.5 out of 10
    N/AInfor Birst offers multi-tenant cloud BI for deployment in a public or private cloud, or on-premises. It provides an in-memory columnar data store and a BI layer comprising a reporting engine, predictive analytics tools, mobile native apps, dashboards, discovery tools, and an open client interface.N/A
    Pricing
    IBM Storage FlashSystemInfor Birst
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    IBM Storage FlashSystemInfor Birst
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    IBM Storage FlashSystemInfor Birst
    Considered Both Products
    IBM
    No answer on this topic
    Infor
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    55 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    52 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    55 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    98%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    45 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    94%
    Implementation went as expected
    46 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    IBM Storage FlashSystemInfor Birst
    Enterprise Flash Array Storage
    Comparison of Enterprise Flash Array Storage features of IBM Storage FlashSystem and Infor Birst
    Feature
    IBM Storage FlashSystem
    8.1
    157 Ratings
    9% below category average
    Infor Birst
    -
    Ratings
    Flash Array Performance9.0152 Ratings00 Ratings
    Flash Array Integration8.1148 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data Compression7.7152 Ratings00 Ratings
    Non-Intrusive Upgrades9.1144 Ratings00 Ratings
    Simplicity8.4154 Ratings00 Ratings
    Power Savings6.2147 Ratings00 Ratings
    BI Standard Reporting
    Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of IBM Storage FlashSystem and Infor Birst
    Feature
    IBM Storage FlashSystem
    -
    Ratings
    Infor Birst
    7.4
    77 Ratings
    10% below category average
    Pixel Perfect reports00 Ratings7.068 Ratings
    Customizable dashboards00 Ratings8.077 Ratings
    Report Formatting Templates00 Ratings7.159 Ratings
    Ad-hoc Reporting
    Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of IBM Storage FlashSystem and Infor Birst
    Feature
    IBM Storage FlashSystem
    -
    Ratings
    Infor Birst
    7.0
    78 Ratings
    13% below category average
    Drill-down analysis00 Ratings8.078 Ratings
    Formatting capabilities00 Ratings7.077 Ratings
    Integration with R or other statistical packages00 Ratings6.127 Ratings
    Report sharing and collaboration00 Ratings7.068 Ratings
    Report Output and Scheduling
    Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of IBM Storage FlashSystem and Infor Birst
    Feature
    IBM Storage FlashSystem
    -
    Ratings
    Infor Birst
    8.0
    75 Ratings
    3% below category average
    Publish to Web00 Ratings8.052 Ratings
    Publish to PDF00 Ratings8.067 Ratings
    Report Versioning00 Ratings7.28 Ratings
    Report Delivery Scheduling00 Ratings9.066 Ratings
    Data Discovery and Visualization
    Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of IBM Storage FlashSystem and Infor Birst
    Feature
    IBM Storage FlashSystem
    -
    Ratings
    Infor Birst
    6.9
    72 Ratings
    15% below category average
    Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)00 Ratings8.072 Ratings
    Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization00 Ratings7.058 Ratings
    Predictive Analytics00 Ratings5.833 Ratings
    Access Control and Security
    Comparison of Access Control and Security features of IBM Storage FlashSystem and Infor Birst
    Feature
    IBM Storage FlashSystem
    -
    Ratings
    Infor Birst
    8.3
    72 Ratings
    2% below category average
    Multi-User Support (named login)00 Ratings9.070 Ratings
    Role-Based Security Model00 Ratings8.068 Ratings
    Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)00 Ratings8.069 Ratings
    Mobile Capabilities
    Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of IBM Storage FlashSystem and Infor Birst
    Feature
    IBM Storage FlashSystem
    -
    Ratings
    Infor Birst
    5.0
    54 Ratings
    44% below category average
    Responsive Design for Web Access00 Ratings7.052 Ratings
    Mobile Application00 Ratings3.034 Ratings
    Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile00 Ratings3.042 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    IBM Storage FlashSystemInfor Birst
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    Cyfe
    Score4 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Dell Compellent (discontinued)
    Score8 out of 10
    Qlik Cloud Analytics (Qlik Sense)
    Score8.1 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Everpure FlashArray
    Score8.2 out of 10
    Jaspersoft Community Edition
    Score7 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    IBM Storage FlashSystemInfor Birst
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.8
    (157 ratings)
    7.5
    (99 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    7.6
    (6 ratings)
    9.0
    (35 ratings)
    Usability
    8.8
    (23 ratings)
    9.0
    (12 ratings)
    Availability
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    4.1
    (6 ratings)
    Performance
    9.3
    (21 ratings)
    7.5
    (6 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.1
    (6 ratings)
    6.0
    (19 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    9.1
    (4 ratings)
    Online Training
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.0
    (3 ratings)
    5.3
    (6 ratings)
    Configurability
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    7.0
    (2 ratings)
    Data Sharing and Collaboration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.0
    (24 ratings)
    Data Sources
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.6
    (76 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    9.0
    (3 ratings)
    5.0
    (2 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    5.1
    (2 ratings)
    6.0
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    8.9
    (2 ratings)
    5.0
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    7.0
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    IBM Storage FlashSystemInfor Birst
    Likelihood to Recommend
    IBM
    IBM Storage FlashSystem is the only good option. It is possible to do with other brands but not with the same compatibility and support. So in the IBM i world, there is not that much options if you want reliable products, performance and compatibility with overall system: IBM Storage FlashSystem product is the one. You may need to adjust performance to your needs and IBM has a complete range of systems for entry (FS5X00), mid-range (FS7X00) or high-end (FS9X00). In IBM i world, IBM Storage FlashSystem is the best, but knowing the product, I would probably recommend it for other platforms. And many of my customers are using it as a cross-technology platform (mainly virtualization on x86 like VMWare).
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Infor
    Infor Birst OEM and embedded analytics are well suited for advanced analytics and business intelligence. It has flexible deployment features and a lot of configuration ability with low code - no coding ability. Ability to ingest data from multiple live data sources. Source data from multiple sources can be segregated into multiple sections based on business criteria. Easily searchable business terms (metadata) across all enterprise analytic content.
    Read full review
    Pros
    IBM
    • 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
    Read full review
    Infor
    • End-to-end solution, from raw source data, ETL, warehousing and reporting, Birst is able to do everything we need in one package instead of needing to develop and maintain multiple technologies
    • Intuitive report development. The drag and drop creation of reports is simple. More complicated queries are easy to generate.
    • Very user-friendly and interactive. A lot of nice features are available both for developers and end users to streamline the process of preparing and consuming data
    • Rich API which allows us to programmatically interact with Birst
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    IBM
    • 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
    Read full review
    Infor
    • Birst prices are fairly expensive. License plus cost of users can add up pretty quickly
    • Depending on the size of data, rendering of reports can take a little bit. Need faster processing of data
    • Takes a little time to understand how to build reports, not the most intuitive UI
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Infor
    We have been able to overcome any of the drawbacks we've found with Birst easily and it has fulfilled almost all of our analytic needs to date. Having seen their roadmap it would be highly unlikely we would move away from this platform any time soon. You simply can't beat the functionality that Birst provides for the price and the things I see coming out of the company solidify that our decision to choose Birst was the best possible choice. We have never regretted the decision.
    Read full review
    Usability
    IBM
    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
    Read full review
    Infor
    I would like to see additional usability put into the ETL scripting. Recently, Birst added a nice function reference inline to formula creation which has kept me from having to return to documentation so much. The same in ETL would be very beneficial. The interface problems related to the Flex framework are being addressed in a rewrite to HTML 5, but for now they are still a hindrance to a higher usability rating.
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    IBM
    Yes. The last really issues I've seen in the environments of my customers were back in the "Storwize" era of systems. Issues with code updates or sometimes rarely failing critical components. BUT: since every component is at least dual redundant even back in that day real outages were very rare. And today in the "FlashSystem Era" the systems are so reliable and available even during code updates there are no complaints. I think the 5 or 6 9s are completely achieved.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Infor
    We frequently experience -103 errors due to us using the Live Connect functionality, which does not seem to handle even minor interruptions in connectivity, and treats all future connection attempts or data requests as errors, even if the issue does not exist any longer
    Read full review
    Performance
    IBM
    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
    Read full review
    Infor
    Everything runs very fast and smoothly. The only process that I wish was faster would be processing the data after uploading new data or making changes to the existing data model. It can take 15-20 minutes (roughly) to upload and process new data once you start getting into 10's of millions of rows. Given my experience with how long it takes me to pull the same data using SQL Server Management Studio, I don't think Birst is unreasonably slow - but for me to give a higher rating, I would want it to be unreasonably fast
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    IBM
    I would rate the overall support for IBM Storage FlashSystem with a 10. The response times have consistently been fast, and the support engineers always come prepared with relevant questions and practical solutions. They demonstrate a deep understanding of the product and our use case, which means issues are typically resolved quickly and without unnecessary back-and-forth. This level of support has been especially valuable for our SAP environment, where uptime and quick resolution are critical.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Infor
    • Poor turnaround time
    • Low response rate when the problem at hand are large
    • Lack of infrastructural knowledge when it comes to scaling solutions
    • Lack of inter team work noticed
    • Most of the tickets are open for a long period of time
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    In-Person Training
    IBM
    Very good traning by experienced personnel. I attend instructor led sessions on IBM TechExchange and STUs before as well as IBM workshops for FlashSystems at IBM Böblingen which I helped to prepare and improve after piloting them. Absolutely nothing to complain about FlashSystem training in Germany or USA. So: all good here!
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Infor
    I have attended two different training sessions. The first one was my initial training on the system. It was well paced, clear and concise. If there were questions that were not able to be answered by the instructor, he took down the question and actually followed up and provided us a response quickly. The second session was specific to the dashboard and report design components. This training was very good though there were some attendants who had little or no experience and their questions slowed the class.
    Read full review
    Online Training
    IBM
    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
    Read full review
    Infor
    Although I found the online resources helpful, a lack of appropriate examples for certain tasks key to report creation and advanced modeling make the online training/documentation less than perfect. For an inexperienced BI professional, the online training would not enable a streamlined launch of the product.
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Infor
    Have clean data! Birst flexibility allows - Start small, then introduce functionality and complexity along the way. If you try to present all the functionality [bells and whistles] and wow them, but bad data is uncovered, the end user blames the new application and turns away.
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Infor
    Birst was better than Domo for our needs because we could get in and tinker with it. Our impression of Domo was that it had a lot of connectors and ready to go reports, but it made too many assumptions about applications we use. We customize too much to use a "ready to go" solution like that. When we looked at Tableau, we liked its visualization capabilities, but it wasn't going to help us do the extractions, ETL, and warehousing of data. It may have come some distance since then.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    IBM
    I'm using cognos - especially cognos reports - as a part of IBMs Storage Intelligence software to manage datacenters and report storage and overall resource consumption to my customers. The software is reliable and - my customers who are using cognos in their businesses - say that they are very satisfied about the scalability of cognos. I can give it only an 8 rating because of the quite heavy resource footprint...
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Infor
    we can see that loading a lot of data can cause a noticable slow down in performance. Birst support indicated that they don't really consider anything less than 30 seconds to be an issue, but that is not the case for our customers, so we have had to change some of implementation to address this
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    IBM
    • 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
    Read full review
    Infor
    • Being a manufacturing company we tend to lag behind technologically. But having all the data for different ERP systems in one place has been an eye opener for the executives. It has lessened the need to convert some legacy ERP systems.
    • Having such a simple reporting tool is a great asset to some of our sites that have traditionally had trouble gathering data from AS400 systems.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    IBM Storage FlashSystem Screenshots

    Screenshot of Flash Core Module 5th GenScreenshot of IBM FlashSystem 5600Screenshot of IBM FlashSystem 5600 (rear)Screenshot of IBM FlashSystem 7600 and 9600Screenshot of IBM FlashSystem 7600 and 9600 (rear)

    Infor Birst Screenshots

    Product screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshot