IBM 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.
$14,200
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Pure Storage in Mountain View, California offers all-flash array data storage promising affordability, high availability, and consistent performance.
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Pricing
IBM Storage FlashSystem
Pure Storage FlashArray
Editions & Modules
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No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Storage FlashSystem
Pure Storage FlashArray
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Entry-Level IBM Storage FlashSystem:
For any organization looking for an all-flash array with features that are both enterprise conducive and budget friendly, the small to entry level offering prices from IBM begin at $18,400.
Mid-Range IBM Storage FlashSystem:
For businesses wanting to take advantage of an enterprise-quality flash array for critical workloads (such as SQL databases, SAP, ERP, CRM, etc.), list prices start at $104,600.
High-Performance IBM Storage FlashSystem:
Organizations seeking a storage array with the ability to run multiple instances of critical applications that are both performance intensive and capacity sensitive, can find IBM prices starting at $368,500.
Contact IBM for configuration and pricing details.
Like I already commented before. IBM Storage FlashSystems are more reliable, much easier to setup and operate and available at a much better price point as the competitor. So our experience is that the competition is going to "no bid" if IBM Storage FlashSystems are entering …
IBM Storage FlashSystem is a comprehensive, feature-rich solution designed to deliver a wide range of advanced capabilities such as SSO which is the key feature that we were looking for. Along with that the ease of use, easier upgrades, deduplication are few features that made …
The PURE solution has better performance because it exclusively uses flash disks, however it ends up providing a higher cost, which in our institution's use case was an important requirement;
We liked the licensing more with the Pure Array and its performance at the time was better than others.
Verified User
Engineer
Chose Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray was selected for its ease of use. Aside from the GUI not being the most intuitive when you first get introduced to it, it holds up to that reputation. I do, however, enjoy other vendors approach to no expansion shelves. In the end, that ends up giving …
The 3D array is a big diference, the compression and deduplication are better, also the Active Cluster is included in price. The price is very competitive.
Pure Storage was tested against 3 different arrays as we are a hospital system running EPIC we needed a system that could handle the large database load and still provide sub-millisecond latency. All systems came real close to the SLAs we were looking for, but in the end, Pure …
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
When you need speed, it's FAST, especially for MS SQL databases. If you are having bottlenecks, you can spend your time finding it in the code because it's not Pure Storage. Love the data reduction and duplication. We can store so much more on this unit than the base physical size. Love the data snapshots. When you need to complete copy your entire environment for testing etc. Nothing is easier, a few clicks and you are done. Extremely helpful for testing and training.
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.
Reporting is too general. Being a tech nerd, I want to be able to see the nitty-gritty details. I also need to be able to define canned sets of reports for problem application systems.
Pricing is a bit higher then some of their direct competitors .
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.
It has so far been a very fast and stable product. We have had wonderful support when we have needed it and the account manager and engineer attached to our organization have been very responsive with any questions and concerns we have had.
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.
From the day our first array was put in (2017) we have had very little issues using it the way we wanted to and none of the setup or processes we incorporate this into have ever been complex. All of the interfaces in the GUI are very intuitive and do not require any CLI experience to do what we need it to do.
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.
We have never had an outage with Purestorage. Yes we have had 2 drives go out but replacements were installed so fast there wasn't any issues. We have had a NVRAM module replaced but were noticed from Pure they were sending a replacement because they were predicting a failure so pure was proactive preventing any issues. Knowing Pure is monitoring our device 24x7 gives us peace of mind.
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.
The corporation has a very diverse data load and when we migrate from a hybrid storage to pure all-flash, significant gains have already been observed. Latency always remains below 1 ms regardless of the load and volumetry used. Application performance also depends heavily on whether or not the code is more permormatic and network access infrastructure. The product has been meeting expectations
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.
Pure Support is timely and communicative. They are always ready to assist and very skilled at what they do, no matter the time of day. Even at 12:10 a.m. on New Years Day when your array has a hiccup that causes some errors in your environment, they will be on the phone with you in an instant. If they are unable to determine the cause right away, because things appear to be normal, they will take your environment's configuration, lab it up in their support environment and then research until they figure out what caused the problem. Even if it takes 3 months. True story.
Excellent training and really you don't need that much. We received training at the Pure offices and also on site when the product was installed. Simple things like how to login to the GUI interface, how to setup users, how to create volume and mount it. How to make a snapshot, how to copy it and mount it. Really is pretty self explanatory on how to do things with the GUI interface. We were expecting complicated base on other vendor products, we got super simple.
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.
Great videos and documentation. There is a common theme with PureStorage, "Keep it elegantly simple". They have great support network and great support user groups. Documentation has been very helpful with providing auditors with methods and procedures on security and other ways the product works. Great documentation on setting PureStorage to be the most effective with VM's, SQL Server, and other products.
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.
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.
Pure Storage FlashArray came up as being the most cost-effective of the lot plus the extras added like call-home support were very welcome. The competitors' options were a lot more expensive and the call-home support added a lot more to the already high costs.
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.
Thanks to the deduplication that is built into the product we are seeing great reduction in total space required by consolidating similar data types on the same array.
Our users are very pleased with the performance.
The replication allowed us to move our workload from to another data center with minimal downtime.
