IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) vs. SANsymphony vs. Scality ARTESCA

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems)
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
IBM Storwize is a family of recognized all-flash and hybrid storage solutions designed to support the virtualization needs and application workloads of mid-sized enterprises.N/A
SANsymphony
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
DataCore SANsymphony software-defined storage aims to deliver flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency in a HCI platform. Powered by a block-level storage virtualization technology, SANsymphony is designed to provide flexibility to control how data is stored, protected, and accessed. The vendor states users can ensure business continuity with just 2 nodes, easily scaling out to 64 nodes, and achieve productivity for performance-demanding workloads by improving I/O processing and reducing…N/A
Scality ARTESCA
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Scality in San Francisco offers scalable file and object storage for media, healthcare, cloud service providers, and others.N/A
Pricing
IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems)SANsymphonyScality ARTESCA
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems)SANsymphonyScality ARTESCA
Free Trial
NoNoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsContact vendor for booking demo and pricing information.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems)SANsymphonyScality ARTESCA
Best Alternatives
IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems)SANsymphonyScality ARTESCA
Small Businesses
DiskStation
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Score 8.8 out of 10
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Score 9.9 out of 10
Amazon S3 Glacier
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Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Dell Unity XT Unified Storage
Dell Unity XT Unified Storage
Score 8.8 out of 10
StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind Virtual SAN
Score 9.9 out of 10
Azure Blob Storage
Azure Blob Storage
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Dell Unity XT Unified Storage
Dell Unity XT Unified Storage
Score 8.8 out of 10
IBM Storage Scale
IBM Storage Scale
Score 9.7 out of 10
Azure Blob Storage
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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User Ratings
IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems)SANsymphonyScality ARTESCA
Likelihood to Recommend
9.9
(20 ratings)
9.1
(7 ratings)
8.0
(3 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.9
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems)SANsymphonyScality ARTESCA
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM
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.
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DataCore Software
Now that you have virtualized your server's CPU and memory resources, you should look to do the same for your storage. Separation of hardware and software has many added benefits not only for CPUs and memory but for storage as well. Without this solution, we would not have been able to afford black-box type SANs at every location. This allowed us to virtualize over 90% of the server environment saving costs and power consumption/cooling and provides all the features costly black-box SANs, including true-HA (which most SAN vendors don't have). Migration from variant SAN storage and using mixed back-end storage solutions is as easier than ever before because the storage being virtualized.
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Scality
The team in charge of implementing Scality has to be full stack in order to guarantee the correct functioning of the entire system. However, you have to think very carefully about the balance between servers and disks, perhaps adopting smaller fully populated servers instead of large semi-populated servers, which would mean that over time our disk updates will not have a fully useful life.
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Pros
IBM
  • 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.
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DataCore Software
  • Fast pools should go to your most used data, and not static files.
  • Redundancy is a must for all aspects of our IT jobs. Who wants to explain when there's no data?
  • Works on Windows server 2012/2016 much better. Solid stability.
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Scality
  • I love the redundancy of the software.
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Cons
IBM
  • 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.
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DataCore Software
  • Our needs are very small when compared to what this product can do. We don't use all of what it is capable of doing. Honestly, I have no cons.
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Scality
  • The overall packaging is not very good. I think it could be more efficient for installation.
  • There are many components in storage servers. This can generally be complex to understand, you have to be patient.
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Likelihood to Renew
IBM
No answers on this topic
DataCore Software
I'm currently in the process of renewing my support.
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Scality
No answers on this topic
Usability
IBM
No answers on this topic
DataCore Software
No answers on this topic
Scality
As an organization, it took us a while to understand the shift from a traditional black box SAN to software-defined storage, but now we are much more certain of what this means. The time invested and the resources were not very high, thanks on the one hand to the technical support and on the other to the coherence and good development of the platform.
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Support Rating
IBM
No answers on this topic
DataCore Software
In the 3 years I have been running this, I have contacted support around 4 or 5 times and that was for minor questions with exception of one time when I was performing an update on the system. And in that one time, they were very timely in assisting me with correcting the problem. Top notch customer support!
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Scality
I have seen Scality in the office meeting with our VP and get the feeling that they are here to support us.
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Alternatives Considered
IBM
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.
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DataCore Software
DataCore is far easier to manage as well as deal with when it comes to hardware (as DataCore works with any hardware). It also seems way more affordable.
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Scality
Due to the nature of our business we require extensive encryption and availability for sensitive customer data. The erasure encoding that Scality provides gives us the assurance that documents are rest are never in a state of being downloaded or available to a casual data thief. This is something that can be found with other vendors but at a fraction of the same cost. Having this kind of performance, availability and redundancy at the cost that Scality provides has made a large difference to our organization.
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Return on Investment
IBM
  • 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.
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DataCore Software
  • More uptime - Typical SANs have redundant controllers, redundant power supply's and can make the drives redundant by leveraging RAID-0, 5, 6, and 10. The claim to be HA but they are not. That is because if I spay water all over them or catch the SAN on fire, the storage will go down. With DataCore's solution we have identical systems (maybe even at different datacenters connected with long-haul-fiber) including duplicate storage. So one side of the solution can totally be taken offline by water, fire, etc. and the other side will remain up providing true-HA storage. Because of this, we can upgrade the SANs during the day and still keep storage services running (zero-downtime).
  • Lower Costs - Ability to use 3rd party hardware which lowers the costs, not only for the initial investment but as storage capacity grows.
  • All the features one can want - High Availability, Thin Provisioning, Asynchronous and Synchronous mirroring/replication, snap-shotting, continues data protection, deduplication, storage reporting, trending with graphs, centralized console for easier management and many more.
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Scality
  • Keeping sensitive customer data secure is a must for our organization and Scality has great features to make this happen.
  • We replaced a single SAN with a Scality ring and found performance to improve as we store more and more customer data.
  • Being able to lose various portions of our Scality ring and allow it to continue to service customers while maintaining high performance has been key to our business.
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ScreenShots

IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) Screenshots

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