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Dell ObjectScale vs IBM Public Cloud comparison

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Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (4th)
Dell ObjectScale
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (7th)
IBM Public Cloud
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (19th), IoT Platforms (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

File and Object Storage Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Dell ObjectScale5.4%
MinIO15.2%
Red Hat Ceph Storage14.5%
Other64.9%
File and Object Storage
PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Public Cloud3.3%
Microsoft Azure14.5%
Amazon AWS13.6%
Other68.6%
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
RM
Solution arhitect at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees
Extends data management capabilities while offering robust options for further enhancement
Dell ECS provides features such as active-active and geo-replication, which offers a good approach for disaster recovery. As a Dell platinum partner, we appreciate that most Dell portfolio products are integrated together. For example, Dell ECS can be integrated with other file share systems or PowerScale without requiring third-party tools. The integration between Dell products is particularly noteworthy because Dell provides the full cycle of storage solutions, from NAS, SAN, hybrid, to object storage. All these solutions are fully integrated together. The pricing is competitive when compared to other vendors. While comparing with HP's offerings, Dell ECS as object storage is one of the best. Pure Storage might offer better pricing, but you won't find the same level of integration across products if you source the full cycle from one vendor. The complete integration of Dell solutions is one of the main features I appreciate, and I often advise my customers to consider this ecosystem. This integration helps with having a single point of contact and support.
Premnath Jaganathan - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at Uop Ipl
Affordability and security improve our cloud experience while learning new systems
I'm not working with any AI features in IBM Public Cloud, but they are in the process of building it.I am very satisfied with the security that IBM Public Cloud provides. I would rate IBM Public Cloud eight out of ten, where one is worst and ten is the best.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Pure Storage is extremely reliable — it's never failed."
"I use all the features of this solution and I find them to be easy to use and functional, such as the compression and capacity to expand."
"The most valuable feature is replication."
"The stability is perfect. The reliability is 100% and the latency is always lower than 1 millisecond."
"The solution is very reliable."
"One of the lesser sung advantages was when we started running our interface engine on Pure Storage. The ability to process messages and pass them through in our organization skyrocketed purely because of a disk that I owned which we were getting out of Pure Storage."
"The stability of Pure Storage is very very good."
"It is all-flash. This makes it a lot faster than the rest of what we have, as it is able to drive high I/O loads, which is big for us."
"I would rate scalability ten out of ten since you buy what you want."
"The performance is good."
"It's my understanding that the initial setup is straightforward."
"Dell's technical support team is good."
"I like that the solution is easy to scale and that's its stable."
"What I like best about Dell ECS is its stability. I also like that you can use it for large-scale data purposes. The solution works fine for me, and I haven't encountered any issues with it."
"The tool is easy to use."
"The impact of Dell ECS on my organization has been positive, improving user experience, security, and reliability."
"It is easy to deploy what you need for the initial setup"
"I've found the stability to be excellent. The performance is good."
"An advantage of IBM Public Cloud is the bare metal server. We can take the bare metal server. It's not shared with anyone. We can deploy our applications without sharing them with anyone. That is an advantage of IBM Public Cloud."
"It provides robust analytics and management tools to give customers complete visibility into their environment and infrastructure."
"This is a predictable and dependable service."
"The beauty of cloud service providers, especially public cloud service providers, is that they are scalable every time when you need them because their payment model is pay-as-you-go."
"For non-complex applications, the IBM Cloud works fine and the price is much lower than the competitors."
"The availability is second to none. Customer support is very good."
 

Cons

"I would like FlashArray to add reports that help us forecast our predicted resource needs based on current usage."
"The GUI could improve, it could be more intuitive. There is hidden functionality."
"Improved reporting on the deduplication and compression functionality would be beneficial."
"We understand that they're thinking about it, but one of the things that would be nice is if they added some basic file-level capabilities to the platform. The idea is that they would run a basic NFS or CIF share from the controllers. FlashBlade is the powerhouse for File and Object storage, but if you don't need all that power, a lightweight file function would make FlashArrays more versatile."
"Its price needs improvement. Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution."
"We haven't seen ROI yet."
"It was a little costly. The price was ultimately higher than both of the other solutions that we evaluated. I'd say that's the only downside."
"We've had it in place for about a year and a half and have had zero complaints, other than that box-to-box replication is not encrypted."
"You should be able to calculate so that when it's full it's 100% full, not just 90%."
"While there can be occasional issues with routing to the wrong region that lead to slight delays, it's typically business as usual."
"Dell ECS could improve the price of the solution. It is expensive."
"Its security can be improved."
"From an improvement perspective, Dell ECS should aim to offer a better pricing plan to its users."
"Dell ECS is not fully compatible with S3, as it supports around ninety percent of S3 APIs, which can be improved. Additionally, sometimes there is an issue with memory where it hangs, and they can improve garbage collection, which takes up a lot of space during cleanup."
"There are some limitations with integration with certain cloud providers, particularly with Google Cloud Platform in Saudi Arabia."
"The initial setup is not so easy."
"An area for improvement in IBM Public Cloud is getting up-to-date information on how to set up everything. It's hard to find new documentation."
"They could improve on customizing reporting capabilities."
"There is not a lot of support for this solution, which is something that needs to be improved."
"Maybe performance enhancers and reports could be better improved. If they do so, it would be better. Of all the drawbacks I saw, this would be the biggest enhancement."
"The solution needs to be more autonomous. It should let the DL go to allow for more jobs on the cloud. It could have a better interface as well."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly deployment process in the next release of this solution."
"The initial setup and the pricing are areas that need improvement."
"Recently, we just faced some issues with the operating system due to the end of life of CentOS 6...So, then the client wanted to try it out under AWS instead of IBM. In short, it has some complexities."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We would like them to improve the pricing, so we could put them to use some more product, like backup or long-term storage. In the future, if the price goes down, then we could buy different types of products."
"We consume it as a service, and that's actually something we really like, or at least I really like from the technical perspective. That's because it means there is no hassle when we need to upgrade arrays to add capacity. We just interact directly with technical counterparts, and we say, "Hey, we're filling up," and they say, "All right, here's another data pack." They ship it in, and we install it. So, the as-a-service model has worked very well. Given the outstanding data reduction rates, it has improved our profitability because we're selling allocated volumes as part of the cloud service or recovering those costs from our tenants. It is very efficient, but that has offset the premium price. It started out that way, but over time, as we've added capacity, the price per gig has gone down a lot because we have a lot of it."
"The solution is expensive."
"It is cheaper than NetApp."
"The pricing is an issue. However, being all-flash, it will always be sort of expensive."
"There should be quite a bit of reduction of TCO with just licensing (and stuff) because we run the VM environment off it."
"We have seen a reduction in TCO."
"I think that the pricing is less expensive compared to other standard products in the market today. Even the support contract and maintenance services cost less when compared to market-leading products like EMC."
"The price of Dell ECS should be reduced."
"It's a lease-based model, so it's capacity-based. We already negotiated the price a lot, but we're still doing that with Dell because somehow the product was not installed successfully, so there was a lot of struggle in the distributor territory between Dell and the environment itself. I would give the solution a 6 out of 10 for the pricing. There's a little room for improvement."
"If I remember correctly, Dell ECS is an appliance, so if you buy Dell ECS, you also have to buy the hardware, while IBM is standalone software, so you can buy IBM as software only without needing to buy the hardware. On a scale of one to five, I'm rating the pricing for Dell ECS a four."
"It is an expensive solution. There is a need to make yearly payments towards the licensing costs attached to the product."
"Dell ECS is a cost-effective solution."
"We are not paying for the license at this stage."
"Dell EMC ECS is too expensive."
"The charges for this solution are made in blocks of models, which are purchased depending on what features an organization requires."
"Pricing is not as fair as Amazon or Azure."
"IBM Public Cloud is pretty cheap. They have an ongoing free tier that basically won't expire, so as long as your solution is small enough, you can have a test set that you can use for demos, which will cost you almost nothing."
"The licensing fees are straightforward and predictable."
"The price of IBM Cloud is very cheap compared to competitors AWS and Azure."
"It pretty much has a standard price. There is no hidden price with IBM Public Cloud."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a nine out of ten."
"IBM has a lesser price compared to other cloud service providers like Azure and AWS."
"We are using the trial version of this solution, so we have not paid anything."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
8%
University
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Educational Organization
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business63
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise143
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I don't really know much about the pricing for Pure Storage FlashArray in terms of the absolute cost. Regarding Everg...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
Despite liking Pure Storage FlashArray, there is room for improvement in automation. Pure Storage FlashArray needs to...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC ECS?
The pricing is moderate and at par with the market. As a service provider, we receive good margins, indicating a favo...
What needs improvement with Dell EMC ECS?
I cannot think of anything as an area for improvement with Dell ECS. I do not see any pricing or usability concerns.
Which is preferable - IBM Public Cloud or Microsoft Azure?
IBM Public Cloud is IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service. It aims to provide organizations with a secure cloud environment to ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Public Cloud?
The prices are relatively lower compared to others. It is a good option for medium-sized businesses. However, busines...
What needs improvement with IBM Public Cloud?
The connectivity and speed of IBM Public Cloud are much lower compared to the competition.
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
EMC ECS, Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS)
IBM Bluemix
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Atos
Uvionics Tech, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Alpha Modus, Inventive, Web Business Consulting, FindBrok, SilverHook Powerboats, United Way of Allegheny County
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Dell Technologies, Nutanix and others in File and Object Storage. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.