No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe vs Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

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
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
3rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
231
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
27th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (13th)
Pavilion HyperParallel Flas...
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
35th
Average Rating
9.4
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (18th)
 

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.
Yacine Bouakttaya - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technology Officer North Africa at Huawei
High-speed data processing has improved billing cycles but performance headroom still needs growth
In terms of improvement regarding IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe, I can compare with other competitors, especially regarding solution architecture. Data resiliency can be a concern because IBM can reach up to only four controllers, while others like Dell EMC can support up to eight controllers with better resiliency without service staff. Additionally, the SBC one benchmark is a storage performance console that stresses different storage solutions like Dell EMC and NetApp. It generates metrics of IOPS and latency, showing that the competition can have two million IOPS, significantly outperforming IBM's capabilities. As for the capability of scaling, we can see the limitations in reaching such high-performance levels.
it_user1534224 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager of Production Systems at a media company with 10,001+ employees
Good support, improves performance, scales well, and boosts team efficiency
For us, in terms of what is very important, is keeping pace with the evolution of the new standards. For example, as PCI Express 4.0 becomes more ubiquitous, moving into PCI Express 5 is important. Having an architecture that can truly utilize 200-gig or maybe 400-gig networking, or having storage densities in line with what we would expect in a Gen 4, Gen 5 PCI Express, are things that as they come available, I hope that the vendor is looking at that going into the future. We need this because we're really at the point where our workloads are about to explode outwards. I would like to see the management layer improved. HyperOS 3.0 is excellent, and this is important because one of the things that we looked at in the beginning, before HyperOS 3.0 had been released, was that this is an excellent technology and it's very versatile, but it would be great if we could run certain things on this box. It would be helpful if there were more ways to consume the APIs or if there were some ways to get into the hardware, get into the functionality of the system programmatically, or have flexibility where, for example, we just need to do quick namespaces, or something similar. We don't want to deploy an entire secondary storage layer on top of this. Rather, we just want to run something quick. Having a containerized system or having some sort of first-party support for basic storage functionality, or basic extensibility would be excellent for us. In many ways, these boxes are very malleable. It's a blank slate, but having a little more in terms of, if you want more directed use of it, having some way to really get at that, would be helpful.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We have tons of capacity on it."
"The scalability options are very nice because you can scale it much better and faster. The scalability was there in the previous environment also, but this is far better than what we had before. It basically helps the user in case they are looking for more storage. We can scale it much faster."
"In Pure Storage FlashArray, the dedupe and compression are excellent, and performance is good too."
"The most valuable feature is how it simplifies the management of the SAN."
"The most valuable feature is it never goes down. We can expand and create volumes."
"This was our first all-flash storage enclosure, so we saw huge boost in performance for all of our servers."
"The most valuable features are the replication of data and the continuous snapshot that we can take from the disc."
"The intuitive way of managing storage is what I appreciate about Pure Storage FlashArray, along with the clever use of flash modules, and absolutely the data reduction, because they are using that in a very clever way to do compression and deduplication."
"Its ease of use, performance, and hardware compression is very useful feature."
"What I like about the product are its high availability, maximum efficiency in performance, and its ability to handle a high level of I/O operations."
"It is a very stable solution."
"Good performance with a user-friendly UI."
"It's easy to use, has good stability, and many features."
"IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is one of the leading storage systems in the world...I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten."
"The high performance and high availability improved our overall processes."
"IBM FlashSystem is an excellent product."
"There's lots of flexibility in how we use the resources while also maintaining a small footprint."
"In summary, this is an excellent system."
"This unit is so dense and the performance is so high that the advice I would give is that if performance is a critical factor for your use case, then you really ought to look at this unit."
"The high performance is very valuable, as well as the enterprise reliability features."
"We have been able to consolidate storage into Pavilion. Pavilions are our only SANs because it is a bring your own disk solution. When new drives come out, we are able to take out half of the drives in the system, put in new drives, move our VMs over to the new drives, take the other drives out, and populate those with new drives. Then, we are suddenly twice as dense as we were before. NVMe flash is only going to get denser and cheaper so we can make use of that every couple of years by just throwing newer disks into it at a fraction of the cost of a new SAN."
"Pavilion provides us with DAS performance and SAN manageability at an affordable price, which has allowed us to continue a very rapid growth of our business."
 

Cons

"The price of the Pure Storage Flash Array is too high and there needs to be more contract clarity."
"When creating a support case, visibility should be extended to others involved in assisting."
"We would like to see more development on their Copy Automation Tool (CAT) for Oracle, as well as better integration for our customers running Oracle VM."
"As long as they always improve on IOPS speed, that's all we're really looking for. The faster the storage can be the more we can do speed of application and speed of use."
"In terms of the future, I have been excited by some of the copy data management stuff that they're talking about building into the environment. There are feature sets where I've done a lot of automation work. So, I am always looking forward to extensions of their API. They're also talking about a phone home centralized analytics database being used as a centralized management console with a list of new cloud features, but this doesn't seem finalized."
"It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays."
"The initial setup of the product is complex."
"They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet. This might be an area for additional focus as it would play into scalability, because the very nature of object storage is that it's infinitely scalable."
"In the FlashSystem 5200, there were only four ports of 32 fiber channels for the architecture. This has been resolved in the new generation."
"I'd like to be able to connect to tape drives behind the storage device to back up the tape if need be. We have all of our storage running in all-flash, and we make a copy on tape. Currently, when we want to hook up tape drives, we have to add some extra equipment, which is a little bit complex. We want IBM to add a feature where we could install a tape into the storage so that we can connect it through a single pane of glass. We'd like to have a feature in the IBM flash storage system so that we can connect backup tape drives through the IBM storage system and we can manage the backup tape from the storage system."
"In the future, the limitation is upgrading the same storage by adding a shelf to the desk. There is a limitation in the backend connection between the storage and extended shelf."
"IBM's support is not good. I experienced a big problem where I opened the console IBM Storage and would see that something was broken. I called the call centers, and I said, "I have a problem. My drive is not working." They want me to give them the serial number, I gave it to them and they told me "I cannot find your product. Your product is not here.""
"Deduplication and compression should be improved."
"I would like to have replication functionality built directly in the product, rather than having to use a separate device for this."
"Currently, when we want to hook up tape drives, we have to add some extra equipment, which is a little bit complex."
"The tool's architecture is complex. It also needs to add data utilization reports."
"In our current configuration, we can only run the line controllers in high availability, active-standby mode, whereas we would like to see active-active implemented."
"The rail system that Pavilion uses to mount up into a standard Dell or APC cabinet extends further back than normal rails, and they cover up the zero PDU slot. So, I don't like the rail system that comes with the device. That is my biggest complaint."
"I would like to see the management layer improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In the beginning, we saw that the price is not very good. When we made some compilations about the deduplication and the compression and what the equipment does, including the differentiation of upper management of the storage, the price was not so bad. However, in the beginning, the price was very difficult to justify."
"Pure is not a cheap product. It is not something that is inexpensive. But, the total cost of ownership tends to be lower than with other solutions, because you don't need a lot of expertise, you don't need a lot of training or very expensive engineers or very expensive consultants."
"The pricing is very attractive and it delivers performance for the money."
"The solution could be cheaper."
"The price of the Pure Storage Flash Array is too high and there needs to be more contact clarity. We went with the Evergreen plan and I don't have clarity on what am I supposed to pay each year or every three years. There was not much contract clarity."
"The price, in general, is around $100,000, however, I know it costs more."
"In comparison to the competitors, Pure is very price-competitive for the future functionality that it provides."
"While it comes with a higher price tag, this investment often translates to significant improvements in performance."
"Compared to other solutions, the cost of IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is reasonable, with a one-time payment of around $70,000. However, additional support is available for $25,000 for three years. The overall maintenance cost is steep."
"The solution's price is competitive."
"The product has an average cost."
"There are pricing options from the mid-rand to the high-range, of which the suitability depends upon the requirements."
"The tool's pricing is competitive."
"Price-wise, the solution offers excellent pricing to its users. In short, the prices offered by the solution are competitive compared to similar solutions."
"Compared to its competitors, IBM's offering is the most cost-effective."
"It's a lot less costly than cloud storage. People get surprised by the cost of cloud storage, which is extremely expensive and four or five times the cost of storage on-premises. People don't realize what they're spending on storage until they start getting bills from Amazon, Microsoft, and others. This is a good way to reduce your cloud storage expenses."
"The licensing fees are very reasonable."
"This is hardware. They have a singular array that you can populate with your own disk, or you can buy the disks through them. For controllers, you pay for the components inside of the SAN, but there is only one chassis that they work with."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays solutions are best for your needs.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Construction Company
10%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business71
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise159
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise6
No data available
 

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 have knowledge about the licensing part, which we obtained for around 10 years from the time of deployment, but I d...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
When it comes to Everpure FlashArray ports shown in the GUI, it would be better if, when one of the Pure array ports ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe?
The licensing cost for IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe can be seen as a bit expensive compared to competitors. You can eith...
What needs improvement with IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe?
In terms of improvement regarding IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe, I can compare with other competitors, especially regardi...
What is your primary use case for IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe?
There are many advantages that we have with IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe against, for example, IBM full flash systems an...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
IBM FlashSystem 9100, FlashSystem 9100
Pavilion HFA
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Information Not Available
Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), Statistics Netherlands (CBS)
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe vs. Pavilion HyperParallel Flash Array and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.