IBM FlashSystem vs Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance comparison

"The most valuable features are deduplication and compression."

"The installation is nice and easy."

"Installing FlashSystem is very easy. It takes less than half an hour, and I can handle it all myself."

"The valuable features for us are the extra add-ons, such as the FIM provisioning, the compression, the disaster recovery capabilities, and the storage pooling functions."

"At the FlashSystem level, customers are especially fond of multi-tier and distributed rate systems, particularly the dynamic rate six arrays."

"The compression and deduplication features are the most valuable."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is compression."

"We've found the solution to be very stable so far."

"I like its storage capacity, quick access to the data, speed, and overall storage management."

"The GUI needs some improvement. An additional function that could be helpful is reducing the time it takes to delete volumes, especially if they are compressed or deduplicated."

"One area for improvement is in the GUI, where host clusters are not properly dealt with. With Hypervisor host clusters, all hosts must see the same volumes in the same order. Using the concept of a “host-group” has been around (even with IBM) for many years, so why not with the V7000?"

"The solution's infrastructure technology level could be PCI Express 5 instead of PCI Express 4 for the next version."

"Events/log analysis tools."

"IBM FlashSystem 5300 needs improvement in its deduplication and compression features."

"The deduplication and compression ratio is not very good. It's not reaching a very high ratio."

"They can include Amazon file system S3 protocol in the upcoming releases. It is a cloud file system. IBM FlashSystem doesn't have this feature in the box for high-end or mid-range. We have got requests for this from customers because we need to use S3 for EDI application storage. At the beginning of every year, IBM releases firmware. When I find any bugs in the firmware during the year, I am unable to find any information from IBM regarding the bug. I need to open a ticket, and the IBM engineering team makes a patch only for me. This patch is not public. By creating a customized patch for a client, they don't really solve the issue for everyone. If multiple users have the same bug, IBM should upload the patch on the official website so that we can download it. IBM FlashSystem has a monitoring tool in the box, but it is not advanced. I need a more advanced tool for more advanced equations and monitoring. All top three storage vendors, that is, EMC, IBM, and Pure Storage, don't have a powerful monitoring tool. To monitor our box to show the statistics for I/Os and latency, I need to pay for extra software. The built-in monitoring storage is not mature enough to handle all requests and generate all reports that I need. They can include the functionality to stretch a cluster natively without using any additional boxes. In addition, there are some features that EMC has integrated with the box. These features are not available in IBM FlashSystem."

"The product needs to improve their scalability."

"The main thing Oracle can improve is the cost. It would be better if Oracle opened up the system to enable integration with other vendors. Whether it's the database, application server, or storage appliance, they should make it easy to integrate them. They need to open up more to ensure that it can work in any environment and IT ecosystem."

"This is an expensive product and if the price were reduced it would be better."

"The tool is cost-efficient."

"Regarding licensing make sure you add at least three years software maintenance from IBM at the beginning, because you will not be able to download firmware updates or any fixes/patches without this."

"There are no licensing fees, it is a one-time purchase of the IBM FlashSystem."

"The cost of the IBM FlashSystem is lower than the HPE solution."

"The solution requires a license and could be less expensive."

"The price depends of the technology that our customers need. The price can come at a lower cost but this may increase as storage is added."

"The total storage capacity vs price is still quite high for the IBM Flash Array."

"The price could be better. We have many competing products now like Huawei and Dell EMC, and these are slightly cheaper."