Dell PowerMax NVMe vs Dell SC Series comparison

Dell PowerMax NVMe and Dell SC Series are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.5, while Dell SC Series is ranked #18 with an average rating of 9.0. Dell PowerMax NVMe holds a 4.0% mindshare in AFS, compared to Dell SC Series’s 0.7% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Dell PowerMax NVMe users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Dell SC Series users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Dell SC Series and Dell PowerMax NVMe are often compared for enterprise storage solutions. Dell PowerMax NVMe demonstrates superior performance and scalability, while Dell SC Series is preferred by users for its affordability and support.

Features: Dell SC Series offers efficient storage management, data deduplication, and effective disaster recovery options. Dell PowerMax NVMe excels with high-speed data access, advanced encryption, and a robust multi-tenant architecture for performance-intensive environments.

Room for Improvement: Users of Dell SC Series suggest improving integration capabilities, enhancing user interface, and increasing support for newer technologies. Dell PowerMax NVMe users highlight the need for better cost efficiency, simpler management tools, and improved compatibility with third-party software.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell SC Series users appreciate its straightforward deployment and responsive customer service. Dell PowerMax NVMe, though requiring more complex initial setup, is backed by highly specialized support teams for ongoing maintenance.

Pricing and ROI: Dell SC Series is praised for its lower setup costs and satisfactory ROI. Conversely, Dell PowerMax NVMe offers substantial long-term ROI despite higher initial investment, justified by its advanced features and performance.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell SC Series Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell SC Series

March 2025

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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

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerMax NVMe is 4.0%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell SC Series is 0.7%, down from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill

Sales Manager at Multicomputos PR

Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature

One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.

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Haseeb Khalid Sheikh

Senior Manager Enterprise Solutions at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

End-to-end NVMe capabilities helps improve availability, performance, and capacity

The solution's most valuable feature is the data reduction ratio. You can store a 5:1 ratio of your data in Dell PowerMax NVMe. For example, if you have 200 terabytes of usable capacity, you can save up to five times of data on that capacity. That means you can save one petabyte of data on just 200 terabytes of usable capacity. The solution's end-to-end NVMe capabilities have improved our operations. Everything is fast, and you don't have to map your storage to old hybrid storage technologies. Our organization has experienced positive change, and the solution has improved our uptime, availability, performance, and capacity.

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Steven McClendon

Data Center Server & Storage Administrator at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Superior platform with excellent snapshots and cost-saving auto-tiering

I'm a big fan of the SC Series platform. Its feature set is superior to some of the other platforms. The snapshots on SC are excellent, allowing for multiple snapshot schedules for any one system. The auto-tiering functionality intelligently moves new data to the highest performance tier and then progresses it down to less expensive tiers over time, providing cost savings for customers.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."

"It has good, reliable, fast storage."

"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."

"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."

"On a scale of one to ten, I rate Pure FlashArray as ten."

"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"We use ESRS for our call-home, and a lot of times, Dell EMC will respond to the issue before we even know it."

"We're consolidating two to three arrays down to one which means that our data center footprint has decreased by like 90%. So we're saving 90% of our space, and it also is much better on power and everything else in our data center. And on top of that, the performance is much, much better than our older arrays."

"The tool is a fast-performing asset. It can perform millions of transactions within a second. I like the tool's architecture as well."

"This platform is reliable in supporting our data availability. We now have a higher performing platform and have been able to consolidate our workloads into one single platform."

"The SRDF site-to-site replication for the volumes is the most important feature for us. That enables us to do site recovery and replication for our VMware infrastructure."

"We can consistently replicate mainframe and open system and have a single recovery point."

"The support team was very cooperative and responsive."

"The smaller footprint of the device has been really nice. We have gone from eight bays to one bay. Having one floor tile in our data center has been pretty awesome. A lot less power and HVAC cooling is being consumed."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe pros

"There's some new stuff coming with 7.3, which just got released, where they're spreading the sparing across the whole array, rather than having a dedicated spare disk, and have it sit there and do nothing until one of them dies, and then it kicks in - and having to rebuild all of that. Now, they'll do the sparing across all the disks and they say that is going to add not only space but performance to the array, with 7.3."

"Its leading feature is the price-performance ratio, which is very good."

"One of the most valuable features is the capability to switch between all-flash to hybrid, which have have actually done for one of our arrays. We started with the hybrid, with the limited if I'm not mistaken, and then over a period of time, we swapped all the hybrids with the SSDs. This was one of the big features because it gave us the capability to not stick with just one kind of media. Secondly, since it has sorted clustering, we were able to bring in the newer boxes and have it all clustered together. These were the two main features that we really looked into, which benefited our use case from an expansion/growth perspective. Another valuable feature is the ease of management."

"It is suitable for small or medium businesses."

"The setup is straightforward."

"Dell SC Series offers a lot of performance, being one of the best performing storages Dell ever made."

"We see very low latency with very high IOPS for mixed workloads."

"The solution has a wide variety of valuable features. The data progression works well. We use the snapshot functionality quite a bit and really like it."

More Dell SC Series pros

Cons

"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."

"There are some challenges with data encryption and reduction."

"It feels more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses rather than enterprises."

"Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services."

"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."

"Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better."

"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."

"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"Dell needs to offer more midrange storage options with enterprise-class features similar to the PowerMAX."

"The initial setup was complex, and we had experienced people working on it."

"The initial setup could be easier."

"Dell PowerMax needs more connectivity options for projects that require separate web access."

"They should work with the storage engineers to better tweak the management tools to give them improved visibility into their data."

"There is room for improvement in the replication. It's an important requirement for us."

"Firmware updates are a bit painful because you have to involve their support, as opposed to having the ability to do it yourself."

"The NVMe integration could be improved."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe cons

"From a performance point of view, it's getting a bit old."

"This solution could be improved if overall performance was improved and operated with a higher speed and supported a higher volume of RAM."

"We can definitely see a need for it being a multi-controller system for customers who want to scale beyond the current capability. That's always a downside. A lot of the new systems are scaling vertically, they scale out, and the Compellent, of course, is controllers with shelves under it, so you don't scale out with it, unless you add another one. But if you do, they don't talk to each other, like some of the other solutions that we sell."

"Dell SC Series is no longer available, while Dell PowerStore, which supports NVMe over TCP, is different and not very affordable."

"What I understand is that this is a 13 year old architecture, so it has lived its life and they're phasing it out. Honestly, we were initially struggling with the integration with VMware (but it was fixed with the VMware 6.5) and, then, it was around a 10GB network. At that time, it had the longevity to go to 100GB as well. It got us thinking about, when we go into the containerized architecture, what do we need to do to fix the infrastructure?"

"The interface could be improved. It should have an application point of view."

"While the scalability is good, there are certain limitations."

"While the price is competitive, in the next release it would be better if they could reduce the fees."

More Dell SC Series cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."

"The tool's pricing is cheap; I rate it a six to seven out of ten. Most of our sales are not subscription-based. We sell the hardware, and customers keep using it. They only renew the service part annually. The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there."

"Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet."

"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."

"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."

"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."

"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."

"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"The cost has room for improvement."

"The cost is expensive. While VMAX now has good pricing, PowerMax is a little expensive."

"I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe a five out of ten for pricing."

"I think it is an expensive tool, but it is the best product. I think it is expensive and the cost one must pay for the best solution."

"Its price is competitive, but they need to have a different price for West Africa. They can do better with the price point to allow us to scale even more. We wanted to migrate our entire storage infrastructure to PowerMax, which would require us to buy more capacity, and from the price point, it didn't attract us."

"Our costs are on a yearly basis."

"Dell PowerMax NVMe's price is expensive."

"The cost of the solution is quite noticeable, but it provides a good fit regarding the price of the hardware and all of the required licenses."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe pricing and cost advice

"It is one of the most cost effective systems for us. We have been able to run it longer than most, getting the most benefit and money out of it."

"The pricing is reasonable, but it is expensive."

"This solution could be better priced in comparison with other vendors."

"Compared to other solutions out there, it's affordable."

"It's a very affordable solution."

"We have found the solution to be affordable."

"The scalability seems a bit more expensive than even buying a brand new one so far. That has been kind of a drawback."

"Pricing depends on varying life cycles."

More Dell SC Series pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

22%

University

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...

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What's the difference between DELL EMC Powerstore and Powermax NVMe?

Dell PowerStore is an all-solid-state midrange storage system. It has many internal elements taken from other Dell of...

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What do you like most about Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe?

First, it's an enterprise storage solution. This is very important for us. Another important feature is replication.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe?

The price is starting from $500,000. It's expensive.

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What do you like most about Dell SC Series?

I find this version to be more budget-friendly compared to products from other vendors. This aspect greatly benefits ...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell SC Series?

Cost considerations are crucial when choosing between solutions like Dell and NetApp. Sometimes Dell offers better pe...

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What needs improvement with Dell SC Series?

In the future, I want any box that comes on-premises to have the provision to integrate with cloud storage. If I want...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 32% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 16% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 12% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 6% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 27% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 10% of the time

Dell VMAX All Flash vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 8% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 5% of the time

More Dell PowerMax NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Dell SC Series

Compared 70% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Dell SC Series

Compared 10% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell SC Series

Compared 10% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell SC Series

Compared 10% of the time

More Dell SC Series Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

March 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe

March 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Dell SC Series

March 2025

Download Dell SC Series product report

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerMax

SC Series Storage, Compellent

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

Pure Storage

Dell PowerMax is the industry’s most secure mission-critical storage platform. With NVMe Dynamic Fabric technology, PowerMax breaks from traditional storage limitations, enabling seamless integration with cloud-native and legacy applications. Designed with a powerful scale-up and scale-out architecture, PowerMax supports mission-critical applications at scale with zero downtime and ultra-low latency. The latest PowerMaxOS 10 release harnesses AI-driven efficiencies for trusted performance, capacity, and security. By choosing PowerMax, you can trust in a secure, intelligent, and always modern storage solution that unlocks the full potential of your data to drive business success.

Dell Technologies

Dell EMC SC Series arrays provide a unified platform for the ultimate in performance, adaptability and machine-driven efficiency. SC Series software delivers modern features that help you meet aggressive workload demands using the fewest drives necessary. With an open, future-ready design, SC Series storage integrates seamlessly with applications and infrastructure, enabling you to scale on a single platform and add capabilities without forklift upgrades.

Dell Technologies

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Rackspace, Open Line

TGen, Frost Science, Gerrie Electric

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell SC Series

March 2025

Free Report: Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell SC Series

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell SC Series and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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