Dell PowerMax NVMe vs Dell VMAX All Flash comparison

Dell PowerMax NVMe and Dell VMAX All Flash are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.5, while Dell VMAX All Flash is ranked #30 with an average rating of 8.5. Dell PowerMax NVMe holds a 4.0% mindshare in AFS, compared to Dell VMAX All Flash’s 0.6% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Dell PowerMax NVMe users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Dell VMAX All Flash users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Dell PowerMax NVMe and Dell VMAX All Flash are two high-performance storage solutions. User reviews show that while Dell PowerMax NVMe excels in certain areas, Dell VMAX All Flash is often considered superior due to its comprehensive features.

Features: Users highlight that Dell PowerMax NVMe offers high-speed data processing, robustness, and strong encryption capabilities. Dell VMAX All Flash is praised for its extensive scalability, performance consistency, and advanced data protection features. The key difference is Dell VMAX All Flash's ability to scale more effectively, which many users find critical.

Room for Improvement: Dell PowerMax NVMe users note issues with complexity in management, need for better analytics, and limited scalability in certain environments. Dell VMAX All Flash users find room for improvement in the areas of initial setup complexity, software upgrades, and documentation clarity. While both products could benefit from enhancements, Dell VMAX All Flash's need for improved setup procedures contrasts with Dell PowerMax NVMe's requirement for better management tools.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell PowerMax NVMe receives positive feedback for a straightforward deployment process but has mixed reviews regarding ongoing support. Dell VMAX All Flash users indicate challenges during deployment but generally report better customer service experiences. The contrast lies in the initial setup ease of PowerMax NVMe versus the superior ongoing support for VMAX All Flash.

Pricing and ROI: Dell PowerMax NVMe is noted for its cost-effective setup but offers moderate ROI, according to user feedback. Dell VMAX All Flash is perceived as more expensive initially but provides higher ROI over time due to its reliable performance and longevity. The main distinction is the upfront affordability of PowerMax NVMe against the long-term value offered by VMAX All Flash.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell VMAX All Flash Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell VMAX All Flash

January 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 February 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.7%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerMax NVMe is 4.0%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell VMAX All Flash is 0.6%, up from 0.2% 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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BrijeshKumar

Technical Lead at L&T Technology Services

With an easy initial setup phase, the tool is useful for multi-site replication and DR

The configuration part of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required. If the product is up and running after, if it goes down, my company has observed that there are multiple failures that occur in the tool, so it needs to be reinstalled from scratch. The tool should have an automated feature or an automated option to handle the aforementioned scenario, which one can simply go and reset, after which the tool should be reinstalled with the same configuration.

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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

"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."

"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."

"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."

"The tool's valuable features are speed, security, data compression, and reliability. Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen. It helps us to save money and resources."

"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."

"The database workloads are pretty fast because I frequently move data from here to there."

"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."

"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"The product is very fast and reliable."

"NVMe technology improves input/output performance."

"It has dramatically cut down the footprint in our data center and reduced the amount of raw disk capacity that we needed to purchase."

"The performance is very good on our servers. It's superior. And the QoS capabilities for providing work congestion protection are also important because about 99 percent of our servers are production servers."

"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."

"We are using the solution's application and snapshot feature."

"The optimization of the cache memory of each engine and the use of persistent memory."

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

More Dell PowerMax NVMe pros

"We haven't experienced any outages or core-level issues in the last ten years, making us comfortable with the storage solution."

"The snapshot feature has been precious for our testing processes, application development, and managing testing environments due to its efficiency and ease of use."

"The most valuable features of VMAX are its performance and GUI interface."

"The ransomware protection feature is housed in a separate unit, specifically addressing the top twenty most critical threats."

"The product's initial setup phase was good."

"It works very well."

Cons

"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."

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

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

"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."

"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."

"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."

"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial."

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"The disadvantage of PowerMax is its cost. It is expensive, mainly due to pricing."

"I would like to see more development in the cloud environment. It would be good if it comes in the cloud kind of setup."

"I would like to see continued visibility and analytics in the platform."

"The main feature that I personally want to see is the possibility to upgrade to the next generation without changing all the components and just change the engine, relying on the compatibility matrices between two different generations. Meaning that we could just keep the enclosure and upgrade the engine, integrating the enclosure to the existing pool, then adding automation tools for orchestration."

"They can make the GUI better, especially for the ones that come out of the box. We did encounter a bit of difficulty in setting up the storage. We had to deploy Solutions Enabler on a Linux machine to be able to fully interact with the storage. They need to upgrade the web interface for the management of the storage that comes out of the box. The management interface for NFS is also a bit old and not very intuitive."

"Support of the product can be slow and an administrative challenge: planning, scheduling, and overseeing data center access for a Dell EMC rep. One improvement could be to enable a self-maintenance option. The requirements that we go through to get Dell EMC onsite to replace failed drives, power supplies, and other small redundant parts can be unnecessarily complex. If simplified, they could send us the parts, then we could replace them much faster, more easily, and truly within the SLA parameters."

"I would like the scalability to improve, as it requires additional footprints."

"I hear from people on my team that they would like improved reporting. While there are some decent tools for doing reporting, they would like to see a lot more built-in functionality. This way when they are logged into the interface everyday doing basic management tasks, they could also see some statistics on what is their storage pool usage and will be their projected usage with their current data growth. They want to be able to see more detailed stats on how they are using the system and have forecasting."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe cons

"The configuration part of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."

"Improvements are needed in both partition recovery and scalability."

"We encountered some challenges during large data migrations that could be addressed for smoother transitions."

"There is room for improvement in the centralized administration."

"The scalability of VMAX is somewhat limited, especially in terms of cache scalability."

"The scalability of VMAX is somewhat limited, especially in terms of cache scalability. We've had to procure additional engines to address this limitation."

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

"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."

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

"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."

"The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits. We don't regret purchasing it."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"Dell is expensive compared to other products and I would rate its pricing a four out of ten."

"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."

"From a general capital investment, it's one of the higher price points in the market. It depends on the size and software features that you would include in a system. So, the cost varies dramatically."

"The PowerMax appliance pricing was reasonable. Dell EMC quoted us a substantial discount."

"The price is really high."

"It scales enormously, but it's expensive to do so."

"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."

"The labor savings and support have been significant. If we're talking 100 hours of labor every three months, that is 100 hours of a database engineer costs. There are performance latency numbers as well as costs associated with recovering data that gets lost, and this system doesn't lose data. You can look at numbers that go around the cost of downtime, if data is not available. This system doesn't go down. Everyone's ROI is going to be unique, but the dependability and performance of the system combined with its ease of operation will definitely save businesses of all sizes money."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe pricing and cost advice

"The price falls within the mid-range, neither inexpensive nor high-priced."

"It is not a cheap product."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

25%

Financial Services Firm

19%

Government

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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.

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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.

See all answers

What do you like most about Dell EMC VMax?

The product's initial setup phase was good.

See all answers

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

It is not a cheap product. As the tool is expensive, I am looking at the market for some products with better prices ...

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What needs improvement with Dell EMC VMax?

There is room for improvement in the centralized administration. There could be better centralizing the administratio...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 33% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 15% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Nimble Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 5% 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 13% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 6% of the time

Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 5% of the time

More Dell PowerMax NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Dell VMAX All Flash

Compared 29% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell VMAX All Flash

Compared 9% of the time

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs Dell VMAX All Flash

Compared 7% of the time

More Dell VMAX All Flash Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

February 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe

February 2025

Download Dell PowerMax NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

All-Flash Storage

January 2025

Download Dell VMAX All Flash product report

Also Known As

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

Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerMax

No data available

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 VMAX All Flash is utilized in hyper-converged solutions like VxRail deployments, critical for Data Domain in backup tasks. It supports multi-site replication, disaster recovery, banking IT operations, and high-performance applications.

Dell VMAX All Flash plays a key role in data-intensive environments due to its robust capabilities in storage, data protection, and high throughput tasks. It is crucial in hyper-converged solutions and VxRail deployments, facilitating multi-site replication and disaster recovery. Its applications span across banking and other critical IT operations requiring high performance. The system's ability to support efficient data compression and provide ransomware protection addresses significant security concerns. Multi-site replication and redundancy safeguard data even during power outages or hardware failures, while the snapshot feature aids in testing, application development, and environment management.

What are the key features of Dell VMAX All Flash?

Compression: Efficient data compression capabilities.
Ransomware Protection: Tackles ransomware threats effectively.
Multi-site Replication and Redundancy: Ensures data safety during power outages or hardware issues.
Snapshots: Aids in testing, application development, and environment management.

What benefits should users look for in Dell VMAX All Flash reviews?

Data Protection: Enhanced data security with ransomware protection.
Performance: High throughput for demanding applications.
Reliability: Multi-site replication and redundancy for critical operations continuity.
Support: Adheres to IP strategies with excellent customer support.

Dell VMAX All Flash is critical in industries like banking, where it supports IT operations requiring high performance, and in environments demanding stringent data protection measures. Its role in multi-site replication and disaster recovery makes it invaluable for business continuity and critical data security across sectors.

Dell Technologies

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Rackspace, Open Line

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell VMAX All Flash

January 2025

Free Report: Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell VMAX All Flash

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