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 #8 with an average rating of 8.5, while Dell VMAX All Flash is ranked #24 with an average rating of 8.2. 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: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell VMAX All Flash

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 VMAX All Flash is 0.6%, up from 0.3% 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

"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."

"We are satisfied with the performance as it is significantly faster compared to traditional storage options."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."

"The solution is very straightforward to set up."

"It offers competitive performance, and the Evergreen storage model of Pure fits well with my organization."

"Everything, especially the VMs inside, is pretty fast."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

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

"PowerMax NVMe has made it a lot easier to understand how much we are able to provision. It has made it a lot faster to provision new things. 90% of my time for provisioning has been reduced. Also, it has made it very easy to understand and see everything behind it versus the older heritage, where Dell EMC was very convoluted and hard to get working. Things that used to take an hour, probably now take five to 10 minutes."

"The solution's snapshot capabilities and replication are very good features. Snapshots are allowing us to quickly build analytical models directly from production data. This gives us amazing insights into market trends and allows us to build more effective trading algorithms. Replication offers us unparalleled levels of resilience."

"It has reduced our footprint in different physical locations."

"Key features include performance, replication time, and dedup and compression."

"We like the compression, dedupe, and I/O on the PowerMax. They are better than on the XtremIO."

"The compression and deduplication are always on. We get more than 4:1 capacity savings using them. The efficiency benefits from compression and deduplication are through a specialized hardware module within the storage itself, and that means there is no overhead to the compression and dedupe."

"Enterprise Cloud Storage is the most valuable feature, along with the data services which come with it, plus the deduplication and compression."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe pros

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

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

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

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

"It works very well."

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

Cons

"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."

"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."

"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."

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

"It is on the expensive side."

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

"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"Dell can improve the Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance. Sometimes, when we need to replace a component, the SLA says four hours, but for some reason, the technician doesn't arrive until the next business day or even six to eight hours later before the case is placed. So, focusing on respecting the SLA is where Dell could improve."

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

"The solution should include more AI features to make it smarter."

"Dell PowerMax NVMe is costly compared to other solutions."

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

"The solution is quite expensive."

"I'd like to see the dedup and compression improve. Two to one is not very good. We should be getting something like three, four, or five to one."

"I think management is where PowerMax is weakest. We're still managing it like we managed EMC arrays in the early 2000s. There's a slicker, fancier GUI that does more things, but at the end of the day, you still have to dig into the command line and issue a lot of the same commands that we still were using almost 20 years ago."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe cons

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

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

"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."

"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

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."

"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."

"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."

"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."

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"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."

"We hope that with the combination of both NVMe and SCM the next PowerMax will be much cheaper that the one which we acquired."

"The pricing for this solution is good compared to other products in the market."

"From reclaiming data center space which is so tightly constrained these days, it will pay for itself in a short amount of time, which is fantastic. Anything we can do to get more out of our current physical data center space helps us a ton, and PowerMax has helped enable that."

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

"Negotiate hard and consider the commercial advantages/benefits to Dell EMC for onboarding your product."

"Since Dell PowerMax NVMe is an enterprise storage, its price is premium."

"It is high-end storage and it is a bit expensive, but it is doing what it is meant for: running business-critical applications or latency-sensitive applications..."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe pricing and cost advice

"It is not a cheap product."

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

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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

24%

Financial Services Firm

18%

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.

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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?

The pricing provided by EMC is reasonable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Dell EMC VMax?

The scalability of VMAX is somewhat limited, especially in terms of cache scalability. We've had to procure additiona...

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 Unity XT vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 5% of the time

Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 4% of the time

More Dell PowerMax NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Dell VMAX All Flash

Compared 27% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell VMAX All Flash

Compared 10% of the time

More Dell VMAX All Flash 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

Download Dell PowerMax NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

All-Flash Storage

March 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

March 2025

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

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

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