Dell PowerMax NVMe vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ comparison

Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Dell Technologies is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.5, while Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.4. Dell Technologies holds a 4.1% mindshare in AFS, compared to Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s 3.0% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

HPE 3PAR StoreServ and Dell PowerMax NVMe are both leading enterprise storage solutions. Dell PowerMax NVMe appears to be a superior product due to its advanced features and is considered worth the price.

Features: HPE 3PAR StoreServ is praised for its efficient storage, robust management capabilities, and seamless scalability. Dell PowerMax NVMe stands out with its industry-leading performance, comprehensive data security features, and integration capabilities. Dell PowerMax NVMe's advanced features give it an edge over HPE 3PAR StoreServ.

Room for Improvement: HPE 3PAR StoreServ users report a need for improvement in the integration process with other systems and better analytics tools. Dell PowerMax NVMe users note desired enhancements in product documentation and more intuitive management tools. Both products have specific areas that require attention, but the emphasis differs based on user priorities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: HPE 3PAR StoreServ is relatively straightforward to deploy with positive feedback on initial setup, though customer service could be more responsive. Dell PowerMax NVMe’s deployment is more complex but is well-supported by excellent customer service. Dell PowerMax NVMe users generally find the complexity manageable due to the higher level of support provided.

Pricing and ROI: HPE 3PAR StoreServ has a lower initial setup cost and users report a quicker ROI. Dell PowerMax NVMe, while more expensive initially, is viewed as offering substantial value over time due to its superior features and performance. Users deem the higher cost of Dell PowerMax NVMe justified by its long-term benefits.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. HPE 3PAR StoreServ Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. HPE 3PAR StoreServ

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 March 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 4.1%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE 3PAR StoreServ is 3.0%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage

Q&A Highlights

reviewer931557

Storage Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

May 05, 2020

Any advice re Dell PowerMax? We are looking at Unity and PowerMax, and also HPE.

The PowerMax NVMe is the high-end storage fromDellEMC it can provide up to 10M IOPS, however, if you need less, you can go with the new Unity XT which is going to have NVMe as well. The new Unity XT is going to be ready for order in June 2019.

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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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Muhammad Saqib

System Engineer at Hybrid Tech

Uninterrupted upgrades accelerate performance with good support

I would rate the solution eight out of ten. It should be noted that in Pakistan, some parts are not readily available, and we need to import them from Singapore or other countries. We encountered an issue with a customer where the midplane failed and was not available. We had to wait for several days for a replacement, even in a 24/7 support case. Additionally, we faced motherboard failures in the customer's environment, encountering two motherboard failures simultaneously. We obtained one motherboard immediately, yet had to wait ten days for another. These issues should have been resolved promptly given the 24/7 support level.

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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 solution uses newer technology for deduplication and compression."

"The solution is very straightforward to set up."

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

"It has good, reliable, fast storage."

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

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

"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"The high availability that other systems don't have. In other systems, there is an owner in the storage processes. But for PowerMAX, there is no owner. All the process storage is passed to all nodes without ownership. So, there is no response feature in the storage in PowerMax. In the other systems, there is a response, which is a very nice feature. No systems have such a feature."

"The performance is very good. Our predominant workloads are all less than 5 milliseconds and it's most common to have a sub-1-millisecond response time for our applications. In terms of efficiency, we've turned on compression and we're able to get as high as two-to-one compression on our workloads, on average."

"The solution's most valuable feature is the data reduction ratio."

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

"It was easy for teams to pick up the technology with very limited exposure and training, then implement and support it."

"The support team was very cooperative and responsive."

"It is a true, stable product."

"There is no management overhead involved in optimizing performance. It does it so well on its own. We don't have to manage much at all. It really is like a set it and forget it solution. My storage engineers love the system. It is a lot less work than our previous systems, which weren't bad by any means. There is not nearly as much management as before. So, we are saving dozens of hours per month for our storage team, and that is a real cost in our business."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe pros

"This solution has allowed for massive performance acceleration of all workloads and massively increased availability (with peer persistence/transparent failover feature)."

"We deployed 3PAR in the national and international markets. It's not bad, the solution."

"We went to an Active-Active data center, set it up to where both data centers are separate, but they act as one. We can have workloads at either side at any given time, and it is all based on the Peer Persistence architecture."

"I am a system integrator, so we sell a lot of 3PAR storage to our customers. Our business has increased compared to previous days."

"When we bought it, the big sell for us was what they called "wide striping", how they striped the data and could get performance on a cheaper disk. Nowadays, the newer models that are out, which we are going to in the next couple of years, the most valuable feature is mainly being able to achieve such high IOPS in such a small chassis."

"Scalability, because our customer is fast growing and our solution should be able to start very small and grow very quickly."

"It has helped with more than just serving data, but also with recovery."

"The most valuable feature is the uptime. It doesn't go down. You can do firmware updates on it, no issues."

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ pros

Cons

"Managing data isn't difficult for me. The performance is usually perfect, but we sometimes have capacity problems."

"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."

"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."

"Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution."

"Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive."

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

"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."

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"I would like to see more security features and improvements in the platform's ease of management."

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

"We had challenges again with the initial setup. I don't know if there was a gap during the requirement-collection phase, but the box was partially delivered to us with missing parts and it delayed the implementation by about 60 days. It was not as smooth as I would have hoped."

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

"Since the merging of EMC and Dell into Dell Technologies, there has been a hurdle that they've had to overcome, and they're not over it yet. It takes two to three times longer for things to get fixed than it did when they were separate companies. That is something that has to be fixed."

"The main challenge with the product was to have control over the simultaneous failures of controllers. For recovery, manual intervention is required."

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

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

More Dell PowerMax NVMe cons

"HPE 3PAR StoreServ's pricing could be cheaper."

"Sadly, the support from HPE has not been all that great. It is tough to get a tech out or get a response from some of the techs that we have."

"We would like to see a bigger integration with the Nimble Storage solution, so we can take our smaller regional companies and be able to send them into our bigger data centers and have everything work seamlessly."

"The tool needs improvement in the utilization report at the granular level."

"The price is a little bit high."

"The solution must be vertically and horizontally expandable."

"The GUI interface could be improved. I have been having trouble with one issue in particular. If you look at the DC and DR, if there is a communication break and the link went down—so the data is not replicating from DC to DR—there is no way to find out how much data is ready for transmission. Only the size of the data that needs to be transferred after the link comes up. If the firewall link is down, there is no way of seeing how much data is waiting to be transferred. This is a weak point of 3PAR."

"The management console could use some work. All the functionality is there, of course, but it can be hard to find some features or do certain tasks."

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ 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 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."

"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."

"They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."

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

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

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"The cost has room for improvement."

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

"One area for improvement, one that everybody always comes to, is price... it's still quite expensive to purchase these big arrays... For us, the pricing doesn't make Dell EMC uncompetitive."

"The pricing is comparable to other vendors."

"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."

"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."

"Our costs for the product are three million."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe pricing and cost advice

"As a school, we always have low budgets. We are a nonprofit organization. We do not have too much budget, so we care about prices, discounts, and especially about the product quality. The last 16 years, we have been an HPE customer. We are very much happy with HPE products."

"For the entire six node cluster and the two 7200 units plus the Brocade Fibre switches, we financed it through HPE Financial. It was $850,000. We leased that and paid it off in October of 2018."

"The solution has two parts: software and hardware, and you need to buy licenses for some features."

"Making the decisions to buy it can be complex."

"3PAR was quite a bit less money than EMC, and that was one of the deciding factors."

"We do not have any licensing fees."

"From a comparison of bang-for-the-buck, what you get for the money, I'd have to say they are one of the market leaders. Are there solutions that do it faster? Sure, but you're going to pay for it. 3PAR isn't the cheapest, it isn't the most expensive, but in my opinion, it's the best."

"We have seen ROI. We are able to see more patients now, bringing more money into the practice."

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user182013

Federal Civ/Intel Engineering Lead at Rubrik

May 1, 2015

Measuring Up: EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR

Leading up to EMC World 2015, IT Central Station asked how I would compare EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR. Until recently, the flash storage conversation in my organization and many others has centered on XtremIO and Pure Storage, the leaders of the all-flash array (AFA) space. To that end, I've written a…

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Answers from the Community

reviewer931557

Storage Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

May 5, 2020

Any advice re Dell PowerMax? We are looking at Unity and PowerMax, and also HPE.

2 out of 7 answers

it_user991506

Engineer / Architect at CenturyLink

May 22, 2019

I have used all, EMC, and HPE 3Par, VNX, Unity, etc. All are OK. But for long term Flash Storage, I would take a look at Hitachi F Series. Best reliability hands down and they provide non-disruptive migrations, no server downtime, no scheduling with users, etc. NDM makes Hitachi a no brainer.

Read full answer

Muhammad Khaled

Senior Presales Engineer with 11-50 employees

May 23, 2019

Read full answer

See all 7 answers

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

Educational Organization

86%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

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.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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's the difference between HPE 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Primera?

HPE Primera has many great features but one of the best is that it is very easy to deploy. From an overall perspectiv...

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What do you like most about HPE 3PAR StoreServ?

The compression features are good.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE 3PAR StoreServ?

It is expensive, however, when we compare it to the features provided by HPE, the price-to-performance ratio is very ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 34% 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 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 13% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

Dell VMAX All Flash vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 7% of the time

NetApp ASA vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 2% of the time

More Dell PowerMax NVMe Competitors

HPE Alletra Storage vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 22% of the time

HPE Primera vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 21% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 6% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 5% of the time

HPE MSA vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 5% of the time

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ 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

March 2025

Download Dell PowerMax NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE 3PAR StoreServ

February 2025

Download HPE 3PAR StoreServ product report

Also Known As

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

Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerMax

HPE 3PAR Flash Storage, InServ, Storeserv, 3PAR Flash Storage, HP Enterprise Storage, 3PAR Flash Array, HP 3PAR Flash Storage

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

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is an AI-driven storage solution that prevents issues before they occur by learning and adjusting in real time. The solution offers a tier-1 all-flash foundation for mission-critical workloads. HPE 3PAR StoreServ was designed with more than 3M IOPS and consistent sub-ms latency. It aims to transform midrange and enterprise deployments with solutions that scale from a few TBs to more than 20PBs. In addition, the solution is built to modernize data centers and is made to handle unpredictable workloads effortlessly. By implementing HPE 3PAR StoreServ, you gain automated and rapid provisioning, hardware-accelerated deduplication and compression, and a multi-tenant design.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ Features

HPE 3PAR StoreServ has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Flexibility: With HPE 3PAR StoreServ, you can easily deploy highly configurable, scale-out storage for multi-tenant workloads.

Always-on availability for your data: HPE 3PAR StoreServ includes an always-on resilient storage infrastructure for your hypervisors and applications. In addition, with Peer Persistence, your virtual machines (VMs), hosts, and data can move freely across data centers rather than being constrained by their physical boundaries.

Fast, scalable performance: HPE 3PAR StoreServ enables you to accelerate consistent mixed-workload performance and also provides necessary QoS levels that are optimized for your highest priority applications.

Performance insights: HPE 3PAR StoreServ helps you gain performance insights in real time, and anticipate as well as prevent issues across the infrastructure stack by utilizing cross-stack analytics.

Flash optimized data protection: With tier-1 data services, multi-tenant security, and copy data management, you can avoid downtime.

Seamless data mobility: HPE 3PAR StoreServ makes it possible for you to not only experience converged data protection, but also experience seamless data mobility services, at flash speed, from the edge to the cloud.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing HPE 3PAR StoreServ. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Easy to manage. The web interface to manage the units is a great asset and one that makes managing storage easy.

User-friendly GUI

Exceptionally fast and well-managed replication
Low latency

Hybrid storage gives you the ability to assign different roles to different types of storage arrays inside one enclosure

Both file-level and block-level replication

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the HPE 3PAR StoreServ solution.

A SAN Consultant at a tech services company says, “One of the features that I like the most is the data replication element. The reason I like it is due to the fact that it's pretty clean on replicating data over to a second site. The product stands on its own in heavy enterprise environments. It's easy to make changes without affecting the environment. The solution is very easy to use. The product is very robust and offers very good performance.”

A Storage Manager at a financial services firm mentions, "There are a lot of screens for easy management where you can change some settings. But after a few years, the important settings were better after an upgrade, and all the vendors have other ways to upgrade their systems."

A Senior IT Infrastructure & Data Center Operation Engineer at Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) comments, “The adaptive optimization is the biggest feature in 3PAR. 3PAR is very usable with thin volume because it detects zeros while writing. Every time I tell the hypervisor to make the full provisioning, it makes the volume as simple provisioning in 3PAR, not full provisioning.”

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Rackspace, Open Line

Just Energy, Latisys, team AG, DreamWorks, BlueShore Financial, Erasmus MC

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. HPE 3PAR StoreServ

January 2025

Free Report: Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. HPE 3PAR StoreServ and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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