Dell PowerMax NVMe vs HPE Nimble Storage 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 #7 with an average rating of 8.9. Dell Technologies holds a 4.0% mindshare in AFS, compared to Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s 2.7% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 99% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

HPE Nimble Storage and Dell PowerMax NVMe offer advanced storage solutions. Dell PowerMax NVMe is considered superior due to its performance and reliability, which users find worth the investment.

Features: HPE Nimble Storage is praised for its integrated data protection, efficient storage utilization, and seamless scalability. Dell PowerMax NVMe stands out with its high performance, low latency, and advanced machine learning capabilities. Users note Dell PowerMax NVMe's superior speed and data efficiency.

Room for Improvement: HPE Nimble Storage users point out the need for improved cloud integration and more robust analytics. Dell PowerMax NVMe users suggest enhancements in ease of use and simplification of management. Both products require more intuitive configuration, but Dell PowerMax NVMe's complexity is a bigger concern.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: HPE Nimble Storage has a straightforward deployment and responsive customer support. Dell PowerMax NVMe, although more complex to set up, benefits from comprehensive documentation and strong technical support. Users find HPE Nimble Storage quicker to deploy, while Dell PowerMax NVMe's customer service is highly effective in resolving issues.

Pricing and ROI: HPE Nimble Storage is recognized for its cost-effectiveness and quicker ROI. Dell PowerMax NVMe, though more expensive, delivers robust performance that justifies the higher cost, with users noting a significant long-term ROI. Pricing may deter some users initially, but Dell PowerMax NVMe's advanced features and reliability can provide better value over time.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. HPE Nimble Storage Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. HPE Nimble Storage

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 HPE Nimble Storage is 2.7%, down from 6.4% 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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Ajit Pratap Kundan

PreSales Lead- Government & Defense at Accops Systems Pvt Ltd

A tool that offers protection against ransomware and other enterprise-level attacks

HPE Nimble Storage's cost is very high, making it one of its downsides. HPE Nimble Storage's cost is very high compared with any HCI solutions, like HPE's SimpliVity, Nutanix, VMware, or Dell VxRail. A person requires a special skill set to operate HPE Nimble Storage because there are hardly any solutions similar to Nimble Storage in the market. The product's support can be made faster and more responsive if HPE trains its partners in such a way that they acquire more expertise on Nimble Storage through the training sessions. HPE Nimble Storage is dependent on only VMware vSphere Hypervisor. In the future, HPE has to make Nimble Storage feasible with other hypervisors like Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix Acropolis, and RHEV, meaning it should be hypervisor agnostic.

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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

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

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

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

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

"I use the tool for Oracle databases, Oracle virtual machines, and Oracle Linux databases. I'm on the storage side, not a database administrator."

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

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

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

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

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

"PowerMax is a compact high-performance appliance. It is one of the best devices in terms of performance specs. It includes an NVMe All-Flash Array."

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

"The support team was very cooperative and responsive."

"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerMax NVMe is its replication feature."

"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."

"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."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe pros

"This product is very easy to set up."

"In the 20 days that we have been using this solution, it has been stable."

"The storage capacity efficiency is phenomenal. It is off the charts in comparison to the compression ratios that we got before. We are able to save a lot more to the device."

"Nimble's phone-home capability is decent. The compression, dedupe, and caching are also solid. Generally, I like the simplicity. It's almost a set-and-forget solution."

"They have really thought through their solution. They've covered everything."

"It has allowed us to upgrade our DMS to the latest version and reuse the older array as the DR storage for VMware SRM."

"The capacity for data storage and compression is good."

"It's easy to use, it's just like 3PAR. I made clusters of 32 hosts with 50 volumes and that took barely an hour. I scripted a lot of it, filled in the names of volumes, the names of servers."

More HPE Nimble Storage pros

Cons

"We need better data deduplication."

"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."

"It is on the expensive side."

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

"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."

"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."

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

"I would like to see some AI features that would allow arrays to intelligently identify threats or unusual behavior in the data pattern and give an alert."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"The tool is costly compared to other similar products. The product's pricing needs to be improved. I would like the product to include the replication feature in its future releases."

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

"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."

"I would also like to see a real-time, graphical view of metrics. I don't know how far back in time we can look, but if we could see the performance from two months or three months back, and how it is performing now, that would be helpful."

"It's a relatively new product, but for the next release I would like to see higher bandwidth on the front-end adapters. This would allow even greater scalability for critical workloads and consolidation for non-critical workloads. The hosts may not require that level of I/O performance today. However, it allows us to scale physical non-cloud environments without large investment."

"Although they call it unified storage where you have SAN and NAS, with a NAS implementation on top of a SAN, the NAS implementation is a little complicated and clumsy. As SAN, as block storage, it is very powerful... If they could provide a very good NAS implementation, it would be better, so that customers don't have to look for other simple solutions for NAS."

"We have had some trouble with the VMAX-to-PowerMax migration, but the VMAX box will be powered down after the migration. The PowerMax boxes are working fine and we don't have any issues with them."

"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."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe cons

"The solution needs to be an active-active controller."

"The solution requires a higher availability."

"The solution could improve by having more granularity. For example, having the ability to go deeper into specific IO channels or specific latency issues that can happen would be a benefit. HPE has this ability on their side but it would be useful to have it on our side."

"We are doing a hybrid and are moving some machines to Microsoft Azure to run in hybrid mode. We are checking the availability of extra software-defined storage so that we can configure it."

"The quality of technical support depends on which member of the support team you speak with."

"Nimble requires its DNS to work in order to interface with VMware vCenter is a little thorn in my eye, but I am being nitpicky here."

"There should be faster interfaces."

"I have problems with the next servicer. For example, I have a new device and it needs to connect to Nimble."

More HPE Nimble Storage cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

"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."

"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."

"The product is expensive."

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

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

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

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"Our costs for the product are three million."

"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."

"The price is starting from $500,000."

"The pricing is competitive. I would rate the pricing of the solution a six out of ten."

"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 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."

"Dell PowerMax NVMe's price is expensive."

"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

"The pricing is expensive, although we do not pay anything in addition to the standard licensing fees."

"The first two that I bought were incredibly expensive, compared to the last five to seven that I have bought. The price has come way down, and it has been a year or so since we bought one."

"HPE Nimble Storage is more expensive than some of the other solutions, such as Pure Storage. They charge more for every feature than other vendors."

"The price of HPE Nimble Storage is good."

"It is more expensive than one of its competitors."

"Our hybrid solution could do with some more competitive pricing and more scaled-down deployments. Already, the smallest one is too much for us. We would flourish by having a smaller unit."

"Nimble Storage is too expensive for our enterprise customers."

"The solution’s pricing is reasonable for the features that it provides."

More HPE Nimble Storage 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

Educational Organization

69%

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.

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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 ...

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...

See all answers

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

How does HPE Nimble Storage compare to VxRail?

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI Vs. VxRail One of the best things about the HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is the three, two, one, z...

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Which would you choose - HPE Nimble Storage or HPE Primera?

HPE Nimble is a versatile synced WAN San solution. It is easy to use and doesn’t require much training for admins. Th...

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What do you like most about HPE Nimble Storage?

The solution's predictive analytics is good. It helps to save costs.

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 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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 28% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 11% 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

HPE Primera vs HPE Nimble Storage

Compared 17% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs HPE Nimble Storage

Compared 17% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs HPE Nimble Storage

Compared 12% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs HPE Nimble Storage

Compared 11% of the time

Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs HPE Nimble Storage

Compared 2% of the time

More HPE Nimble Storage 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

HPE Nimble Storage

March 2025

Download HPE Nimble Storage product report

Also Known As

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

Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerMax

Nimble 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 Nimble Storage is a highly effective All-Flash Storage Array solution that aims to enable organizations to reliably store and access their data. Organizations across a wide variety of industries trust Nimble Storage to assist them with all of their data storage-based needs. It both tracks all of the IT architecture that an organization uses and protects that architecture from a variety of digital threats.

HPE Nimble Storage Benefits

Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy HPE Nimble Storage include:

Increased security. Nimble Storage provides organizations with powerful layers of protection. It leverages predictive analytics powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning to keep businesses from suffering harm related to emerging threats. The AI and ML software identifies threats before they can threaten a user’s data.

Reduced costs and increase profits. Businesses that deploy Nimble Storage find that their overhead costs end up being significantly reduced by up to 49%. One of the reasons for this is that Nimble Storage uses a “pay as you go” subscription model which means that users never pay for more storage than they actually need.

Ease of use. Nimble Storage is simple for administrators to utilize. They can install it without any kind of outside assistance. It is also simple for the average administrator to manage without specialized training.

HPE Nimble Storage Features

Artificial intelligence. The backbone of Nimble Storage’s IT infrastructure is its AI software. The HPE InfoSight feature makes it so that administrators don’t need to make guesses when managing their data storage. It offers users suggestions as to what they can do to improve their storage performance.

Scaling. Nimble Storage gives users the ability to scale their data storage so that it appropriately meets their needs. They can both “scale up” or increase the sheer amount of data that they can store at a given time and “scale out” or increase their ability to perform effectively.

Hybrid storage. Nimble Storage has the ability to store data both on the cloud and on-premises so as to meet an organization’s storage requirements. Its multi-cloud feature enables users to seamlessly manage all of their data storage and utilization operations with ease.

Reviews from Real Users

HPE Nimble Storage is a highly effective solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Two major advantages it offers are its ease of use and its powerful InfoSight analytics feature.

Andrew B., Head Of Information Technology at Zambia National Building Society, writes, “It's a very easy solution. Whenever I have a question, I find they have already provided a solution for it.”

Prataparao D., Technical Solution's Consultant for HPE Storage Devices at Karvy Innotech, says, “HPE Nimble Storage uses the InfoSight platform and it is useful because we can identify the faults and can analyze the performance. It has many other features. This feature is the best that I have observed from HPE Nimble Storage.”

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Rackspace, Open Line

Ace Relocation, Atkins Nutritionals, Berkeley Research Group, Canadian International School, City of Hot Springs, Clackamas County, Corona-Norco Unified School District, Ideal Integrations, Linear Technology, P&O Maritime, Retail Apparel Group (RAG), Virtual Radiologic

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. HPE Nimble Storage

March 2025

Free Report: Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. HPE Nimble Storage

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