Dell PowerMax NVMe vs HPE Primera comparison

Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Dell Technologies is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.6, while Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.0. Dell Technologies holds a 3.9% mindshare in AFS, compared to Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s 4.2% 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.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Dell PowerMax NVMe and HPE Primera compete in the enterprise storage solutions category. Dell PowerMax NVMe seems to have the upper hand in data throughput and reliability, while HPE Primera excels in data management and system control.

Features: Dell PowerMax NVMe offers exceptional speed, robust reliability, and strong performance focus. HPE Primera provides AI-driven data management, streamlined performance, and enhanced data insights.

Room for Improvement: Dell PowerMax NVMe users often mention system setup complexity, high learning curve, and need for streamlined management tools. HPE Primera users look for better initial cost-effectiveness, more flexible scalability options, and improved system redundancy features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell PowerMax NVMe deployment is intricate but well-supported by customer service. HPE Primera offers user-friendly deployment but has mixed feedback on customer service consistency.

Pricing and ROI: Dell PowerMax NVMe has higher upfront costs but offers significant long-term ROI. HPE Primera also incurs high initial expenses but provides quicker ROI through intelligent data management.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. HPE Primera Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. HPE Primera

April 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 May 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerMax NVMe is 3.9%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Primera is 4.2%, down from 5.1% 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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Taufeeq Rauf

Head of IT at NATIONAL INSTITUTIONAL FACILITATION TECHNOLOGIES (PVT.) LTD.

Offers a simple user interface and is useful for data replication

I use HPE Primera for mission-critical applications. My company uses the product as a storage solution for our machines. The availability of HPE Primera in our company is critical for us, considering that we operate in an HA environment where we can't have downtime since we need to deal with cheque clearance for banks. The product's interface is simple to use. I am satisfied with the user experience provided by the product. The ease of use of the product's interface has directly had an impact on our company's operations, along with the improvement in the availability and performance of machines. Compared to HPE Primera, I work with a much more reliable storage solution like Dell PowerStore. Compared to HPE Primera, Dell PowerStore's features related to deduplication are very good, and it also offers a physical storage capacity of eight TB, which can be expanded up to forty TB. I would recommend the product to others who plan to use it only after taking into consideration their usage and requirements. From the price and performance point of view, Dell PowerStore is a better choice. I rate the tool a seven out of ten.

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

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

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

"Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."

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

"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."

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

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

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

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

"The solution has good operability and easy scalability."

"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."

"A huge benefit of the PowerMax has been the decreasing of our physical footprint. We recently did a consolidation where we went from 58 tiles down to 5. If we had used just the PowerMax, we could have gone from 58 tiles down to 2 tiles, which is huge space savings. If you have 56 newly available floor tiles on a raised floor data center, which you previously had to cool and provide power to, then now, not only are my costs going down, I now have more revenue opportunities because I have more space to put new customers."

"You can use PowerMax for all workloads and consolidation. We have used it to scale thousands of VMs."

"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."

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

More Dell PowerMax NVMe pros

"It serves as the primary storage in my production environment."

"The performance of the solution is good."

"The most valuable feature of HPE Primera is its performance and simple replication."

"The most valuable feature is an all-flash system, which means the data access speed is amazing while the latency is almost nothing, and it can deliver IOPS up to 16,000."

"The high availability was most valuable because they come with what's called 100% data availability. With special terms, they license and guarantee 100% data availability. That was probably one of the key features or components that HPE was offering with that model."

"The most valuable feature of HP Primera is that you don't have to buy an additional product for application replication. It's a stable product. The tool is scalable. I recommend HPE Primera because it's one of HP's most stable product."

"HPE Primera has good integration. All the users are using HP servers and some systems, such as Synergy, which integrate well into the solution."

"The interface is simplified."

More HPE Primera pros

Cons

"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."

"It is on the expensive side."

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

"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."

"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."

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

"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."

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"Dell PowerMax NVMe needs to increase storage and improve scalability."

"Dell PowerMax or Symmetrix is a block-level storage and unified storage, supporting both NAS and SAN. One area for improvement would be integration with public cloud services."

"There are so many configurations in the tool that cannot be done by anyone who is not a Dell personnel."

"We are very interested in NVMe over Fibre Channel, which I understand is on the horizon. We would like to see that come to fruition."

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

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

"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."

"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."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe cons

"The product's stale snapshots feature needs improvement."

"The solution could prove the reporting."

"The file server embedded in Pure, the GUI, and the tracking and reporting features are better with Pure Storage."

"The price of the product is an area of concern. From an improvement perspective, the solution should be made more affordable in terms of price."

"I would like to see improved training offered with HPE Primera."

"HPE Primera's pricing model is an area of concern and can be considered for improvement."

"This solution would be expensive for small business and it could be priced more competitively for that market."

"On the controller side, I would like to see NAS capabilities."

More HPE Primera cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."

"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."

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

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

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"In terms of price-performance, it beat out other competitors when we were taking a look and comparing it to the market. That was one of the biggest driving points for us."

"Dell PowerMax NVMe's price is expensive."

"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."

"Dell offers various pricing models, including a pay-as-you-go option where storage is provided without upfront charges, billing only for used capacity. As a 360° partner, significant discounts are available."

"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 price is okay."

"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."

"The price is really high."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe pricing and cost advice

"The price of HPE Primera could improve, it is expensive."

"There is only a one-time license purchase needed and no additional costs. If HP could reduce the training cost, then that would be advantageous to the seller."

"The price of this solution is good for medium-sized and large businesses."

"The pricing for HDD was good."

"HPE Primera service is cost-effective."

"Licensing fees are billed on a yearly basis and the cost of GreenLake service is included."

"The price of the solution should be cheaper."

"HPE Primera is a little bit higher than Dell PowerStore...HPE Primera costs around 80,000 USD."

More HPE Primera pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Educational Organization

37%

Computer Software Company

10%

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...

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.

See all answers

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

Dell offers various pricing models, including a pay-as-you-go option where storage is provided without upfront charge...

See all answers

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...

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about HPE Primera?

For over a year, I have not seen any downtime in the product.

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 31% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 18% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 15% 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 28% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 13% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 10% of the time

Dell VMAX All Flash vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 2% of the time

More Dell PowerMax NVMe Competitors

HPE Alletra Storage vs HPE Primera

Compared 36% of the time

HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs HPE Primera

Compared 19% of the time

HPE Nimble Storage vs HPE Primera

Compared 10% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs HPE Primera

Compared 7% of the time

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs HPE Primera

Compared 2% of the time

More HPE Primera Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

April 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe

May 2025

Download Dell PowerMax NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE Primera

April 2025

Download HPE Primera product report

Also Known As

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

Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerMax

Primera

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 introduces HPE Primera, a new storage platform designed to deliver superior simplicity, availability, and performance for mission-critical applications
HPE Primera advances the HPE Intelligent Data Platform, a portfolio of products and solutions designed to help customers transition from delivering storage to unlocking business value with intelligent data

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Rackspace, Open Line

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. HPE Primera

April 2025

Free Report: Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. HPE Primera

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