Dell PowerMax NVMe vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe comparison

Dell Technologies and Pure Storage are both solutions in the NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays category. Dell Technologies is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.5, while Pure Storage is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.6. Dell Technologies holds a 9.2% mindshare in N, compared to Pure Storage’s 2.5% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Pure Storage users who would recommend it.

Dell PowerMax NVMe

Read 75 Dell PowerMax NVMe reviews

2,624 Views
1,775 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Read 35 Pure FlashArray X NVMe reviews

860 Views
426 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Dell PowerMax NVMe

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Dell PowerMax NVMe and Pure FlashArray X NVMe are leading enterprise storage solutions. Pure FlashArray appears to have an advantage in simplicity and cost-effectiveness, whereas Dell PowerMax offers extensive enterprise features and longevity.

Features: Dell PowerMax NVMe offers advanced replication, encryption, and end-to-end NVMe support. It is known for its robust performance, security features, and integration capabilities. Pure FlashArray X NVMe focuses on simplicity and innovative data reduction technologies, with high operational efficiency and an easy-to-use interface.

Room for Improvement: Dell PowerMax NVMe could improve in ease of management, cost efficiency, and user experience. Pure FlashArray X NVMe needs enhancements in support responsiveness, feature customization, and support structure.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell PowerMax NVMe is straightforward to deploy, but users need better configuration guidance and customer support. Pure FlashArray X NVMe boasts rapid deployment and intuitive setup but some report delays in customer support.

Pricing and ROI: Dell PowerMax NVMe has higher initial setup costs but offers robust ROI through enterprise features and longevity. Pure FlashArray X NVMe is more cost-effective initially, with all-inclusive pricing and efficient ROI through reduced management costs.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Pure FlashArray X NVMe Report (Updated: February 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Pure FlashArray X NVMe

February 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 838,640 peers since 2012

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

Dell PowerMax NVMe

Ranking in All-Flash Storage

9th

Ranking in NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays

3rd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Ranking in All-Flash Storage

16th

Ranking in NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays

6th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays category, the mindshare of Dell PowerMax NVMe is 9.2%, down from 15.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 2.5%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays

Featured Reviews

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"It is easy to manage and upgrade."

"Uptime by far is the most important thing, and also the replication ability (SRDF). Most of the customers who need this type of availability also want the protection of multiple data centers, and it is able to easily switchover workloads to their other data centers."

"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."

"We are happy with the monitoring that Dell EMC is doing for us. They have helped us to identify many issues during the routine checks, issues which we were not aware of."

"It is a true, stable product."

"The best feature is the protection - PowerMax NVMe is volume-based and replicates data, so it's very comfortable for us to use."

"It allows us to protect our data using different data centers and replicate bi-directionally between our two main data centers."

"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."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe pros

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

"The latency is good."

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

"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."

"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."

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

"The solution uses newer technology for deduplication and compression."

"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

Cons

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

"There is also room for improvement in the PowerMax architecture and hardware itself. They should design the PowerMax on the basis of PCIe 4.0. I would like to see the possibility of an NVMe drive that operates on PCIe 4.0 and not PCIe 3.0."

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

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

"I would like it to support NVMe over Fabrics, because that is the next item for consideration on the NVMe roadmap. PowerMax supports NVMe on the back-end, but when it starts supporting NVMe over Fibre Channel, suddenly various hosts can directly communicate with PowerMax, and with NVMe-oF, as well. Suddenly, Gen 6 and Gen 7 switchers will be able to help facilitate that particular communication channel."

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

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

"The one area for improvement in Dell PowerMax NVMe would be to align the features of the on-premises version with those available in the cloud, as this would provide added value and flexibility."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe 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."

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

"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."

"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics should not incur extra charges."

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

"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The cost is expensive. While VMAX now has good pricing, PowerMax is a little 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..."

"Our costs are on a yearly basis."

"Its price is competitive, but they need to have a different price for West Africa. They can do better with the price point to allow us to scale even more. We wanted to migrate our entire storage infrastructure to PowerMax, which would require us to buy more capacity, and from the price point, it didn't attract us."

"The cost has room for improvement."

"Support pricing is very high. Our support contract is about to expire and Dell EMC provided us with an extremely high renewal quote. It was four times more than the support contract for our previous EMC VNX solution."

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

More Dell PowerMax NVMe pricing and cost advice

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

"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."

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

"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 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."

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

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

838,640 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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 offerings and integrated into the PowerStoreOS. The installation and setup have a ...

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?

The price is starting from $500,000. It's expensive.

See all answers

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 should not incur extra charges. This is one of the main things organizations need.

See all answers

Comparisons

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

Dell Unity XT vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 6% of the time

More Dell PowerMax NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 33% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 15% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Nimble Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 5% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe

February 2025

Download Dell PowerMax NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

February 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Also Known As

Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerMax

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

Overview

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

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

Sample Customers

Rackspace, Open Line

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Pure FlashArray X NVMe

February 2025

Free Report: Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Pure FlashArray X NVMe and other solutions. Updated: February 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

838,640 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Pure FlashArray X NVMe report.

See our list of best NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors and best All-Flash Storage vendors.

We monitor all NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.