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 8.8% mindshare in N, compared to Pure Storage’s 2.6% 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 76 Dell PowerMax NVMe reviews

2,445 Views
1,662 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Read 35 Pure FlashArray X NVMe reviews

873 Views
424 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Dell PowerMax NVMe

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Pure FlashArray X NVMe

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

Dell PowerMax NVMe

Ranking in All-Flash Storage

8th

Ranking in NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays

3rd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Ranking in All-Flash Storage

15th

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 April 2025, in the NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays category, the mindshare of Dell PowerMax NVMe is 8.8%, down from 13.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 2.6%, down from 2.9% 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.

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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

"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."

"The optimization of the cache memory of each engine and the use of persistent memory."

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

"PowerMax, with version 9.02, which we installed recently, has some very good features, such as CloudIQ."

"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."

"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."

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

"The product is very fast and reliable."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe pros

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

"The latency is good."

"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."

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

"The tool's valuable features are speed, security, data compression, and reliability. Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen. It helps us to save money and resources."

"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."

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

"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

Cons

"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 installation of equipment needed support's help."

"The price could be lower, and we are unhappy with the price."

"The initial setup was complex. ESRS is a very complex solution to put into our environment, because it requires external access to the Internet. That's a very tough thing for us to do, because we are a PCI and PII company. We store a lot of data for people which is personal. Therefore, going out to the Internet is not our preferred path."

"PowerMax's software is highly stable, but we faced two hardware issues in one year. We had a failure of the storage director module, and the physical disk failed on another occasion. Dell EMC should improve its hardware quality."

"We would like more documentation, a guide to the features of the PowerMax."

"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."

"The solution is quite expensive."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe cons

"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."

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

"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."

"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."

"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."

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

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

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe a five out of ten for pricing."

"The pricing is comparable to other vendors."

"Dell is expensive compared to other products and I would rate its pricing a four out of ten."

"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..."

"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."

"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 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."

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

More Dell PowerMax NVMe pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

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

"The product is expensive."

"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."

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

"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

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 14% 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

Dell Unity XT vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 5% of the time

More Dell PowerMax NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 32% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 17% 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

April 2025

Download Dell PowerMax NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

March 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

April 2025

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

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