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Dell PowerMax vs Pure Storage FlashArray comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 18, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
1.0
Organizations reduced costs and improved performance with Pure FlashArray X NVMe, achieving quick ROI and efficient resource management.
Sentiment score
8.2
Dell PowerMax delivers cost savings, enhanced efficiency, increased uptime, and improved performance, leading to high user satisfaction and ROI.
Sentiment score
7.8
Pure Storage FlashArray enhances efficiency, lowers costs, and boosts ROI with simple management, data reduction, and evergreen updates.
By opting for the gold subscription every three years, you get a free upgrade to the latest controller release.
If you wait more than seven years to buy another one, you get a return on your investment.
During a DCDR setup and migration from VMAX to Dell PowerMax, what was planned as a two-day downtime was completed in just three to four hours.
The performance metrics or benchmarks I use to measure success with Dell PowerMax include uptime as well as our response times on our platforms, both of which are exactly where we want them to be, which is five nines and as fast as possible.
My client has seen significant ROI since the install, and when you don't go down, that's an ROI in and of itself.
In the long term, spanning three to five years, the total cost of ownership becomes cheaper, considering power consumption, data center footprint, and NVMe technology usage.
We have seen a return on investment as the solution has reduced resource requirements, allowing less experienced personnel to manage the storage.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.1
Pure FlashArray X NVMe's technical support is praised for responsiveness, despite occasional follow-up issues, earning high customer satisfaction.
Sentiment score
8.4
Dell PowerMax's customer service is highly rated for promptness and knowledge, despite some issues with SLA and language barriers.
Sentiment score
8.7
Pure Storage FlashArray is praised for excellent, responsive customer support, offering swift issue resolution and proactive problem identification.
With Pure FlashArray X NVMe, we need to escalate the issue and get an account manager for its resolution.
We also had one outage where a controller of one of the products had failed and had to be replaced on-site.
Customers always have their issues resolved promptly.
I would rate Dell PowerMax support as a ten, as I have never had an issue with Dell support as it relates to this product.
Dell support for Dell PowerMax is exceptional, rating a perfect 10 out of 10.
I evaluate Dell's support for PowerMax as very good, especially regarding their response time as well as their willingness to get ahead of issues.
Pure's support organization is responsive with minimal bureaucracy, making support a key factor in customer retention.
The support from Pure Storage is excellent.
Opening a case with Pure is a smooth process, and they prove to be reliable, even in severe cases where infrastructure issues arise.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.1
Pure FlashArray X NVMe offers scalable storage with low latency, easy upgrades, though capacity customization and high costs are noted.
Sentiment score
7.7
Dell PowerMax provides scalable, efficient performance with NVMe, valued for enterprise use despite some cost and scaling speed concerns.
Sentiment score
7.8
Pure Storage FlashArray offers seamless scalability, ease of upgrades, and efficient storage, satisfying diverse enterprise needs with flexible growth options.
You cannot increase capacity if latency is present.
It is highly scalable.
It is suitable for both medium-sized and enterprise businesses.
Scalability is not an issue.
Dell PowerMax is good for enterprises, and it also depends on how much workload you're going to bring in on Dell PowerMax in terms of performance and how many users are going to use the database you're hosting.
Volumes can be defined to grow to any level without impacting overall performance.
A big banking client had around 300 petabytes of data on Pure Storage.
The solution is highly scalable, particularly when there is a need to expand capacity.
I rate FlashArray's scalability nine out of 10.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Pure Storage offers exceptional stability and reliability with outstanding support, consistently achieving high user ratings for performance and service.
Sentiment score
8.7
Dell PowerMax is highly rated for reliability, performance, and stability, with quick support for occasional issues.
Sentiment score
8.0
Pure Storage FlashArray is praised for its stability, reliability, 100% uptime, and efficient support with minimal downtime issues.
During the eight years, there have been no problems such as hardware failure or stopping.
I would rate the stability of the solution as a ten out of ten.
I would rate the stability of the product at seven out of ten.
These patches can be applied on the fly without requiring software upgrades or system downtime.
I would rate it nine out of ten since there are no required downtimes, even during firmware upgrades.
There has been no downtime with Dell PowerMax; it's been extremely reliable, easy to manage, easy to upgrade, and trustworthy as we've upgraded over the years from one version to another.
I have not encountered any significant issues, such as applying firmware that introduces bugs.
Stability has never been an issue except for minor controller glitches causing failover events, similar to brakes and tires on a car.
I encountered instances where the entire cluster went down due to workload and throughput issues.
 

Room For Improvement

Pure FlashArray X requires cost-effective improvements in UI, integration, cloud features, multitenancy, analytics, backup, AI, and scalability.
Dell PowerMax needs improvements in deduplication, UI, cloud integration, cost efficiency, AI, security, and system setup.
Pure Storage FlashArray needs improvements in scalability, cloud integration, user controls, pricing, and compatibility with VMware and third-party environments.
Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe.
We would appreciate a built-in transparent failover in the next release to eliminate the need for a separate metro cluster.
I'm eagerly anticipating the roadmap's promise of introducing multiple controllers, which could significantly boost scalability and resilience.
Compared to competitors such as NetApp, which integrates with public cloud hyperscalers (GCP, Azure, AWS), Dell PowerMax lacks in this aspect.
Dell can assist by providing plug-and-play integrated templates that allow customers to drag, drop, modify, and connect with any target system for generating snapshots without logging into the storage directly.
Dell PowerMax NVMe is very reliable storage and cannot experience downtime.
Integrating object storage into the FlashArray would benefit entry-level and SMB customers by offering a more unified solution.
Storing cold data on expensive arrays doesn't make financial sense, and tiering to any of the big three cloud providers would be advantageous.
Currently, the limited selection of on-premise instruments hinders Pure Storage FlashArray's ability to compete effectively with other vendors.
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise buyers see Pure FlashArray X NVMe as a justified premium investment due to performance and comprehensive licensing.
Dell PowerMax is costly yet competitive, appreciated for total ownership value, offering various pricing models and potential savings.
Pure Storage FlashArray is costly but valued for performance, all-inclusive features, and efficiency-enhancing Evergreen upgrades.
While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits.
The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there.
Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products.
The higher cost compared to other vendors is justified by additional features, vendor-managed upgrades, and superior support services.
It is the best choice for large projects in terms of price and features compared to midrange solutions.
The price is starting from $500,000.
They're expensive.
The cost of Pure FlashArray is a bit high compared to peers, but its sustainability and features justify the price.
We lost a lot of customers because we couldn't compete on price with other vendors.
 

Valuable Features

Pure FlashArray X NVMe offers exceptional performance, reliability, scalability, and seamless VMware integration, enhancing workload efficiency and user experience.
Dell PowerMax offers advanced performance, security, and efficiency through NVMe, data reduction, and seamless integration, supporting diverse workloads.
Pure Storage FlashArray offers fast, user-friendly data management with exceptional performance, scalability, and integration, ensuring efficient and reliable operations.
Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator.
The platform's robust features include excellent sustainability tracking, and a comprehensive dashboard offering insights into IOPS, bandwidth, performance, and virtual activities.
Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen.
NVMe provides additional fast cache, similar to random access memory (RAM), which improves overall system performance and read/write experience for users.
Dell PowerMax NVMe is very supportive of our operational growth since we require daily performance from our core banking systems and need to facilitate data movement efficiently.
The key benefits of using Dell PowerMax, quantified in terms of saved hours and saved costs, is having one single platform that provides functionality to all of our internal customers.
FlashArray's integration with the Pure One instrument provides a centralized platform for efficient management of all arrays.
Another noteworthy aspect is their platform, Pure One, a cloud-based analytics platform that automatically creates a case and sends out a part if a disk or controller fails.
It handles internal data migration seamlessly in the background without going offline, achieving a hundred percent uptime.
 

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
14th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
Dell PowerMax
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
7th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
84
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (3rd)
Pure Storage FlashArray
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
4th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
199
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerMax is 4.1%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pure Storage FlashArray is 6.5%, down from 7.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Jaehoon Oh - PeerSpot reviewer
Supports efficient storage management through volume snapshots and offers reliable non-disruptive upgrades
I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could be enhanced. I can see the performance statistics in the Pure Storage console, but it does not show the performance by 4K byte unit. It displays IOPS and bandwidth, but IOPS is about real use, and I want to know how many IOPS are currently running in 4K byte units. I cannot see that IOPS because most storage systems report their performance by 4K byte unit. I want to see Pure Storage performance by 4K byte unit to compare with other storage or other internal NVMe SSD.
MayankChauhan - PeerSpot reviewer
Delivers essential support and performance for intensive operations in real-time environments
Our infrastructure is spread across the private as well as a public cloud. Our requirement was that the IOPS latency should not be more than one millisecond. If anything goes beyond one millisecond, it's a problem for us. We wanted a system that could handle the transactions and meet our latency requirements. There are performance benefits for sure. The amount of deduplication and compression offered by Dell PowerMax is quite good, especially with databases. Dell PowerMax delivers optimum performance and reliable support, integral for handling failures and ensuring operational continuity. The performance capacity optimization and support we receive from Dell are also valuable.
Nabeel Sayegh - PeerSpot reviewer
Supercharges enterprise storage by way of highly optimized hardware, comprehensive data management and a feature rich interface.
During their early years, I was a member of Pure's Customer Advisory Board. In addition, when we first adopted Pure, they did not have replication GA yet. We got into their beta testing program and help them work out certain issues with that technology. One weakness I can say the array has, still to this day, is limited control on scheduling snapshots. Depending on the type of replication schedule you are building, you may or may not have control on specifying the start time of a given replication schedule. This is not a very big problem in the grand scheme of things, but something nonetheless that has bothered me about the scheduler in general. Another area for improvement would be automatic host alias creation. Other platforms such as EMC Unity/PowerStore will automatically detect the host name, create a alias for it and associate the logged in HBA's to it. Pure does not do this for you and as a result, requires manual configuration. This can be very time consuming especially when you are deploying a large number of new servers.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Educational Organization
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

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.
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 ...
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...
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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe?
When comparing Dell PowerMax NVMe with other vendors, such as IBM enterprise solutions, the price is relatively higher.
Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashArray?
We consume less physical storage because of the solution’s deduplication and compression.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I don't have the billing details right now, but the pricing is high.
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
Dell PowerMax NVMe, Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerMax
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Rackspace, Open Line
Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerMax vs. Pure Storage FlashArray and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.