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Dell PowerPath vs Pure Storage FlashArray comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 PowerPath
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Storage Software (3rd)
Pure Storage FlashArray
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
198
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Dell PowerPath and Pure Storage FlashArray aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Dell PowerPath is designed for Storage Software and holds a mindshare of 11.1%, up 8.4% compared to last year.
Pure Storage FlashArray, on the other hand, focuses on All-Flash Storage, holds 6.3% mindshare, down 8.6% since last year.
Storage Software
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Derrick Brockel - PeerSpot reviewer
A resilient and reliable solution that has many load-balancing technologies and provides high availability
People who want to buy the solution must create a scorecard of Dell PowerPath against other products. They must run database tests. They must consider factors like pricing, performance, ease of use, visibility, and reliability. They must also run tests to understand which product recovers faster. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"OS-aware multipathing is a valuable feature of the product."
"It provides a high availability and will increase the performance of any server or operating system."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is migration without disruptions."
"The product is very reliable."
"The user interface is good."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that disaster recovery scenarios are very good and easy to use in Dell PowerPath since it is available in a simplified form."
"The solution has improved our performance, reliability, and redundancy."
"We have found the solution to be quite flexible and very scalable."
"The all-flash disc is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"The most valuable features are the ease of use and support."
"The tool has reduced our power consumption."
"Pure Storage FlashArray offers numerous valuable features, such as low latency and high throughput."
"The speed of the Pure FlashArray is very, very fast and nothing in the market can compare to it."
"It helps simplify storage. When you're running Pure all-flash, you don't have to do a lot of the old Oracle best practices. You don't have to worry about putting log files on a different disk channel than the data files, and those types of issues... That has made it vastly easier to do large volumes, rapid provisioning in databases, without taking a performance hit."
"Provides fast access and is user-friendly."
"The connections are a lot faster than what we had in the past. One InfiniBand does what we did on all of our Fibre Channels."
 

Cons

"The solution is quite stable, although they have not quite worked out all of the kinks."
"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"While I utilize it for data migration, I would love to do that data migration in a GUI from an ease of use perspective."
"Customers do not choose PowerPath unless they have Unix or Linux."
"Although PowerPath is very mature and has been on the market for more than 15 years there are still a lot of bugs that have been profiled with PowerPath, specifically, during any OS upgrade."
"The solution should provide extensive reports on backups and backup failures."
"The technical support is good but they are not available all the time."
"The product must adapt to other storage technologies like HPE 3PAR."
"FlashArray could improve on the administrative side. For example, when you need to upgrade the boxes, we can't do that ourselves. We need to open a ticket with support and have them do that for us. You don't need to be on the call with them. We tell them we have a slot that we want to upgrade, and they send us an email when it's done."
"The solution could improve by having a multi-tenant feature."
"Just some nit picky stuff, like allowing servers and volumes to be grouped. Therefore, it would easier to work with them in the GUI."
"Currently, the solution fails to support file screening."
"A year ago they promised that they would be able to read through the database encryption with more metric and they have not delivered on that patch, which is significant because it gives us back so much more storage room. We want to be able to read through the encryption."
"It goes at about 95 percent, so we have had some performance issues. It is hard to clear them."
"We did have one hiccup with the integration of vCenter. When we were installing Pure Storage, we were using vCenter 6.7, which defaults to the HTML5 Web Client. The current plugin for Pure Storage doesn't show up in that client at all. You have to go and use the legacy FlexFlash client to see the Pure Storage plugin in vCenter."
"As long as they always improve on IOPS speed, that's all we're really looking for. The faster the storage can be the more we can do speed of application and speed of use."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is fair."
"The product is a little bit expensive."
"The solution is expensive."
"Pricing is good. I don't have any issues with the pricing of this solution."
"I rate the product's price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is affordable, and ten is really expensive. Dell PowerPath is an expensive tool."
"There are no additional costs associated with the product."
"We do not incur additional costs beyond the licensing fee."
"While more expensive than NetApp, Pure Storage FlashArray offers superior performance that often justifies the higher cost and adds value overall."
"Pure Storage has not helped us to reduce our licensing costs."
"Our costs are around $100,000."
"The pricing of Pure Storage FlashArray is reasonable."
"We feel that the pricing is fair and the licensing process was easy for both."
"We would like them to improve the pricing, so we could put them to use some more product, like backup or long-term storage. In the future, if the price goes down, then we could buy different types of products."
"Pure came in at a better price point than EMC and performed better than Compellent."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Government
13%
Healthcare Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Retailer
11%
Educational Organization
34%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Dell PowerPath?
The solution has improved our performance, reliability, and redundancy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell PowerPath?
The product is a little bit expensive. It is a little pricey because it provides multipathing with other OSs. I rate the pricing a five out of ten.
What needs improvement with Dell PowerPath?
The product must adapt to other storage technologies like HPE 3PAR. When we use 3PAR storage, we have to use another technology to load balance. The product must be integrated with other products l...
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 Storage. It may be more expensive, but it should pay for itself for its functionalit...
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?
The cost of Pure Storage is subjective and determined by your environment. Pure Storage tends to be more expensive than NetApp, but it is cheaper than EMC. Performance varies with data workload, ma...
 

Also Known As

PowerPath
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Healthcare Residential Service Company
Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp, DataCore, Dell Technologies and others in Storage Software. Updated: March 2025.
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