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Dell PowerScale vs Red Hat Ceph Storage comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
227
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
Dell PowerScale
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
95
Ranking in other categories
NAS (1st), File and Object Storage (1st)
Red Hat Ceph Storage
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (3rd), File and Object Storage (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
SK
Solutions Architect at a university with 10,001+ employees
Operates seamlessly and minimizes downtime while meeting enterprise file share demands
The features of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) that I appreciate the most include the scale of architecture and the way it is designed. These features benefit my company by providing less downtime and less overhead. While I have not calculated an exact number regarding the reduction in downtime, we have always been using the product, so we have no baseline to compare it to. However, it is a very good product. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) scales very well with the growing needs of my company.
Rifat Rahman - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Architect & CEO at Tirzok Private Limited
Offers reliable performance and availability for large deployments
I would like to see improvements in Red Hat Ceph Storage not because I necessarily think it needs improvement, but because I generally prefer to do things manually rather than following the containerization part. Current deployments are based on containers, but I deploy manually with my scripts and controls. If there are no Kubernetes-like requirements, I often prefer to deploy a whole manual process. I don't ask for improvements in the deployment model because Red Hat has its own philosophy about making things, but it's my personal choice that I prefer things manually. Some features are available only in the containerization part, so if those are also available in manual deployment, that will help.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"All use cases for Everpure FlashArray are anything that requires a SAN should use it because it is the easiest thing on the market."
"The stability of Pure Storage is very very good."
"I would recommend this product to other users because Everpure FlashArray is very easy to maintain compared to other SAN storage and easy to handle as well."
"The security operating system is its most valuable feature because it's very simple, easy to use, and operate. You don't have to do very serious training to operate this equipment. It's user-friendly and pretty straightforward."
"We find the ease of usability and setup valuable."
"It benefits our IT organization in the way that it's easier for the administrators to manage."
"We have integrated the solution with VMware, and the process was seamless."
"The support team is available all the time and they seem to know what they are doing."
"Based on the flexibility of the system itself, it was easy for us to manage the growth by buying individual nodes as needed."
"The performance, overall, is quite impressive."
"What I appreciate about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) are its best features: it supports both file and object storage, and it is very easy to manage."
"The guaranteed performance, combined with the scalability through its scale-out capability, makes it an excellent choice."
"We would highly recommend PowerScale; we've been very happy with our overall experience."
"The solution in general has allowed us to move off of multiple Windows boxes where they had huge data stores, and we migrated it to the Isilon, making it easier and more cost-effective with just one point of contact."
"Dell PowerScale is much more advanced compared to competitors, offering more flexibility with different types of drives and nodes, and in terms of simplicity in management."
"Currently, Dell PowerScale is the center of our mainframe of our core of our business, and it is where we store everything."
"The high availability of the solution is important to us."
"I really like that Red Hat Ceph Storage can be used as a total solution without any storage area network components."
"Data redundancy is a key feature, since it can survive failures (disks/servers) and we didn’t lose our data or have a service interruption during server or disk failures."
"The product spawned a new vision of storage deployment, as well as a strong interest in reusing equipment and increasing ROI."
"It opens doors for completely open-source cloud."
"We are using Ceph internal inexpensive disk and data redundancy without spending extra money on external storage."
"Without any extra costs, I was able to provide a redundant environment."
"We have not encountered any stability issues for the product."
 

Cons

"Storage. There could be better storage."
"When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller."
"I would like to see more cloud integration."
"Improved reporting on the deduplication and compression functionality would be beneficial."
"The only thing is that we've had to upgrade controllers a few times because we ended up wanting to use more stuff on here."
"When it comes to Everpure FlashArray ports shown in the GUI, it would be better if, when one of the Pure array ports went down, there was a possibility to highlight that particular port which has gone down."
"Pure will probably have to move to other layers of the stack, not only storage but, maybe, hyperconverged."
"The price of this solution is high and should be lowered."
"The price of the solution could be reduced."
"The legacy file system for Epsilon didn't scale into the cloud and didn't have a separate OS. It would be key if this was made possible."
"I'd like to see more Iceland products in the cloud so that we can port our data into different environments if needed. I would also like to see a virtual appliance or software-defined Iceland product."
"We have issues in Brazil with the procurement of solutions because we have to check the entire market and justify the pricing to our audit institutions, making it difficult to keep with the same vendor."
"Because of the magic that it does 'under the hood,' it is very difficult to find out within the system where all your storage is going. That's a little bit of a ding that we have on it. It does so much magic in order to protect itself from drive failures or multiple drive failures, that it automatically handles the provisioning and storage of your data. But by doing that, finding out why a file of a certain size, or a directory of a certain size, is using more storage than is being reported in InsightIQ, is very difficult to discern."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) could be improved, particularly the UI, which could use some polishing as far as ease of use for the customer."
"One downside of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is that it is really complicated to configure."
"The product’s expansion capacity, pricing clarity, and ease of use need improvement."
"What could be improved in Red Hat Ceph Storage is its user interface or GUI."
"While the documentation for Ceph Storage is helpful, it could be improved."
"The management features are pretty good, but they still have room for improvement."
"I've heard the integration with OpenShift is great, however, the licensing cost is excessively high."
"Ceph is not a mature product at this time. Guides are misleading and incomplete."
"The product lacks RDMA support for inter-OSD communication."
"This product uses a lot of CPU and network bandwidth. It needs some deduplication features and to use delta for rebalancing."
"Ceph Storage lacks RDMA support for inter-OSD communication. That is a huge loss in terms of performance."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"While more expensive than NetApp, Pure Storage FlashArray offers superior performance that often justifies the higher cost and adds value overall."
"The guaranty that Pure Storage provides when you purchase it doesn't meet the overall capacity needs to provide extra storage, if needed. Thus, it is not meeting our expectations."
"When we bought the unit, we bought per capacity. So, the licensing is per capacity, and the only thing that we have to buy every year or every three years is maintenance. Included in that maintenance is the upgrade of the controllers every three years at no cost to us."
"The best features come included without any additional cost."
"You get what you pay for. It is expensive, but it really works."
"I have had a couple of customers who have complained about the cost. It can be a little more expensive than some of the other platforms. After it has been installed, I have never had a customer say, "I wish we wouldn't have spent all that extra money." They have always been happy with the product after it has been installed. They might be on the fence about it because of the price, but everybody who I have ever seen install it, they are always happy with it."
"All storage is expensive so any price improvement would help."
"We do not incur additional costs beyond the licensing fee."
"It's a high-cost offering amounting to three or four million Swedish kronor, or about $400,000 or euros, for approximately 480 terabytes of storage."
"This solution is priced slightly higher than others on the market but does offer good quality. With this solution's data reduction and compression, we were able to purchase less. Costs have dropped because of the data rate of compression and deduplication."
"Our company finds the pricing high, but it decreases over time."
"It is an expensive product with a high storage capacity suitable for large data requirements."
"The only drawback for us is that it's a large upfront investment. This was a huge decision for a startup company to make. It took a bit for us to get over the line on it, but we have not regretted it."
"The platform is not cheap. However, on the software side, you can choose what you want license. So, you can start your licensing with the features that you need, then after buying the platform add some other features."
"The price of the solution is high."
"Dell PowerScale is expensive on the start-up side but we can recoup those costs quickly by not having to reapply the savings to other equipment."
"The operational overhead is higher compared to Azure because we own the hardware."
"There is no cost for software."
"I rate the product’s pricing an eight out of ten."
"We never used the paid support."
"The other big advantage is that Ceph is free software. Compared to traditional SAN based storage, it is very economical."
"The price of this product isn't high."
"Most of time, you can get Ceph with the OpenStack solution in a subscription​​ as a bundle.​"
"The price of Red Hat Ceph Storage is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business69
Midsize Enterprise37
Large Enterprise157
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise51
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

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 needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
I do not have any improvements at the moment; I like how it is. I have nothing to add about needed improvements.
What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
I believe the support engineers need to improve their skills. In our case, the engineer provides adequate hardware su...
What is your primary use case for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
Dell PowerScale's primary use case for our organization is server virtualization.
How does Red Hat Ceph Storage compare with MiniO?
Red Hat Ceph does well in simplifying storage integration by replacing the need for numerous storage solutions. This ...
What needs improvement with Red Hat Ceph Storage?
Areas of Red Hat Ceph Storage that have room for improvement include more promotion. Many people do not know about th...
What advice do you have for others considering Red Hat Ceph Storage?
I do not have experience working with solutions such as Red Hat Ceph Storage and StorPool. I have plenty of experienc...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon
Ceph
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
OMRF, University of Utah, Translational Genetics Research Institute, Arcis, Geofizyka Torumn, Cyprus E&P Corporation, Colburn School, Columbia Sportswear, Harvard Medical School, University of Michigan, National Library of France,
Dell, DreamHost
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerScale vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
896,942 professionals have used our research since 2012.