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Dell PowerStore vs Dell VMAX All Flash comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

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

Pure FlashArray X NVMe
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
15th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
Dell PowerStore
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (4th), NAS (2nd), Enterprise SAN (1st), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (1st)
Dell VMAX All Flash
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
24th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerStore is 17.5%, up from 15.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell VMAX All Flash is 0.6%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Brian Ricci - PeerSpot reviewer
It's constantly enhanced and has impressive reliability and data compression
The maintenance is a bit expensive. The service and support are there for three years, but after the third year, it is pretty pricey for renewal. I hope Dell addresses that. Everything is pricey these days anyway. It is not like the old days of Compellent. We used to be able to see the metrics for our customers. On Compellent, we could look up that customer and see all the metrics. That is not allowed for us now. We cannot do that anymore. I have to be explicitly allowed by the customer to do that, and some companies' security does not allow that.
BrijeshKumar - PeerSpot reviewer
With an easy initial setup phase, the tool is useful for multi-site replication and DR
The configuration part of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required. If the product is up and running after, if it goes down, my company has observed that there are multiple failures that occur in the tool, so it needs to be reinstalled from scratch. The tool should have an automated feature or an automated option to handle the aforementioned scenario, which one can simply go and reset, after which the tool should be reinstalled with the same configuration.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I appreciate the performance."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"It offers competitive performance, and the Evergreen storage model of Pure fits well with my organization."
"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"Its flexibility is valuable because we have had some moments where we had to adapt, and it has been quite flexible."
"PowerStore is easy to use. All the drives use soft encryption. To upgrade it, you download the app, and it runs by itself. It's very easy to deploy, share, and create volumes."
"It is very easy to use. Access is very friendly. It shows you a lot of important information at the first glance. It has been very easy to use."
"Reliable, with comprehensive features and a well-established support base."
"For access from virtual machines, iSCSI, and NFS, it is very good. It helps increase performance."
"The product's initial deployment phase has been straightforward."
"The use of NVMe is notable, and the speed and performance it provides are commendable."
"The deduplication functionality provided by the solution is fairly good. The speed offered by the product is enough for our organization."
"The most valuable features of VMAX are its performance and GUI interface."
"The ransomware protection feature is housed in a separate unit, specifically addressing the top twenty most critical threats."
"The product's initial setup phase was good."
"The snapshot feature has been precious for our testing processes, application development, and managing testing environments due to its efficiency and ease of use."
"It works very well."
"We haven't experienced any outages or core-level issues in the last ten years, making us comfortable with the storage solution."
 

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."
"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."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"There are some challenges with data encryption and reduction."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"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."
"It was very new when we first deployed it a year ago. Even the upgrade processes and knowing what to expect, as well as documentation, could be more robust."
"The customer service and support are bad."
"It would be helpful for us to have support for the S3 protocol because our main competitor has the S3 protocol in their system."
"The previous version of Dell PowerStore we used was easier to use compared to the current one. They have made it more cumbersome to handle, although it still works. It has become more complicated to manage."
"After the smooth launch of the product in our company, only the areas around upgrades are a bit problematic. In our organization, we face difficulties when updating the product."
"I do not like having to use VPLEX for synchronous replication, as opposed to having the store software built-in."
"During the installation phase, the licensing part was not straightforward. It was very difficult for the technicians, who are not trained Dell EMC technicians, to do the licensing because the information on their website is not straightforward... Eventually, I had to pass this task to our business partner and they did it for us."
"With PowerStore, we have to choose between block storage and NAS functionality."
"The scalability of VMAX is somewhat limited, especially in terms of cache scalability. We've had to procure additional engines to address this limitation."
"The configuration part of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"We encountered some challenges during large data migrations that could be addressed for smoother transitions."
"The scalability of VMAX is somewhat limited, especially in terms of cache scalability."
"There is room for improvement in the centralized administration."
"Improvements are needed in both partition recovery and scalability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive."
"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."
"The licensing is on a yearly basis."
"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."
"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
"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."
"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."
"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 solution's price was comparable to other products for the use case, size, and setup."
"PowerStore's pricing is reasonable."
"Dell PowerStore charges for the hardware warranty every three years. The price will depend on the storage model or how much hardware it has."
"We purchased it with a five-year warranty."
"The pricing structure and licensing model of Dell PowerStore are very good and I like it. We chose it because it was reasonably priced and met our requirements"
"The solution is expensive."
"We are happy with the pricing that we get from Dell."
"Dell PowerStore is more expensive than Dell EMC Unity All Flash. Dell PowerStore's performance metrics were way higher than what Dell EMC Unity All Flash offered."
"The price falls within the mid-range, neither inexpensive nor high-priced."
"It is not a cheap product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
24%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Government
7%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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 do you think about Dell EMC PowerStore? Is it actually a new product?
PowerStore is flexible, scalable, simple, and performant with market-leading economics for a wide range of legacy and...
How does Dell's EMC PowerStore compare with its EMC Unity XT?
Dell EMC PowerStore is a unified storage platform that has the added benefit of being scalable. The automated managem...
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 VMax?
The product's initial setup phase was good.
What needs improvement with Dell EMC VMax?
The scalability of VMAX is somewhat limited, especially in terms of cache scalability. We've had to procure additiona...
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
PowerStore
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Information Not Available
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Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerStore vs. Dell VMAX All Flash and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
847,862 professionals have used our research since 2012.