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Dell PowerStore vs NetApp AFF A-Series comparison

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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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
4th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
218
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Dell PowerStore
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
188
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (4th), NAS (2nd), Enterprise SAN (1st), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (1st)
NetApp AFF A-Series
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
20th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise SAN (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Everpure FlashArray is 7.5%, up from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerStore is 10.8%, down from 17.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF A-Series is 0.8%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Dell PowerStore10.8%
Everpure FlashArray7.5%
NetApp AFF A-Series0.8%
Other80.9%
All-Flash Storage
 

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.
reviewer2304864 - PeerSpot reviewer
Vmware Windows Senior Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Resilience has supported proactive management and secured audit readiness across multiple sites
The resilience in Dell PowerStore benefits my company from an auditing perspective because we know we have that resilience in place. I see Dell PowerStore playing a bigger role in the future because we are starting to use it more, and that is pushing it. The biggest return on investment for me when using Dell PowerStore is scalability. Scalability is key. I can amplify that scalability is the biggest return on investment because we have redundancy between two sites; if something goes down, we have to manage it, but we want to do it proactively.
Raymond Ciscon - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at MacLean-Fogg Company
Gives us the foundation to grow efficiently
We're a manufacturer. All of our ERP software is dependent upon fast performance and connection to this hardware. So when there was an issue years ago when something was wrong or slow, that prompted us to say, "Can we check storage? Can we check the network?" Ever since we've gone up to all-flash FAS systems, there's never any questions about performance when it comes to storage. There's been a huge leap from spinning disks to SSDs. I'm hoping with the next update, we'll go to NVMe and we'll have similar experiences. Last year, we refreshed the SAN at our headquarters. We signed a Keystone agreement with the ability to pay for storage as a service at an excellent price point yet still have the hardware on-prem. I manage the hardware, and, for me, it's the best of both worlds. We've just come up with a situation where, finally, after some time, we're going to need to buy some additional storage. In previous situations like this, it usually meant the purchase of an additional shelf at a large price. Now we have Keystone, and we're locked in at that price per tebibyte. We just have to say that we want to add 25 tebibytes and they take care of it. It's worked out really well. We work ISO 27001 certified. Since I manage the enterprise storage, we use SnapMirror, and we're currently using Veeam for backups. Thanks to what this tool provides, we are able to get through that portion of our certification without a problem. No changes, no rectifying. It's very slick. Our company's goals include maintaining a level of consistency. We're never going to be on the bleeding edge. We're never going to have the super fastest abilities. We want something that works, is easier for us to manage, and has a better growth path. For us, in the past, in the need for additional disk space, if we didn't do the sizing right in the first place, buying additional disks was incredibly expensive. Now, with Keystone, that's no longer an issue, and that's what we like.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is an easy to use product for all of my team members."
"We saw a vast improvement when we switched over to using the Pure Storage model over the XtremIO."
"Remote assist is a valuable feature that supports customers and engineers in troubleshooting and resolving issues, allowing for easy problem identification and repair."
"The stability of Pure Storage is very very good."
"The stability and performance are the best things about the solution."
"The solution is very reliable."
"The deduplication and compression rates are beyond impressive."
"At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way."
"It's a great product. Integrating PowerStore with the IT workflow is easy."
"To growth and business success, Dell PowerStore contributes definitely because the appliances have these expansion enclosures and scale-up and scale-out work pretty well with Dell PowerStore, up to a certain degree."
"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is the all-NVMe flash storage. This is the most powerful feature of this series. It supports compression and duplication leads."
"Overall, I rate Dell PowerStore a ten out of ten."
"The features I like most about Dell PowerStore are the reliability, the time, and the performance."
"The cybersecurity features and data resiliency of Dell PowerStore are strong, confirmed by a white-hat hacking test."
"The most valuable features of PowerStore are its density and data reduction."
"The product is reliable and stable."
"The deduplication and compression options from NetApp AFF A-Series are good to use for efficient storage capacity."
"The amazing thing is that whenever we have come up with an issue where we need to get something done, and it wasn't necessarily available, they could do things for us, usually within the next revision of the software."
"NetApp support is fantastic."
"NetApp AFF A-Series is faster and more robust compared to the all-flash storage of NetApp."
"NetApp's hot and cold storage are its most valuable features. We currently use the A series. Immutable snapshots are another advanced security feature that is positive."
"MetroCluster is the best product on the market. It synchronizes the storage. NetApp's update packages are a huge advantage because the firmware and server updates are in one package."
"NetApp's inline deduplication and compression are unmatched compared to other vendors."
"NetApp helps us get the fastest output."
 

Cons

"In the next version of this program, I would like to see increased security, higher encryption, and faster throughput."
"Its price could be cheaper. It is not the cheapest one out there, but I'm not directly involved in the figures and negotiations."
"When creating a support case, visibility should be extended to others involved in assisting."
"The connectivity needs improvement. You do not have the possibility to have a file and block connectivity at the same time on the same machine."
"One requested enhancement yet to manifest is the scheduling of snapshot replications."
"A minor issue that comes to mind is that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad."
"I would not say anything because we still do not use Everpure FlashArray fully."
"The only time that we had problems with it was that there was a bug in the VVol implementation but, outside of that, it has been flawless."
"The storage could be improved. I would like a feature for how to best secure an appliance and the storage since we are connecting the container to the public cloud."
"The solution’s security and technical support could be improved."
"As a partner, I'd like to be added to each customer's CloudIQ to take a look."
"Improvements could be made in the replication solutions of Dell PowerStore. Even though replication between Dell PowerStores is possible, high latency connectivity is problematic."
"Many customers are looking for a cyber recovery feature included in PowerStore. We would like to see this added in a future release."
"Personally, I feel that Dell PowerStore is a little bit costly in the market compared to other products, but this is just my personal perspective."
"The management UI is pretty decent and gets the job done, but the upgrade process is challenging."
"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."
"The solution's ransomware protection could be improved."
"NetApp is shifting to the cloud and adopting AI, but it is not improving its core technology to deliver faster storage. We're still waiting to see if it improves speed with solutions like the 90 series."
"NetApp AFF A-Series should work on cost. The solutions, especially enterprise-level storage, should be more affordable to improve their appeal to businesses."
"It would be helpful if our partner organized a yearly session with my team to discuss the new feature sets on our current solutions and other ways NetApp can help us. Perhaps we are missing some information to help us make the right decision."
"We have several problems with the limitations of NetApp systems in terms of volume shares. We have a brick in a 700 or a controller, and we sometimes make small volumes, but Kubernetes container volumes don't allow us."
"Pricing could always be lower."
"I really don't have a lot of complaints. In the past, there were issues, however, they've really done a great job of reaching out."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pure Storage has not helped to reduce our HANA licensing costs."
"It's a good price point and it's a solid product for the price."
"We purchased a license to use this solution and we pay for the storage ourselves."
"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."
"Pure came in at a better price point than EMC and performed better than Compellent."
"It was less expensive than some of the alternatives. It's not as though it was a premium price to get that kind of quality. It's a very competitive product from a price perspective..."
"It is light years beyond anything else with the same price point."
"Dell and Pure Storage offer competitive pricing, but Pure Storage might have a slight advantage."
"Licensing is very simple. Everything is included in the basic license. There are no concerns about having to pay to add a feature. Everything is there."
"PowerStore's pricing is reasonable."
"Dealing with the licensing part of the product is very simple, especially considering the fact that we don't have many licenses associated with the tool."
"The solution’s pricing is always too high."
"It is expensive compared to one of its competitors."
"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."
"Dell PowerStore charges for the hardware warranty every three years. The price will depend on the storage model or how much hardware it has."
"The pricing structure and licensing model of Dell PowerStore are pretty decent. It's pretty competitive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business66
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise152
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business61
Midsize Enterprise37
Large Enterprise92
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Large Enterprise8
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
The only issue is the pricing. Because we have competition, our customers always take another brand and say they can ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
Our customers using Dell storage also use competing solutions. Our customers who have Everpure FlashArray may also ha...
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 needs improvement with NetApp AFF A-Series?
NetApp is doing great with cloud integration; however, there may be room for improvement in integrating with existing...
What advice do you have for others considering NetApp AFF A-Series?
It would be great to see some automation from NetApp. I rate NetApp AFF A-Series a nine out of ten.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp AFF A-Series?
With respect to pricing, NetApp can be competitive but hasn't been explored to a large extent.
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
PowerStore
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
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Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerStore vs. NetApp AFF A-Series and other solutions. Updated: May 2026.
893,438 professionals have used our research since 2012.