Pure Storage FlashArray and Dell PowerStore are both robust storage solutions with distinctive strengths and weaknesses. Pure Storage FlashArray is praised for its overall performance, whereas Dell PowerStore is recognized for its flexibility and scalability.
Features: Pure Storage FlashArray offers consistent high-speed performance, simplicity, and cost-effectiveness. Dell PowerStore provides scalability, integration capabilities, and extensive support resources.
Room for Improvement: Pure Storage FlashArray needs enhancements in data replication, reporting features, and integration flexibility. Dell PowerStore requires improvements in performance consistency, management tools, and has a higher initial setup cost.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Pure Storage FlashArray offers swift, hassle-free deployment and responsive support. Dell PowerStore deployment can be complex but benefits from comprehensive support resources.
Pricing and ROI: Pure Storage FlashArray is cost-effective due to its performance benefits and lower long-term costs. Dell PowerStore justifies its higher initial setup cost with its scalability and significant ROI potential.
Rather than Pure just saying it's Cisco's problem, call Cisco, they actually got on with a TAC engineer and talked us through it.
The guys in South Africa, and they're very, very good.
What I like about Pure Storage technical support is that when you enter a request, you immediately get a response.
If it's a serious issue, they respond in four hours.
With regard to post-deployment support, if we have any needs and call them, they respond within minutes.
I got an email within 15 minutes saying 'you had an unexpected node failure, and do you need help?'
Opening a case with Pure is a smooth process, and they prove to be reliable, even in severe cases where infrastructure issues arise.
I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center.
We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency.
We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC.
Overall, they need to make the system stable.
If a customer finds out SSD is not supported, they will look for another option.
If you want to delve into where your I/Os are going, the reporting might need more in-depth information to make informed decisions.
Integrating object storage into the FlashArray would benefit entry-level and SMB customers by offering a more unified solution.
I would like FlashArray to add reports that help us forecast our predicted resource needs based on current usage.
We also have an X90R2 with two petabytes of NVMe in it which fits in about six rack units of space.
We are able to push the X70 way past our current needs from a throughput and IOPS perspective – without any degradation on latency.
We have also performed storage and controller upgrades live with zero downtime.
The magic is that we could do that with the data in place, inside the frame, keeping the drive.
The design for scalability of the solution is perfect.
The most valuable features of PowerStore are its scale up and scale out.
The solution is highly scalable, particularly when there is a need to expand capacity.
I rate FlashArray's scalability nine out of 10.
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.
We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees.
Dell is right there in the mix as far as providing the best price point, as well as meeting the performance requirements that we have.
There are a lot of solutions similar to PowerStore in regards to networking capacity and their prices are very cheap compared to PowerStore.
Likely the cost is $400,000 whereas IBM may be $250,000.
The cost of Pure FlashArray is a bit high compared to peers, but its sustainability and features justify the price.
Despite having various series, the entry costs can remain high.
We have gone through multiple software upgrades, as well as completely non-disruptive hardware upgrades.
During the eight years, there have been no problems such as hardware failure or stopping.
There was one minor issue when the M70s were first released – but they have been 100% stable since.
We have not even had to call support since putting it into production.
Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.
I would rate the stability of Dell PowerStore a ten out of ten.
I have not encountered any significant issues, such as applying firmware that introduces bugs.
Going from a legacy vendor to Pure Storage, we saw reductions in MRP reports previously running at six hours going to 30 minutes.
The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance.
The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use.
One of the main characteristics of PowerStore is that it is like another piece of VMware, so you can run applications on top, applications that have direct access to the storage.
Dell's built-in intelligence is the best because it can also calculate how much data is needed for storage beforehand and if you need to add more drives or anything.
Another important feature is the power of this frame. It's very powerful. We have almost less than a millisecond of response time, all the time, even during backup windows.
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.
The Pure1 storage management lets us see the details about utilization and everything else for all 40 storage boxes in one place.
Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.
Dell EMC PowerStore is a midrange next-generation data storage solution. It is designed with a data-centric, intelligent, and adaptable infrastructure and helps consolidate storage and virtual server environments. The Dell EMC PowerStore platform includes two major configurations, including PowerStore T and PowerStore X. Dell EMC PowerStore enables you to deploy the appliance and consolidate data and applications and supports both flash and SCM Optane devices.
Dell EMC PowerStore Offers:
Dell EMC PowerStore Features
Some of the most powerful Dell EMC PowerStore features include:
Dell EMC PowerStore Benefits
Some of the benefits of using Dell EMC PowerStore include:
Reviews from Real Users
Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Dell EMC PowerStore users who are currently using the solution.
PeerSpot user Maurizio D., who is a CTO at Universita' degli Studi di Pisa, says it "Gives us flexibility, performance, and ease of use. It also has some very good compression capabilities. We were looking for a solution that was easy to install in our VMware environment, that was flexible. PowerStore X is a type of a VMware cluster that you install inside your environment. If you have a VMware environment, like we have in production, it's easy to install and use."
Another PeerSpot user, Jorg L., who is an IT Administrator at a construction company, mentions "For access from virtual machines, iSCSI, and NFS, it is very good. It helps increase performance."
"The administration tools take advantage of machine learning and make recommendations to the admins, and that makes the administration easier," says a Chief Information Officer at a computer software company. He also comments that “Overall, we've benefited from the dedupe, compression, and replication, the advanced technology, of this frame. It's all better than what we had in the previous generation of XtremIO appliances, and above what we were getting in the Dell EMC Unitys.”
Pure Storage FlashArray is the world’s first enterprise-class storage array that runs exclusively on the nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) protocol for memory access and storage. It represents a totally state-of-the-art type of storage technology. It offers users shared accelerated storage that delivers cutting-edge features in the realms of performance, simplicity, and consolidation. Pure Storage is fresh and modern today and will be for the next decade. Without forklift upgrades or planned downtime, Pure Storage takes the work out of storage ownership and delivers unprecedented customer satisfaction.
Pure Storage FlashArray is built with simplicity and reliability in mind. The solution can be implemented and optimized in hours, as opposed to other similar solutions that can take days. It has no moving parts, which removes areas where it could potentially be vulnerable to suffering errors. It is highly stable and gives users the ability to manage system shutdowns in a way that prevents data loss.
Benefits of Pure Storage FlashArray
Some of the benefits of using Pure Storage FlashArray include:
Reviews from Real Users
Pure Storage FlashArray is a highly effective piece of storage technology which stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its overall robustness and the value that it offers by way of its reliability and ease of use. It provides users with many valuable features that allow them to maximize what they can do with this solution. Pure Storage FlashArray’s reliability and ease of use make it a highly valuable solution.
PeerSpot user Prabakaran K., a technical consultant at Injazat Data Systems, notes the robustness of this solution when he writes, "FlashArray has many valuable features. It's very user-friendly and it has high availability, so there is comparatively less downtime. During maintenance, there is no shutdown procedure, so you can directly power off the Array and manage the shutdown process without any data loss, which is a unique feature. Managing replication and data migration is also very easy."
PeerSpot user Jason D., a cloud solutions architect at a tech services company, notes three features that make this solution valuable when he writes, "We've had different types of storage, and three things of this solution are valuable. The first one is its outstanding performance. The second one is its stability. In the about three years that we've had it, we've had component failures, but we never had a service interruption or any data loss. The third one, which is really critical, is that it is super easy to use in terms of provisioning, storage, and managing the arrays. I'm able to maintain a multi-site environment with a couple of dozen arrays with a single mid-level storage admin."
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