We performed a comparison between Dell EMC Powermax and Dell EMC PowerStorebased on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, our reviewers consider Dell EMC PowerStore to be a superior solution. The setup is simpler, and although the price is on the higher side, most users consider it to be worthwhile for the high performance.
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."
"The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"The solution is scalable."
"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"It has dramatically cut down the footprint in our data center and reduced the amount of raw disk capacity that we needed to purchase."
"The smaller footprint of the device has been really nice. We have gone from eight bays to one bay. Having one floor tile in our data center has been pretty awesome. A lot less power and HVAC cooling is being consumed."
"The SRDF replication piece is probably the best feature. It's useful for maintaining recoverability in the event of a disaster."
"It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"It's faster and more resilient."
"There is no management overhead involved in optimizing performance. It does it so well on its own. We don't have to manage much at all. It really is like a set it and forget it solution. My storage engineers love the system. It is a lot less work than our previous systems, which weren't bad by any means. There is not nearly as much management as before. So, we are saving dozens of hours per month for our storage team, and that is a real cost in our business."
"We're consolidating two to three arrays down to one which means that our data center footprint has decreased by like 90%. So we're saving 90% of our space, and it also is much better on power and everything else in our data center. And on top of that, the performance is much, much better than our older arrays."
"We are able to provide storage at the right service levels without overmanaging it."
"The solution is very easy to implement."
"The support is very good."
"The compression is excellent."
"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."
"Reliable, with comprehensive features and a well-established support base."
"Pricing is very good. It's very competitive against those of all the others that I looked at in the marketplace, such as Hitachi, IBM, HP, and Pure. 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."
"The PowerStore's compression ratio is even higher than the Unity system."
"It has its own file formatting protocol, which saves a lot of space."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"It is on the expensive side."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."
"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."
"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."
"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"There is some room to grow, especially with some of the installation quirks."
"The solution does not use new versions of OS and patches. Its installation is also difficult. The solution is not as fast as other storage in the market."
"We have issues that we don't know about, which Dell EMC fixes."
"I would also like to see a real-time, graphical view of metrics. I don't know how far back in time we can look, but if we could see the performance from two months or three months back, and how it is performing now, that would be helpful."
"The initial setup was complex, and we had experienced people working on it."
"They should work with the storage engineers to better tweak the management tools to give them improved visibility into their data."
"Firmware updates are a bit painful because you have to involve their support, as opposed to having the ability to do it yourself."
"Dell can improve the Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance. Sometimes, when we need to replace a component, the SLA says four hours, but for some reason, the technician doesn't arrive until the next business day or even six to eight hours later before the case is placed. So, focusing on respecting the SLA is where Dell could improve."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"I would like to see a Snapshot feature. Currently, it is unable to occupy the capacity."
"It needs more mature code."
"The only thing is that with PowerStore, we don't have a solution for the file object."
"The solution only does thin provisioning."
"The setup process could be improved. We had some issues regarding configuration and the time it took to do things. It wasn't specifically the people we worked with, but more the process and how it's done. They can work on that."
"The only area I can highlight for improvement is that the 4:1 data reduction target has not been reached. This may be due to an issue with Dell EMC's initial analysis of data compression. As a result, we have had to add new physical disks to reach our goal of total available disk space."
"When it comes to Dell PowerStore, I would like to see more integration and more security features included. It's unfortunate that the solution does not feature Flash trace."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 3rd in NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays with 66 reviews while Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays with 47 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while Dell PowerStore is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "Simplified storage provisioning for us, enabling us to assign any volumes in two to three minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell PowerStore writes "It has a very strong NAS that can support a lot of big, heavy environments". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and Dell XtremIO, whereas Dell PowerStore is most compared with Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, Pure Storage FlashArray, NetApp AFF and Huawei OceanStor Dorado. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell PowerStore report.
See our list of best NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors and best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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