We performed a comparison between Dell EMC PowerStore and Pure Storage FlashArray based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Both products received high marks from users. Pure Storage FlashArray has a slight edge in the comparison due to its superior customer support.
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."
"The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"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 scalable."
"A particularly valuable feature is its simplicity."
"It provides a big benefit when upgrading a new VMware environment. For example, in a big environment with 10 to 30 ESXs, you can take everything and put that into PowerStore. So, it is cost-effective, which is very important and has been massive for us. You reduce almost 80% from the hardware and work directly from PowerStore. Building hardware, especially in a big VMware environment, is a big issue for my organization."
"Migrations are very easy and fast."
"The supportability of SCME drives for faster data access from the PowerStore and is the most valuable feature."
"The solution is stable."
"I find all of the Dell PowerStore features to be valuable."
"You can add compute and capacity independently. We have sized the solution based on our current needs, but in the future we can choose to increase capacity if we grow our activity in the market. And if we have more business in our monetary system, we can increase compute. The ability to choose what we increase is a good feature."
"Dell EMC PowerStore is scalable."
"This solution has helped my organization by cutting down on provisioning time. I used to have to provision a VM and it would take ten minutes. Now, it takes thirty seconds."
"The amount of throughput that we're getting is really nice."
"We also like the compactness, the small footprint. It takes up very little space in a data center and uses little power."
"We have tons of capacity on it."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is its high stability level."
"The compression and deduplication features help to make the best use of the capacity."
"The performance and the ever-growing maintenance are the most valuable features of this solution."
"It reduces space and the polar consumption. It also accelerates the application."
"The software layer has to improve."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"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."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"With PowerStore, we have to choose between block storage and NAS functionality."
"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."
"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."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"Dell PowerStore is a good solution overall, but some models could support hypervisors better by allowing for more customization and flexibility for customer needs."
"The pricing could be lower. It is very expensive."
"I have not seen anything specific. The only thing I can think of that needs improvement is the price."
"I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable."
"From a scalability perspective, it is a very small storage solution, so it's not very expandable."
"Just some nit picky stuff, like allowing servers and volumes to be grouped. Therefore, it would easier to work with them in the GUI."
"On a couple of occasions, the waiting time for an upgrade has been pretty substantial."
"They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet. This might be an area for additional focus as it would play into scalability, because the very nature of object storage is that it's infinitely scalable."
"They could improve the price."
"It would be good to have metrics of the box's performance so we can see what it delivers, but currently, I can't see what it's actually doing."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage with 47 reviews while Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 174 reviews. Dell PowerStore is rated 8.6, while Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Dell PowerStore writes "It has a very strong NAS that can support a lot of big, heavy environments". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Effective provisioning, helpful support, and reliable". Dell PowerStore is most compared with Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, NetApp AFF, Dell PowerMax NVMe and Huawei OceanStor Dorado, whereas Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem, VMware vSAN and Dell Unity XT. See our Dell PowerStore vs. Pure Storage FlashArray report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
