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.
"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."
"The main feature of Dell PowerStore is its support for NVMe as well as hybrid solutions."
"The PowerStore's compression ratio is even higher than the Unity system."
"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."
"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."
"For access from virtual machines, iSCSI, and NFS, it is very good. It helps increase performance."
"This solution is highly flexible and offers efficient online compression capabilities."
"Its flexibility is valuable because we have had some moments where we had to adapt, and it has been quite flexible."
"Migrations are very easy and fast."
"The deduplication and compression meet all of our system requirements."
"The first year, we started out with one or five terabytes and it took what was 20 terabytes of storage down to less than one terabyte."
"Pure Storage technology allowed us to automate tasks, reducing something which started as a 12-hour turnaround down to about 15 minutes."
"It has made working with storage as easy and simple as it should be."
"The solution has probably reduced my power use substantially."
"It is an easy to use product for all of my team members."
"Data deduplication features make it easier to manage storage and forecast growth."
"It is noticeably easier to manage than other appliances that we have."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"The software layer has to improve."
"It is on the expensive side."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."
"In fututre releases, some focus on anti-malware should be there."
"We are looking for the Dell PowerStore to become more mature to maximize our use cases."
"There are certain shortcomings with the technical support team of Dell PowerStore, where improvements are required."
"The cost of technical support is high."
"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."
"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."
"The support is not very good."
"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."
"The customer service and support are bad."
"In the next release of the solution I would like to see Vormetric native block encryption."
"It was a little costly. The price was ultimately higher than both of the other solutions that we evaluated. I'd say that's the only downside."
"The 3PAR SSD arrays that we have are still failing a lot so even though we're under warranty, we still have to get someone out and usually have someone troubleshoot so that usually adds onto the cost. With Pure, we've had a disc fail and we pop it out and you pop it in and it's good to go."
"When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller."
"In terms of the future, I have been excited by some of the copy data management stuff that they're talking about building into the environment. There are feature sets where I've done a lot of automation work. So, I am always looking forward to extensions of their API. They're also talking about a phone home centralized analytics database being used as a centralized management console with a list of new cloud features, but this doesn't seem finalized."
"Part of our company works on Dell EMC because Pure Storage did not have synchronous applications when we were purchasing our products."
"There are many features which need to be added, particularly on the replication side."
"Just some nit picky stuff, like allowing servers and volumes to be grouped. Therefore, it would easier to work with them in the GUI."
Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage with 46 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 HPE Nimble Storage, 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.
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