We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and HPE Primera based 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, HPE Primera came out ahead of Dell PowerMax NVMe. Even though both products have multiple valuable features and similar support quality, users found complications with Dell PowerMax NVMe's deployment and dislike its licensing model, evaluating the solution as expensive.
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"The solution is scalable."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."
"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"The latency is good."
"The uptime is the most valuable feature."
"PowerMax NVMe has made it a lot easier to understand how much we are able to provision. It has made it a lot faster to provision new things. 90% of my time for provisioning has been reduced. Also, it has made it very easy to understand and see everything behind it versus the older heritage, where Dell EMC was very convoluted and hard to get working. Things that used to take an hour, probably now take five to 10 minutes."
"The stability is amazing. Zero downtime reported over the last years."
"We like the compression, dedupe, and I/O on the PowerMax. They are better than on the XtremIO."
"The number one most valuable feature is reliability. I want to go home at the end of the day and come in the next day knowing it works, especially since we have storage offshore."
"We are happy with the monitoring that Dell EMC is doing for us. They have helped us to identify many issues during the routine checks, issues which we were not aware of."
"The UI is very easy to use. We can add volumes and manage them easily."
"The optimization of the cache memory of each engine and the use of persistent memory."
"Primera's main advantage is its support for NVM drives and normal flash drives. It has some sort of AI analysis that automatically tells us how to optimize the performance."
"The product has better replication features than the previous products."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to provide the IOPS ratio which is required by a lot of our customers."
"It serves as the primary storage in my production environment."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the artificial intelligence for the storage inside of the software and firmware because customers do not like functionalities which require manual interruption."
"HPE Primera is stable."
"When taking into account the price, maintenance required, and performance of HPE Primera, it is an effective solution."
"We sold Primera to a public university, and they're happy with it. They have been using it for about four months with no significant problems."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"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."
"We need better data deduplication."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"I hear from people on my team that they would like improved reporting. While there are some decent tools for doing reporting, they would like to see a lot more built-in functionality. This way when they are logged into the interface everyday doing basic management tasks, they could also see some statistics on what is their storage pool usage and will be their projected usage with their current data growth. They want to be able to see more detailed stats on how they are using the system and have forecasting."
"There is room for improvement in the replication. It's an important requirement for us."
"PowerMax Storage needs improvement in the area of monitoring tools. It should have more functions and more complicated analysis options inside the monitoring tools."
"Although they call it unified storage where you have SAN and NAS, with a NAS implementation on top of a SAN, the NAS implementation is a little complicated and clumsy. As SAN, as block storage, it is very powerful... If they could provide a very good NAS implementation, it would be better, so that customers don't have to look for other simple solutions for NAS."
"We brought up this question to the implementation engineer. We were comparing use cases where a customer is using RecoverPoint, then goes to PowerMax. In our previous setup with XtremIO, we were using RecpverPoint and keeping snapshots for 30 days, every few seconds. With PowerMax, I requested this for every 15 minutes, keeping it for a week. The engineer's answer was, "There will be too many snapshots. It might slow down the system." This is specifically for the use cases where there is RecoverPoint. While PowerMax works with RecoverPoint, and you can use it, there should be some way where you can have even more snapshots and not to worry about performance and system cache."
"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."
"I would like a more informative CloudIQ for iOS. What you can see via the web UI significantly differs from what you can see via the web application."
"I would like to see continued visibility and analytics in the platform."
"One of the drawbacks of the model we purchased is that it is not running NVMe drives. Even though they say that it is NVMe-ready, it is still on the SSD drives. The model that we purchased has only eight hard drives, and only the ones on the top could work on NVMe. The rest of them are still on the SSD. Its competitors, such as EMC and Pure Storage, are moving or have already moved to NVMe. HPE should improve this solution for NVMe. HPE should also improve IOs in this solution. IOs in HPE are weaker than Hitachi and Pure Storage."
"We've encountered issues in the past where maintaining a read-only state is essential to prevent data encryption when VPN access is impacted."
"On the controller side, I would like to see NAS capabilities."
"HPE Primera's deduplication area is not as good as the one offered by Dell PowerStore, making it an area where improvements are required."
"We used to receive hardware errors a lot of times. The ambient temperatures rise rate was approximately 35 to 55 degrees, but when it was approximately 27 or 28, we used to get errors a lot."
"This solution would be expensive for small business and it could be priced more competitively for that market."
"There are certain shortcomings in the technical support offered by HPE where improvements are required."
"The initial setup is not straightforward."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while HPE Primera is ranked 7th in All-Flash Storage with 38 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while HPE Primera is rated 8.4. 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 HPE Primera writes "A highly stable and easy-to-configure solution that provides excellent features that enable smooth migration". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, whereas HPE Primera is most compared with HPE 3PAR StoreServ, HPE Nimble Storage, Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. HPE Primera report.
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