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 stability is perfect. The reliability is 100% and the latency is always lower than 1 millisecond."
"The compression and deduplication features help to make the best use of the capacity."
"We consume less physical storage because of the solution’s deduplication and compression."
"Technical support is good."
"As soon as we introduced our first Pure Storage FlashArray, the first benefit was at least twice the performance increase. Our production databases simply ran twice as fast with no other change."
"This solution has improved our organization. In the past, we had reports that were taking up to two hours and after switching to SSD storage the overall processing power dropped to half an hour. The end users saw an immediate performance gain."
"It's reduced our overhead management time on storage, since it is so simple to get in and just provision a volume, present it to the host, and then you are done."
"The speed is the most valuable feature, along with the ease of getting it connected. We were able to get it online in less than a day."
"PowerMax, with version 9.02, which we installed recently, has some very good features, such as CloudIQ."
"We are able to provide storage at the right service levels without overmanaging it."
"The compression and deduplication are the most valuable features because of the cost savings."
"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerMax NVMe is its replication feature."
"The solution has good operability and easy scalability."
"You can use PowerMax for all workloads and consolidation. We have used it to scale thousands of VMs."
"We were able to move away from a middleware solution for high availability, going right to snapshots and data replication on arrays."
"The SRDF site-to-site replication for the volumes is the most important feature for us. That enables us to do site recovery and replication for our VMware infrastructure."
"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."
"Has a great mapping feature."
"The solution is very easy to implement."
"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."
"The deduplication functionality provided by the solution is fairly good. The speed offered by the product is enough for our organization."
"It is a stable solution."
"A particularly valuable feature is its simplicity."
"Its flexibility is valuable because we have had some moments where we had to adapt, and it has been quite flexible."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could be better."
"The setup needs to be improved the most. They can do a little more with the user interface, but the setup is what I would like to see made a bit easier."
"Larger capacity and more storage ports would be the two things I'd like to see."
"Currently, the solution fails to support file screening."
"The integration capabilities could be improved."
"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."
"The way Pure Storage does the controller storage warranty or replacement has been an issue for some people who just replace the controllers every couple of years, and that's where some of the confusion with pricing and support has come in. They should be clear on the way the controller replacements happen, as it is important to know whether or not you can get a good return on them, because it can be a little confusing."
"It is a bit expensive."
"PowerMax Storage needs improvement in the area of monitoring tools. It should have more functions and more complicated analysis options inside the monitoring tools."
"I would like NVMe to be end-to-end in the next release. Right now, it is not end-to-end."
"If the solution had more power-saving capabilities, it would be quite nice."
"The price cap of Dell PowerMax NVMe is very high."
"There are some stability issues that we just recently experienced. We hope the next release will solve these problems."
"Dell PowerMax NVMe needs to increase storage and improve scalability."
"We would like more documentation, a guide to the features of the PowerMax."
"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."
"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."
"It doesn't support SSD or Flash."
"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."
"It's also only supported with a limited amount of switches."
"The UI should be a little more user-friendly to manage."
"While using Dell PowerStore's interface in our organization, we sometimes miss out on some information."
"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 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage with 46 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, Huawei OceanStor Dorado, Dell XtremIO and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, whereas Dell PowerStore is most compared with Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage and Huawei OceanStor Dorado. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell PowerStore report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors and best NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.
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