Dell PowerMax NVMe vs HPE Primera comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Feb 23, 2023

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.

  • Ease of Deployment: Although Dell PowerMax NVMe is straightforward to deploy, some users experienced difficulties. HPE Primera is described as straightforward and easy to set up.
  • Features: Dell PowerMax NVMe has good performance and compression, replication, deduplication, snapshots, and provisioning are listed as valuable features. The product's drawbacks include its management, firmware updates, and GUI interface. According to its reviewers, HPE Primer is a stable solution with good performance, and IOPS, replication, firmware, and compression are listed as its most valuable features. The areas that require improvement are its storage options, interface, and features for integration and reporting.
  • Pricing: Dell PowerMax NVMe users dislike the licensing model and find the product expensive but worth its price. The opinions of HPE Primera reviewers vary, however, the prevailing estimation is that the solution has a competitive price and is cost-effective.

  • Service and Support: Users of Dell PowerMax NVMe and HPE Primera like their service and support but note that the time of replies can be shortened for both of them.

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.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. HPE Primera Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are the management view of the solutions, ease of provision, and deprovision, it is fantastic.""I find two features of Pure Storage most valuable. The first is the "safe mode" function, and the second is its simplicity.""Their REST API is wonderful, well-documented, and easy to use.""The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is its high stability level.""Has also helped simplify storage for us. The other person we put in there, took about a week to implement. And we had both arrays set up within around four hours with a thirty minute drive time between the two locations.""The most valuable feature is replication.""The most valuable feature is that maintenance is free.""The reliability is very good."

More Pure Storage FlashArray Pros →

"It was easy for teams to pick up the technology with very limited exposure and training, then implement and support it.""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.""Dell PowerMax NVMe has good scalability and performance.""The SRDF replication piece is probably the best feature. It's useful for maintaining recoverability in the event of a disaster.""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 optimization of the cache memory of each engine and the use of persistent memory.""The stability is amazing. Zero downtime reported over the last years.""The high availability that other systems don't have. In other systems, there is an owner in the storage processes. But for PowerMAX, there is no owner. All the process storage is passed to all nodes without ownership. So, there is no response feature in the storage in PowerMax. In the other systems, there is a response, which is a very nice feature. No systems have such a feature."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe Pros →

"One of the most valuable features is the ease of deployment.""There has been a lot of changes in HPE Primera OS, and most of the time any package related to it is simple to upgrade. It does not require any support for the operation. The customer can easily deploy any code directly from the GUI which is very good. Additionally, we have individual storage we can allocate and easily manage.""In my opinion, HPE is making good progress and moving ahead with InfoSight, which is predictive analytics and artificial intelligence.""The most valuable feature of HPE Primera is its performance and simple replication.""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 product's initial setup phase was easy.""The interface is simplified.""It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution."

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Cons
"It would be nice if Pure had something in its portfolio that provided higher deduplication and compression for backups.""This product has only two active controllers, whereas other solutions can have more. This is something that needs to improve.""The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN.""I would like the ability to swap out the network adapters into it. So, without taking out the whole controller, I would like to be able to swap adapters. This would make things easier.""I think replication is one area that still needs improvement. Earlier, Pure Storage FlashArray only had IP-based replication. There was no API-based replication, but they have enhanced the feature now. However, they need to work on API replication for C-type of arrays.""We have not seen a reduction in our TCO nor have we seen ROI.""The solution could improve by having a multi-tenant feature.""We would like to see more development on their Copy Automation Tool (CAT) for Oracle, as well as better integration for our customers running Oracle VM."

More Pure Storage FlashArray Cons →

"I'd like to see the dedup and compression improve. Two to one is not very good. We should be getting something like three, four, or five to one.""I would like to see more development in the cloud environment. It would be good if it comes in the cloud kind of setup.""I would like the scalability to improve, as it requires additional footprints.""The initial setup was complex, and we had experienced people working on it.""The technical support is lacking. We are working with Dell EMC to get some better understanding of this.""Setting up PowerMax with VMAX is always complex.""Since the merging of EMC and Dell into Dell Technologies, there has been a hurdle that they've had to overcome, and they're not over it yet. It takes two to three times longer for things to get fixed than it did when they were separate companies. That is something that has to be fixed.""Dell should work on their marketing strategies to make the product more visible on the market. They should promote the product's compatibility with IBM, as not everyone knows it."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe Cons →

"HPE Primera is not good enough as a storage solution as it does not provide a good NAS storage.""The IOPS and throughput could be better. That's the only drawback compared to other vendors.""The solution could improve by having seamless migration from other storage systems. The process should be made easier.""Primera should be more user-friendly.""We would like to have more flash storage and its stability. This is an area of challenge for us.""Only HPE can manage the product.""We cannot use this storage for critical applications and data.""The product’s price needs improvement."

More HPE Primera Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "We feel that the pricing is fair and the licensing process was easy for both."
  • "There is always room for negotiation."
  • "The price was slightly higher than others, but competitive, if you consider all the other features that you get from it."
  • "It is a more expensive solution, but it is worth it. You are getting what you paid for."
  • "For pricing, you have to take into account their performance on deduplication and compression in a $/GB comparison."
  • "We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO)."
  • "It is a cheaper solution."
  • "Pure Storage is all-flash, so this sometimes tends to make it a bit more expensive in the beginning."
  • More Pure Storage FlashArray Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Our costs for the product are three million."
  • "From reclaiming data center space which is so tightly constrained these days, it will pay for itself in a short amount of time, which is fantastic. Anything we can do to get more out of our current physical data center space helps us a ton, and PowerMax has helped enable that."
  • "Our costs are on a yearly basis."
  • "It scales enormously, but it's expensive to do so."
  • "From a general capital investment, it's one of the higher price points in the market. It depends on the size and software features that you would include in a system. So, the cost varies dramatically."
  • "The cost has room for improvement."
  • "The cost is expensive. While VMAX now has good pricing, PowerMax is a little expensive."
  • "We hope that with the combination of both NVMe and SCM the next PowerMax will be much cheaper that the one which we acquired."
  • More Dell PowerMax NVMe Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The price of this solution is good for medium-sized and large businesses."
  • "From what I see, this is competitively-priced and HPE are doing their best to stay competitive."
  • "The price to capacity ratio is good."
  • "It is basically in the mid-range of the price. It is not cheaper than Hitachi, but it is cheaper than Pure Storage. There are no additional costs. Everything was taken care of in the price."
  • "Licensing fees are billed on a yearly basis and the cost of GreenLake service is included."
  • "I believe HPE Primera and Pure Storage are similar in price."
  • "There is only a one-time license purchase needed and no additional costs. If HP could reduce the training cost, then that would be advantageous to the seller."
  • "The price of HPE Primera could improve, it is expensive."
  • More HPE Primera Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure… more »
    Top Answer:We consume less physical storage because of the solution’s deduplication and compression.
    Top Answer:We have customers who use a three-year or five-year license. We also have customers who use Evergreen.
    Top Answer:Dell PowerStore is an all-solid-state midrange storage system. It has many internal elements taken from other Dell… more »
    Top Answer:First, it's an enterprise storage solution. This is very important for us. Another important feature is replication.
    Top Answer:The pricing is comparable to other vendors. There aren't significant price differences. Since the price is high, a few… more »
    Top Answer:HPE Nimble is a versatile synced WAN San solution. It is easy to use and doesn’t require much training for admins. The… more »
    Top Answer:HPE Primera has many great features but one of the best is that it is very easy to deploy. From an overall perspective… more »
    Top Answer:For over a year, I have not seen any downtime in the product.
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerMax
    Primera
    Learn More
    Overview

    Pure Storage FlashArray is the world’s first enterprise-class storage array that runs exclusively on the nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) protocol for memory access and storage. It represents a totally state-of-the-art type of storage technology. It offers users shared accelerated storage that delivers cutting-edge features in the realms of performance, simplicity, and consolidation. Pure Storage is fresh and modern today and will be for the next decade. Without forklift upgrades or planned downtime, Pure Storage takes the work out of storage ownership and delivers unprecedented customer satisfaction.

    Pure Storage FlashArray is built with simplicity and reliability in mind. The solution can be implemented and optimized in hours, as opposed to other similar solutions that can take days. It has no moving parts, which removes areas where it could potentially be vulnerable to suffering errors. It is highly stable and gives users the ability to manage system shutdowns in a way that  prevents data loss.

    Benefits of Pure Storage FlashArray

    Some of the benefits of using Pure Storage FlashArray include:

    • A much higher level of speed than similar pieces of technology. Pure Storage FlashArray maximizes the speed at which data can be transferred while at the same time minimizing system latencies that might slow the transfer down. Additionally, it offers users quick memory read and data access speeds.

    • A higher bang for your buck in terms of the storage capabilities you get for the money you pay. They are smaller in size than more standard storage technologies, but they offer flash memory, which enables users to store larger amounts of data than the current standard.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Pure Storage FlashArray is a highly effective piece of storage technology which stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its overall robustness and the value that it offers by way of its reliability and ease of use. It provides users with many valuable features that allow them to maximize what they can do with this solution. Pure Storage FlashArray’s reliability and ease of use make it a highly valuable solution. 

    PeerSpot user Prabakaran K., a technical consultant at Injazat Data Systems, notes the robustness of this solution when he writes, "FlashArray has many valuable features. It's very user-friendly and it has high availability, so there is comparatively less downtime. During maintenance, there is no shutdown procedure, so you can directly power off the Array and manage the shutdown process without any data loss, which is a unique feature. Managing replication and data migration is also very easy."

    PeerSpot user Jason D., a cloud solutions architect at a tech services company, notes three features that make this solution valuable when he writes, "We've had different types of storage, and three things of this solution are valuable. The first one is its outstanding performance. The second one is its stability. In the about three years that we've had it, we've had component failures, but we never had a service interruption or any data loss. The third one, which is really critical, is that it is super easy to use in terms of provisioning, storage, and managing the arrays. I'm able to maintain a multi-site environment with a couple of dozen arrays with a single mid-level storage admin."

    Dell EMC PowerMax is the world’s fastest storage array. With end-to-end non-volatile memory express (NVMe), real-time machine learning, seamless cloud mobility, and up to 350GB per second bandwidth, PowerMax features high-speed smarts to power your most critical workloads. PowerMax is true modern scale-up and scale-out storageת designed for mission-critical applications of today and tomorrow – including databases and transaction processing applications as well as real-time analytics workloads that demand uncompromising uptime and extremely low latency.

    PowerMax consists of two models, PowerMax 2000 and 8000. The PowerMax 8000 delivers industry-leading performance density with up to 7.5 million IOPS5 per rack and 187,000 IOPS6 per U (rack unit). PowerMax supports mixed open systems, mainframe, IBM i, block, and file environments. The PowerMax 2000 is the entry point into mission-critical storage, high availability, and delivering robust data services in a safe, secure compact package.

    PowerMax systems incorporate the most current and robust end-to-end NVMe technology with industry-standard NVMe flash drives, NVMe storage class memory drives, and FC-NVMe host connectivity via NVMe over Fabrics. PowerMax SCM, powered by dual-port Intel® Optane™ technology, offers rapid-fire fast performance and secure low latency ideal for electronic trading, real-time analytics, high-performance databases, and big data workloads.

    Features of Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe

    Robust architecture with amazing performance combines demanding mixed workloads.

    • Built-in machine learning automates data placement for maximum performance with no additional management cost.
    • Very secure end-to-end dynamic encryption safeguards digital assets with 3.5:1 data reduction, guaranteed by Dell Technologies.
    • Seamless cloud mobility pushes data from PowerMax to AWS, Azure, Dell EMC ECS, and PowerScale for long-term retention on lower-cost object storage.

    Benefits of Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe

    Powerful Architecture

    • Designed for speed – robust multi-controller scale-up, scale-out architecture with built-in end-to-end NVMe.
    • Performance optimized – up to 350GB/s sustained bandwidth2, under 100µs read latency3.
    • Efficiency without compromise – global inline data reduction with guaranteed 3.5:1 average DRR4.

    Simple Operations

    • Intuitive storage management – provision storage in less than 30 seconds.
    • Workload consolidation – outstanding consolidation of block, file, mainframe, IBM i storage on a single array.
    • DevOps automation and containers – workflow automation and streamlined IT processes (vRA, vRO, CSI, CSM, Kubernetes).
    • Non-disruptive data migration – initiate data migrations from older arrays to PowerMax in three simple steps.

    Trusted Innovation

    • Mission-critical availability – proven six nines availability and the best replication for business continuance, disaster recovery (BC/DR).
    • Deep VMware integration – mission-critical availability and the most efficient scalability for VMware Virtual Volumes deployments (64,000 vVols).
    • Flexible consumption – several options, predictability, and investment protection with pay-per-use solutions and Future-Proof guarantees.

    PowerMax sets the standard for data storage today. It is uniquely, intuitively designed with a multi-controller, active/active scale-out architecture, an industry-standard, end-to-end NVMe. Inline, global dedupe and compression add outstanding efficiency to your data center, even while scaling. Additionally, PowerMax offers you the best in remote replication, proven six nines of availability, and end-to-end efficient encryption so that your data is always secure and your resources are fully optimized.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Ahmed K., a senior storage systems engineer at a pharma/biotech company, says Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe has “secure, fast performance, and good reporting capabilities.”

    Nikolay M. a lead system administrator at Central Hospital of Civil Aviation shares that with PowerMax, “we have not yet hit the ceiling in its efficiency, performance, and scalability… Now, with PowerMax, everything runs smoothly.”

    “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… We are saving dozens of hours per month for our storage team, and that is a real cost in our business," adds Paul C., a Senior Solution Architect at Rackspace.

    HPE introduces HPE Primera, a new storage platform designed to deliver superior simplicity, availability, and performance for mission-critical applications
    HPE Primera advances the HPE Intelligent Data Platform, a portfolio of products and solutions designed to help customers transition from delivering storage to unlocking business value with intelligent data

    Sample Customers
    Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
    Rackspace, Open Line
    Information Not Available
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Healthcare Company12%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Computer Software Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization31%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    REVIEWERS
    Healthcare Company23%
    Financial Services Firm21%
    Retailer10%
    Comms Service Provider10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Government8%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company29%
    Financial Services Firm24%
    Comms Service Provider10%
    Government10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization38%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Financial Services Firm6%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise57%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise40%
    Large Enterprise42%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise63%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise65%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business47%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise34%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise47%
    Large Enterprise36%
    Buyer's Guide
    Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. HPE Primera
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. HPE Primera and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    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, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and Dell VMAX All Flash, whereas HPE Primera is most compared with HPE 3PAR StoreServ, HPE Nimble Storage, Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF and HPE Alletra. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. HPE Primera 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.