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.
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"The latency is good."
"The solution is scalable."
"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."
"Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"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."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"For access from virtual machines, iSCSI, and NFS, it is very good. It helps increase performance."
"The solution's technical support is excellent. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature of the solution for me is the deduplication part, especially since most of the servers in our organization are Windows-based servers."
"This solution is very useful to us as we use it internally for all of the services that we need. We use it as a lab and we showcase new technology to the customers and how it can help them going forward."
"When compared to Pure Storage, Dell PowerStore's cost was quite attractive."
"Dell EMC PowerStore is scalable."
"The solution is easy to use and has good performance."
"The way you're able to manage all your PowerStores as one solution is very good for us. PowerStore enables you to federate or cluster multiple appliances with automated load balancing. In terms of management, it's helpful that we can do it from a single interface where we're able to manage multiple PowerStores. When you have multiple PowerStores it works intelligently by running the workloads based on the needs of the infrastructure."
"It's simple, powerful, and ready to use."
"I never have to worry about its performance or if it is the root cause of an issue."
"We also like the compactness, the small footprint. It takes up very little space in a data center and uses little power."
"The stability and performance are the best things about the solution."
"The management is simple in Pure Storage FlashArray."
"Technical support is excellent. I've had very good responses from technical support. We had a couple of cases where we needed support. Some of the communications were purely over email and some has been an actual call to the service desk."
"It is easy to manage. You don't have to have the same people who used to manage the Dell EMC arrays because the solution is more intuitive."
"The speed is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"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 would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"In fututre releases, some focus on anti-malware should be there."
"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."
"It is on the expensive side."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"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."
"There is no Synchronize replication feature on the storage."
"The solution only does thin provisioning."
"We are happy with the service in general. The only thing would be the price of the platform."
"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."
"While using Dell PowerStore's interface in our organization, we sometimes miss out on some information."
"Could be improved by including a synchronizing feature for the file systems."
"Could use some additional automation."
"It is way in excess of what we need. If anything, we could see a bit more speed. I'm just comparing it with what some of my colleagues who are implementing their own systems do."
"A minor issue that comes to mind is that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad."
"The number of Filesystems is limited, which it is not on the EMC VNX."
"If we suddenly dump large amounts of data onto the storage system, it takes a while to process it."
"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."
"We would like to integrate it more with our backup solutions."
"They could improve the price."
"The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN."
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.
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.