No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

DDN IntelliFlash vs Dell PowerMax comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
3rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
231
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
DDN IntelliFlash
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
31st
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (15th)
Dell PowerMax
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
5th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (3rd)
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
Anil Rahulwar - PeerSpot reviewer
L3 Storage Engineer at Capgemini
Good customer service and support and suitable for large environments
It is very easy to install. Users don't need to remember anything while deploying IntelliFlash because everything will be taken care of by tech support. They can easily modify the installation or change the password with the help of the tech support. It is very easy to integrate IntelliFlash with other solutions. We have plugins that can be integrated with other solutions. It will require maintenance. It is the same as any other storage solution: updates and upgrades, firmware upgrades, and drive upgrades.
Gouranga Maiti - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Project Manager IT at ITC Ltd
High‑performance all‑flash storage has transformed data warehousing and reporting speed
The features of Dell PowerMax that I find most valuable so far include its all-flash capability, along with its performance, reliability, and efficiency. Additionally, it has snapshot-level features that allow me to take snapshots or backups within only a few seconds. There is no need to wait long, and unnecessary high bandwidth used for backup does not occur because I can take the whole snapshot backup within a fraction of a second. I have used the deduplication feature of Dell PowerMax. Deduplication and compression are very effective, so despite my large amount of data, the effective size is reduced due to this deduplication and compression, allowing me to store more data on the same storage. Regarding the impact of Dell PowerMax's real-time data encryption on my data protection strategies, I have not used that feature personally. However, in another department, my colleagues are using it, and they have not faced any performance bottlenecks due to data encryption. The encryption is very powerful, but I have not implemented that encryption in our database data warehouse systems since they are for internal use only, not exposed worldwide. At first, I faced several issues, and our report rendering complaints were quite annoying. However, now with Dell PowerMax storage's high IOPS handling capabilities, the output comes within a fraction of a second, making our users happy. Whatever our requirement or demand is, it has already been implemented in Dell PowerMax with its all-flash NVMe storage. New bricks can also be added if a size increase is required, allowing for additional bricks to be added as needed. Everything is in place; therefore, I do not think any other improvements are required. However, it is worth noting that Dell is continuously inventing and releasing more powerful types of storage. This results in increased reliability, enhanced data handling capabilities, improved deduplication ratios, and the fulfillment of more IOPS demand.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Pure Storage FlashArray is a good product with minimal management requirements once set up correctly and helped reduce our storage footprint from EMC."
"One of the features that my customers are really interested in is immutable snapshots. There are immutable snapshots to which your applications can be reverted back if you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or malicious attack. That's kind of a key deal, and it is one of the selling points I use to point out to my customers the value and the features that Pure Storage brings to the table."
"With Pure Storage, we don't see any latency or IOPS. It has been a very seamless integration."
"The reliability is very good."
"From the first test that we have conducted, we are very satisfied with this solution."
"We tested our VDI environment on this array and it performed flawlessly and boosted the user experience."
"It has been quite satisfactory in performance and scalability."
"Using this solution has improved our consolidation ratio and it saves us a lot of space."
"Ease of Use: Someone can learn it in only few hours Performance: Easy Tier is doing miracles Data Compression: Up to 80% space reduction in the database"
"Once we got this solution in there, we were able to get the reporting down from eight hours to under 20 minutes."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"EasyTier/hotcaching: Valuable because it allows greater performance than standard SAS disks Cheaper than pure solid state without needing to actively manage where the data is located."
"It's very fast. We were seeing read latencies of less than one millisecond. It is robust."
"Tegile All-Flash Storage Arrays deliver maximum performance, high density, compelling economics and it is ideal for latency-sensitive, business-critical workloads such as online transaction processing, real-time analytics, decision support, and data warehousing."
"We have been able to realize storage space savings for our virtualization environment and it has reduced our electricity usage by reducing the number of disks needed for the virtual environment."
"It has cut batch job runtime in half, so we're seeing performance improvement throughout the organization."
"The number one most valuable feature is reliability, as 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."
"The most valuable aspects include the remote replication features, as it allows us to protect our data using different data centers and replicate bi-directionally between our two main data centers."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the data reduction ratio."
"The most important feature or function in Dell PowerMax is the capacity to deliver the required IOPS."
"PowerMax is a good storage solution for the banking sector; choose it for your core banking system because of the dedupe and compression, the I/O, and the high availability for your data."
"The response time, compared to XtremIO, is far better."
"The solution is easy to use with applications that are user-friendly."
"The solution's technical support was good, and it is one of the tool's main advantages."
 

Cons

"The number of Filesystems is limited, which it is not on the EMC VNX."
"The price could be better."
"The scalability of the solution is not as good as it probably could be."
"Larger capacity and more storage ports would be the two things I'd like to see."
"In the configuration, which we brought in or tested it in, it has a very limited config as far as the array goes. That said, it still did more than our anticipation."
"The interface lacks the same level of control as some other arrays I've used."
"The difference in pricing could become a problem for Pure because the commoditization of the solutions could lead to a different price being a problem."
"The only time that we had problems with it was that there was a bug in the VVol implementation but, outside of that, it has been flawless."
"Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device."
"Technical support is bad. It'd grade them at 30% or 40%. The response time is terrible."
"The monitoring matrix and its dashboard need work."
"We had just one small stability problem with power flapping and it did not start up again automatically. We had to access service ports and manually restart the storage processors."
"They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."
"It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element."
"In future releases, I look forward to more AI features."
"I would say it's somewhat scalable, maybe not so much as some of the competition, but we don't really care."
"Dell PowerMax can be improved because there are very strict guidelines when it comes to installation and the amount of control a customer has."
"The initial setup was complex, and we had experienced people working on it."
"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."
"The REST API needs improvement. We are a very big automation company, and this would be big for us."
"The NVMe integration could be improved."
"Support pricing is very high. Our support contract is about to expire and Dell EMC provided us with an extremely high renewal quote."
"I would like to make some changes regarding scalability and the number of disks that the solution can be scaled versus the other competitors."
"My understanding is that Dell PowerMax is very expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"While it comes with a higher price tag, this investment often translates to significant improvements in performance."
"I think that the pricing is less expensive compared to other standard products in the market today. Even the support contract and maintenance services cost less when compared to market-leading products like EMC."
"The solution is expensive."
"All storage is expensive so any price improvement would help."
"There is an annual or perpetual license required for this solution."
"We do not incur additional costs beyond the licensing fee."
"It is cost-effective because after buying a subscription, they provide a service to upgrade hardware for free. They are providing so many features. When you consider the features provided, it is cost-effective."
"I would rate the pricing of Pure Storage FlashArray a five out of ten. It is expensive but not too much."
"I recommend the full bundle software in order to have all the functionality. It is more expensive to purchase it one by one."
"I think we pay around 100 grand per year for three arrays or four arrays."
"Its price is competitive, but they need to have a different price for West Africa. They can do better with the price point to allow us to scale even more. We wanted to migrate our entire storage infrastructure to PowerMax, which would require us to buy more capacity, and from the price point, it didn't attract us."
"Dell PowerMax NVMe's price is expensive."
"Dell is expensive compared to other products and I would rate its pricing a four out of ten."
"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."
"We hope that with the combination of both NVMe and SCM the next PowerMax will be much cheaper that the one which we acquired."
"The pricing might be a bit high for small organizations, so it's more suitable for larger enterprises."
"Dell offers various pricing models, including a pay-as-you-go option where storage is provided without upfront charges, billing only for used capacity. As a 360° partner, significant discounts are available."
"Our costs for the product are three million."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays solutions are best for your needs.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Construction Company
19%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
9%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business71
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise159
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise62
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I find the pricing of Everpure FlashArray to be quite high compared to other storage solutions; however, the reliabil...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
I believe we have covered the most important features; the architecture of Pure Storage is essential, and features su...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IntelliFlash?
It is a bit cheaper than other products, 10% to 20% cheaper.
What needs improvement with IntelliFlash?
DDN IntelliFlash should improve in terms of sales. In future releases, I look forward to more features about AI and M...
What is your primary use case for IntelliFlash?
We use IntelliFlash products for larger environments, like Qatar Airways. They have large scalability and use more th...
What's the difference between DELL EMC Powerstore and Powermax NVMe?
Dell PowerStore is an all-solid-state midrange storage system. It has many internal elements taken from other Dell of...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was great.
What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe?
Dell PowerMax can be improved because there are very strict guidelines when it comes to installation and the amount o...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
Tegile, IntelliFlash N-Series, IntelliFlash T-Series, IntelliFlash HD-Series
Dell PowerMax NVMe, Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerMax
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Bank of Stockton, Barnsley College, Boyes Turner, Brigham Young University
Rackspace, Open Line
Find out what your peers are saying about DDN IntelliFlash vs. Dell PowerMax and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.