Dell PowerMax NVMe vs Dell PowerStore comparison

Dell PowerMax NVMe and Dell PowerStore are both solutions in the NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays category. Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.5, while Dell PowerStore is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.7. Dell PowerMax NVMe holds a 8.8% mindshare in N, compared to Dell PowerStore’s 23.6% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Dell PowerMax NVMe users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Dell PowerStore users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Dell PowerMax NVMe and Dell PowerStore are two leading storage solutions in the market. Dell PowerStore seems to have the upper hand due to its advanced features and adaptable architecture.

Features: Dell PowerMax NVMe is known for its speed, reliability, and efficient use of NVMe technology, handling high I/O workloads efficiently. Dell PowerStore offers a versatile and scalable platform, advanced data services, and seamless integration across various environments.

Room for Improvement: Dell PowerMax NVMe requires more modern management capabilities, improved cloud integration, and better user interface updates. Dell PowerStore could improve its learning curve, offer more detailed documentation, and enhance the setup process for beginners.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell PowerMax NVMe is straightforward to deploy and supported by robust customer service. Dell PowerStore also enjoys positive deployment experiences but comes with higher complexity due to its advanced features. Both receive commendations for customer service, though PowerMax is seen as slightly more accessible during the initial setup.

Pricing and ROI: Dell PowerMax NVMe offers competitive pricing and strong ROI due to lower long-term costs and straightforward setup. Dell PowerStore, with higher initial investments, provides superior ROI over time due to its forward-looking features and flexibility.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell PowerStore Report (Updated: February 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell PowerStore

February 2025

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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

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 2.6%, down from 2.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerMax NVMe is 8.8%, down from 13.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerStore is 23.6%, down from 27.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill

Sales Manager at Multicomputos PR

Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature

One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.

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Haseeb Khalid Sheikh

Senior Manager Enterprise Solutions at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

End-to-end NVMe capabilities helps improve availability, performance, and capacity

The solution's most valuable feature is the data reduction ratio. You can store a 5:1 ratio of your data in Dell PowerMax NVMe. For example, if you have 200 terabytes of usable capacity, you can save up to five times of data on that capacity. That means you can save one petabyte of data on just 200 terabytes of usable capacity. The solution's end-to-end NVMe capabilities have improved our operations. Everything is fast, and you don't have to map your storage to old hybrid storage technologies. Our organization has experienced positive change, and the solution has improved our uptime, availability, performance, and capacity.

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Ken Boyer

Associate Director, Systems & Engineer at IQVIA

Reduces the footprint, is easy to use, and can handle heavy workloads

The systems I currently have in place are old, and their support is running out. They're at the end of their life cycle. One of the key improvements that PowerStore is going to bring is that it will enable me to shrink the physical footprint. I'll be going from 5 physical HP arrays, which are about 12 racks in size, down to 4 PowerStores, which can fit on one rack. As a result, I'll be able to shrink the footprint, save power, cooling, etc. I will also be able to improve the existing performance and longevity of the platform. When we put the PowerStore in for the Oracle database, it was previously on NetApp. The staff wanted to do snapshots but also clone, and then be able to clone from a clone to add it to another system. PowerStore enabled them to do just that. They not only got their performance back to where it needed to be from previously being on the NetApp array but also got some of the feature functions that they require for the application.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I appreciate the performance."

"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."

"The latency is good."

"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."

"The solution is very straightforward to set up."

"The solution uses newer technology for deduplication and compression."

"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."

"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"The solution's snapshot capabilities and replication are very good features. Snapshots are allowing us to quickly build analytical models directly from production data. This gives us amazing insights into market trends and allows us to build more effective trading algorithms. Replication offers us unparalleled levels of resilience."

"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."

"Uptime by far is the most important thing, and also the replication ability (SRDF). Most of the customers who need this type of availability also want the protection of multiple data centers, and it is able to easily switchover workloads to their other data centers."

"We are able to provide storage at the right service levels without overmanaging it."

"I am impressed with the tool's reliability since we see a few hardware failures with it. Also, the solution's replication configuration is good."

"The best feature is the protection - PowerMax NVMe is volume-based and replicates data, so it's very comfortable for us to use."

"My storage engineers are very happy with PowerMax. They are very pleased with the performance, decreased latency, and dependability. From the team, the RESTful API makes management so much easier for them versus the command line interface."

"We removed the need to observe whether we ran into issues with the performance of disks or number of IOPS. Previously, our Oracle Database would throw us performance errors. Now, with PowerMax, everything runs smoothly."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe pros

"It is very easy to use. Access is very friendly. It shows you a lot of important information at the first glance. It has been very easy to use."

"The software upgrades are all included for no additional charge."

"The most valuable features of Dell PowerStore are the support for NVMe and SCM, which provides end-to-end performance and high IOPS, minimizing latency. It is a full-fledged storage solution."

"A particularly valuable feature is its simplicity."

"Dell PowerStore is very simple to implement, and its user interface is very simple."

"The most valuable feature is that it is easy to use this frame. I am a SAN administrator, but I was able to train my colleague, who had only been a VMware administrator, on the PowerStore in about half a day. Now he's autonomous in assigning volumes and creating data stores..."

"The most valuable features of Dell PowerStore are the resilience, scalability, flexibility of expansion, and ease of managing the entire solution including the servers and storage."

"The most valuable aspects of Dell PowerStore are integration with VMware and reliability."

More Dell PowerStore pros

Cons

"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."

"One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them."

"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."

"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."

"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."

"Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution."

"Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive."

"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics should not incur extra charges."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"I believe it would be of great benefit to work on the customization of the pricing structure for different enterprises and their specific needs."

"Dell needs to offer more midrange storage options with enterprise-class features similar to the PowerMAX."

"The solution should include more AI features to make it smarter."

"The disadvantage of PowerMax is its cost."

"There is some room to grow, especially with some of the installation quirks."

"I would like NVMe to be end-to-end in the next release. Right now, it is not end-to-end."

"I would like to see more development in the cloud environment. It would be good if it comes in the cloud kind of setup."

"The NVMe integration could be improved."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe cons

"We'd like to see some improvements on the security side."

"The support team should have more people with experience in the solution's installation process, as it is one of the areas where I see certain shortcomings."

"There are certain shortcomings with the technical support team of Dell PowerStore, where improvements are required."

"The biggest area in PowerStore that needs improvement is the overall visibility within the ESX environment."

"There are some management issues in Dell PowerStore. I have managed several pieces of Dell PowerStore's hardware area, and I could feel that it was almost like a step back in certain areas when it came to the management interface."

"Reporting is an area that could be improved. It's very simplistic sometimes, and some of the very technical guys on my team want to see more of the details and be able to massage the report a little bit better."

"The price is on the higher side."

"We would consider this solution if the pricing is competitive with other options, as it offers a very good solution. However, the current price is slightly higher than the competition."

More Dell PowerStore cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."

"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."

"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."

"The tool's pricing is cheap; I rate it a six to seven out of ten. Most of our sales are not subscription-based. We sell the hardware, and customers keep using it. They only renew the service part annually. The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there."

"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."

"Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet."

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"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 tool is very expensive."

"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."

"The price is starting from $500,000."

"Dell PowerMax NVMe's price is expensive."

"The pricing might be a bit high for small organizations, so it's more suitable for larger enterprises."

"One area for improvement, one that everybody always comes to, is price... it's still quite expensive to purchase these big arrays... For us, the pricing doesn't make Dell EMC uncompetitive."

"The pricing is comparable to other vendors."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe pricing and cost advice

"The licensing for this solution is good and is in the mid-range tier."

"The price is high compared to the Tunisian market."

"The pricing structure and licensing model of Dell PowerStore are very good and I like it. We chose it because it was reasonably priced and met our requirements"

"It is expensive compared to one of its competitors."

"We only have a single machine and we are currently using half of the hard disk slots. We have asked for an upgrade for the rest of the hard disks but, from my point of view, it costs too much. We have 12 to 15 hard disks inside and if we try to upgrade only the hard disks, it costs the same as the complete system. This is something I don't understand."

"Dealing with the licensing part of the product is very simple, especially considering the fact that we don't have many licenses associated with the tool."

"We are happy with the pricing that we get from Dell."

"Pricing depends on the model and negotiation. Sometimes we manage to get good discounts, sometimes not."

More Dell PowerStore pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

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What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe?

First, it's an enterprise storage solution. This is very important for us. Another important feature is replication.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe?

The price is starting from $500,000. It's expensive.

See all answers

What do you think about Dell EMC PowerStore? Is it actually a new product?

PowerStore is flexible, scalable, simple, and performant with market-leading economics for a wide range of legacy and...

See all answers

How does Dell's EMC PowerStore compare with its EMC Unity XT?

Dell EMC PowerStore is a unified storage platform that has the added benefit of being scalable. The automated managem...

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What do you like most about Dell EMC PowerStore?

It's a great product. Integrating PowerStore with the IT workflow is easy.

See all answers

Comparisons

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 16% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 12% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 8% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 7% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

HPE Alletra Storage vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 10% of the time

Dell VMAX All Flash vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 8% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 5% of the time

Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs Dell PowerMax NVMe

Compared 4% of the time

More Dell PowerMax NVMe Competitors

Dell Unity XT vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 15% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 14% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 9% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 8% of the time

More Dell PowerStore Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

March 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe

March 2025

Download Dell PowerMax NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerStore

March 2025

Download Dell PowerStore product report

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerMax

PowerStore

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

Pure Storage

Dell PowerMax is the industry’s most secure mission-critical storage platform. With NVMe Dynamic Fabric technology, PowerMax breaks from traditional storage limitations, enabling seamless integration with cloud-native and legacy applications. Designed with a powerful scale-up and scale-out architecture, PowerMax supports mission-critical applications at scale with zero downtime and ultra-low latency. The latest PowerMaxOS 10 release harnesses AI-driven efficiencies for trusted performance, capacity, and security. By choosing PowerMax, you can trust in a secure, intelligent, and always modern storage solution that unlocks the full potential of your data to drive business success.

Dell Technologies

Dell PowerStore stands out for its high performance, flexibility, and easy integration with VMware. It offers notable data compression and deduplication capabilities while providing powerful NVMe support and machine learning to optimize IT operations.

Dell PowerStore is designed to offer a comprehensive approach to IT infrastructure by enhancing performance and simplifying management. It is particularly suitable for companies that require scalable solutions to increase compute or capacity independently. Featuring built-in intelligence, PowerStore allows efficient storage consolidation and reduced footprint, while integration with CloudIQ enhances monitoring and analytics. However, there are areas for improvement, such as stability, enterprise features, and the user interface. Pricing is high, and support responsiveness needs attention. Organizations primarily use PowerStore for VMware environments, storage, and data protection, supporting high-performance databases and VMware workloads. It is utilized in data centers for disaster recovery and hybrid setups.

What are the key features of Dell PowerStore?

Flexibility: Independently scales compute or capacity
High Performance: Offers powerful NVMe support and machine learning
Integration: Easily integrates with VMware
Data Efficiency: Provides data compression and deduplication
Simplified Management: Built-in intelligence for efficient storage management

What benefits should users consider?

Performance Optimization: Enhance IT operations with machine learning
Scalability: Increase compute or storage capacity as needed
Integration Potential: Improve efficiency with VMware and CloudIQ
Data Protection: Reliable for disaster recovery and hybrid environments

In industries like IT, finance, and healthcare, Dell PowerStore supports efficient data management and enhances infrastructure performance. Organizations leverage it to manage extensive data, streamline virtualization processes, and facilitate migration from legacy systems, while integrating cloud and on-premises infrastructures for improved operations.

Dell Technologies

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Rackspace, Open Line

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell PowerStore

February 2025

Free Report: Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell PowerStore

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