Dell PowerMax vs Dell XtremIO comparison

Dell PowerMax and Dell XtremIO are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Dell PowerMax is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.9, while Dell XtremIO is ranked #22 with an average rating of 8.0. Dell PowerMax holds a 4.1% mindshare in AFS, compared to Dell XtremIO’s 0.8% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Dell PowerMax users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 80% of Dell XtremIO users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 18, 2025

Dell XtremIO and Dell PowerMax are competing storage solutions designed for enterprise environments. Dell PowerMax seems to have the upper hand with its advanced capabilities and performance, making it a strong contender for complex setups.

Features: Dell XtremIO offers simplicity, inline data deduplication, and consistent performance. It supports virtualization platforms and provides robust snapshots. Dell PowerMax provides adaptable infrastructure, inline deduplication and compression, and AI-driven monitoring, supporting high availability and extensive connectivity options.

Room for Improvement: Dell XtremIO could improve in handling complex enterprise requirements and offering advanced AI features. It also lacks extensive connectivity options found in more advanced solutions. Dell PowerMax could enhance its deployment simplicity and streamline its customization options. It might benefit from clearer cost management tools given its higher initial investment. More intuitive user interfaces could improve the setup process.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell XtremIO is recognized for its straightforward setup, which supports rapid deployment. Dell PowerMax has a more intricate deployment process due to customization options but offers comprehensive support services, which benefit long-term use through its robust infrastructure.

Pricing and ROI: Dell XtremIO features a lower entry cost with a quicker ROI due to efficient storage and reduced upfront investment, though costs may increase with expanded use. Dell PowerMax, despite a higher initial cost, provides substantial ROI over time with performance, scalability, and reduced operational overhead, making it a cost-effective option for enterprises seeking superior performance and scalability.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerMax vs. Dell XtremIO Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax vs. Dell XtremIO

June 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 860,168 peers since 2012

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 July 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerMax is 4.1%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell XtremIO is 0.8%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage

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.

Read full review

MayankChauhan

Lead Consultant - Cloud & Infrastructure Services at Infosys

Delivers essential support and performance for intensive operations in real-time environments

Our infrastructure is spread across the private as well as a public cloud. Our requirement was that the IOPS latency should not be more than one millisecond. If anything goes beyond one millisecond, it's a problem for us. We wanted a system that could handle the transactions and meet our latency requirements. There are performance benefits for sure. The amount of deduplication and compression offered by Dell PowerMax is quite good, especially with databases. Dell PowerMax delivers optimum performance and reliable support, integral for handling failures and ensuring operational continuity. The performance capacity optimization and support we receive from Dell are also valuable.

Read full review

Stanislaw Jagielski

Trainer, Storage Consultant at Oxon

Efficient and straightforward setup boosts data management capabilities

Scalability is a significant feature of Dell XtremIO, as it is easy to expand and manage. It provides a lot of features suited for complex systems, such as scalability and the ability to define multi-domain systems, which are beneficial for data management and storage separation. It is efficient from the customer's point of view, offering deduplication at both the volume and file levels. The configuration and setup are straightforward, provided one has knowledge in setting up network infrastructure like VLANs. It is easy to install, use, and configure, making it a reliable product.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

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

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."

"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."

"The duplication algorithm allows us to get a lot more use out of less storage. We're running a five terabyte array right now and we're running probably about 30 terabytes on it. So the duplication rate is pretty phenomenal, without a cost to performance. It still runs pretty smoothly."

"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."

"The solution is very straightforward to set up."

"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"We have worked with customer success support, and the service is very good."

"Enterprise Cloud Storage is the most valuable feature, along with the data services which come with it, plus the deduplication and compression."

"Based on our experience with VMAX, there isn't any hardware failure or something like that in PowerMax. Performance-wise also, everything is fine. We haven't faced any performance issues or any hardware failure. Its performance is great as compared to VMAX. Its I/O per second rate is higher than the old model."

"It is a very stable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten."

"Performance and management aspects are satisfactory."

"We can consistently replicate mainframe and open system and have a single recovery point."

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

"The solution's most valuable feature is the data reduction ratio."

More Dell PowerMax pros

"Scalability is a significant feature of Dell XtremIO, as it is easy to expand and manage."

"The guaranteed sub-millisecond response time for a 4K block."

"Xtrem10's features are more simple to implement. The integration and interface are also good."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"Linear performance – The XtremIO wasn’t the fastest in all tests against other all flash arrays, but even with a massive workload, the response time and user experience were absolutely predictable with no sharp drop-offs."

"Deduplication and cloning capability"

"It is great for applications like Microsoft Exchange, ERP, SQL and VDI; basically saved the VDI buy-in from users, as now performance was seamless in comparison to a physical PC."

"The solution's most valuable features are the inline data reduction and deduplication."

More Dell XtremIO pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe 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 believe it would be of great benefit to work on the customization of the pricing structure for different enterprises and their specific needs."

"The main challenge with the product was to have control over the simultaneous failures of controllers. For recovery, manual intervention is required."

"PowerMax's software is highly stable, but we faced two hardware issues in one year. We had a failure of the storage director module, and the physical disk failed on another occasion. Dell EMC should improve its hardware quality."

"We brought up this question to the implementation engineer. We were comparing use cases where a customer is using RecoverPoint, then goes to PowerMax. In our previous setup with XtremIO, we were using RecpverPoint and keeping snapshots for 30 days, every few seconds. With PowerMax, I requested this for every 15 minutes, keeping it for a week. The engineer's answer was, "There will be too many snapshots. It might slow down the system." This is specifically for the use cases where there is RecoverPoint. While PowerMax works with RecoverPoint, and you can use it, there should be some way where you can have even more snapshots and not to worry about performance and system cache."

"The tool needs to improve its performance. Today's applications are demanding a response rate of one millisecond or below. The product should also look into AI integration."

"Although they call it unified storage where you have SAN and NAS, with a NAS implementation on top of a SAN, the NAS implementation is a little complicated and clumsy. As SAN, as block storage, it is very powerful... If they could provide a very good NAS implementation, it would be better, so that customers don't have to look for other simple solutions for NAS."

"The technical support is lacking. We are working with Dell EMC to get some better understanding of this."

More Dell PowerMax cons

"This solution is geared toward enterprise-level companies. Small and medium-sized businesses would find it extremely expensive."

"I am not too impressed with XtremeIO because we had a major failure."

"Get rid of the Java aspect of the GUI console."

"Management: At the time, there was no snapshot scheduler, so I had to write XSnapCourier to address it. The sad thing is that even after the newest release, which includes a native scheduler, most customers using XSnapCourier chose to stick with it due to a more feature-rich experience."

"Ease of use is key in the converged and hyper-converged world that requires administrators to have both hypervisor and storage skills."

"The product is highly expensive. Additionally, there is a significant lack of training, support documents, and forums available for Dell XtremIO, making troubleshooting difficult for third-party individuals."

"The solution needs to be simplified. When you integrate your storage with other systems, could use a little bit of automation."

"When we upgraded the capacity from five to ten TB, the price of the disks was high."

More Dell XtremIO cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."

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

"They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."

"The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits. We don't regret purchasing it."

"The product is expensive."

"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe a five out of ten for pricing."

"The PowerMax appliance pricing was reasonable. Dell EMC quoted us a substantial discount."

"Support pricing is very high. Our support contract is about to expire and Dell EMC provided us with an extremely high renewal quote. It was four times more than the support contract for our previous EMC VNX solution."

"The pricing is competitive. I would rate the pricing of the solution a six out of ten."

"Our costs for the product are three million."

"Negotiate hard and consider the commercial advantages/benefits to Dell EMC for onboarding your product."

"The labor savings and support have been significant. If we're talking 100 hours of labor every three months, that is 100 hours of a database engineer costs. There are performance latency numbers as well as costs associated with recovering data that gets lost, and this system doesn't lose data. You can look at numbers that go around the cost of downtime, if data is not available. This system doesn't go down. Everyone's ROI is going to be unique, but the dependability and performance of the system combined with its ease of operation will definitely save businesses of all sizes money."

"The pricing is comparable to other vendors."

More Dell PowerMax pricing and cost advice

"There are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."

"Too high priced for the Brazil market."

"It's not cheap, but it absolutely gets the job done. I don't have any real comment regarding licensing specifically."

"The initial purchase price was good but when you need to upgrade, it's a different story."

"This is the best flash array on the market for high-end workloads, so expect to pay for that. But the support subscription cost is fixed for seven years, which made it easier for us to plan on the maintenance costs."

"The license for XtremIO is in the box, so you don't have to buy anything."

"This solution is a little bit pricey."

"Don’t buy this array. You’re paying for loads of magic beans, since it’s mediocre at best for a platform in a rapidly growing field. Look instead at Pure Storage or something with variable block deduplication. You’ll end up spending less and getting a better product with actual support."

More Dell XtremIO pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which All-Flash Storage solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Comparison Review

it_user182013

Federal Civ/Intel Engineering Lead at Rubrik

May 1, 2015

Measuring Up: EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR

Leading up to EMC World 2015, IT Central Station asked how I would compare EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR. Until recently, the flash storage conversation in my organization and many others has centered on XtremIO and Pure Storage, the leaders of the all-flash array (AFA) space. To that end, I've written a…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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?

When comparing Dell PowerMax NVMe with other vendors, such as IBM enterprise solutions, the price is relatively higher.

See all answers

What do you like most about Dell EMC XtremIO?

The feature I like most about Dell Xtremio is its hardware quality compared to other vendors. It's clear they're cont...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell XtremIO?

Pricing is hard to determine as it depends on the given configuration. XtremIO offers features that justify a potenti...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Dell XtremIO?

The interface could be simplified for beginners to ease the configuration of special objects in the system. While the...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 29% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 19% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 10% of the time

HPE Nimble Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 5% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Dell PowerMax

Compared 27% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Dell PowerMax

Compared 13% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell PowerMax

Compared 10% of the time

Dell VMAX All Flash vs Dell PowerMax

Compared 9% of the time

HPE Primera vs Dell PowerMax

Compared 2% of the time

More Dell PowerMax Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Dell XtremIO

Compared 25% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell XtremIO

Compared 11% of the time

VAST Data vs Dell XtremIO

Compared 8% of the time

NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays vs Dell XtremIO

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Dell XtremIO

Compared 7% of the time

More Dell XtremIO Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

June 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax

June 2025

Download Dell PowerMax product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell XtremIO

June 2025

Download Dell XtremIO product report

Also Known As

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

Dell PowerMax NVMe, Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerMax

Dell EMC XtremIO Flash, Dell EMC XtremIO X2, XtremIO, XtremIO X2

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 offers robust performance, reliability, and efficient data handling. It is recognized for its compression, deduplication, and NVMe technology, significantly benefiting data centers with its advanced replication and uptime.

PowerMax is equipped to handle mission-critical applications, providing impressive performance metrics with low latency and high IOPS capacity. Its CloudIQ and Unisphere interfaces enhance manageability, while REST API support simplifies storage management. Users in sectors like healthcare, finance, and telecommunications leverage its capabilities for database management, high-transaction block storage, and disaster recovery. However, opportunities for improving deduplication efficiency, interface complexity, and automation remain.

What are the key features of Dell PowerMax?

Data Reduction: Combines compression and deduplication for efficient storage use.
NVMe Technology: Enables swift data handling with high throughput.
CloudIQ and Unisphere: Streamlines manageability and control.
REST API Support: Simplifies integration with management tools.
High Availability: Ensures consistent uptime across platforms.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Performance Metrics: Look for low latency and high IOPS as indicators.
Reliability: Consistent operations with minimal interruptions.
Manageability: Efficient control over storage environments.
Cost Efficiency: Note any potential savings in data processing and storage.

Industries utilize Dell PowerMax to support diverse environments like VMware, Oracle, and PostgreSQL. It serves multiple sectors such as healthcare, finance, and government, aiding in data storage consolidation, disaster recovery, and high-availability hosting for critical systems and applications.

Dell Technologies

Bring all-flash, scale-out storage to your enterprise applications with EMC XtremIO. Purpose-built for flash, XtremIO storage arrays are amazingly fast. Delivering high IOPS at less than 1 millisecond latency is just the start. EMC XtremIO helps you harness the power of flash storage by building in innovations like content-based data placement and dual-stage metadata.

Dell Technologies

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Rackspace, Open Line

Raiffeisen Bank Bulgaria, Wentworth-Douglas Hospital

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax vs. Dell XtremIO

June 2025

Free Report: Dell PowerMax vs. Dell XtremIO

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerMax vs. Dell XtremIO and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Dell PowerMax vs. Dell XtremIO 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.