Dell PowerMax vs Huawei OceanStor Dorado comparison

Dell Technologies and Huawei are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Dell Technologies is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.9, while Huawei is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.8. Dell Technologies holds a 4.1% mindshare in AFS, compared to Huawei’s 4.5% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Huawei users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on May 18, 2025

Huawei OceanStor Dorado and Dell PowerMax compete in high-performance storage solutions. PowerMax appears to have an edge in technical reliability and scalability, while OceanStor Dorado offers a more favorable price-to-performance ratio.

Features: OceanStor Dorado is appreciated for its competitive price-to-performance ratio, NVMe speed, HyperMetro functionality, and efficient deduplication and compression. Dell PowerMax offers robust deduplication and compression, excellent I/O performance, and high reliability, appealing to performance-intensive environments with its NVMe technology and scalability.

Room for Improvement: OceanStor Dorado could enhance NAS capabilities, better integrate with third-party solutions, and improve localization support. PowerMax users desire improvements in NVMe support, enhanced CloudIQ functionalities, and better cloud service integration, including Kubernetes. Simplifying the GUI and offering more efficient management tools are also noted areas for PowerMax.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both products primarily operate on-premises, with OceanStor Dorado also supporting hybrid clouds. Huawei's technical support is generally well-regarded, though local support can present language barriers. Dell PowerMax offers robust support, but users sometimes seek a more streamlined service process.

Pricing and ROI: OceanStor Dorado is known for its competitive pricing and ROI, attributed to lower ownership costs and maintenance expenses. While Dell PowerMax is priced higher, its performance and features justify the investment for organizations prioritizing storage performance, even though the cost might limit accessibility for smaller businesses.

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

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax vs. Huawei OceanStor Dorado

June 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 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 Huawei OceanStor Dorado is 4.5%, up from 4.2% 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.

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TOLGA ALNIAK

Expert (System Architect) at Migros Ticaret A.Ş.

Offers ransomware protection for files stored on servers

Data processing is the most important feature. We are using Huawei OceanStor Dorado, which employs SSD storage on the hardware side. No reported performance issues or improvements are required for our systems because all of the systems run on memory on the host side. The Oracle data and Oracle virtual machines also operate from memory. Additionally, we use Oracle for patching systems, with all data residing in memory. There is some latency during backup times, typically at night, but this is acceptable for us. These latencies occur outside of office hours, so they do not impact our operations during normal times when there is no noticeable latency.

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

"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."

"The solution is very straightforward to set up."

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

"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."

"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."

"It has good, reliable, fast storage."

"The solution is scalable."

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"Dell PowerMax NVMe's tech support is good."

"You can use PowerMax for all workloads and consolidation. We have used it to scale thousands of VMs."

"The uptime is the most valuable feature."

"Dell PowerMax NVMe has been a significant enhancement for data handling in my industry. Its improved security features and data calculation capabilities make it a valuable solution for our customers. The most critical feature of Dell PowerMax NVMe for performance enhancement is its strong network support and integration with other vendors, along with its efficient use of hardware components like CPU and memory. Data reduction technologies in PowerMax have been highly beneficial for our company, allowing us to optimize storage and reduce costs by consolidating files"

"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."

"The solution has good operability and easy scalability."

"It is easy to manage and upgrade."

"The stability is amazing. Zero downtime reported over the last years."

More Dell PowerMax pros

"The integrated Huawei Flash technology within OceanStor Dorado stands out as one of the most valuable features."

"The customer support is helpful."

"Huawei has more features than other vendors. It integrates well with security management solutions, though not directly with databases."

"Has good capacity, is effective and easy to manage."

"Most of the features which all enterprises storages solutions have are available in Huawei OceanStor Dorado."

"The most valuable aspects encompass a comprehensive set of common features, such as NetFlow technology, hyper-micro, and hyper-application functionalities."

"The initial setup is straightforward. Deployment takes about a day."

"This is a stable product that we can use for DR in production."

More Huawei OceanStor Dorado pros

Cons

"It feels more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses rather than enterprises."

"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."

"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."

"The software layer has to improve."

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

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

"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"The GUI interface is very complicated and could be improved by streamlining the number of steps in the process."

"We are very interested in NVMe over Fibre Channel, which I understand is on the horizon. We would like to see that come to fruition."

"There are some stability issues that we just recently experienced. We hope the next release will solve these problems."

"The NVMe integration could be improved."

"Dell PowerMax NVMe needs to increase storage and improve scalability."

"The tool is costly compared to other similar products. The product's pricing needs to be improved. I would like the product to include the replication feature in its future releases."

"If the solution had more power-saving capabilities, it would be quite nice."

"The initial setup was complex. ESRS is a very complex solution to put into our environment, because it requires external access to the Internet. That's a very tough thing for us to do, because we are a PCI and PII company. We store a lot of data for people which is personal. Therefore, going out to the Internet is not our preferred path."

More Dell PowerMax cons

"They should add a feature to the platform to help us manage storage communication with one of the vendors."

"There are some limitations to this product because they do not have unified storage."

"The product should be better aligned with the virtual environments"

"The data compression and deduplication ratio of Huawei OceanStor Dorado is not as good as other solutions, such as EMC and Pure Storage. It is important when looking at capacity effectiveness."

"The speeds of the disks themselves need to be faster. The disks are not flash. When we opened our hard drive from the inclusion, I saw a converter, and it's not entirely flash."

"The solution's price could be better."

"Huawei OceanStor Dorado's biggest weakness is its lack of cloud integration."

"This solution can improve by providing easier migrations and better Metro features."

More Huawei OceanStor Dorado cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

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

"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."

"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."

"I think it is an expensive tool, but it is the best product. I think it is expensive and the cost one must pay for the best solution."

"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."

"The cost has room for improvement."

"Our costs are on a yearly basis."

"Dell is expensive compared to other products and I would rate its pricing a four out of ten."

More Dell PowerMax pricing and cost advice

"We usually recommend our customers choose advanced licensing and enterprise companies are more inclined to choose this solution because it is more cost-effective than competitors."

"It's not easy to receive an upgrade license of Huawei OceanStor Dorado. It's easy to buy OceanStor with several features, but when you want to add on features later it's not easy. I had some problems."

"In price comparisons with alternative products, it stands out as a more cost-effective option."

"Huawei OceanStor Dorado is more affordable than the competitor solutions"

"There are some costs in addition to the standard licensing fees, depending on the requirements."

"The solution's licensing structure needs improvement."

"The price of Huawei OceanStor Dorado is very inexpensive, it cost approximately $5 per gigabyte."

"It is an expensive solution."

More Huawei OceanStor Dorado pricing and cost advice

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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

16%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

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 ...

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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...

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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 Huawei OceanStor Dorado?

The product has the best compression and encryption features. The most valuable features I have found in the tool are...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Huawei OceanStor Dorado?

The products they offer are quite cheap. However, I do not have much information about licensing since we don't buy t...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Huawei OceanStor Dorado?

Some customers have reported not understanding how the immutable part can be unlocked. From my perspective, it's not ...

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

NetApp AFF vs Dell PowerMax

Compared 3% of the time

More Dell PowerMax Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Huawei OceanStor Dorado

Compared 17% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Huawei OceanStor Dorado

Compared 14% of the time

Huawei OceanStor vs Huawei OceanStor Dorado

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Huawei OceanStor Dorado

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Primera vs Huawei OceanStor Dorado

Compared 4% of the time

More Huawei OceanStor Dorado 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

Huawei OceanStor Dorado

June 2025

Download Huawei OceanStor Dorado product report

Also Known As

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

Dell PowerMax NVMe, Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerMax

OceanStor Dorado V3 All-Flash Storage System

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

Huawei's OceanStor Dorado V3 all-flash storage is the ideal choice for enterprises' mission-critical business. It is the industry's first commercial use of NVMe all-flash storage, and it delivers high-performing, reliable, and efficient storage services.

Huawei

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Rackspace, Open Line

Telecom Italia, Hi3G Sweden, KPN

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax vs. Huawei OceanStor Dorado

June 2025

Free Report: Dell PowerMax vs. Huawei OceanStor Dorado

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

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