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Dell PowerMax vs IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 1, 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
Dell PowerMax
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
5th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
92
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (3rd)
IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
26th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (11th)
 

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.
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.
Yacine Bouakttaya - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technology Officer North Africa at Huawei
High-speed data processing has improved billing cycles but performance headroom still needs growth
In terms of improvement regarding IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe, I can compare with other competitors, especially regarding solution architecture. Data resiliency can be a concern because IBM can reach up to only four controllers, while others like Dell EMC can support up to eight controllers with better resiliency without service staff. Additionally, the SBC one benchmark is a storage performance console that stresses different storage solutions like Dell EMC and NetApp. It generates metrics of IOPS and latency, showing that the competition can have two million IOPS, significantly outperforming IBM's capabilities. As for the capability of scaling, we can see the limitations in reaching such high-performance levels.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It reduces space and the polar consumption. It also accelerates the application."
"The solution offers amazing performance."
"When users don't call wanting to kill me, that's ROI."
"It has been very stable. I have not seen or heard of downtime storage issues after moving over to it."
"Because we were able to afford to go all flash, we don't manage the tiers, we're not moving data up, and we're not waiting for overnight cycles."
"We have seen savings in our storage, and the speed of deployment has gone from several days to a few minutes, reducing backup and restore times from 93 days to minutes and simplifying storage for us."
"Now with Pure Storage, our developers work a lot faster and more efficiently which has definitely improved our productivity."
"All use cases for Everpure FlashArray are anything that requires a SAN should use it because it is the easiest thing on the market."
"The speed and the compatible interface with IBM are the most valuable features of the PowerMax product."
"They are reliable and do everything you could possibly want and much more, with a lot of features that other arrays just don't have."
"It is easy to manage and upgrade."
"A huge benefit of the PowerMax has been the decreasing of our physical footprint. We recently did a consolidation where we went from 58 tiles down to 5. If we had used just the PowerMax, we could have gone from 58 tiles down to 2 tiles, which is huge space savings. If you have 56 newly available floor tiles on a raised floor data center, which you previously had to cool and provide power to, then now, not only are my costs going down, I now have more revenue opportunities because I have more space to put new customers."
"PowerMax is a compact high-performance appliance. It is one of the best devices in terms of performance specs. It includes an NVMe All-Flash Array."
"We use ESRS for our call-home, and a lot of times, Dell EMC will respond to the issue before we even know it."
"It was easy for teams to pick up the technology with very limited exposure and training, then implement and support it."
"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."
"It is a very stable product. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten because we did not face any issues in the last three years."
"It's easy to use, has good stability, and many features."
"The most valuable features of IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe are its steady performance and usefulness in high-traffic environments."
"IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is easy to use and comes with good performance."
"IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is one of the leading storage systems in the world...I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten."
"Its ease of use, performance, and hardware compression is very useful feature."
"The solution is more available for IOPS warehousing, resolving issues, and reporting than other products."
"IBM FlashSystem is an excellent product."
 

Cons

"The GUI is simplistic and basic. I feel like it's explanatory, but not enough, it needs a little more to it."
"Many high-end platforms from other vendors like Dell EMC or Hitachi, their backend has Active/Active architecture, unlike Pure Storage FlashArray which doesn't utilize an Active/Active architecture on the backend."
"They could improve the price."
"The solution needs an integrated NAS platform, file platform."
"I would like to migrate to the cloud in the future and know how that would actually work with this product."
"Automation could be simplified."
"Part of our company works on Dell EMC because Pure Storage did not have synchronous applications when we were purchasing our products."
"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."
"When it comes to Oracle and database workloads, data reduction could be a little bit better."
"In my opinion, Dell PowerMax could be improved regarding pricing; the pricing is very expensive."
"Dell PowerMax NVMe needs to increase storage and improve scalability."
"Dell PowerMax NVMe is costly compared to other solutions."
"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."
"The technical support is lacking. We are working with Dell EMC to get some better understanding of this."
"The size and weight of Dell PowerMax are quite cumbersome."
"I'm not a fan of the UI that they've deployed over the recent years; I feel that you can do more with the command line platform than you can with the actual UI."
"In terms of improvement regarding IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe, I can compare with other competitors, especially regarding solution architecture."
"In the FlashSystem 5200, there were only four ports of 32 fiber channels for the architecture. This has been resolved in the new generation."
"There is a tool provided by IBM for repairing batteries which can only be utilized by those who have an IBM technical advisor under service contract. However, for individuals who do not have such a contract, the tool can be difficult to use and requires a zip file copy. I believe that it would be greatly beneficial if the tool were made more user-friendly and accessible for all individuals who need to repair batteries."
"IBM's support is not good. I experienced a big problem where I opened the console IBM Storage and would see that something was broken. I called the call centers, and I said, "I have a problem. My drive is not working." They want me to give them the serial number, I gave it to them and they told me "I cannot find your product. Your product is not here.""
"Currently, when we want to hook up tape drives, we have to add some extra equipment, which is a little bit complex."
"Other vendors have included a block and file system. IBM doesn't include a file system. And yet, it's very necessary for all organizations' networks to have file systems. We have other systems for the file system, however, ideally, we would like to have one system with these features."
"The solution's compression needs to be improved, as it's not the best."
"The tool's architecture is complex. It also needs to add data utilization reports."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I have had a couple of customers who have complained about the cost. It can be a little more expensive than some of the other platforms. After it has been installed, I have never had a customer say, "I wish we wouldn't have spent all that extra money." They have always been happy with the product after it has been installed. They might be on the fence about it because of the price, but everybody who I have ever seen install it, they are always happy with it."
"We are finding the TCO of flash to be lower than SSD implementations."
"We would like them to improve the pricing, so we could put them to use some more product, like backup or long-term storage. In the future, if the price goes down, then we could buy different types of products."
"The price is very reasonable when compared to other solutions."
"We evaluated Oracle and Hitachi, but Pure Storage had the better pricing."
"The pricing of Pure Storage is all-inclusive. It is very fair, and very easy. In comparison, Dell EMC has licensing that needs to be added if you wan to work in a complex environment or in specific functionalities."
"My organization has a yearly license, but I believe that Pure Storage FlashArray has capacity-based licenses as well. I'm definitely happy with the pricing."
"We have seen a reduction in the TCO, because Pure Storage is partnering with Belfrics. This partnership reduces our latency and space."
"The tool is very expensive."
"Dell is expensive compared to other products and I would rate its pricing a four out of ten."
"The cost is expensive. While VMAX now has good pricing, PowerMax is a little expensive."
"Since Dell PowerMax NVMe is an enterprise storage, its price is premium."
"The cost of the solution is quite noticeable, but it provides a good fit regarding the price of the hardware and all of the required licenses."
"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 price is starting from $500,000."
"The pricing is competitive. I would rate the pricing of the solution a six out of ten."
"The solution's price is competitive."
"The price of IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is less than Dell. For upgrades, the Dell solutions are more expensive."
"The product has an average cost."
"The price of the FlashSystem 9100 NVMe is reasonable."
"The price of IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMele can be considered affordable when taking into account the operating system that is required for it to function properly. This operating system, which is licensed by IBM, may carry a higher cost, but it is worth the investment for larger corporate entities, such as insurance companies, Fortune Five companies, and banks, who make up a significant portion of their target market. The FlashSystems are designed for larger corporations and multinational enterprises, and may not be the most cost-effective solution for smaller businesses."
"Compared to its competitors, IBM's offering is the most cost-effective."
"It's a lot less costly than cloud storage. People get surprised by the cost of cloud storage, which is extremely expensive and four or five times the cost of storage on-premises. People don't realize what they're spending on storage until they start getting bills from Amazon, Microsoft, and others. This is a good way to reduce your cloud storage expenses."
"The tool's pricing is competitive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Healthcare Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
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 Business17
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise63
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise6
 

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'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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe?
The licensing cost for IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe can be seen as a bit expensive compared to competitors. You can eith...
What needs improvement with IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe?
In terms of improvement regarding IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe, I can compare with other competitors, especially regardi...
What is your primary use case for IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe?
There are many advantages that we have with IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe against, for example, IBM full flash systems an...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
Dell PowerMax NVMe, Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerMax
IBM FlashSystem 9100, FlashSystem 9100
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Rackspace, Open Line
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerMax vs. IBM FlashSystem 9100 NVMe and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
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