Pure Storage FlashBlade and Dell PowerMax vie in the high-performance storage solutions category. FlashBlade holds an edge due to its user-friendliness and superior speed, making it a strong contender, especially in S3 workloads and data replication.
Features: Pure Storage FlashBlade is renowned for user-friendly installation and seamless Kubernetes integration, offering high performance, speed, and scalability. Its standout features include performance analytics, object storage, and strong S3 workload capabilities. Dell PowerMax is praised for high IOPS performance, compression, and deduplication, supported by its NVMe technology. It is reliable, especially for complex and mission-critical workloads, with extensive data protection and high availability.
Room for Improvement: Pure Storage FlashBlade could enhance cloud integration and advanced deduplication features. Users suggest improvements in its cloud ecosystem and documentation, citing challenges with integration and certification processes. Dell PowerMax users desire simpler management tools and more competitive pricing, highlighting the need for better cloud capabilities, GUI enhancements, and optimal licensing costs.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both Pure Storage FlashBlade and Dell PowerMax have strong customer support. FlashBlade users report satisfactory technical services but occasionally find it challenging to access experienced engineers promptly. Dell PowerMax support is viewed as responsive and effective, with emphasis on negotiating service terms upfront to optimize support quality. Both see on-premise deployment with private and hybrid cloud environments.
Pricing and ROI: Pure Storage FlashBlade, though expensive, is justified by its high performance and management efficiencies. Users benefit from a simplified licensing model and see ROI in reduced management time. Dell PowerMax also involves significant costs, acknowledged for its enterprise capabilities. With negotiated discounts, price competitiveness is attainable despite high initial investment. Users report reductions in total cost of ownership when utilizing its advanced functionalities effectively.
By opting for the gold subscription every three years, you get a free upgrade to the latest controller release.
If you wait more than seven years to buy another one, you get a return on your investment.
During a DCDR setup and migration from VMAX to Dell PowerMax, what was planned as a two-day downtime was completed in just three to four hours.
The performance metrics or benchmarks I use to measure success with Dell PowerMax include uptime as well as our response times on our platforms, both of which are exactly where we want them to be, which is five nines and as fast as possible.
My client has seen significant ROI since the install, and when you don't go down, that's an ROI in and of itself.
It does not require much management once you set up correctly, so it saves time, allowing an admin to focus on other work.
We also had one outage where a controller of one of the products had failed and had to be replaced on-site.
Customers always have their issues resolved promptly.
Pure has good storage.
I would rate Dell PowerMax support as a ten, as I have never had an issue with Dell support as it relates to this product.
Dell support for Dell PowerMax is exceptional, rating a perfect 10 out of 10.
I evaluate Dell's support for PowerMax as very good, especially regarding their response time as well as their willingness to get ahead of issues.
I would rate them an eight out of ten.
The support is done through email and is not that great, making it a very problematic area I've been dealing with for over four years.
It is highly scalable.
It is suitable for both medium-sized and enterprise businesses.
It hasn't broken down anytime in the last six to seven years, despite hurricanes, earthquakes, and power outages.
Scalability is not an issue.
Dell PowerMax is good for enterprises, and it also depends on how much workload you're going to bring in on Dell PowerMax in terms of performance and how many users are going to use the database you're hosting.
Volumes can be defined to grow to any level without impacting overall performance.
Pure Storage FlashBlade is scalable.
During the eight years, there have been no problems such as hardware failure or stopping.
I would rate the stability of the solution as a ten out of ten.
I would rate the stability of the product at seven out of ten.
These patches can be applied on the fly without requiring software upgrades or system downtime.
I would rate it nine out of ten since there are no required downtimes, even during firmware upgrades.
There has been no downtime with Dell PowerMax; it's been extremely reliable, easy to manage, easy to upgrade, and trustworthy as we've upgraded over the years from one version to another.
In case there is any issue with any blade, the data is moved to another.
We would appreciate a built-in transparent failover in the next release to eliminate the need for a separate metro cluster.
I'm eagerly anticipating the roadmap's promise of introducing multiple controllers, which could significantly boost scalability and resilience.
We mostly rely on long-term releases. We don't need the most up-to-date features, but we need a reliable environment.
Compared to competitors such as NetApp, which integrates with public cloud hyperscalers (GCP, Azure, AWS), Dell PowerMax lacks in this aspect.
Dell can assist by providing plug-and-play integrated templates that allow customers to drag, drop, modify, and connect with any target system for generating snapshots without logging into the storage directly.
Dell PowerMax NVMe is very reliable storage and cannot experience downtime.
Technical support definitely needs significant improvement.
Its configuration should be easier.
While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits.
The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there.
I would give it a nine out of ten in terms of costliness.
The higher cost compared to other vendors is justified by additional features, vendor-managed upgrades, and superior support services.
It is the best choice for large projects in terms of price and features compared to midrange solutions.
The price is starting from $500,000.
The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the past, but one benefit is that they have built-in ransomware protection.
Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator.
The platform's robust features include excellent sustainability tracking, and a comprehensive dashboard offering insights into IOPS, bandwidth, performance, and virtual activities.
Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen.
NVMe provides additional fast cache, similar to random access memory (RAM), which improves overall system performance and read/write experience for users.
Dell PowerMax NVMe is very supportive of our operational growth since we require daily performance from our core banking systems and need to facilitate data movement efficiently.
The key benefits of using Dell PowerMax, quantified in terms of saved hours and saved costs, is having one single platform that provides functionality to all of our internal customers.
We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte.
The best features of Pure Storage FlashBlade include better throughput and better performance.
Product | Market Share (%) |
---|---|
Dell PowerMax | 4.2% |
Pure FlashArray X NVMe | 0.9% |
Pure Storage FlashBlade | 1.9% |
Other | 93.0% |
Company Size | Count |
---|---|
Small Business | 15 |
Midsize Enterprise | 11 |
Large Enterprise | 12 |
Company Size | Count |
---|---|
Small Business | 17 |
Midsize Enterprise | 16 |
Large Enterprise | 54 |
Company Size | Count |
---|---|
Small Business | 11 |
Midsize Enterprise | 11 |
Large Enterprise | 20 |
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.
PowerMax leads in mission-critical enterprise storage with advanced architecture and AI-driven automation, ensuring secure and efficient IT optimization. Its multi-node NVMe scale-out framework delivers unmatched performance and consolidation, backed by Dell’s Future-Proof Program.
PowerMax is renowned for its robust reliability, performance, and efficient data reduction capabilities. Users benefit from its NVMe architecture, aiding significant scalability and cost efficiency through effective deduplication and compression. Unisphere simplifies management, while CloudIQ provides enhanced monitoring. With high availability and strong IOPS capabilities, PowerMax effectively manages demanding workloads and ensures seamless operations. Its compact design and increased storage capacity enhance user experience, particularly with easy maintenance and robust performance.
What are the key features of PowerMax?Dell PowerMax is predominantly employed in mission-critical applications such as SQL, Oracle databases, ERP systems, and high transactional environments. Healthcare, finance, and e-commerce sectors leverage its high performance, scalability, and NVMe technology for low latency and redundancy. It is adept in storage consolidation, data analytics, and disaster recovery.
FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.
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