Dell PowerMax vs VAST Data comparison

Dell Technologies and VAST Data are both solutions in the NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays category. Dell Technologies is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.8, while VAST Data is ranked #10. Dell Technologies holds a 9.4% mindshare in N, compared to VAST Data’s 6.3% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of VAST Data users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 1, 2026

Dell PowerMax and VAST Data compete in the high-performance storage solutions market. VAST Data seems to have an advantage due to its advanced features and perceived value.

Features: Dell PowerMax is renowned for its robustness, scalability, and integration capabilities in mission-critical storage performance. VAST Data emphasizes a unique architecture, excellent data reduction, and high-speed analytics.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell PowerMax is known for its streamlined deployment and strong customer service. VAST Data stands out with its flexible, software-driven model that simplifies data management and focuses on rapid, agile customer engagement.

Pricing and ROI: Dell PowerMax offers competitive initial setup costs, focusing on long-term reliability and substantial ROI. VAST Data may have a higher upfront investment, but its modern efficiency features propose a strong ROI with reduced operational costs.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerMax vs. VAST Data Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax vs. VAST Data

March 2026

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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

Everpure FlashArray X NVMe

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays category, the mindshare of Everpure FlashArray X NVMe is 4.6%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerMax is 9.4%, up from 9.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VAST Data is 6.3%, up from 5.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Dell PowerMax	9.4%
Pure FlashArray X NVMe	4.6%
VAST Data	6.3%
Other	79.7%

NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays

Featured Reviews

Jaehoon Oh

Chief Technology Officer at Lambda256

Supports efficient storage management through volume snapshots and offers reliable non-disruptive upgrades

I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could be enhanced. I can see the performance statistics in the Pure Storage console, but it does not show the performance by 4K byte unit. It displays IOPS and bandwidth, but IOPS is about real use, and I want to know how many IOPS are currently running in 4K byte units. I cannot see that IOPS because most storage systems report their performance by 4K byte unit. I want to see Pure Storage performance by 4K byte unit to compare with other storage or other internal NVMe SSD.

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Gouranga Maiti

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.

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Alan Powers

HPC CTO at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Stability-wise, a device that has been up and running for years

The failover capability and resiliency are some of the solution's valuable features. The big thing is resilience because it has richer coding in it, so multiple devices can't fail. Also, one can still access a number of CBoxes that can allow one to access their file system. Once a device fails, it fails the transparency of the end-user, and it just starts using another resource. The encryption capability, the snapshots, along with a whole bunch of features make the tool valuable. VAST Data keeps adding more and more features all the time.

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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

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

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

"I use the tool for Oracle databases, Oracle virtual machines, and Oracle Linux databases. I'm on the storage side, not a database administrator."

"I appreciate the performance."

"It has good, reliable, fast storage."

"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."

"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."

More Everpure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"My client has seen significant ROI since the install, and when you don't go down, that's an ROI in and of itself."

"I would rate my experience with the initial setup a nine out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy."

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

"Dell PowerMax is pretty much 100%."

"Dell PowerMax NVMe has good scalability and performance."

"The solution is stable. I would rate it ten out of ten."

"It's faster and more resilient."

"It is a fantastic Dell EMC product ever competing with all the vendors. It stands out in terms of performance. You can ask for mission-critical application workloads."

More Dell PowerMax pros

"The solution is useful for machine learning and scientific applications, including computer simulations."

"This has been one of the most reliable storage systems that I have ever used."

Cons

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

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

"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."

"We need better data deduplication."

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

"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."

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

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

More Everpure FlashArray X NVMe cons

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

"We have issues that we don't know about, which Dell EMC fixes."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"It's a relatively new product, but for the next release I would like to see higher bandwidth on the front-end adapters. This would allow even greater scalability for critical workloads and consolidation for non-critical workloads. The hosts may not require that level of I/O performance today. However, it allows us to scale physical non-cloud environments without large investment."

"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."

More Dell PowerMax cons

"The read/write ratio is an area in the solution with some flaws and needs improvement."

"The write performance could be improved because it is less than half of the read performance."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

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

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

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

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

"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."

"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."

More Everpure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"The price is on the market. It's not inexpensive, but it's available on the market."

"Dell PowerMax NVMe's price is expensive."

"Our costs for the product are three million."

"It scales enormously, but it's expensive to do so."

"Dell offers various pricing models, including a pay-as-you-go option where storage is provided without upfront charges, billing only for used capacity. As a 360° partner, significant discounts are available."

"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."

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

"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."

More Dell PowerMax pricing and cost advice

"We acquired VAST Data as a one-time, capital purchase."

"Price-wise, VAST Data is not the cheapest, not the most expensive one."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	15
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	12

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	56

No data available

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?

The price of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is very expensive, though I do not know the actual price because I am using the E...

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What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could ...

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

The pricing of Dell PowerMax is a bit high, but compared to other storage solutions from vendors like HP, Dell remain...

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What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe?

My primary suggestion for improvement would be enhancing the IOPS handling capability even further. Nowadays, technic...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Everpure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 12% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Everpure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Everpure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 8% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Everpure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 8% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Everpure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 4% of the time

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Dell PowerStore vs Dell PowerMax

Compared 16% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell PowerMax

Compared 7% of the time

Everpure FlashArray vs Dell PowerMax

Compared 6% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Dell PowerMax

Compared 6% of the time

Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs Dell PowerMax

Compared 4% of the time

More Dell PowerMax Competitors

Everpure FlashArray vs VAST Data

Compared 11% of the time

Everpure FlashBlade vs VAST Data

Compared 8% of the time

NetApp AFF vs VAST Data

Compared 7% of the time

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs VAST Data

Compared 7% of the time

MinIO vs VAST Data

Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Everpure FlashArray X NVMe

March 2026

Download Everpure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax

March 2026

Download Dell PowerMax product report

Buyer's Guide

NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays

February 2026

Download VAST Data product report

Also Known As

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

Dell PowerMax NVMe, Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerMax

No data available

Overview

Everpure FlashArray X NVMe delivers high performance, reliability, and low latency, making it ideal for block storage in private cloud infrastructures and mission-critical applications.

Boasting robust data reduction, high availability, and seamless scalability, Everpure FlashArray X NVMe supports databases, VMware environments, and machine learning analytics. Known for its intuitive interface, superior support, volume snapshots, and AI-powered analytics, it efficiently manages storage needs, often deployed to replace outdated systems. Users highlight its simplistic management and easy configuration, although opportunities exist to enhance pricing, replication features, VNC integration, and storage capabilities.

What are the key features?

Data Reduction: Effective compression and deduplication improve storage efficiency.
Seamless Scalability: Easily scales to meet growing demands without downtime.
Volume Snapshots: Quickly create snapshots for data protection and recovery.
VMware Compatibility: Integrates smoothly with VMware environments for optimal performance.
AI-Powered Analytics: Provides insights for enhanced storage management and efficiency.

What benefits and ROI should be considered?

Low Latency and High Availability: Ensures rapid data access and uninterrupted service.
Easy Management: Intuitive interface simplifies configuration and monitoring.
Evergreen Model: Continuous upgrades without disruptive migrations.
Enhanced Support: Reliable service and support for critical applications.

Organizations in industries such as finance and healthcare implement Everpure FlashArray X NVMe to bolster data performance and reliability. They leverage its integration capabilities with Oracle databases and SQL workloads, supporting machine learning and virtualization. It's often chosen to upgrade legacy storage systems, ensuring high availability and speed for demanding environments.

Everpure (formerly Pure Storage)

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?

Reliability: Ensures consistent service uptime and data integrity.
High Performance: NVMe architecture provides exceptional speed and efficiency.
Data Reduction: Deduplication and compression drive down costs.
Management Tools: Unisphere interface for easy system management.
CloudIQ: Advanced monitoring for predictive insights.
High Availability: Supports mission-critical and demanding workloads.

What benefits should users expect from PowerMax?

Performance Optimization: Handles low latency and high IOPS needs.
Scalability: Expands effortlessly with growing data and workload demands.
Enhanced Monitoring: Predictive analytics for proactive management.
Efficient Maintenance: Streamlined processes reduce downtime and costs.

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.

Dell Technologies

Innovation to break decades of data storage trade-offs.

VAST Data

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Rackspace, Open Line

Norwest Venture Partners, General Dynamics Information Technology, Ginkgo Bioworks

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax vs. VAST Data

March 2026

Free Report: Dell PowerMax vs. VAST Data

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