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Dell PowerScale vs Hitachi Content Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

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
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
218
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (4th)
Dell PowerScale
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
81
Ranking in other categories
NAS (1st), File and Object Storage (2nd)
Hitachi Content Platform
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (15th)
 

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.
BE
Systems Engineer at Unisity LLC
Flexibility and reliability have supported seamless data growth
I cannot think of anything to improve about Dell PowerScale (Isilon). The hardest challenge we have is due to how we've bought things over time. The way that we moved to the PowerEdge platform for the newer systems creates a scale problem as I still buy the older style systems, which are more dense storage. They're different chassis, so the problem we run into in the data center is the depth of the actual equipment. The newer equipment, if we buy an FX910 or a 900, it's a lot shorter in scale than if I buy an 83,000, which is much bigger. This makes it more complicated for deployment.
EB
Storage Enginner at BNP Paribas
Archive data reliably for years and have trusted support simplifying complex deployments
An application that can do the monitoring and reporting interface for Hitachi Content Platform would be beneficial. Hitachi Content Platform monitor or intelligent monitoring is known, and deployment of this was attempted, but it appears that Hitachi abandoned this project, so it is not in use. The potential of that application was great, but it does not cover everything. When Hitachi was asked about it, they indicated there is no application in the project they will start to develop for this purpose, and they redirected to Prometheus. They shared some Prometheus metrics that can be integrated with Grafana to get some metrics on Hitachi Content Platform, but having a dedicated interface from Hitachi itself would be great, similar to what other vendors provide. The upgrade process for Hitachi Content Platform is too long. When upgrading for just two mandatory versions, it took weeks because all nodes had to be restarted. A hardware support tool is necessary every time upgrading to another version, and it is not practical for the production environment. A large downtime must be predicted and the application team must be asked to stop and suspend their technical batches, which takes a lot of time to do.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"It simplifies storage."
"This solution has improved the way our organization functions through its reliability and consistent platform for storage and has helped us to simplify storage because the management tools make everything a lot easier."
"The technical support from Pure Storage FlashArray is perfect; if we have some trouble or we need to change something, we ask for support and they are helpful and answer immediately."
"We actually originally went with a competitor's product, and after about eight months, a lot of wrangling, had them buy it back from us, and then we bought a similar Pure Storage product, and it's just been great."
"My rating of Pure Storage is a ten out of ten because of the price for performance and footprint - the overall value."
"The deduplication and compression meet all of our system requirements."
"The compression and deduplication features help to make the best use of the capacity."
"Overall, the hardware itself, and the OneFS file system, are the best selling points, combined with the delivery and the installation."
"The fact that we were able to set it up, use it, and, for the most part, didn't have to worry about it after we had it set up has been valuable."
"PowerScale helped free up our employees' time to focus on other business priorities. There are now automated jobs such as backing up and replicating data, that reduce the footprint we have. Those types of tasks were previously done manually."
"Dell PowerScale overall is easy to use."
"The guaranteed performance, combined with the scalability through its scale-out capability, makes it an excellent choice."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the unlimited scalability. The tool has high availability and high storage capacity."
"The most valuable feature for me is SyncIQ."
"The single pane of glass for both IT and for the end-user is a valuable feature. On the IT side, I can actually control where things are stored, whether something is stored on solid-state drives or spinning drives... The single pane of glass makes it very easy to use and very easy to understand. We started at 100 terabytes and we moved to 250 and it still feels like the exact same system and we're able to move data as needed."
"Companies can scale the solution."
"One of the most hidden valuable features is ensuring that you don't have bit rot, so it will go and check every single object that's stored on the system, then ensure that if there's a problem, it'll be repaired from either a local copy or remote copy, depending upon your configuration."
"In all my experience and feedback from customers, we are confident that this product is very good."
"The Hitachi Content Platform is a stable and reliable solution."
"This solution has a ton of valuable features, including a hidden capability that ensures you don't have bit rot by checking every single object stored on the system and repairing any problems from either a local copy or remote copy, depending upon your configuration."
"The main selling point is its compatibility with different environments. It functions like an on-prem Google Drive or Dropbox built on top of the object storage."
"The way that they handle the DR is very good because when there is a failover, it is seamless to the users."
"Hitachi is a big company, so it's a very strong product."
 

Cons

"I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications."
"The data reduction that we had initially anticipated when we bought Pure and we move over, is way lower than the expected reduction. It depends on the workloads, of course. But that has been a challenge at times."
"The backend of this solution utilizes an Active/Passive architecture, rather than an Active/Active architecture, which is a disadvantage, when compared to some of its competitors. Its storage capacity should be expanded in the next release."
"A noticeable area for improvement is the support for object storage. The FlashArray does not natively support object storage like S3 or Swift, which pushes customers needing these features towards the more expensive FlashBlade."
"The price of this solution could be improved."
"I would rate this solution an eight because we have had outages. The commit times went very high in the database. The whole array went down so our customers were down for around eight hours. This was a very big outage which could have been our fault because we didn't do the upgrade in time."
"The time-to-market could be better at times, but I think that's true for all vendors of hardware."
"Price is about the only thing that's wrong with it."
"Because of the magic that it does 'under the hood,' it is very difficult to find out within the system where all your storage is going. That's a little bit of a ding that we have on it. It does so much magic in order to protect itself from drive failures or multiple drive failures, that it automatically handles the provisioning and storage of your data. But by doing that, finding out why a file of a certain size, or a directory of a certain size, is using more storage than is being reported in InsightIQ, is very difficult to discern."
"Pricing is an issue. It's quite expensive for the amount of storage we have."
"I have escalated questions to the technical support team of Dell, and I find the support center to be very poor compared to what it was during EMC's time."
"Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us."
"That said, for the other security features, it would be helpful if Tenable - and I know it's outside the scope of this question itself - had Isilon-specific plugins."
"There are some missing features in the product, especially when our company needs to do some tape backup, and we see that the tool doesn't have integration capabilities."
"Technical support could be improved. Whenever we have a hiccup, we'd like to get it fixed maybe quicker."
"I think Dell PowerScale (Isilon) can be improved, as the cost models are quite expensive for administration."
"This product's ability to track logs for access still needs to be improved."
"What is lacking in this solution is a simple process to migrate from existing systems."
"They should improve the user interface. It is a little bit complex, and it does not have a self-learning method; you need to know how to use it before you touch the system, and the user interface is not self-explanatory."
"At present, it is complicated to use the CLI command."
"Hitachi Content Platform is a complicated solution. You need to put several pieces of the hardware together in order to achieve the capacity or the performance needed."
"This product's ability to track logs for access could be differentiating and still needs to be improved, but that probably doesn't exist on any product in its class either."
"Overall, it's costly."
"Although they claim to provide NFS, the actual implementation requires an additional gateway, which makes it a costly solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our Evergreen Storage subscription is supposed to be good when we go to upgrade."
"Pure Storage FlashArray is expensive."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could always improve. They are still more expensive than some alternative offerings. Cost is always a concern and when there is a battle they tend to be more expensive."
"It is light years beyond anything else with the same price point."
"The price of the solution is not expensive."
"Cost-wise, I imagine that the product's price would probably give you a nosebleed if you were a younger company."
"The price was slightly higher than others, but competitive, if you consider all the other features that you get from it."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray is expensive."
"This solution is priced slightly higher than others on the market but does offer good quality. With this solution's data reduction and compression, we were able to purchase less. Costs have dropped because of the data rate of compression and deduplication."
"The pricing for this solution is reasonable."
"It's a high-cost offering amounting to three or four million Swedish kronor, or about $400,000 or euros, for approximately 480 terabytes of storage."
"We paid an additional fee to have Dell's ProDeploy Plus team implement it."
"The pricing is excellent."
"Pricing for this solution is reasonable."
"The platform is not cheap. However, on the software side, you can choose what you want license. So, you can start your licensing with the features that you need, then after buying the platform add some other features."
"The solution is expensive; it is not the cheapest solution out there. If you look at it from a total cost of ownership perspective, then it is a very compelling solution. However, if you're looking at just dollar per terabyte and not looking at the big picture, then you could be distracted by the price. It is not an amazing price, but it's pretty good. It is also very good when you consider the total cost of ownership and ease of management."
"Hitachi is more expensive than StorageGRID."
"The pricing could be better."
"The product’s cost is average."
"Overall, it's costly."
"Pricing is comparable to other solutions in the market."
"I think the ROI for this solution is very good because the pricing for it is in between other solutions."
"The price of the Hitachi Content Platform is very high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business66
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise152
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise46
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise5
 

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?
The only issue is the pricing. Because we have competition, our customers always take another brand and say they can ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
Our customers using Dell storage also use competing solutions. Our customers who have Everpure FlashArray may also ha...
What do you like most about Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
The solution provides massive performance, scalability, efficiency, and ease of management.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
As I mentioned before, we did not purchase Dell PowerScale (Isilon) directly. Since our organization is a government ...
What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
I think Dell PowerScale (Isilon) could improve some functions such as Apache S3 or containerized storage support, as ...
What needs improvement with Hitachi Content Platform?
In comparison to competitors like Huawei, which can use all storage protocols in the same platform, Hitachi Content P...
What is your primary use case for Hitachi Content Platform?
Mainly, from my project, Hitachi Content Platform is used for archiving. The customer is in banking, so they need to ...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon
HCP, Hitachi Vantara Content Platform, Hitachi Vantara HCP
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
OMRF, University of Utah, Translational Genetics Research Institute, Arcis, Geofizyka Torumn, Cyprus E&P Corporation, Colburn School, Columbia Sportswear, Harvard Medical School, University of Michigan, National Library of France,
Rabobank, Xinhua News Agency, Kremsm'ller Industrieanlagenbau KG, KSC Commercial Internet, AIS Group, Shanghai Interactive Television Co. Ltd (SiTV), China Telecom, Spin Master
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerScale vs. Hitachi Content Platform and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,438 professionals have used our research since 2012.