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Dell PowerScale vs Qumulo 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
7.2
Number of Reviews
231
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
Dell PowerScale
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
97
Ranking in other categories
NAS (1st), File and Object Storage (1st)
Qumulo
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
NAS (10th), File and Object Storage (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.
SK
Solutions Architect at a university with 10,001+ employees
Operates seamlessly and minimizes downtime while meeting enterprise file share demands
The features of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) that I appreciate the most include the scale of architecture and the way it is designed. These features benefit my company by providing less downtime and less overhead. While I have not calculated an exact number regarding the reduction in downtime, we have always been using the product, so we have no baseline to compare it to. However, it is a very good product. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) scales very well with the growing needs of my company.
ES
Storage Consultant Storage at Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Unified file platform has delivered secure multi‑protocol access for massive data growth
The creators of Qumulo were the ones who created Isilon, and I had a conversation with them, so any of the features within Isilon may need tweaking, but I think they resolved it here. In the year that I worked with it, I did not see anything that I had an issue with. The security is great, and it works with cloud technologies, being a hands-based tool, so you can use it with AWS or Microsoft Azure. It programs very easily. There are REST APIs, and there is a cloud connection. The management and program layer is made up of three capabilities: API, the command line, and a visual interface. In the year that I worked with it and brought it in, I think it has been effective. The only thing I would like to see added to Qumulo is for the interface to improve visually, more in line with vCenter, but that is just my thought. Overall, I appreciate it.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its ease of use is a very big thing for our customers; it's easy to set up and easy to maintain, and the support is automated, which is very good."
"Pure is simple to set up and manage on a day-to-day basis."
"Like I tell everybody else that I deal with, if you want to focus your time on doing more valuable things for your company, and you deal with storage on a day-to-day basis like I do, the best thing you can do is put Pure in your environment."
"The speed is the most valuable feature, along with the ease of getting it connected. We were able to get it online in less than a day."
"Everpure FlashArray is probably not cheap storage, but it provides great performance, scalability, and everything a customer needs."
"I am very satisfied with this solution and I would recommend it to others."
"We currently have four Pure Storage FlashArray boxes, and all the storage boxes are on an Evergreen subscription model where we receive the latest hardware and features without any cost in a completely non-intrusive task."
"It makes things ten times easier."
"You plug in a new node and data starts migrating over to it, and IT spreads out the load. We've added multiple nodes to the system since deploying it. The process is pretty seamless, and we are able to do it with no downtime. It's a very easy process to do."
"Prior to Isilon, we had to access data from multiple different platforms, and this solution offers unified storage and the ability to consolidate and migrate data, which was a big step forward and allowed us to cut costs by eliminating multiple platforms and putting it all on one array."
"With Dell PowerScale (Isilon), it uses not just a terabyte but petabytes of data, storing a large amount of data takes within minutes, and you can bring it down to seconds as well, as it does not take much time to upload or copy the data here and there, and upgrades also do not take much time."
"The solution allows me to use SSMDS to store data for end users and share it within different locations."
"The guaranteed performance, combined with the scalability through its scale-out capability, makes it an excellent choice."
"The solution's flexibility for supporting various data workloads while keeping them protected is great."
"Currently, Dell PowerScale is the center of our mainframe of our core of our business, and it is where we store everything."
"Regarding stability, I find no lagging, crashing, or downtime with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), and it is a highly scalable, stable, and reliable solution that I have experienced."
"The most valuable feature of Qumulo is the ability to share files and reliability."
"The feature that I like most is the analytics part of the file system."
"It is a very stable product. I never faced any issues."
"The most valuable feature is real-time analytics."
"The ratio of total operational cost to complexity versus feature set is very good."
"The data protection algorithm to protect the data between the nodes has been the most valuable feature. The integration with backup platforms such as Veeam and Veritas has also been valuable."
"Overall, I would rate Qumulo a nine. I appreciate that it does snapshots, and you could use replication."
"The most valuable features of Qumulo are the ease of management and special permissions that are quick to enable. The overall performance of the solution is good."
 

Cons

"Pure will probably have to move to other layers of the stack, not only storage but, maybe, hyperconverged."
"As partners, we should have the option to download the software, rather than have to go back through Pure to obtain it."
"It's too early to tell if we've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership. The solution is expensive."
"With the introduction of Albireo technology and 81x data de-duplication reduction, Pure Storage better start looking at more effective de-duplication techniques."
"The price of this solution could be improved."
"The GUI is simplistic and basic. I feel like it's explanatory, but not enough, it needs a little more to it."
"The pricing and licensing of Everpure FlashArray is a problem because Everpure is considered more expensive than competitors."
"The product could improve by providing the capability to support NAS storage – CIFS and NFS."
"The price always has room for improvement."
"Version upgrades and patches take a long time to complete."
"Perhaps if there was a local chatbot built within the system or on the dashboard where we could directly ask for anything on the OneFS, it could help us."
"Additional metadata reporting would be great. We have to use a separate tool to report on that. We would like to view the age of data and how long it has been since someone has accessed a file."
"I would like to see increased reporting and statistics functionalities."
"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."
"Improvements could be made to reduce the costs and the high level of knowledge needed to maintain and use them. We had old hard drives with moving parts in Dell PowerScale, and due to this, we must switch to a more efficient environment with all-flash."
"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."
"In the next release, I would like to see the ability to have more control at a terminal level of the file system."
"The support for iMac and protocols should be improved, not all features are available."
"Some anti-theft permissions do not transfer well to Qumulo."
"One aspect of Qumulo that I hoped to see improved was its software upgrade process, which did see significant progress during my usage. Initially, upgrading the software resulted in several minutes of system downtime. However, by the time I departed last summer, the downtime had reduced to mere ten seconds. Although I am unsure if Qumulo has yet achieved a completely outage-free upgrade, I simply performed the upgrades early in the morning before the marketing department began its workday, so any downtime was inconsequential."
"There is plenty of room for improvement. In the future, I would like to see non-disruptive updates."
"The price of the software is a bit expensive, so a reduction in cost would make it more competitive."
"The solution could improve availability and improve data protection or data services such as compression of deduplication. In a future release, we'd like to have more cloud API integrations."
"Qumulo should continue to expand automation and orchestration capabilities."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The cost was initially high, but once more people were using it, the costs came down. This was because the University was reselling it to other departments."
"The price, in general, is around $100,000, however, I know it costs more."
"Cost-wise, it's been very effective."
"They have a standardized fee; it's been the same price for 10 years straight. I am happy with the price — I think it's good."
"It is not the cheapest one out there. We're paying yearly, but I'm not 100% sure."
"It's expensive, but you get what you pay for."
"In the beginning, we saw that the price is not very good. When we made some compilations about the deduplication and the compression and what the equipment does, including the differentiation of upper management of the storage, the price was not so bad. However, in the beginning, the price was very difficult to justify."
"The pricing is excellent."
"The pricing is expensive, but I think it's a fair value because it does manage itself. It definitely is much simpler than any of the other scale-out storage platforms that we've looked at in the past."
"I always want things to be less expensive. However, I would say the pricing is fair. Their costs are in alignment with their competitors. It is a good value for the money."
"The solution's licensing cost varies based on capacity and performance requirements."
"It is an expensive product with a high storage capacity suitable for large data requirements."
"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 only drawback for us is that it's a large upfront investment. This was a huge decision for a startup company to make. It took a bit for us to get over the line on it, but we have not regretted it."
"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."
"The price of Qumulo is reasonable."
"The price of the solution is in the middle range compared to others. We look at the price per terabyte."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
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 Business25
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise53
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise7
 

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 have knowledge about the licensing part, which we obtained for around 10 years from the time of deployment, but I d...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
When it comes to Everpure FlashArray ports shown in the GUI, it would be better if, when one of the Pure array ports ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Dell PowerScale has been expensive. Setup costs or provisio...
What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
For improvements, we can focus on enhancing performance, upgrading the nodes, and accessing data through Isilon for m...
What is your primary use case for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
Dell PowerScale is our main NAS environment storage where we create CIFS and NFS file shares for users.When users req...
What needs improvement with Qumulo?
The creators of Qumulo were the ones who created Isilon, and I had a conversation with them, so any of the features w...
What is your primary use case for Qumulo?
Qumulo is a distributor system that represents names based on similar tools. We had a few petabytes of data, and cert...
What advice do you have for others considering Qumulo?
I have plans to increase the usage of Qumulo in the future. We have brought it in to work with specific teams or test...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon
No data available
 

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,
County of Riverside Sheriff Department, Hyundai Mobis Automotive North America, University of Arizona, UCSD - San Diego Supercomputer Center, Medical College of Wisconsin, Sinclair Oil, Royal Dutch Shell, Kaiser Permanente, Deluxe Creative, Vexcel Imaging, University of Florida, The Madison Square Garden Company, Arizona State University, Cinesite, San Diego Padres Baseball, Johns Hopkins University - School of Medicine, IHME, EllieMae, Washington State University.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerScale vs. Qumulo and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,270 professionals have used our research since 2012.