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Dell PowerScale vs Red Hat Ceph Storage comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 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
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)
Red Hat Ceph Storage
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (3rd), File and Object Storage (2nd)
 

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.
Rifat Rahman - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Architect & CEO at Tirzok Private Limited
Offers reliable performance and availability for large deployments
I would like to see improvements in Red Hat Ceph Storage not because I necessarily think it needs improvement, but because I generally prefer to do things manually rather than following the containerization part. Current deployments are based on containers, but I deploy manually with my scripts and controls. If there are no Kubernetes-like requirements, I often prefer to deploy a whole manual process. I don't ask for improvements in the deployment model because Red Hat has its own philosophy about making things, but it's my personal choice that I prefer things manually. Some features are available only in the containerization part, so if those are also available in manual deployment, that will help.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We also use VMware integrations developed by Pure, their plugins in our vCenter environment. They help by allowing our non-technical operations teams to deploy new data stores and resize data stores without me having to involve myself all the time to do those simple tasks."
"It's simple, powerful, and ready to use."
"I would highly recommend this solution; it has all the features we need and tests all the software solutions that are currently available and that will be available in the future."
"Now they are trying to add more and more applications because they're getting better performance and stability."
"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."
"I have never experienced an outage with the product or had any support that was below excellent."
"Now, with Pure Storage, we have totally eliminated that problem."
"The stability is perfect, the reliability is 100%, and the latency is always lower than 1 millisecond."
"The solution provides massive performance, scalability, efficiency, and ease of management."
"Dell PowerScale aligns with our organization's strategic goals of improving operational efficiency because we are able to provide a centralized location for file systems."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is its single space of storage."
"The solution is extremely easy to manage. This is its most valuable feature."
"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."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) stability is solid as a rock."
"The configuration of the solution and the user interface are both quite good."
"I really like that Red Hat Ceph Storage can be used as a total solution without any storage area network components."
"The product spawned a new vision of storage deployment, as well as a strong interest in reusing equipment and increasing ROI."
"We are using Ceph internal inexpensive disk and data redundancy without spending extra money on external storage."
"Red Hat Ceph Storage is working exactly as it should be; it's running in the background, it's working, and it doesn't bother me."
"The high availability of the solution is important to us."
"The most valuable feature is the stability of the product."
"I like the distributed and self-healing nature of the product."
 

Cons

"Currently, the solution fails to support file screening."
"There is not a great need for improvement, but better pricing could be beneficial."
"I would not say anything because we still do not use Everpure FlashArray fully."
"I have been primarily working with storage and have not fully explored other areas, but there is some room for improvement when it comes to performance reporting."
"It doesn’t provide enough information on performance analytics. For example, Nimble Storage has Infosight, which provides data; Pure Storage doesn’t have an equivalent."
"We haven't seen ROI yet."
"There's always an opportunity for new feature functionality."
"It took us a year to get it to stabilize and to get the best out of Pure."
"The analytics could be improved."
"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."
"The technical support is average. There are certainly not the best that we have ever dealt with, but far from the worst ones."
"The only thing that I think PowerScale could do better is improving the HTTP data access protocol."
"There aren't many templates still coming out for it. They need to provide templates so we can copy and paste what we've done in the past to future, new things."
"The solution's rate structure or rate redundancy needs to be improved."
"For improvements, we can focus on enhancing performance, upgrading the nodes, and accessing data through Isilon for more efficiency."
"The portal is really complicated to figure out features and functions, and it could be easier to navigate."
"I would like to see better performance and stability when Ceph is in recovery."
"It would be nice to have a notification feature whenever an important action is completed."
"What could be improved in Red Hat Ceph Storage is its user interface or GUI."
"If troubleshooting is needed, the response should be faster."
"We have encountered slight integration issues."
"In the deployment step, we need to create some config files to add Ceph functions in OpenStack modules (Nova, Cinder, Glance). It would be useful to have a tool that validates the format of the data in those files, before generating a deploy with failures."
"This product uses a lot of CPU and network bandwidth. It needs some deduplication features and to use delta for rebalancing."
"It took me a long time to get the storage drivers for the communication with Kubernetes up and running. The documentation could improve it is lacking information. I'm not sure if this is a Ceph problem or if Ceph should address this, but it was something I ran into. Additionally, there is a performance issue I am having that I am looking into, but overall I am satisfied with the performance."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are finding the TCO of flash to be lower than SSD implementations."
"We have an Evergreen Storage subscription, which I think is a great feature."
"I would rate the pricing of Pure Storage FlashArray a five out of ten. It is expensive but not too much."
"The price is very reasonable when compared to other solutions."
"It is not the cheapest one out there. We're paying yearly, but I'm not 100% sure."
"The Evergreen Storage subscription is great, because then I get new controllers every three years."
"We feel that the pricing is fair and the licensing process was easy for both."
"No storage device is cheap, but Pure Storage is fairly priced and offers what you pay for. You get all the licenses in the future when you purchase a license."
"We use the TNA approach which is a great opportunity for us to better manage the licenses based on how much consumption is available for the different customers so we can use that approach and scalability."
"The price of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is reasonable."
"It is a really expensive solution."
"Pricing for this solution is reasonable."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is an expensive solution."
"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 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 general cost for a system like this is expensive. The total cost depends on your use case. You need to pay for every additional feature that you use."
"The price of Red Hat Ceph Storage is reasonable."
"The operational overhead is higher compared to Azure because we own the hardware."
"I rate the product’s pricing an eight out of ten."
"We never used the paid support."
"There is no cost for software."
"Most of time, you can get Ceph with the OpenStack solution in a subscription​​ as a bundle.​"
"If you can afford a product like Red Hat Ceph Storage then go for it. If you cannot, then you need to test Ceph and get your hands dirty."
"The price of this product isn't high."
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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%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

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 Business13
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
 

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...
How does Red Hat Ceph Storage compare with MiniO?
Red Hat Ceph does well in simplifying storage integration by replacing the need for numerous storage solutions. This ...
What needs improvement with Red Hat Ceph Storage?
Areas of Red Hat Ceph Storage that have room for improvement include more promotion. Many people do not know about th...
What advice do you have for others considering Red Hat Ceph Storage?
I do not have experience working with solutions such as Red Hat Ceph Storage and StorPool. I have plenty of experienc...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon
Ceph
 

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,
Dell, DreamHost
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerScale vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,270 professionals have used our research since 2012.