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Dell PowerStore vs Dell SC Series comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 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

Pure FlashArray X NVMe
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
15th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
Dell PowerStore
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
85
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (4th), NAS (2nd), Enterprise SAN (1st), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (1st)
Dell SC Series
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
17th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
54
Ranking in other categories
Frame-Based Disk Arrays (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerStore is 17.3%, up from 16.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell SC Series is 0.8%, down from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature
One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.
Brian Ricci - PeerSpot reviewer
It's constantly enhanced and has impressive reliability and data compression
The maintenance is a bit expensive. The service and support are there for three years, but after the third year, it is pretty pricey for renewal. I hope Dell addresses that. Everything is pricey these days anyway. It is not like the old days of Compellent. We used to be able to see the metrics for our customers. On Compellent, we could look up that customer and see all the metrics. That is not allowed for us now. We cannot do that anymore. I have to be explicitly allowed by the customer to do that, and some companies' security does not allow that.
Steven McClendon - PeerSpot reviewer
Superior platform with excellent snapshots and cost-saving auto-tiering
I'm a big fan of the SC Series platform. Its feature set is superior to some of the other platforms. The snapshots on SC are excellent, allowing for multiple snapshot schedules for any one system. The auto-tiering functionality intelligently moves new data to the highest performance tier and then progresses it down to less expensive tiers over time, providing cost savings for customers.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I appreciate the performance."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"It offers competitive performance, and the Evergreen storage model of Pure fits well with my organization."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."
"The latency is good."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"The most valuable feature is the functionality of the integration between the storage and the domain."
"My company found the tool to be really easy to use, expand, and manage."
"The solution is easy to use and has good performance."
"The PowerStore's compression ratio is even higher than the Unity system."
"The management capabilities of Dell PowerStore are extremely easy to use and user-friendly."
"Overall, we're quite happy with the product because we can move the data that is stored on more than 10 of our current storage devices to a single PowerStore."
"PowerStore is easy to use. All the drives use soft encryption. To upgrade it, you download the app, and it runs by itself. It's very easy to deploy, share, and create volumes."
"Dell EMC PowerStore is scalable."
"Dell SC Series offers a lot of performance, being one of the best performing storages Dell ever made."
"It is just as stable as any other high-end solution."
"Technical support is very good. I do use it from time to time and it's always excellent."
"The interface is easy to use which makes the product user-friendly."
"We see very low latency with very high IOPS for mixed workloads."
"Its feature set is superior to some of the other platforms."
"We replicate between SAN to SAN for a lot of features and supportability. It also helps us when we want to upgrade to a newer SC Series or move the data from one data center to another."
"The setup and installation is much simpler now, because Dell has standardized the configure process."
 

Cons

"The software layer has to improve."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"Managing data isn't difficult for me. The performance is usually perfect, but we sometimes have capacity problems."
"Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better."
"Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive."
"Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"It feels more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses rather than enterprises."
"The upgrades themselves are running fine, but after the upgrade is when we have a problem. With the update to 1.4, we had a head crash. They told us, 'This is a known issue. Please upgrade to 2.' We upgraded to 2 and, one week later they told us, 'Yeah, there are some issues in 2.0.0. You can lose data. Please upgrade to 2.0.1.' Overall, they need to make the system stable."
"The data resiliency and cybersecurity features of Dell PowerStore are just normal and would be considered medium; we need additional components such as cybersecurity vault for increased resilience."
"Dell PowerStore can improve the integration with VMware."
"The maintenance is a bit expensive. The service and support are there for three years, but after the third year, it is pretty pricey for renewal."
"As a partner, I'd like to be added to each customer's CloudIQ to take a look."
"Dell PowerStore is an unfinished product compared to the HPE systems because it is relatively new."
"Dell PowerStore should offer more cybersecurity and warehouse data security."
"We have not seen an ROI and it would be good to have an ROI calculator made available by Dell."
"There's always room for improvement in the operating code."
"What I understand is that this is a 13 year old architecture, so it has lived its life and they're phasing it out. Honestly, we were initially struggling with the integration with VMware (but it was fixed with the VMware 6.5) and, then, it was around a 10GB network. At that time, it had the longevity to go to 100GB as well. It got us thinking about, when we go into the containerized architecture, what do we need to do to fix the infrastructure?"
"I don't think the solution is very scalable."
"If Dell SC Series could have supported the protocol NVMe over TCP, that would have been great. It does not."
"I would like to see higher compression, dedupe, faster I/O, and bigger drives."
"Overall, I'd like to see more synergy between Dell EMC's higher-tier platforms and their mid-tier platforms. What I have said, constantly, to my partners at Dell EMC is that the clear articulation of the path is really important to us. In that vein, what I'd also like to see is, with the migration strategy that's built into this product, a lot more attention paid to Dell's - in particular - legacy platforms and how we get from some of our legacy EMC platforms onto this platform with a straight-through migration and scaling strategy, not host-based migrations and not piecemeal... Dell EMC would do well to focus more on my ability to skip a generation, rather than having me take individual hops because I can't greenfield my way into a software-defined data center fast enough. This journey of multiple hops is not helpful."
"Dell could improve the upgrading process."
"If Dell SC Series wasn't being phased out, adding an NVMe tier and secure snapshots like those on the PowerStore platform would be beneficial."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."
"The product is expensive."
"The tool's pricing is cheap; I rate it a six to seven out of ten. Most of our sales are not subscription-based. We sell the hardware, and customers keep using it. They only renew the service part annually. The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there."
"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."
"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."
"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."
"Dell PowerStore is affordable and the license is just a face license which is great."
"Licensing is very simple. Everything is included in the basic license. There are no concerns about having to pay to add a feature. Everything is there."
"We purchased it with a five-year warranty."
"The price of Dell PowerStore could improve. The price should be managed more compared to Huawei Dorado or IBM All-Flash series."
"The price is not cheap, but it's worth it for the features you get from the storage. If you can afford it, you are probably buying the best solution that you can have for this virtual environment."
"PowerStore's pricing is reasonable."
"When we compared it with the other solutions, the pricing of PowerStore was equal. The pricing is good."
"The rate is always too high. Nobody likes paying for it. I have not seen a client yet who says that the price should be higher. Initially, people look at it, but when they see what the benefits are, it is a no-brainer. We can give them good pricing at the outset."
"Compared to other solutions out there, it's affordable."
"There are costs involving the solution, vendor fees and product safety which are additional."
"The SC Series was priced fairly. I wouldn't call it either expensive or cheap because we had a very tight budget, so if they were able to fit in that type of budget, they met our expectations."
"Pricing depends on varying life cycles."
"We have reviewed many platforms over the years. It is probably the best solution for its value."
"The maintenance is usually pretty good. It's not like some of the others where they increase it in the fourth, fifth, or sixth years."
"Always keep in mind, this is not just a enclosure with disks is a complete SAN as a service. There is software, license, and storage in one single solution."
"It has a good price point and offers some value-added enterprise features."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
21%
University
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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.
What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...
What do you think about Dell EMC PowerStore? Is it actually a new product?
PowerStore is flexible, scalable, simple, and performant with market-leading economics for a wide range of legacy and...
How does Dell's EMC PowerStore compare with its EMC Unity XT?
Dell EMC PowerStore is a unified storage platform that has the added benefit of being scalable. The automated managem...
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...
What do you like most about Dell SC Series?
I find this version to be more budget-friendly compared to products from other vendors. This aspect greatly benefits ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell SC Series?
Cost considerations are crucial when choosing between solutions like Dell and NetApp. Sometimes Dell offers better pe...
What needs improvement with Dell SC Series?
In the future, I want any box that comes on-premises to have the provision to integrate with cloud storage. If I want...
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
PowerStore
SC Series Storage, Compellent
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Information Not Available
TGen, Frost Science, Gerrie Electric
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerStore vs. Dell SC Series and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,491 professionals have used our research since 2012.