Dell PowerStore vs Dell VMAX All Flash comparison

Dell PowerStore and Dell VMAX All Flash are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Dell PowerStore is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.8, while Dell VMAX All Flash is ranked #24 with an average rating of 8.2. Dell PowerStore holds a 17.3% mindshare in AFS, compared to Dell VMAX All Flash’s 0.6% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Dell PowerStore users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Dell VMAX All Flash users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Dell PowerStore and Dell VMAX All Flash are two high-performance storage solutions. Dell PowerStore seems to have the upper hand due to its modern architecture and cost-efficiency, while Dell VMAX All Flash is favored for its reliability and extensive feature set.

Features: Dell PowerStore is valued for its data-centric design, automation, and operational simplicity. Dell VMAX All Flash is recognized for its proven robustness, integration capabilities, and comprehensive data services.

Room for Improvement: For Dell PowerStore, users suggest enhancing scalability and advanced analytics features. For Dell VMAX All Flash, users point to the need for simplification and refined management tools.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell PowerStore is noted for its quick setup and excellent customer support, providing a seamless deployment experience. Dell VMAX All Flash, while stable, has a more complex deployment process and requires significant assistance from support services.

Pricing and ROI: Dell PowerStore offers competitive upfront costs and visible ROI for mid-range solutions. Dell VMAX All Flash has higher initial costs but delivers long-term value and substantial ROI for enterprise-level applications.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerStore vs. Dell VMAX All Flash Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerStore vs. Dell VMAX All Flash

April 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 851,823 peers since 2012

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

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 VMAX All Flash is 0.6%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill

Sales Manager at Multicomputos PR

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.

Read full review

Brian Ricci

President at Pinnacle Computer Services, Inc.

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.

Read full review

BrijeshKumar

Technical Lead at L&T Technology Services

With an easy initial setup phase, the tool is useful for multi-site replication and DR

The configuration part of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required. If the product is up and running after, if it goes down, my company has observed that there are multiple failures that occur in the tool, so it needs to be reinstalled from scratch. The tool should have an automated feature or an automated option to handle the aforementioned scenario, which one can simply go and reset, after which the tool should be reinstalled with the same configuration.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."

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

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."

"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."

"The solution is very straightforward to set up."

"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."

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

"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"It provides a big benefit when upgrading a new VMware environment. For example, in a big environment with 10 to 30 ESXs, you can take everything and put that into PowerStore. So, it is cost-effective, which is very important and has been massive for us. You reduce almost 80% from the hardware and work directly from PowerStore. Building hardware, especially in a big VMware environment, is a big issue for my organization."

"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is the metro cluster because we have two data centers and high availability."

"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."

"The most valuable aspects of Dell PowerStore are the promising roadmap, and the interesting features to come."

"The deduplication functionality provided by the solution is fairly good. The speed offered by the product is enough for our organization."

"This solution is highly flexible and offers efficient online compression capabilities."

"The most valuable feature is the unwavering performance."

"If I were giving advice to another company looking at Dell PowerStore, I would say that you cannot go wrong with Dell, as the sales and support teams are always top notch."

More Dell PowerStore pros

"The ransomware protection feature is housed in a separate unit, specifically addressing the top twenty most critical threats."

"The snapshot feature has been precious for our testing processes, application development, and managing testing environments due to its efficiency and ease of use."

"It works very well."

"The most valuable features of VMAX are its performance and GUI interface."

"We haven't experienced any outages or core-level issues in the last ten years, making us comfortable with the storage solution."

"The product's initial setup phase was good."

Cons

"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."

"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."

"Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive."

"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."

"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."

"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."

"Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services."

"There are some challenges with data encryption and reduction."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"Reporting is an area that could be improved. It's very simplistic sometimes, and some of the very technical guys on my team want to see more of the details and be able to massage the report a little bit better."

"There seems to be a lack of a price range in the small company, small medium company segment."

"Sometimes, you have to go back and forth with the technical support team, where they want you to do something you've already done."

"Dell PowerStore is an unfinished product compared to the HPE systems because it is relatively new."

"During the installation phase, the licensing part was not straightforward. It was very difficult for the technicians, who are not trained Dell EMC technicians, to do the licensing because the information on their website is not straightforward... Eventually, I had to pass this task to our business partner and they did it for us."

"Upgrading an old model to a new one can be complex, particularly when using VMware."

"There could be better reporting."

"One of the big differences when we were looking at Pure is that they had more of an in-place upgrade option going forward, kind of future-proofing things. We hear Dell is working towards that, but they weren't quite there, especially three years ago."

More Dell PowerStore cons

"Improvements are needed in both partition recovery and scalability."

"We encountered some challenges during large data migrations that could be addressed for smoother transitions."

"The scalability of VMAX is somewhat limited, especially in terms of cache scalability."

"The configuration part of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."

"There is room for improvement in the centralized administration."

"The scalability of VMAX is somewhat limited, especially in terms of cache scalability. We've had to procure additional engines to address this limitation."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

"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."

"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'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."

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

"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."

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is good. There's no need to pay for a license; it's all-inclusive."

"The solution's price was comparable to other products for the use case, size, and setup."

"I rate the price of Dell PowerStore a seven out of ten."

"Pricing depends on the model and negotiation. Sometimes we manage to get good discounts, sometimes not."

"With compression, we were able to have a solution within our company's budget. We include a clause in the contract with Dell that states if the compression ratio is not met, we will adjust the workload accordingly."

"There are no separate licenses required as all the basic licenses are included in the bundle."

"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."

"The pricing structure and licensing model of Dell PowerStore are pretty decent. It's pretty competitive."

More Dell PowerStore pricing and cost advice

"It is not a cheap product."

"The price falls within the mid-range, neither inexpensive nor high-priced."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which All-Flash Storage solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

851,823 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

23%

Financial Services Firm

19%

Government

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Dell EMC VMax?

The product's initial setup phase was good.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC VMax?

The pricing provided by EMC is reasonable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Dell EMC VMax?

The scalability of VMAX is somewhat limited, especially in terms of cache scalability. We've had to procure additiona...

See all answers

Comparisons

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 18% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 15% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 9% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 7% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

HPE Alletra Storage vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 14% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 14% of the time

Dell PowerVault vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 9% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 9% of the time

More Dell PowerStore Competitors

Dell PowerMax vs Dell VMAX All Flash

Compared 58% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell VMAX All Flash

Compared 8% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Dell VMAX All Flash

Compared 6% of the time

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs Dell VMAX All Flash

Compared 5% of the time

More Dell VMAX All Flash Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

May 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerStore

May 2025

Download Dell PowerStore product report

Buyer's Guide

All-Flash Storage

May 2025

Download Dell VMAX All Flash product report

Also Known As

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

PowerStore

No data available

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

Pure Storage

Dell PowerStore stands out for its high performance, flexibility, and easy integration with VMware. It offers notable data compression and deduplication capabilities while providing powerful NVMe support and machine learning to optimize IT operations.

Dell PowerStore is designed to offer a comprehensive approach to IT infrastructure by enhancing performance and simplifying management. It is particularly suitable for companies that require scalable solutions to increase compute or capacity independently. Featuring built-in intelligence, PowerStore allows efficient storage consolidation and reduced footprint, while integration with CloudIQ enhances monitoring and analytics. However, there are areas for improvement, such as stability, enterprise features, and the user interface. Pricing is high, and support responsiveness needs attention. Organizations primarily use PowerStore for VMware environments, storage, and data protection, supporting high-performance databases and VMware workloads. It is utilized in data centers for disaster recovery and hybrid setups.

What are the key features of Dell PowerStore?

Flexibility: Independently scales compute or capacity
High Performance: Offers powerful NVMe support and machine learning
Integration: Easily integrates with VMware
Data Efficiency: Provides data compression and deduplication
Simplified Management: Built-in intelligence for efficient storage management

What benefits should users consider?

Performance Optimization: Enhance IT operations with machine learning
Scalability: Increase compute or storage capacity as needed
Integration Potential: Improve efficiency with VMware and CloudIQ
Data Protection: Reliable for disaster recovery and hybrid environments

In industries like IT, finance, and healthcare, Dell PowerStore supports efficient data management and enhances infrastructure performance. Organizations leverage it to manage extensive data, streamline virtualization processes, and facilitate migration from legacy systems, while integrating cloud and on-premises infrastructures for improved operations.

Dell Technologies

Dell VMAX All Flash is utilized in hyper-converged solutions like VxRail deployments, critical for Data Domain in backup tasks. It supports multi-site replication, disaster recovery, banking IT operations, and high-performance applications.

Dell VMAX All Flash plays a key role in data-intensive environments due to its robust capabilities in storage, data protection, and high throughput tasks. It is crucial in hyper-converged solutions and VxRail deployments, facilitating multi-site replication and disaster recovery. Its applications span across banking and other critical IT operations requiring high performance. The system's ability to support efficient data compression and provide ransomware protection addresses significant security concerns. Multi-site replication and redundancy safeguard data even during power outages or hardware failures, while the snapshot feature aids in testing, application development, and environment management.

What are the key features of Dell VMAX All Flash?

Compression: Efficient data compression capabilities.
Ransomware Protection: Tackles ransomware threats effectively.
Multi-site Replication and Redundancy: Ensures data safety during power outages or hardware issues.
Snapshots: Aids in testing, application development, and environment management.

What benefits should users look for in Dell VMAX All Flash reviews?

Data Protection: Enhanced data security with ransomware protection.
Performance: High throughput for demanding applications.
Reliability: Multi-site replication and redundancy for critical operations continuity.
Support: Adheres to IP strategies with excellent customer support.

Dell VMAX All Flash is critical in industries like banking, where it supports IT operations requiring high performance, and in environments demanding stringent data protection measures. Its role in multi-site replication and disaster recovery makes it invaluable for business continuity and critical data security across sectors.

Dell Technologies

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerStore vs. Dell VMAX All Flash

April 2025

Free Report: Dell PowerStore vs. Dell VMAX All Flash

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerStore vs. Dell VMAX All Flash and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

851,823 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Dell PowerStore vs. Dell VMAX All Flash report.

See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.

We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.