Dell PowerStore vs NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays comparison

Dell Technologies and NetApp are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Dell Technologies is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.7, while NetApp is ranked #24 with an average rating of 9.0. Dell Technologies holds a 14.3% mindshare in AFS, compared to NetApp’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays and Dell PowerStore are leading solutions in the storage array market. Dell PowerStore often edges out with its advanced features and flexibility, despite NetApp EF-Series being favored for its competitive pricing and reliable support.

Features: NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays are praised for their high performance and simplicity, offering efficient data protection and management. Dell PowerStore stands out with its scale-up and scale-out architecture, advanced deduplication, and integration with VMware. Users find Dell PowerStore's features more extensive and adaptable to various workloads.

Room for Improvement: NetApp EF-Series users seek more advanced automation capabilities and improved scalability options. Dell PowerStore users express a need for greater stability in software updates and enhanced initial setup processes. Dell PowerStore generally receives more favorable feedback despite these concerns.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NetApp EF-Series is commended for its straightforward deployment and robust customer support. Dell PowerStore, while noted for its intuitive deployment experience, faces criticism for occasional complexities in advanced configurations. Both products are supported well, but NetApp EF-Series leads in ease of initial deployment.

Pricing and ROI: NetApp EF-Series is appreciated for its competitive pricing and solid ROI backed by lower setup costs. Dell PowerStore, though seen as an initial higher investment, is valued for its long-term ROI due to its extensive features and performance enhancements. Ultimately, Dell PowerStore's advanced capabilities justify its price for many users.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerStore vs. NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays Report (Updated: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerStore vs. NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

February 2026

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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 February 2026, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 1.5%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerStore is 14.3%, down from 17.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is 1.0%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Dell PowerStore	14.3%
Pure FlashArray X NVMe	1.5%
NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays	1.0%
Other	83.2%

All-Flash Storage

Featured Reviews

Jaehoon Oh

Chief Technology Officer at Lambda256

Supports efficient storage management through volume snapshots and offers reliable non-disruptive upgrades

I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could be enhanced. I can see the performance statistics in the Pure Storage console, but it does not show the performance by 4K byte unit. It displays IOPS and bandwidth, but IOPS is about real use, and I want to know how many IOPS are currently running in 4K byte units. I cannot see that IOPS because most storage systems report their performance by 4K byte unit. I want to see Pure Storage performance by 4K byte unit to compare with other storage or other internal NVMe SSD.

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reviewer2304864

Vmware Windows Senior Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Resilience has supported proactive management and secured audit readiness across multiple sites

The resilience in Dell PowerStore benefits my company from an auditing perspective because we know we have that resilience in place. I see Dell PowerStore playing a bigger role in the future because we are starting to use it more, and that is pushing it. The biggest return on investment for me when using Dell PowerStore is scalability. Scalability is key. I can amplify that scalability is the biggest return on investment because we have redundancy between two sites; if something goes down, we have to manage it, but we want to do it proactively.

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Tayo Olubanke

Managing Director at GCET

Offers flexibility and top-notch technology

You can go to bed peacefully if you have a NetApp. If you have NetApp within your data center, you get to know about power failure if you are using it. Your NetApp will still come alive. Even if it does not come alive, I can say that it is not like other tools when it comes to dealing with power failure. The tool is affordable, and the technology is top-notch. It is the only technology that has software for what we call inline compression and deduplication. All the products under NetApp are aiming to use AI. I know that you can achieve whatever you want to do with NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays. I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"On a scale of one to ten, I rate Pure FlashArray as ten."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."

"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."

"Everything, especially the VMs inside, is pretty fast."

"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."

"The tool's valuable features are speed, security, data compression, and reliability. Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen. It helps us to save money and resources."

"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"To growth and business success, Dell PowerStore contributes definitely because the appliances have these expansion enclosures and scale-up and scale-out work pretty well with Dell PowerStore, up to a certain degree."

"The beauty is the simplicity - customers can manage multiple workloads from a single dashboard with scale-out architecture."

"Dell PowerStore has impacted my organization positively because we have reduced outages."

"The resilience in Dell PowerStore benefits my company from an auditing perspective because we know we have that resilience in place."

"We find NAS to be the most impactful feature of Dell PowerStore. The compression and deduplication technology is very important and essential, and this was one of the reasons that we decided to go with Dell PowerStore."

"With Dell PowerStore, we're getting close to 200,000 IOPS, which has doubled our performance."

"The graphical interface does everything and we don't need to use the CLI; we can do everything, and it's user-friendly and simple."

"The tool's most valuable features are compression and speed."

More Dell PowerStore pros

"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."

"The speed is the most valuable feature."

"The stability, speed, and reliability are the solution's best features. The information is also very secure."

"The management software is very good."

"Some of the valuable features include MetroCluster switchover, in terms of disaster recovery, it is easy to use, and flexible."

"The main advantage of this solution is performance."

"The benefits are better up-time, better response time."

"One of the most valuable features is the overall performance it provides. You're able to throw a pile of IOPS at it and it will handle that without much issue."

More NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays pros

Cons

"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."

"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."

"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."

"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."

"We need better data deduplication."

"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."

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

"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"Sometimes they have equipment in stock. Sometimes they don't, so they have to arrange it from somewhere. That's been a challenge, and it's a negative point from a support perspective."

"Customer service is good, though if you are running into some issues where you have to chase after them or they do not understand what is going on, overall it is pretty good."

"For a rating of ten, what's missing is knowing quite reliably that you end up with the right support team for your problem because way too often you have a problem, call support, and then end up with people who repair laptops."

"We'd like to see some improvements on the security side."

"Dell PowerStore is a good solution overall, but some models could support hypervisors better by allowing for more customization and flexibility for customer needs."

"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."

"Other products have better management and analytics features."

"When it comes to Dell PowerStore, I would like to see more integration and more security features included. It's unfortunate that the solution does not feature Flash trace."

More Dell PowerStore cons

"It was difficult to implement and lacks some additional features that would be useful, but as a solution fits a particular need for our organization."

"This solution does not have any compression or deduplication."

"This solution has limited storage."

"The only major drawback is the replication between EF-Series units."

"Better integration with other brands is important so we would like to see it easier to integrate."

"We need a center related to NetApp in Egypt so that we can deal with them directly."

"I would like to shrink it more, if we can. The smaller, the better."

"As far as the manageability, being able to port between the two and have to do less training in-house from a customer point of view, that would be the part to improve."

More NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."

"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."

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

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

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

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"The pricing structure and licensing model of Dell PowerStore are very good and I like it. We chose it because it was reasonably priced and met our requirements"

"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."

"It is easy to work with Dell from the licensing perspective."

"There's still a cap on the upgrade path, where you can consume all the engines within the frame before you have to go to another frame... Normally, we exceed the IOPS on the frames before we can ever exhaust the storage, so anything they can do to help us avoid stranded storage capacity, capacity that we couldn't get to, would be beneficial."

"We purchased it with a five-year warranty."

"PowerStore's pricing is reasonable."

"HCL Tech has a TLA with Dell, so in terms of price point, we are very competitive. Based on my experience, the cost of Dell PowerStore for around 500 GB of capacity is very competitive compared to any other platform in the market."

"The price is high compared to the Tunisian market."

More Dell PowerStore pricing and cost advice

"One has to opt for a perpetual-based licensing model for one year or three years. After three years, you need to renew the license."

"It's a way to get relatively low-cost, very high-performance, low-latency block storage as a point solution."

"The pricing of this solution is competitive with other vendors here in Egypt."

"Its cost-effectiveness is a major selling point. Compared to other storage vendors, the EF-Series offers excellent value for its price. It's truly a leading product in the industry."

"They provide licenses upon purchase, so there's no need for additional licenses. Regarding additional expenses apart from the standard licensing fees, such as for support or maintenance, there aren't any. Updates take around twenty to thirty minutes, including rebooting the systems, and we haven't faced any problems with the NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays. We utilize various other storages like Fujitsu, IBM, and Dalian SIP, but the NetApp EF-Series stands out as we've had no issues throughout the entire year of usage."

"This solution is not available to many users because the cost is very expensive."

"The cost of our license is approximately $200,000 over three years for NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays. There can be additional costs for storage. For example, if you want to have eight terabytes."

"The pricing is comparable with other competitors and similar in mid-range solutions, and for high range solutions, it would depend on our requirements or needs."

More NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

12%

Performing Arts

10%

Marketing Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	15
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	12

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	55
Midsize Enterprise	34
Large Enterprise	85

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	12
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	18

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.

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

The price of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is very expensive, though I do not know the actual price because I am using the E...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could ...

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...

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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...

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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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays?

One has to opt for a perpetual-based licensing model for one year or three years. After three years, you need to rene...

See all answers

What needs improvement with NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays?

The support of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required. I want NetApp's supp...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays?

There are so many things to talk about around the use cases associated with the tool. There are so many reasons why I...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerMax vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 12% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 10% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 9% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 8% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 7% of the time

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HPE Alletra Storage vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 14% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 12% of the time

Dell PowerVault vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 8% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 8% of the time

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NetApp AFF vs NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

Compared 14% of the time

Dell XtremIO vs NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

Compared 10% of the time

Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series vs NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

Compared 9% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

Compared 8% of the time

NetApp ASA vs NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

Compared 8% of the time

More NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

January 2026

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerStore

February 2026

Download Dell PowerStore product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

January 2026

NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays report

Download NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays product report

Also Known As

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

PowerStore

NetApp EF540, NetApp EF-Series

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 is a scalable, high-performance platform supporting both modern and traditional workloads, enhancing IT operations with AI-driven automation and advanced data reduction features.

Designed for flexibility, Dell PowerStore integrates seamlessly with VMware, providing robust security and high IOPS. Users benefit from fast NVMe storage, intelligent data management, and scalable performance to handle diverse workload demands. However, improvements are needed in replication, enterprise functionalities, and UI complexity. Stability and support issues highlight the need for enhanced monitoring and pricing strategies.

What are the key features of Dell PowerStore?

Advanced Compression: Optimizes storage capacity effectively.
Data Deduplication: Reduces redundant data, improving efficiency.
Scalability: Easily adjusts to growing business needs.
VMware Integration: Enhances virtualization performance.
AI-Driven Management: Simplifies IT operations.
NVMe Storage: Provides fast, reliable access to data.
Robust Security: Ensures data protection.

What benefits does Dell PowerStore offer?

High Performance: Supports demanding applications with high IOPS.
Flexible Design: Adapts to changing workload requirements.
Cost Efficiency: Promotes ROI through data reduction and scaling.
Enhanced Management: Streamlines operations with AI and integrations.
Improved Data Handling: Efficiently manages databases and storage.

In industries like finance, healthcare, and IT, Dell PowerStore is critical for VMware virtualization, high-performance databases, and backup storage. It supports hosting virtual machines, mirroring storage, and handling SAP and Oracle databases effectively. Its role in hybrid and on-premises setups showcases its adaptability and integration capabilities for mission-critical tasks.

Dell Technologies

The NetApp EF560 all-flash array is an all-SSD storage system for applications that demand extremely high levels of performance and reliability. Requiring just 2U of rack space, the EF560 all-flash array combines extreme IOPS, microsecond response times, and up to 12GBps of bandwidth with leading, enterprise-proven availability features.

NetApp

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Information Not Available

RP Data, Western Oregon University, Toei Animation

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerStore vs. NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

February 2026

Free Report: Dell PowerStore vs. NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

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