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Dell PowerStore vs Pure Storage FlashArray 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
1.0
Organizations reduced costs and improved performance with Pure FlashArray X NVMe, achieving quick ROI and efficient resource management.
Sentiment score
6.6
Dell PowerStore reduces infrastructure costs, enhances data management, boosts performance, and streamlines operations with reliability and efficiency.
Sentiment score
3.9
Pure Storage FlashArray enhances efficiency, lowers costs, and boosts ROI with simple management, data reduction, and evergreen updates.
By opting for the gold subscription every three years, you get a free upgrade to the latest controller release.
If you wait more than seven years to buy another one, you get a return on your investment.
If you purchase storage with 300 terabytes, you can easily achieve one petabyte of effective capacity.
It's been trouble-free the entire time, with very high performance, as it has been designed and built properly.
We have seen a return on our investment in Dell PowerStore; definitely our cost per terabyte has been very good compared to some of the other vendors that we would have been using previously, and our performance benchmarks have exceeded what we were expecting.
In the long term, spanning three to five years, the total cost of ownership becomes cheaper, considering power consumption, data center footprint, and NVMe technology usage.
We have seen a return on investment as the solution has reduced resource requirements, allowing less experienced personnel to manage the storage.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.1
Pure FlashArray X NVMe's technical support is praised for responsiveness, despite occasional follow-up issues, earning high customer satisfaction.
Sentiment score
6.2
Dell PowerStore's support is praised for responsiveness and professionalism, though some face language and time zone challenges.
Sentiment score
8.0
Pure Storage FlashArray is praised for excellent, responsive customer support, offering swift issue resolution and proactive problem identification.
We also had one outage where a controller of one of the products had failed and had to be replaced on-site.
Customers always have their issues resolved promptly.
Pure has good storage.
If necessary, they will search for a specialist within their Dell network who we can approach with our questions.
I would rate the technical support of Dell PowerStore between nine and ten out of ten.
They're responsive, knowledgeable, and have a quick turnaround.
Pure's support organization is responsive with minimal bureaucracy, making support a key factor in customer retention.
The support from Pure Storage is excellent.
Opening a case with Pure is a smooth process, and they prove to be reliable, even in severe cases where infrastructure issues arise.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.1
Pure FlashArray X NVMe offers scalable storage with low latency, easy upgrades, though capacity customization and high costs are noted.
Sentiment score
7.1
Dell PowerStore offers scalable, flexible architecture, supporting diverse business needs through easy expansion and integration of multiple appliances.
Sentiment score
7.4
Pure Storage FlashArray offers seamless scalability, ease of upgrades, and efficient storage, satisfying diverse enterprise needs with flexible growth options.
It is highly scalable.
It is suitable for both medium-sized and enterprise businesses.
It hasn't broken down anytime in the last six to seven years, despite hurricanes, earthquakes, and power outages.
The solution's scalability is a ten out of ten.
The customer likely exceeds 20,000 users globally.
You can create as many tools as needed, providing scalability based on the use case.
A big banking client had around 300 petabytes of data on Pure Storage.
The solution is highly scalable, particularly when there is a need to expand capacity.
I rate FlashArray's scalability nine out of 10.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Pure Storage offers exceptional stability and reliability with outstanding support, consistently achieving high user ratings for performance and service.
Sentiment score
7.6
Dell PowerStore is generally reliable, though update-related bugs can cause minor concerns among users despite consistent stability.
Sentiment score
8.3
Pure Storage FlashArray is praised for its stability, reliability, 100% uptime, and efficient support with minimal downtime issues.
During the eight years, there have been no problems such as hardware failure or stopping.
I would rate the stability of the solution as a ten out of ten.
I would rate the stability of the product at seven out of ten.
When I removed all the cables, it failed over within five minutes.
There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze.
I would rate the stability of Dell PowerStore as ten out of ten.
For stability, I rate it a ten out of ten.
I have not encountered any significant issues, such as applying firmware that introduces bugs.
Stability has never been an issue except for minor controller glitches causing failover events, similar to brakes and tires on a car.
 

Room For Improvement

Pure FlashArray X requires cost-effective improvements in UI, integration, cloud features, multitenancy, analytics, backup, AI, and scalability.
Dell PowerStore needs improved integration, features, and support, focusing on UI, stability, pricing, and cybersecurity enhancements.
Pure Storage FlashArray needs improvements in scalability, cloud integration, user controls, pricing, and compatibility with VMware and third-party environments.
We would appreciate a built-in transparent failover in the next release to eliminate the need for a separate metro cluster.
I'm eagerly anticipating the roadmap's promise of introducing multiple controllers, which could significantly boost scalability and resilience.
We mostly rely on long-term releases. We don't need the most up-to-date features, but we need a reliable environment.
If you want to delve into where your I/Os are going, the reporting might need more in-depth information to make informed decisions.
In my organization, we have had to go through two weeks with no replication, which is not very handy for our production environment.
Something needs to be done with the caching to ensure that if some issue occurs, there needs to be an ability to disable caching during maintenance to make it static, safe, and good.
Integrating object storage into the FlashArray would benefit entry-level and SMB customers by offering a more unified solution.
Storing cold data on expensive arrays doesn't make financial sense, and tiering to any of the big three cloud providers would be advantageous.
As a technical professional, I lack visibility into the system logs.
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise buyers see Pure FlashArray X NVMe as a justified premium investment due to performance and comprehensive licensing.
Dell PowerStore offers strong value with competitive pricing, straightforward licensing, and favorable price-to-performance compared to other NVMe options.
Pure Storage FlashArray is costly but valued for performance, all-inclusive features, and efficiency-enhancing Evergreen upgrades.
While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits.
The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there.
I would give it a nine out of ten in terms of costliness.
Likely the cost is $400,000 whereas IBM may be $250,000.
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.
There's no need to pay for a license; it's all-inclusive.
They're expensive.
While they say it's free, we actually pay for support upfront.
The cost of Pure FlashArray is a bit high compared to peers, but its sustainability and features justify the price.
 

Valuable Features

Pure FlashArray X NVMe offers exceptional performance, reliability, scalability, and seamless VMware integration, enhancing workload efficiency and user experience.
Dell PowerStore provides seamless management, impressive performance, intelligent optimization, and strong cybersecurity with ease of deployment and scalability.
Pure Storage FlashArray offers fast, user-friendly data management with exceptional performance, scalability, and integration, ensuring efficient and reliable operations.
Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator.
The platform's robust features include excellent sustainability tracking, and a comprehensive dashboard offering insights into IOPS, bandwidth, performance, and virtual activities.
Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen.
The solution promotes data reduction, often meeting the compression ratio.
The PowerStore's compression ratio is even higher than the Unity system.
The deduplication part of the solution is valuable since, as a user, you get more space for less money.
FlashArray's integration with the Pure One instrument provides a centralized platform for efficient management of all arrays.
Another noteworthy aspect is their platform, Pure One, a cloud-based analytics platform that automatically creates a case and sends out a part if a disk or controller fails.
It handles internal data migration seamlessly in the background without going offline, achieving a hundred percent uptime.
 

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe
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Ranking in All-Flash Storage
14th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
Dell PowerStore
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
129
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (4th), NAS (1st), Enterprise SAN (1st), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (1st)
Pure Storage FlashArray
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
4th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
202
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 1.0%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerStore is 15.8%, down from 17.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pure Storage FlashArray is 6.4%, down from 7.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Dell PowerStore15.8%
Pure Storage FlashArray6.4%
Pure FlashArray X NVMe1.0%
Other76.8%
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Jaehoon Oh - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Eoin O’Brien - PeerSpot reviewer
Improves cost efficiency and significantly while boosting workload performance
We have realized several benefits from using Dell PowerStore; we migrated to the current Dell PowerStore models from tiered storage, and now we're using all flash. The dedupe and compression has been a big benefit for us versus the old storage that it was running, and we've seen the performance of all flash for our storage services. My company finds particular features within Dell PowerStore valuable, primarily the cost benefits for the performance that we get out of the platform. We've definitely seen the benefit on that side of it, including the cost per terabyte, and the support from Dell has been excellent as well. We haven't had any issues with it, so it's been very reliable as a platform for us. The performance metrics I use to measure success with Dell PowerStore are all IOPS and throughput. We are not using it with AI workloads on Dell PowerStore, so it's primarily just customers running IaaS, however, it is important that it's reliable and performs well, and we get that from Dell PowerStore. Dell PowerStore has supported growth and operational success for my business; a key driver at the moment is consolidation, and the dedupe and compression ratios allow us to standardize on a single platform. This has helped improve our operational metrics and overall operations, as we now have only one vendor to support and one set of storage arrays to manage. We have a very clear path into support and escalation if there is an issue, and we are not dealing with multiple vendors.
Parul-Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Expands capacity and requires minimal management
The main drawback is the support. I’ve been working for four years without a local representative, and although I’ve submitted many requests, nothing has changed. They sometimes call me in the middle of the night, even though I’ve informed them about my working hours. I often raise cases to speak with someone directly because I prefer to discuss issues over the phone rather than via email. I specifically request them to call me when I open a ticket, but they continually reply by email instead. This ongoing situation has been very frustrating in terms of the support I receive. As a technical professional, I lack visibility into the system logs. Whenever an issue arises, a ticket is opened for us. While I'm glad they take this step, it can be frustrating. They inform me, “Hey, we opened this ticket for you. It’s critical. Call me so we can discuss what’s going on.” However, as a product manager for my institution, I don’t have access to the logs, which are withheld due to, as they say, proprietary code. I understand that, but I have been working in storage for many years and am not new to this field. In fact, I spent 17 years at IBM Storage, dealing with large enterprise systems, not just small vendor products. I wish I could access the normal logs to diagnose issues myself, rather than relying solely on their information. Before I can escalate issues or open a checklist, I need to have a clear understanding of what’s happening based on the logs. Sometimes the situation feels rushed, and I end up having to push my support team for answers. There are moments when I feel like I’m left in the dark about the log details until I actually call them for clarification. It can be quite challenging. Pure Storage can improve FlashArray by providing more logging visibility to customers. Currently, there is no log visibility. They could include an audit log, but I cannot see any system logs when problems occur.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business41
Midsize Enterprise27
Large Enterprise61
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business60
Midsize Enterprise34
Large Enterprise137
 

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 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...
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 ...
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...
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 do you like most about Pure Storage FlashArray?
We consume less physical storage because of the solution’s deduplication and compression.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I don't have the billing details right now, but the pricing is high.
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
PowerStore
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Information Not Available
Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerStore vs. Pure Storage FlashArray and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.