We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and Pure Storage FlashArray based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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 high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."
"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"The stability is amazing. Zero downtime reported over the last years."
"The tool is a fast-performing asset. It can perform millions of transactions within a second. I like the tool's architecture as well."
"The most valuable feature is the performance and compression. The most useful tool is CloudIQ."
"There is no management overhead involved in optimizing performance. It does it so well on its own. We don't have to manage much at all. It really is like a set it and forget it solution. My storage engineers love the system. It is a lot less work than our previous systems, which weren't bad by any means. There is not nearly as much management as before. So, we are saving dozens of hours per month for our storage team, and that is a real cost in our business."
"It offers a high level of availability, so pretty much near zero downtime."
"It was easy for teams to pick up the technology with very limited exposure and training, then implement and support it."
"PowerMax is a compact high-performance appliance. It is one of the best devices in terms of performance specs. It includes an NVMe All-Flash Array."
"Enterprise Cloud Storage is the most valuable feature, along with the data services which come with it, plus the deduplication and compression."
"It is easy to manage. You don't have to have the same people who used to manage the Dell EMC arrays because the solution is more intuitive."
"We've been using FlashArray's snapshot for backups. Their replication across sites and response time are also excellent."
"NVMe data storage platform that's easy to set up and easy to use. It's stable, with a lower response time, and quick technical support."
"The data reduction technology part of the scalability has been impressive, like its ability to host additional workloads, volumes of data, and databases."
"The performance of the storage is just unbelievable."
"Simplicity and reliability are the most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray."
"The most valuable features are the replication of data and the continuous snapshot that we can take from the disc."
"The job of support for the storage engineers dramatically changed. We know more quickly the automation of the provisioning. We can now focus on things that bring more value to the company than just managing storage."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"There is room for improvement in the replication. It's an important requirement for us."
"I would like it to support NVMe over Fabrics, because that is the next item for consideration on the NVMe roadmap. PowerMax supports NVMe on the back-end, but when it starts supporting NVMe over Fibre Channel, suddenly various hosts can directly communicate with PowerMax, and with NVMe-oF, as well. Suddenly, Gen 6 and Gen 7 switchers will be able to help facilitate that particular communication channel."
"We are very interested in NVMe over Fibre Channel, which I understand is on the horizon. We would like to see that come to fruition."
"We've had a couple of little things come up, but for the most part, they've been pretty stable."
"There are some stability issues that we just recently experienced. We hope the next release will solve these problems."
"We had challenges again with the initial setup. I don't know if there was a gap during the requirement-collection phase, but the box was partially delivered to us with missing parts and it delayed the implementation by about 60 days. It was not as smooth as I would have hoped."
"The REST API needs improvement. We are a very big automation company, and this would be big for us."
"We brought up this question to the implementation engineer. We were comparing use cases where a customer is using RecoverPoint, then goes to PowerMax. In our previous setup with XtremIO, we were using RecpverPoint and keeping snapshots for 30 days, every few seconds. With PowerMax, I requested this for every 15 minutes, keeping it for a week. The engineer's answer was, "There will be too many snapshots. It might slow down the system." This is specifically for the use cases where there is RecoverPoint. While PowerMax works with RecoverPoint, and you can use it, there should be some way where you can have even more snapshots and not to worry about performance and system cache."
"They could improve the price."
"Going forward, don't complicate things for the customers."
"Had some issues with Purity not being entirely compatible with VMware ESXi."
"A three wave application or multi wave application synchronization would be an improvement."
"In the configuration, which we brought in or tested it in, it has a very limited config as far as the array goes. That said, it still did more than our anticipation."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good."
"I’d love to view the average, minimum and maximum performance in the reports (Analysis tab - Performance) but it is only graphics and you need to export data in CSV to find this information."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 174 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "Simplified storage provisioning for us, enabling us to assign any volumes in two to three minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Effective provisioning, helpful support, and reliable". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and Dell XtremIO, whereas Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and HPE Primera. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Pure Storage FlashArray report.
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