Dell PowerPath vs Pure Storage FlashArray comparison

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239 views|80 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
Pure Storage Logo
18,745 views|9,975 comparisons
99% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Dell PowerPath and Pure Storage FlashArray based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp, DataCore, Dell Technologies and others in Storage Software.
To learn more, read our detailed Storage Software Report (Updated: May 2024).
771,212 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"We have found the solution to be quite flexible and very scalable.""The solution has improved our performance, reliability, and redundancy.""The product is very reliable.""The most valuable feature of this solution is migration without disruptions.""It provides a high availability and will increase the performance of any server or operating system.""The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that disaster recovery scenarios are very good and easy to use in Dell PowerPath since it is available in a simplified form.""OS-aware multipathing is a valuable feature of the product.""The user interface is good."

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"The compression and deduplication features help to make the best use of the capacity.""The code upgrades are very smooth.""The simplicity of it. The performance is good, but the simplicity is the best thing. Storage management is quite complex, but Pure Storage is easy to manage.""At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way.""The speed is the most valuable feature of this solution.""It is all-flash. This makes it a lot faster than the rest of what we have, as it is able to drive high I/O loads, which is big for us.""The security operating system is its most valuable feature because it's very simple, easy to use, and operate. You don't have to do very serious training to operate this equipment. It's user-friendly and pretty straightforward.""The most valuable feature of the Pure Storage Flash Array is the blazing fast monitoring."

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Cons
"Customers do not choose PowerPath unless they have Unix or Linux.""The product must adapt to other storage technologies like HPE 3PAR.""The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required.""The technical support is good but they are not available all the time.""Although PowerPath is very mature and has been on the market for more than 15 years there are still a lot of bugs that have been profiled with PowerPath, specifically, during any OS upgrade.""The solution should provide extensive reports on backups and backup failures.""The solution is quite stable, although they have not quite worked out all of the kinks.""While I utilize it for data migration, I would love to do that data migration in a GUI from an ease of use perspective."

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"There are a lot of things to improve.""We would like to be able to connect to data tape for backup, specifically to the LTO backups.""Pure Storage FlashArray could improve some aspects. There are certain features that are good and there are some features that I see some issues with at the technical level. Those issues are related to replication. They need to resolve those issues, which I have already highlighted to the Pure team. Additionally, there are some issues in the active cluster that could improve.""With scalability, I have run into a little problem with our last upgrade. There were some undocumented limitations to the number of drives that our controller could run on. So, instead of putting in a new data pack as we had anticipated, we had to keep adding and removing to get up to the capacity that we needed to be. What should have been a one day process (or a few hours) turned into a month and a half process.""I would rate this solution an eight. To make it a ten it would have to be a little cheaper.""Areas for improvement would be the financial operations. In the next release, I would like to see a NAS protocol included.""As long as they always improve on IOPS speed, that's all we're really looking for. The faster the storage can be the more we can do speed of application and speed of use.""One thing I'd like to see in a future release is integration between their main storage array and what they call their FlashBlade product; to be able to snapshot directly from the primary array into multiple different backup copies on FlashBlade."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The price of the solution is fair."
  • "Pricing is good. I don't have any issues with the pricing of this solution."
  • "There are no additional costs associated with the product."
  • "I rate the product's price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is affordable, and ten is really expensive. Dell PowerPath is an expensive tool."
  • "The solution is expensive."
  • "The product is a little bit expensive."
  • More Dell PowerPath Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "We feel that the pricing is fair and the licensing process was easy for both."
  • "There is always room for negotiation."
  • "The price was slightly higher than others, but competitive, if you consider all the other features that you get from it."
  • "It is a more expensive solution, but it is worth it. You are getting what you paid for."
  • "For pricing, you have to take into account their performance on deduplication and compression in a $/GB comparison."
  • "We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO)."
  • "It is a cheaper solution."
  • "Pure Storage is all-flash, so this sometimes tends to make it a bit more expensive in the beginning."
  • More Pure Storage FlashArray Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The solution has improved our performance, reliability, and redundancy.
    Top Answer:The product is a little bit expensive. It is a little pricey because it provides multipathing with other OSs. I rate the pricing a five out of ten.
    Top Answer:The product must adapt to other storage technologies like HPE 3PAR. When we use 3PAR storage, we have to use another technology to load balance. The product must be integrated with other products like… more »
    Top Answer:Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Storage. It may be more expensive, but it should pay for itself for its… more »
    Top Answer:We consume less physical storage because of the solution’s deduplication and compression.
    Top Answer:We have customers who use a three-year or five-year license. We also have customers who use Evergreen.
    Ranking
    3rd
    out of 6 in Storage Software
    Views
    239
    Comparisons
    80
    Reviews
    4
    Average Words per Review
    383
    Rating
    8.8
    3rd
    out of 48 in All-Flash Storage
    Views
    18,745
    Comparisons
    9,975
    Reviews
    20
    Average Words per Review
    441
    Rating
    9.1
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    PowerPath
    Learn More
    Overview

    EMC PowerPath: Host-based software for automated data path management, failover and recovery, and optimized load balancing. PowerPath automates, standardizes, and optimizes data paths in physical and virtual environments as well as cloud deployments to deliver high availability and performance.

    AUTOMATE FAILOVER/RECOVERY

    PowerPath automates data path failover and recovery to ensure applications are always available and remain operational.

    OPTIMIZE LOAD BALANCING

    Adjust I/O paths constantly to leverage all available data paths and to monitor and rebalance the dynamic environment for the best application performance.

    STANDARDIZE PATH MANAGEMENT

    Simplify and standardize data path management across heterogeneous physical and virtual environments as well as cloud deployments.

    Pure Storage FlashArray is the world’s first enterprise-class storage array that runs exclusively on the nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) protocol for memory access and storage. It represents a totally state-of-the-art type of storage technology. It offers users shared accelerated storage that delivers cutting-edge features in the realms of performance, simplicity, and consolidation. Pure Storage is fresh and modern today and will be for the next decade. Without forklift upgrades or planned downtime, Pure Storage takes the work out of storage ownership and delivers unprecedented customer satisfaction.

    Pure Storage FlashArray is built with simplicity and reliability in mind. The solution can be implemented and optimized in hours, as opposed to other similar solutions that can take days. It has no moving parts, which removes areas where it could potentially be vulnerable to suffering errors. It is highly stable and gives users the ability to manage system shutdowns in a way that  prevents data loss.

    Benefits of Pure Storage FlashArray

    Some of the benefits of using Pure Storage FlashArray include:

    • A much higher level of speed than similar pieces of technology. Pure Storage FlashArray maximizes the speed at which data can be transferred while at the same time minimizing system latencies that might slow the transfer down. Additionally, it offers users quick memory read and data access speeds.

    • A higher bang for your buck in terms of the storage capabilities you get for the money you pay. They are smaller in size than more standard storage technologies, but they offer flash memory, which enables users to store larger amounts of data than the current standard.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Pure Storage FlashArray is a highly effective piece of storage technology which stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its overall robustness and the value that it offers by way of its reliability and ease of use. It provides users with many valuable features that allow them to maximize what they can do with this solution. Pure Storage FlashArray’s reliability and ease of use make it a highly valuable solution. 

    PeerSpot user Prabakaran K., a technical consultant at Injazat Data Systems, notes the robustness of this solution when he writes, "FlashArray has many valuable features. It's very user-friendly and it has high availability, so there is comparatively less downtime. During maintenance, there is no shutdown procedure, so you can directly power off the Array and manage the shutdown process without any data loss, which is a unique feature. Managing replication and data migration is also very easy."

    PeerSpot user Jason D., a cloud solutions architect at a tech services company, notes three features that make this solution valuable when he writes, "We've had different types of storage, and three things of this solution are valuable. The first one is its outstanding performance. The second one is its stability. In the about three years that we've had it, we've had component failures, but we never had a service interruption or any data loss. The third one, which is really critical, is that it is super easy to use in terms of provisioning, storage, and managing the arrays. I'm able to maintain a multi-site environment with a couple of dozen arrays with a single mid-level storage admin."

    Sample Customers
    Healthcare Residential Service Company
    Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company29%
    Mining And Metals Company14%
    Outsourcing Company14%
    Non Profit14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Government11%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Energy/Utilities Company9%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Healthcare Company12%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Computer Software Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization31%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise25%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise66%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise57%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise40%
    Large Enterprise42%
    Buyer's Guide
    Storage Software
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp, DataCore, Dell Technologies and others in Storage Software. Updated: May 2024.
    771,212 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Dell PowerPath is ranked 3rd in Storage Software with 8 reviews while Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 174 reviews. Dell PowerPath is rated 8.4, while Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Dell PowerPath writes "A resilient and reliable solution that has many load-balancing technologies and provides high availability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Effective provisioning, helpful support, and reliable". Dell PowerPath is most compared with NetApp ONTAP, whereas Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and VMware vSAN.

    We monitor all Storage Software 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.