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Amazon FSx vs Dell PowerScale comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
231
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
Amazon FSx
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
File System Software (5th), Cloud Storage (15th), File and Object Storage (18th)
Dell PowerScale
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
107
Ranking in other categories
NAS (1st), File and Object Storage (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
MuhammadAzhar Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior DevOps Engineer at Alibaba Group
Shared storage capabilities provide enterprise value with good reliability
Amazon FSx is more costly compared to other storage solutions like EBS or EFS. The auto-scaling feature should be improved, as it currently includes downtime. I need to manually increase the storage, which is not ideal. Integrating FSx with Windows Server is challenging; it's a long process involving Active Directory (AD) setup and synchronization.
RahulSharma8 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Platform Engineer at Expedia Group
Unified file sharing has simplified multi-tenant access and has delivered seamless data replication
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) includes its replication features; when we decommissioned our old Isilon cluster, we migrated all of the data to a new cluster, and it was pretty seamless. All you have to do is create the certificates and make those certificates available to the target cluster, then initiate a few jobs. The inter-cluster replication feature, called SyncIQ, allows you to set up all of the jobs and move your data entirely, either timely or all at once. Another suitable feature is the ability to back up your directories; you can take snapshots for all of your directories, and in fact, I believe you can take around a thousand snapshots for a single directory. The inter-replication, geo-replication is one feature. Dell provides a variety class of hardware suitable for your workloads, meaning if your data is just lab and not critical, you don't have to spend much on the hardware; conversely, if your data is mission-critical, you can buy a high-performance node from Dell. Additionally, you can span Dell PowerScale (Isilon) cluster to a large number of nodes, and code upgrades are pretty smooth because all protocols will be upgraded under a single piece of code. Since it provides a single file system that spans across the nodes, you don't have to worry about that directory structure being separately created on individual nodes, making it a fitting solution for a data lake solution because you can access the same data from multiple protocols.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is its speed."
"If you factor in the ease in terms of operations, as well as the cost of the array compared to other solid state arrays, it becomes a clear positive for Pure Storage."
"From the first test that we have conducted, we are very satisfied with this solution."
"It comes with a large number of features out-of-the-box, which makes it easy for us to see problems and manage capacity."
"It is noticeably easier to manage than other appliances that we have."
"We are finding the TCO of flash to be lower than SSD implementations."
"Like I tell everybody else that I deal with, if you want to focus your time on doing more valuable things for your company, and you deal with storage on a day-to-day basis like I do, the best thing you can do is put Pure in your environment."
"It worked flawlessly."
"I rate the stability of Amazon FSx ten out of ten."
"On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Amazon FSx a ten."
"We used it for disaster recovery perspective behind a number of resources, like batch services and RDS."
"FSx operates as an independent service, not tied to any server, which eliminates dependencies between applications for storage."
"The shared storage capability is highly valuable."
"On a scale of one to ten, with one being worst and ten being best, I would rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) a ten."
"Our users are able to easily roll back snapshots without going through IT."
"Eyeglass is used to monitor for malware, which is very useful for us."
"The overall operational efficiency and ease of use of Dell PowerScale is commendable; it is very good storage with easy access via GUI, meaning we do not need to perform many complex maneuvers for storage management."
"The solution's most valuable features are scalability and flexibility."
"There are also the policies that you set up on replication and purging files, and policies for something called WORM. That's a "write once, read many," where you can't overwrite certain files or certain data. It puts them in a "protected mode" where it becomes very difficult for someone to accidentally delete. We use that for certain files or certain directories, because we're dealing with video and some video has to be protected for chain-of-custody purposes. The WORM feature works great."
"I would rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) as a product a ten out of ten."
"The guaranteed performance, combined with the scalability through its scale-out capability, makes it an excellent choice."
 

Cons

"A year ago they promised that they would be able to read through the database encryption with more metric and they have not delivered on that patch, which is significant because it gives us back so much more storage room. We want to be able to read through the encryption."
"It would be nice to have a better view of the allocated capacity on their Platform as a Service solution because we have to do some manual calculations to understand how much we are going to pay every month to use the storage that is allocated."
"Pure Storage's logs could provide more visibility to the end-user. The logging algorithms are different from those of other vendors. For example, Cisco's logs provide extensive troubleshooting data, whereas Pure Storage logs offer limited information. We have to contact support to get more information."
"I would like some form of QoS implemented. As a service provider, it would be beneficial to have it."
"Pure will probably have to move to other layers of the stack, not only storage but, maybe, hyperconverged."
"It needs to improve its price."
"Once, before Pure went public, we were a member of their customer advisory board and beta tested replication. One requested enhancement yet to manifest is the scheduling of snapshot replications."
"It is way in excess of what we need. If anything, we could see a bit more speed. I'm just comparing it with what some of my colleagues who are implementing their own systems do."
"A direct FTP feature would be beneficial instead of relying on transmission services."
"Amazon FSx is more costly compared to other storage solutions like EBS or EFS."
"I've been facing a challenge when doing a failover from FSx side. AWS console does not refresh within a half hour."
"From my experience, there are areas in Amazon FSx where more performance is needed, as they will be looking for higher IOPS."
"If they integrated some functions, as they have on Data Domain with a cyber recovery vault, it would be ideal."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a little bit pricey, and its pricing could be improved."
"Since our Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is our own on-prem in-house built system, we don't have many up-to-date resources, and we're still a few years behind."
"We're still fairly new with it. It's been a pretty positive experience thus far. However, they could improve implementation, as we had to rack and stack it ourselves."
"I see a disadvantage if I cannot integrate Dell PowerScale with the public cloud, as I have not used this feature before."
"There are some missing features in the product, especially when our company needs to do some tape backup, and we see that the tool doesn't have integration capabilities."
"Dell's customer service needs improvement. Specifically, hardware failures under warranty should be addressed within the promised timeline."
"Always, there is room for improvement in terms of cybersecurity, as new challenges are continually emerging in the market."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are no licensing fees or other costs."
"Cost-wise, it's been very effective."
"The solution is expensive."
"Because the price is a bit higher than other products, the data reduction equalizes the price with amount of the data reduction."
"The price, in general, is around $100,000, however, I know it costs more."
"The cost of Pure Storage is subjective and determined by your environment. Pure Storage tends to be more expensive than NetApp, but it is cheaper than EMC. Performance varies with data workload, making cost considerations complex."
"We feel that the pricing is fair and the licensing process was easy for both."
"Pricing is moderate. It is neither cheap nor expensive."
"The lowest price I have paid is $370 or $380 per month, while the highest can exceed $3,000 per month."
"The pricing is expensive, but I think it's a fair value because it does manage itself. It definitely is much simpler than any of the other scale-out storage platforms that we've looked at in the past."
"Price was also a significant factor in our decision to go with PowerScale. The team at EMC, now Dell EMC, came through with a highly competitive offer that tipped the scales towards their solution. There was only one other solution around the same price point, but it could not match PowerScale on features. That other solution is no longer on the market."
"It is an expensive product with a high storage capacity suitable for large data requirements."
"Dell PowerScale is an expensive solution compared to other products like Qumulo."
"We use the TNA approach which is a great opportunity for us to better manage the licenses based on how much consumption is available for the different customers so we can use that approach and scalability."
"The general cost for a system like this is expensive. The total cost depends on your use case. You need to pay for every additional feature that you use."
"The price of the solution can fluctuate. The price can be competitive or other times not. The price of the solution could be better."
"We paid an additional fee to have Dell's ProDeploy Plus team implement it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
15%
University
8%
Retailer
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business71
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise159
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise65
 

Questions from the Community

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I find the pricing of Everpure FlashArray to be quite high compared to other storage solutions; however, the reliabil...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
I believe we have covered the most important features; the architecture of Pure Storage is essential, and features su...
What needs improvement with Amazon FSx?
From my experience, there are areas in Amazon FSx where more performance is needed, as they will be looking for highe...
What is your primary use case for Amazon FSx?
Our customers mainly use Amazon FSx for high-performance computing. Our customers are mainly in the Life Science and ...
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon FSx?
There is an ongoing project where my customers are exploring the FSx solution, but not yet for AI-driven projects; th...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
The on-premises solution with Dell PowerScale, when we buy directly from Dell, is economical. We have done some level...
What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
There should be some enhancement where Dell PowerScale can have block level functionality or block storage kind of fu...
What is your primary use case for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
We use Dell PowerScale for our object scale and different kinds of storage, including both object storage and file st...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, Amazon FSx for Lustre
PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Neiman Marcus, T Mobile, Docxellent, Matrix, Lyell
OMRF, University of Utah, Translational Genetics Research Institute, Arcis, Geofizyka Torumn, Cyprus E&P Corporation, Colburn School, Columbia Sportswear, Harvard Medical School, University of Michigan, National Library of France,
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon FSx vs. Dell PowerScale and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
914,262 professionals have used our research since 2012.