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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
106
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

"This solution has helped my organization by cutting down on provisioning time. I used to have to provision a VM and it would take ten minutes. Now, it takes thirty seconds."
"Pure support is very proactive, they monitor our infrastructure in real-time, so they respond before we even open a ticket."
"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."
"After switching to Everpure FlashArray, we saw significant results, as whatever hardware we used before is now compressed to 80%, maximizing space utilization in a single system."
"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are the management view of the solutions, ease of provision, and deprovision, it is fantastic."
"It's a great return on investment, based on the mission."
"Overall, Pure Storage FlashArray has never let us down in front of customers so far."
"It allows engineers to focus on other things rather than doing the more manual tasks. It automates tasks, so the ease of use is extreme. It simplifies the storage."
"On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Amazon FSx a ten."
"I rate the stability of Amazon FSx ten out of ten."
"The shared storage capability is highly valuable."
"FSx operates as an independent service, not tied to any server, which eliminates dependencies between applications for storage."
"We used it for disaster recovery perspective behind a number of resources, like batch services and RDS."
"Dell PowerScale offers several advantages, particularly regarding AI-driven data insights, automation, and advanced workloads."
"The features of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) that I prefer the most include some of the newer technologies that are on it, which would include SmartSync and the ability for the data mover to continue to make incremental changes."
"The solution's scalability is very good."
"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."
"The fact that the business saw a noticeable improvement in performance the day we switched over was a game-changer, not to mention the ability to seamlessly swap out the nodes to move from the older Isilon platform to Dell PowerScale, with no data migration, making everything seamless, done behind the scenes, and users only noticing the jump in performance."
"I would rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) as a product a ten out of ten."
"Regarding stability, I find no lagging, crashing, or downtime with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), and it is a highly scalable, stable, and reliable solution that I have experienced."
"We have been using it for a little while now, and what we have seen is that the NAS performance is quite good, and the ones we are using for data integration and AI factory are working very well as well."
 

Cons

"I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good."
"The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN."
"Everpure FlashArray can be improved as the pricing is expensive, but you do get what you pay for; you are paying a premium for better service, better warranties, less downtime, and other things, so I do not know that a lower price would work out because you probably would not have that high of quality for those things."
"Some services could be inserted directly into the SAN, so Pure Storage could complete with the HyperFlex."
"In terms of the future, I have been excited by some of the copy data management stuff that they're talking about building into the environment. There are feature sets where I've done a lot of automation work. So, I am always looking forward to extensions of their API. They're also talking about a phone home centralized analytics database being used as a centralized management console with a list of new cloud features, but this doesn't seem finalized."
"FlashArray could improve on the administrative side. For example, when you need to upgrade the boxes, we can't do that ourselves. We need to open a ticket with support and have them do that for us. You don't need to be on the call with them. We tell them we have a slot that we want to upgrade, and they send us an email when it's done."
"The integration capabilities could be improved."
"Data reduction is an area that needs improvement. There is a garbage collection service that runs but during that time, system utilization increases."
"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."
"The portal is really complicated to figure out features and functions, and it could be easier to navigate."
"It would be good to have synchronized mirroring between two clusters without using a third-party program."
"Dell PowerScale has covered many advantages as a product. However, there are disadvantages that could be improved."
"We used to have a chat feature available on the support site. It's not available to us anymore."
"Additional metadata reporting would be great. We have to use a separate tool to report on that. We would like to view the age of data and how long it has been since someone has accessed a file."
"The only thing that I think PowerScale could do better is improving the HTTP data access protocol."
"Technical support could be improved. Whenever we have a hiccup, we'd like to get it fixed maybe quicker."
"Dell PowerScale is strong overall, but a few areas such as OneFS, QA, and reporting could be more intuitive, especially when analyzing detailed performance and capacity information."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"They have a standardized fee; it's been the same price for 10 years straight. I am happy with the price — I think it's good."
"We have 16 or 18 arrays. We like to do the three-year support model so that we get Evergreen and therefore, we get free upgrades. We pay around more than 1.5 million dollars."
"Pure is not a cheap product. It is not something that is inexpensive. But, the total cost of ownership tends to be lower than with other solutions, because you don't need a lot of expertise, you don't need a lot of training or very expensive engineers or very expensive consultants."
"My organization has a yearly license, but I believe that Pure Storage FlashArray has capacity-based licenses as well. I'm definitely happy with the pricing."
"The price was slightly higher than others, but competitive, if you consider all the other features that you get from it."
"I'm good with the licensing. Of course, pricing can always be less... It's actually not a bad pricing model, considering I don't have to rip-and-replace."
"Our costs are around $100,000."
"Pure Storage FlashArray's pricing is very competitive."
"The lowest price I have paid is $370 or $380 per month, while the highest can exceed $3,000 per month."
"It is an expensive product with a high storage capacity suitable for large data requirements."
"Pricing for this solution is reasonable."
"The price of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is reasonable."
"Dell PowerScale is expensive on the start-up side but we can recoup those costs quickly by not having to reapply the savings to other equipment."
"It is a really expensive solution."
"I always want things to be less expensive. However, I would say the pricing is fair. Their costs are in alignment with their competitors. It is a good value for the money."
"It's a high-cost offering amounting to three or four million Swedish kronor, or about $400,000 or euros, for approximately 480 terabytes of storage."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
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 Enterprise22
Large Enterprise64
 

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: August 2026.
913,076 professionals have used our research since 2012.