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DataCore Swarm 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)
DataCore Swarm
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.1
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (17th)
Dell PowerScale
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
99
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.
N Bravi - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Manager at MSDSYSTEMS S.R.L.
Has simplified data protection across two locations and reduced time spent on recovery efforts
The best features DataCore Swarm offers are its scalability and the ability to truly solve many problems related to data loss and recovery. It is important because if we want to add a new code, it sets itself up from scratch, and if we want to add, for example, a 72 terabytes or petabytes node, we just drop it in, which is very easy. DataCore Swarm has positively impacted my organization through the support for my dedicated salespersons.
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 stability and performance are the best things about the solution."
"Its ease of use is a very big thing for our customers; it's easy to set up and easy to maintain, and the support is automated, which is very good."
"Running SAP on Pure Storage helps a lot without doing any further tuning to improve application performance. Our internal clients are happy."
"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."
"You get what you pay for; it is expensive, but it really works, so I would really recommend using Pure Storage."
"The ease of use. That's what our customers love. They say it's very easy, they don't need special training, they don't need to call us or any other company or integrator to help them do their job. That's the main reason they purchase Pure."
"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."
"Data deduplication features make it easier to manage storage and forecast growth."
"With DataCore Swarm, we have transitioned from tape-based backups, which were long, to Swarm, making the process more rapid and efficient."
"The best features DataCore Swarm offers are its scalability and the ability to truly solve many problems related to data loss and recovery."
"The first feature is compatibility with the S3 protocol. DataCore SWARM allows you to quickly have an on-premise, robust and scalable environment that is natively compatible with the S3 protocol. The functionalities used are therefore derived from the S3 protocol, notably versioning and therefore the possibility of configuring immutability in governance or compliance mode. The object metada can be enriched with the addition of tags to subsequently enable filtering and searching. Configuring and using DataCore SWARM is simple and flexible. It is very easy to create domains, tenants and buckets for different use cases with various authentications. The cluster architecture also allows replication between different clusters at different configured levels (Cluster / Domains / ...) A web interface for browsing the content of existing buckets allows simple and rapid manipulation of certain objects such as sharing via a link or cropping a video. Finally, the physical architecture of the solution is based on an x86 server and its scale-up or scale-out evolution is very simple by adding disks or servers."
"I find its flexibility valuable."
"DataCore Swarm is highly available."
"The ability for the solution to use any new hardware quickly and without administration is a great thing in the context of hosting."
"I find its flexibility valuable, it's also user-friendly, and I'm happy with the dashboards and the customization."
"On a scale of one to ten, with one being worst and ten being best, I would rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) a ten."
"I can certainly recommend PowerScale for mission-critical workloads, it is a powerful but simple platform with little administration overhead."
"I assess the stability and reliability of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) as perfect, as we haven't had any hiccups with it so far."
"Dell PowerScale is a scalable solution. It allows non-disruptive upgrades and maintenance of the system."
"My experience with Dell as a vendor is pretty good; they are probably one of the best in the industry."
"The solution's most valuable features are scalability and flexibility."
"It is stable and very user-friendly."
"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."
 

Cons

"Beyond a certain amount of petabytes, you have to have a separate system. Basically, it's not infinitely scalable."
"I would like to see more cloud integration."
"What I dislike about Everpure FlashArray is that in the replication, if it is in the pod, we cannot directly add devices to the pod without breaking the relationship."
"I wish they could add more of a monitor on the machine itself so you don't have to rely on a KVM or something to look at the display, such as an onboard diagnostic display."
"I would like to see more detailed reporting on the data. However, it would be nice to know what are the exact VMs usage after deduplication and/or what that VMs actual latency and bandwidth is, outside of VMware."
"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."
"If they could make it cheaper, that would be something."
"The price of this solution could be improved."
"The pricing can definitely be better."
"The solution needs simpler architecture."
"The product currently requires a significant number of servers to start. There are also network prerequisites to be met in order to guarantee good security of the architecture, which means that the product is only available to large customers. Besides, the license starts at 100TB. An Appliance version is being developed with an architecture based on containers which will make it possible to offer DataCore SWARM to everyone. The product has been evolving since the acquisition by DataCore, but maintaining and updating the product is not always easy and needs to be improved. For now, we only use DataCore SWARM for a few use cases and therefore a small part of the existing functionalities. With use we will perhaps have more criticism of the product but not for the moment!"
"The main issue currently is the hard installation process."
"The legacy file system for Epsilon didn't scale into the cloud and didn't have a separate OS. It would be key if this was made possible."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) could improve in terms of having some problems with using IPv6 and IPv4 on the same namespace at the same time, which is one of our biggest problems as you have to do some really bad workarounds to get that working."
"A recent development is, that there's a key feature coming out in OneFS 9.3, however, when you then try to get to 9.3 or 9.4 of the OneFS, it's been pulled from the download of the Dell website and we're referring back to 9.2.1 as the target code."
"The price always has room for improvement."
"Dell PowerScale needs to reduce its price."
"Beyond containerized storage support and software updating, I have had very bad experiences with Dell PowerScale (Isilon) because they present more issues than other storage options, even when compared with NetApp."
"Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us."
"There is room for improvement with the updates. It can take a significant amount of time to do a major OS update."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Because the price is a bit higher than other products, the data reduction equalizes the price with amount of the data reduction."
"I would prefer that they lower their pricing."
"I don't know the exact cost but it's around $1,000."
"The pricing is an issue. However, being all-flash, it will always be sort of expensive."
"There are no licensing fees aside from the support."
"We would like them to improve the pricing, so we could put them to use some more product, like backup or long-term storage. In the future, if the price goes down, then we could buy different types of products."
"Price is about the only thing that's wrong with it. A little bit better pricing would be great."
"You pay for what you use. For example, if you use one terabyte, you just pay for that one terabyte. But the pricing could always be better"
"The first installation brick is expensive but the upgrades are extremely simple and granular by adding disks or nodes."
"The solution's licensing cost varies based on capacity and performance requirements."
"It is an expensive product with a high storage capacity suitable for large data requirements."
"The price of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is reasonable."
"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."
"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 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."
"The platform is not cheap. However, on the software side, you can choose what you want license. So, you can start your licensing with the features that you need, then after buying the platform add some other features."
"The pricing is excellent."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
19%
Comms Service Provider
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
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 Business29
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise55
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for DataCore Swarm?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was that in many cases, it was expensive, but my salesperson ga...
What needs improvement with DataCore Swarm?
I believe DataCore Swarm cannot be improved in any way because for me, it is perfect.
What is your primary use case for DataCore Swarm?
My main use case for DataCore Swarm is in a big company in Italy that has two problems: it has very big data to manag...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Dell PowerScale has been expensive. Setup costs or provisio...
What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
For improvements, we can focus on enhancing performance, upgrading the nodes, and accessing data through Isilon for m...
What is your primary use case for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
Dell PowerScale is our main NAS environment storage where we create CIFS and NFS file shares for users.When users req...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
Caringo Swarm
PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
iQ Media, NEP, Texas Tech University, Telefónica, City of Austin, Massive Media, Data Deposit Box, Premier Physician Services, Truliant Federal Credit Union
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 DataCore Swarm vs. Dell PowerScale and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.