DDN IntelliFlash vs Dell PowerMax comparison

DataDirect Networks and Dell Technologies are both solutions in the NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays category. DataDirect Networks is ranked #12 with an average rating of 9.0, while Dell Technologies is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.8. DataDirect Networks holds a 1.0% mindshare in N, compared to Dell Technologies’s 8.6% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of DataDirect Networks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Dell Technologies users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on May 18, 2025

DDN IntelliFlash and Dell PowerMax are competitors in the storage solutions market. Based on the evaluation, Dell PowerMax has the upper hand with its robust performance and advanced features, indicating a higher value proposition.

Features: DDN IntelliFlash provides hybrid storage configurations, rapid data access, and efficient data management. Dell PowerMax offers superior data reduction capabilities, exceptional scalability, and advanced automation, consistently delivering high performance.

Room for Improvement: DDN IntelliFlash could benefit from enhancing its performance under heavy workloads, expanding its feature set to match competitors, and improving long-term data reduction efficiency. Dell PowerMax could be more user-friendly in its setup, reduce its overall system complexity, and improve its cost-effectiveness for smaller organizations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: DDN IntelliFlash is known for straightforward deployment and responsive customer service. Dell PowerMax, although more complex to deploy, benefits from an extensive global service network, ensuring comprehensive support.

Pricing and ROI: DDN IntelliFlash offers competitive pricing with appealing initial setup costs, presenting a compelling ROI due to its workload management efficiency. Dell PowerMax, despite higher initial costs, offers significant long-term benefits with high performance and robust capabilities, indicating greater ROI over time.

To learn more, read our detailed DDN IntelliFlash vs. Dell PowerMax Report (Updated: May 2025).

Buyer's Guide

DDN IntelliFlash vs. Dell PowerMax

May 2025

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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

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 2.8%, down from 2.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DDN IntelliFlash is 1.0%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerMax is 8.6%, down from 12.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill

Sales Manager at Multicomputos PR

Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature

One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.

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Anil Rahulwar

Storage Engineer at Movate

Good customer service and support and suitable for large environments

It is very easy to install. Users don't need to remember anything while deploying IntelliFlash because everything will be taken care of by tech support. They can easily modify the installation or change the password with the help of the tech support. It is very easy to integrate IntelliFlash with other solutions. We have plugins that can be integrated with other solutions. It will require maintenance. It is the same as any other storage solution: updates and upgrades, firmware upgrades, and drive upgrades.

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MayankChauhan

Lead Consultant - Cloud & Infrastructure Services at Infosys

Delivers essential support and performance for intensive operations in real-time environments

Our infrastructure is spread across the private as well as a public cloud. Our requirement was that the IOPS latency should not be more than one millisecond. If anything goes beyond one millisecond, it's a problem for us. We wanted a system that could handle the transactions and meet our latency requirements. There are performance benefits for sure. The amount of deduplication and compression offered by Dell PowerMax is quite good, especially with databases. Dell PowerMax delivers optimum performance and reliable support, integral for handling failures and ensuring operational continuity. The performance capacity optimization and support we receive from Dell are also valuable.

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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 of this solution is its ease of use."

"I use the tool for Oracle databases, Oracle virtual machines, and Oracle Linux databases. I'm on the storage side, not a database administrator."

"The latency is good."

"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."

"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."

"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."

"The tool's valuable features are speed, security, data compression, and reliability. Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen. It helps us to save money and resources."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"High performance and ease-of-management are the most valuable features."

"It provides a combination of all the protocols that you need, without losing deduplication and compression."

"EasyTier/hotcaching: Valuable because it allows greater performance than standard SAS disks"

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"We use IntelliFlash products for larger environments, like Qatar Airways."

"It has reduced our electricity usage by reducing the amount of disks needed for the virtual environment."

"It performed great originally, and when it performed great, it was awesome."

"Data Compression: Up to 80% space reduction in the database"

More DDN IntelliFlash pros

"The tool is a fast-performing asset. It can perform millions of transactions within a second. I like the tool's architecture as well."

"Dell PowerMax NVMe's tech support is good."

"The performance is very good. Our predominant workloads are all less than 5 milliseconds and it's most common to have a sub-1-millisecond response time for our applications. In terms of efficiency, we've turned on compression and we're able to get as high as two-to-one compression on our workloads, on average."

"PowerMax NVMe has made it a lot easier to understand how much we are able to provision. It has made it a lot faster to provision new things. 90% of my time for provisioning has been reduced. Also, it has made it very easy to understand and see everything behind it versus the older heritage, where Dell EMC was very convoluted and hard to get working. Things that used to take an hour, probably now take five to 10 minutes."

"It is easy to manage and upgrade."

"The support team was very cooperative and responsive."

"The number one most valuable feature is reliability. I want to go home at the end of the day and come in the next day knowing it works, especially since we have storage offshore."

"It significantly simplifies storage."

More Dell PowerMax pros

Cons

"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."

"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."

"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."

"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."

"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."

"The software layer has to improve."

"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."

"It feels more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses rather than enterprises."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element."

"In future releases, I look forward to more AI features."

"In the proxy section you can’t choose a user account and password, so it is not allowed at the moment to go out, if customer has such constellation."

"Performance is horrible now. Our original intent was to buy new storage in about two years. But since it became a critical urgency for us, we decided to purchase a new one in two or three months."

"Technical support is bad. It'd grade them at 30% or 40%. The response time is terrible."

"Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device."

"It's somewhat scalable, but maybe not so much as some of the competition."

"We had just one small stability problem with power flapping and it did not start up again automatically. We had to access service ports and manually restart the storage processors."

More DDN IntelliFlash cons

"I would like to see more development in the cloud environment. It would be good if it comes in the cloud kind of setup."

"The disadvantage of PowerMax is its cost. It is expensive, mainly due to pricing."

"I hear from people on my team that they would like improved reporting. While there are some decent tools for doing reporting, they would like to see a lot more built-in functionality. This way when they are logged into the interface everyday doing basic management tasks, they could also see some statistics on what is their storage pool usage and will be their projected usage with their current data growth. They want to be able to see more detailed stats on how they are using the system and have forecasting."

"The technical support is lacking. We are working with Dell EMC to get some better understanding of this."

"Although they call it unified storage where you have SAN and NAS, with a NAS implementation on top of a SAN, the NAS implementation is a little complicated and clumsy. As SAN, as block storage, it is very powerful... If they could provide a very good NAS implementation, it would be better, so that customers don't have to look for other simple solutions for NAS."

"Support of the product can be slow and an administrative challenge: planning, scheduling, and overseeing data center access for a Dell EMC rep. One improvement could be to enable a self-maintenance option. The requirements that we go through to get Dell EMC onsite to replace failed drives, power supplies, and other small redundant parts can be unnecessarily complex. If simplified, they could send us the parts, then we could replace them much faster, more easily, and truly within the SLA parameters."

"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."

"There is some room to grow, especially with some of the installation quirks."

More Dell PowerMax cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."

"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."

"The tool's pricing is cheap; I rate it a six to seven out of ten. Most of our sales are not subscription-based. We sell the hardware, and customers keep using it. They only renew the service part annually. The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there."

"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."

"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."

"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."

"The product is expensive."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"I think we pay around 100 grand per year for three arrays or four arrays."

"I recommend the full bundle software in order to have all the functionality. It is more expensive to purchase it one by one."

"I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe a five out of ten for pricing."

"It is high-end storage and it is a bit expensive, but it is doing what it is meant for: running business-critical applications or latency-sensitive applications..."

"Dell is expensive compared to other products and I would rate its pricing a four out of ten."

"The price is okay."

"The pricing might be a bit high for small organizations, so it's more suitable for larger enterprises."

"The cost has room for improvement."

"Dell PowerMax NVMe's price is expensive."

"It scales enormously, but it's expensive to do so."

More Dell PowerMax pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Real Estate/Law Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

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What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IntelliFlash?

It is a bit cheaper than other products, 10% to 20% cheaper.

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What needs improvement with IntelliFlash?

DDN IntelliFlash should improve in terms of sales. In future releases, I look forward to more features about AI and M...

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What is your primary use case for IntelliFlash?

We use IntelliFlash products for larger environments, like Qatar Airways. They have large scalability and use more th...

See all answers

What's the difference between DELL EMC Powerstore and Powermax NVMe?

Dell PowerStore is an all-solid-state midrange storage system. It has many internal elements taken from other Dell of...

See all answers

What do you like most about Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe?

First, it's an enterprise storage solution. This is very important for us. Another important feature is replication.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe?

When comparing Dell PowerMax NVMe with other vendors, such as IBM enterprise solutions, the price is relatively higher.

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 29% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 18% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Nimble Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 5% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

VAST Data vs DDN IntelliFlash

Compared 31% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs DDN IntelliFlash

Compared 23% of the time

NetApp AFF vs DDN IntelliFlash

Compared 16% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs DDN IntelliFlash

Compared 15% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs DDN IntelliFlash

Compared 14% of the time

More DDN IntelliFlash Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Dell PowerMax

Compared 27% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Dell PowerMax

Compared 13% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell PowerMax

Compared 10% of the time

Dell VMAX All Flash vs Dell PowerMax

Compared 9% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell PowerMax

Compared 5% of the time

More Dell PowerMax Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

May 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

DDN IntelliFlash

June 2025

Download DDN IntelliFlash product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerMax

June 2025

Download Dell PowerMax product report

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

Tegile, IntelliFlash N-Series, IntelliFlash T-Series, IntelliFlash HD-Series

Dell PowerMax NVMe, Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerMax

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

Pure Storage

Western Digital through its IntelliFlash arrays delivers high-performance storage with a complete range of features and connectivity options, including inline compression and deduplication, application and VM consistent snapshots, replication, RAID, data encryption, VMware vCenter integration, and multi-protocol support for SAN (FC, iSCSI) and NAS (NFS, SMBv3). IntelliFlash arrays deliver high availability through dualredundant and hot-swappable components, active/active or active/passive controllers, non-disruptive software upgrades, eMLC flash, and proactive cloud-based monitoring, analytics, and intelligence. A RESTful API provides scripted or programmatic control.

DataDirect Networks

Dell PowerMax offers robust performance, reliability, and efficient data handling. It is recognized for its compression, deduplication, and NVMe technology, significantly benefiting data centers with its advanced replication and uptime.

PowerMax is equipped to handle mission-critical applications, providing impressive performance metrics with low latency and high IOPS capacity. Its CloudIQ and Unisphere interfaces enhance manageability, while REST API support simplifies storage management. Users in sectors like healthcare, finance, and telecommunications leverage its capabilities for database management, high-transaction block storage, and disaster recovery. However, opportunities for improving deduplication efficiency, interface complexity, and automation remain.

What are the key features of Dell PowerMax?

Data Reduction: Combines compression and deduplication for efficient storage use.
NVMe Technology: Enables swift data handling with high throughput.
CloudIQ and Unisphere: Streamlines manageability and control.
REST API Support: Simplifies integration with management tools.
High Availability: Ensures consistent uptime across platforms.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Performance Metrics: Look for low latency and high IOPS as indicators.
Reliability: Consistent operations with minimal interruptions.
Manageability: Efficient control over storage environments.
Cost Efficiency: Note any potential savings in data processing and storage.

Industries utilize Dell PowerMax to support diverse environments like VMware, Oracle, and PostgreSQL. It serves multiple sectors such as healthcare, finance, and government, aiding in data storage consolidation, disaster recovery, and high-availability hosting for critical systems and applications.

Dell Technologies

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Bank of Stockton, Barnsley College, Boyes Turner, Brigham Young University

Rackspace, Open Line

Buyer's Guide

DDN IntelliFlash vs. Dell PowerMax

May 2025

Free Report: DDN IntelliFlash vs. Dell PowerMax

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