Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Dell ECS vs Microsoft Azure comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
8.5
Pure Storage FlashBlade boosts ROI by reducing costs, enhancing efficiencies, increasing VM density, and saving 20%-85% in time.
Sentiment score
8.7
Dell ECS offers data availability and economical operation, becoming a vital, stable, and reliable component of users' technology stacks.
Sentiment score
7.2
Microsoft Azure saves costs and boosts efficiency with scalable cloud services, pay-as-you-go pricing, and reduced maintenance expenses.
It does not require much management once you set up correctly, so it saves time, allowing an admin to focus on other work.
The value for money is good, and Microsoft Azure has positively impacted our operational costs.
When we use Microsoft Azure, it provides enhanced security from our perspective, though I am not certain about the financial return on investment or benefits for our users as I do not have that information.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.0
Pure Storage FlashBlade support is praised for responsiveness and knowledge but criticized for slower responses and occasional language barriers.
Sentiment score
7.8
Dell ECS support is praised for quick responses, though time zones and escalations can cause initial service delays.
Sentiment score
6.5
Customer service is mixed; paid support is praised for responsiveness, while free options may face delays and complexity.
I would rate them an eight out of ten.
The support is done through email and is not that great, making it a very problematic area I've been dealing with for over four years.
There is a lack of SUSE Linux experts which affects the level of support.
The response time and quality of the technical support are satisfactory.
Customer support is generally good but sometimes struggles with complex issues.
The support from Microsoft Azure is good.
Regarding technical support from Microsoft, I find they are responsive and helpful, depending on which support package you're on.
I rate technical support as excellent because we have not experienced many problems when calling for assistance.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.8
Pure Storage FlashBlade is praised for scalability, ease of expansion, and support, despite some areas needing improvement.
Sentiment score
8.4
Dell ECS is highly scalable, ideal for large enterprises, allowing effortless storage expansion and serving thousands concurrently.
Sentiment score
7.8
Microsoft Azure excels in scalability and flexibility, supporting various workloads, though cost and limitations may concern some users.
Pure Storage FlashBlade is scalable.
Through the fabrics, it provides the clustering, allowing us to add nodes easily.
It allows scale-out processes by adding extra nodes, providing flexibility for customers to increase capacity on demand.
I would rate scalability between eight or nine, as it provides a good ability to scale and expand storage.
Microsoft Azure is not just one product; it is a platform with multiple products within Microsoft Azure, and I would say it is scalable and would rate it a nine.
The scalability of Microsoft Azure is excellent for growth and adaptation, depending on company requirements.
Scalability with Microsoft Azure is amazing, which is a primary reason for using cloud solutions.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.8
Pure Storage FlashBlade is praised for its impressive stability and reliability, with minimal disruptions and consistent uptime even during upgrades.
Sentiment score
8.0
Dell ECS is highly stable and reliable, with minimal issues and responsive support, scoring 7-9.5 in user ratings.
Sentiment score
7.8
Microsoft Azure is highly reliable and scalable, despite occasional outages; users confidently rate it high for stability and performance.
In case there is any issue with any blade, the data is moved to another.
We have not experienced any outages in the last four years.
I'd rate stability maybe 9.5 out of ten.
Dell ECS provides high stability compared to other object solutions.
Microsoft Azure is quite stable, but recent outages and security issues have slightly decreased my confidence.
 

Room For Improvement

Users seek better cloud integration, enhanced deduplication, improved support, protocol enhancements, simpler configuration, and a more intuitive interface.
Dell ECS requires better integration, support, scalability, user experience, security, and improved disaster recovery, while addressing compatibility and cost-effectiveness.
Microsoft Azure needs pricing transparency, intuitive interface, improved support, better technical features, and refined management tools for users.
Technical support definitely needs significant improvement.
Its configuration should be easier.
Live logs should be viewable through the GUI like with Logstash or Elasticsearch.
The deployment is not easy, and some expertise is required to configure the virtual data center and replication groups.
Incorporating extra integrations beyond S3, like Hadoop file systems, and being well aligned with trends like AI solutions would be beneficial.
Recent outages and security issues are also a concern, causing a decrease in confidence, especially when partnering with third-party companies.
The administrative side is suitable for technical people, but our finance and HR super users find it less user-friendly, as they prefer drag-and-drop features to build their own solutions without contacting IT.
There is still room for improvement in terms of pricing.
 

Setup Cost

Pure Storage FlashBlade offers high performance and features, justifying its cost with no extra software fees and fixed support costs.
Dell ECS pricing is viewed as both cost-effective with bundled benefits and expensive, needing more flexible models.
Microsoft Azure offers flexible, competitive pricing, yet complexity makes AWS and GCP potentially more cost-effective for enterprises.
The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the past, but one benefit is that they have built-in ransomware protection.
It relies on nearline SAS drives, which are cheaper than flash or SSDs.
The pricing model is on the higher side compared to other vendors.
The price is reasonable given the abundance of features, including managing, control, host resources, dockers, and containers.
Microsoft solutions might be cheaper than some services like AWS, but some solutions may be more expensive depending on the services compared.
Copilot is expensive based on recent pricing for our POC.
Regarding the pricing for Microsoft Azure services, I would rate our satisfaction as very good.
 

Valuable Features

Pure Storage FlashBlade offers fast, scalable, and user-friendly storage with efficient integration, analytics, and versatility for diverse needs.
Dell ECS is praised for seamless integration, scalability, cost-effectiveness, data management, and excellent disaster recovery capabilities.
Microsoft Azure offers flexibility, scalability, global presence, integration, security, ease of use, and cost-effectiveness for enhanced organizational infrastructure.
We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte.
The best features of Pure Storage FlashBlade include better throughput and better performance.
The stability of this solution is a major advantage, as we've not experienced any outages in the last four years.
Dell ECS helps with managing storage requirements since it's S3 kind of object storage with all needed enterprise features such as immutability, snapshotting, and application management, which are nice sets of features usually required.
If we encounter any issues or need to upgrade anything, we can simply open a ticket, and the EMC team is there to assist us.
Power BI, another feature of Azure, is extremely elegant and has robust features that support forecasting using R and Python.
Data integrations are particularly effective on Microsoft Azure, especially with our banner services that we automate through Power Automate.
Microsoft Azure's scalability feature obviously supports business growth by scaling with the growth of the business, which is great, and it also scales with your requirements and aligns with your data strategies.
 

Categories and Ranking

Pure Storage FlashBlade
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (16th), Software Defined Storage (SDS) (8th), File and Object Storage (8th)
Dell ECS
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (5th)
Microsoft Azure
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
316
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (1st), PaaS Clouds (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

File and Object Storage
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Eric Black - PeerSpot reviewer
The ability to leverage multi-tenancy along with immutability is a huge benefit for us
The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top. Veeam Backup specifically has started to streamline their API, and they are doing that with SOS API. They have optimized it. Any of the S3 devices out there that support this SOS API can have far more API calls at once. On our side, that translates to better restoration. With SOS API, it can leverage far more restorations at a single given time or read from the device in simple terms. That results in maximizing the output and throughput from the device itself.
SamuelThomas - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing efficiently with user-friendly interfaces for monitoring and managing resources
We normally recommend Dell ECS to enterprise customers and government customers Dell ECS is very easy to handle, primarily because the web UI dashboard and everything is very easy to manage for every customer. They can monitor the DPS, access failures, bandwidth, failed requests, and latency.…
SubodhThakar - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrates various functionalities and have good documentation but have high pricing
Cosmos DB offered better scalability. In Azure SQL, we had to carefully manage the storage tier, switching back and forth based on needs. But when we first implemented Cosmos DB, we had a good understanding of the required data volume over the past three months. This helped us select the appropriate tier because we had those figures. If we had done it the other way around, it would have been much harder to estimate the data accurately. While you can get a rough idea, whether it works out in practice is more of a hit-and-miss approach, which we have already experienced with Cosmos DB. We applied the knowledge gained from that exercise to build a similar solution over Azure SQL. On the DevOps side, our team consisted of five members, ranging from senior to junior roles. We would raise requests for specific services needed in the development environment. The process typically takes three to five business days, including all necessary approvals, from submitting the request to receiving the resources and verifying access.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which File and Object Storage solutions are best for your needs.
859,687 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 14, 2013
Amazon vs Rackspace vs Microsoft vs Google: Cloud Hosting Services Comparison
Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Educational Organization
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
29%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?
The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?
The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate. FlashBlade is worth the money due to the experience and per...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?
Its configuration should be easier. There should be easier language for the configuration.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC ECS?
The pricing is moderate and at par with the market. As a service provider, we receive good margins, indicating a favo...
What needs improvement with Dell EMC ECS?
Dell ECS is not fully compatible with S3 ( /products/amazon-s3-reviews ), as it supports around ninety percent of S3 ...
Which is preferable - IBM Public Cloud or Microsoft Azure?
IBM Public Cloud is IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service. It aims to provide organizations with a secure cloud environment to ...
Which is better - SAP Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure?
One of the best features of SAP Cloud Platform is that it is web-based and you can log in from anywhere in the world....
How does Microsoft Azure compare to Google Firebase?
I would recommend Google Firebase instead of Microsoft Azure, simply for the array of features that it has to offer. ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
EMC ECS, Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage, EMC Elastic Cloud Storage
Windows Azure, Azure, MS Azure
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL
Atos
BMW, Toyota, easyJet, NBC Sports, HarperCollins, Aviva, TalkTalk Business, Avanade, and Telenor.
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Nutanix, Dell Technologies and others in File and Object Storage. Updated: June 2025.
859,687 professionals have used our research since 2012.