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Dell ECS vs NetApp StorageGRID 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

Pure Storage FlashBlade
Sponsored
Ranking in File and Object Storage
6th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (17th)
Dell ECS
Ranking in File and Object Storage
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp StorageGRID
Ranking in File and Object Storage
10th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the File and Object Storage category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 5.8%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell ECS is 7.9%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp StorageGRID is 5.5%, up from 4.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
File and Object Storage
 

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.…
Mir Gulzar Ahmed - PeerSpot reviewer
Object-based storage and offers intuitive management tools, making it easy to configure and maintain
The only thing missing is flexibility in configuration to cater to specific customer requirements. Another area of improvement is marketing. NetApp's marketing of StorageGRID isn't optimal. They should present it more effectively, especially in regions like Pakistan. Here, I haven't seen any marketing campaigns from NetApp for StorageGRID or the Solid State Platform (SSP). While StorageGRID is a globally recognized product, I haven't seen any marketing efforts from NetApp in Pakistan. Even competitors are promoting object storage solutions here, but NetApp seems less efficient in selling StorageGRID. There might be one or two customers, but even as a NetApp partner, I'm not aware of any major sales. I've been trained on StorageGRID, and it is a good product. I'm unsure why it hasn't gained traction in Pakistan compared to other countries. So, I just recommend improving the marketing campaigns in Pakistan. I'm pretty confident that if we have one example of successful StorageGRID implementation in Pakistan, other customers will follow suit.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is very easy to use, and it is very fast."
"The onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good."
"Speed and ease of use are the two most valuable features."
"I would rate this solution an eight plus. It has has good flexibility and stability, it's easy to manage and the response time is good."
"I like its size. It is smaller than the other competitors. We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte."
"It uses the same platform for connectivity so integration is seamless."
"I would rate Pure Storage FlashBlade a ten out of ten."
"The ease of deployment and management has helped us simplify our storage. We also do not have to worry about capacity management as much. A lot of these things are native to Pure Storage."
"We face very few hardware failures."
"What I like best about Dell ECS is its stability. I also like that you can use it for large-scale data purposes. The solution works fine for me, and I haven't encountered any issues with it."
"The most valuable feature for me is off-site storage."
"Dell ECS is a very stable solution and most of the S3 APIs are supported."
"Dell ECS is a cost-effective solution that provides ease of use and availability."
"It's definitely good for unstructured data. In earlier days, we had Centera, so for the DR it's really good. It has load balancing facility, and we're using it with the Kemp Load Balancer."
"The setup was straightforward."
"Dell's technical support team is good."
"It has improved our operational efficiency through time consumption and logistics by 40 to 50 percent. Everything that had to do with our legacy tape solution has been improved and is now more efficient."
"NetApp StorageGRID is a great alternative to AWS S3 buckets. Erasure coding is very valuable."
"The speed of the disks removed the bottleneck from our storage."
"It helps automate our storage infrastructure."
"It has awesome scalability. We consume it with storage appliance nodes, then we just plug and play as we need more."
"The backup features are valuable. I've heard from our backup and data protection people that our clients are very satisfied with the performance in junction with the backup, which they archive on this type of object storage."
"The management portals have most significantly improved our data retrieval times. They've made it much easier to restore data compared to our previous methods."
"The technical support is good."
 

Cons

"I would also like to see better support for CIFS workloads."
"Its configuration should be easier."
"On our dedupe during our initial buy, we were expecting a number a little higher like 4x. However, we are getting about 3.6. While it is close enough, it doesn't quite hit the numbers. So, this has been a challenge."
"Pure Storage FlashBlade should improve on more cloud integration."
"The Pure Storage Orchestrator is our biggest pain point at the moment. If we can have more say in future developments of feature sets that we will need to support for our use case, that would be pretty beneficial to us."
"In terms of scalability, it doesn't expand out quite as robustly as some of the others, but it covers 90% of the market in what it does."
"Its configuration should be easier."
"The solution is expensive."
"They could provide centralized reports."
"From an improvement perspective, Dell ECS should aim to offer a better pricing plan to its users."
"The disaster recovery could be improved because there should be something in-built within the ECS. Search and recovery should be in-built. Right now, we have to use some external tools for performing the recovery itself. For example, we're using Atempo or deploying Golden Superna, so it has dependency on the external third party vendors."
"They need to ensure that the system will work if a site goes down."
"We have had issues when the ECS is expiring or the NetBackup is expiring images."
"In Taiwan, they don't have professional technical support."
"The deployment is not easy, and some expertise is required to configure the virtual data center and replication groups."
"The solution’s stability could be improved."
"One key improvement I'd like to see in StorageGRID is enhanced visibility for management purposes."
"I just recommend improving the marketing campaigns in Pakistan."
"They can enhance the deduplication and compression features, which are crucial for saving more disk space. It's not at the same level as the NetApp filer or the real NetApp cluster that runs itself on its architecture, as StorageGRID is a software solution that emulates a RAID level."
"Beyond the initial setup, this product is a little bit difficult to configure."
"The price is something that NetApp could improve, as with most companies. NetApp is known for not being the cheapest storage option, which is also valid for StorageGRID. There are other storage options on the market which we are aware of and have done proofs of concept for, but you cannot really compare the list prices because, as a big user of NetApp storages, we have totally different prices than some list prices. Still, the price information we got for other options are almost always less expensive than StorageGRID."
"We want to move towards Azure in the cloud. Right now, the system is all physical."
"They can enhance the deduplication and compression features, which are crucial for saving more disk space."
"There was a small amount of confusion when working with StorageGRID and Active Directory for access. We had to do things three to four times resulting in our engineer troubleshooting a couple of things. The location of the menu, along with what is inside the menu: configurations, settings, etc., is not straightforward to users. Most users are Windows-based. So, when make logical changes to the menu which are not similar to Windows, users and administrators get confused."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of this solution could be made more affordable."
"The product is very expensive."
"I have seen ROI. It has allowed me to increase the density of my VMs without having to purchase anything additional."
"I understand that it is competitively priced compared to other brands."
"Pure Storage FlashBlade is a hardware appliance, and it's very expensive if you compare its price with other solutions. You can get the same features and benefits from its competitor, VAST Data, but for half the price of Pure Storage FlashBlade."
"Support is a separate line item. Support is a different cost, but whatever your support is now, that's what you're going to pay forever. If your support's $100 today, six years from now it's $100. It doesn't fluctuate unless you upgrade it, or change it, etc."
"Our licensing is renewed annually."
"The price is a little high."
"If I remember correctly, Dell ECS is an appliance, so if you buy Dell ECS, you also have to buy the hardware, while IBM is standalone software, so you can buy IBM as software only without needing to buy the hardware. On a scale of one to five, I'm rating the pricing for Dell ECS a four."
"We are not paying for the license at this stage."
"The price of Dell ECS should be reduced."
"It's a lease-based model, so it's capacity-based. We already negotiated the price a lot, but we're still doing that with Dell because somehow the product was not installed successfully, so there was a lot of struggle in the distributor territory between Dell and the environment itself. I would give the solution a 6 out of 10 for the pricing. There's a little room for improvement."
"It is an inexpensive product."
"The charges for this solution are made in blocks of models, which are purchased depending on what features an organization requires."
"It is an expensive solution. There is a need to make yearly payments towards the licensing costs attached to the product."
"The product is quite expensive."
"The pricing is quite flexible and depends on the specific customer requirements. The initial cost is primarily based on the desired capacity, so it's not a fixed price."
"We save money on storage costs from this solution since it allows us to have a source of revenue from customers consuming the service."
"It is very cost-effective."
"The licensing that the S3 service provides them from a FabricPool standpoint is more attractive than the licensing from AWS or Azure."
"I rate the product pricing around five out of ten—it's negotiable, depending on the circumstances."
"Creating your own data stores, backups, or storage grids, helps eliminate all these costs of downloading all the data back after you downloaded to the cloud."
"While we have been able to save money on storage costs, it could be better."
"NetApp is not known for being the cheapest storage option on the market. Almost all of the other storage options we looked at were less expensive than StorageGRID. The price is one thing to criticize, which is what we hear internally and from customers as well. They find the cost of the terabytes in this class of storage a little bit higher than expected."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
29%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Manufacturing Company
19%
Computer Software Company
16%
Government
5%
 

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 ...
What do you like most about NetApp StorageGRID?
The management portals have most significantly improved our data retrieval times. They've made it much easier to rest...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp StorageGRID?
I rate the product pricing around five out of ten—it's negotiable, depending on the circumstances.
What needs improvement with NetApp StorageGRID?
The product's continual innovation and enhancement in integration capabilities with other NetApp solutions could be b...
 

Also Known As

No data available
EMC ECS, Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage, EMC Elastic Cloud Storage
Storage GRID
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL
Atos
ASE, DARZ GmbH
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell ECS vs. NetApp StorageGRID and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.