We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and Dell XtremIO based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The initial setup was straightforward in the way that it was a database vacuum storage."
"It is the SAN backbone for our company."
"Pure Storage FlashArray's overall speed is its most valuable feature."
"The deduplication and compression meet all of our system requirements."
"Pure is simple to set up and manage on a day-to-day basis."
"I never have to worry about its performance or if it is the root cause of an issue."
"The most valuable feature is replication."
"Pure gives us better compression, it's easier to manage, a lot less hands-on."
"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."
"It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The stability is great. It is five nines."
"They're basically tanks. You could take a baseball bat to the thing, and it's still going to keep running and doing what it's supposed to do. We've had a couple of part failures, and you can pretty much replace any part on that thing at any time during the day in the middle of production without worrying about anything happening."
"It is easy to manage and upgrade."
"The high availability that other systems don't have. In other systems, there is an owner in the storage processes. But for PowerMAX, there is no owner. All the process storage is passed to all nodes without ownership. So, there is no response feature in the storage in PowerMax. In the other systems, there is a response, which is a very nice feature. No systems have such a feature."
"We are most interested in cloud utilization."
"It has dramatically cut down the footprint in our data center and reduced the amount of raw disk capacity that we needed to purchase."
"Very good IOPS performance"
"It has very good performance for an application which needs lower latency and a better response, for example, in microseconds."
"The most valuable features are that it is fast and reliable."
"We mostly use it for backup, because we cannot measure anything, and we are afraid to use it for surveillance systems. We were planning to use it for mostly for surveillance systems."
"Linear performance – The XtremIO wasn’t the fastest in all tests against other all flash arrays, but even with a massive workload, the response time and user experience were absolutely predictable with no sharp drop-offs."
"Ease of management, aside from the serious performance, is the best feature."
"The guaranteed sub-millisecond response time for a 4K block."
"The Metro clustering and solid-state performance, are the most valuable features of this solution."
"A three wave application or multi wave application synchronization would be an improvement."
"On a couple of occasions, the waiting time for an upgrade has been pretty substantial."
"The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN."
"I would love to see a true one click upgrade solution. Right now, you have to click and schedule an appointment with Pure Storage to be able to upgrade. I would love for it to automatically download, install, and fall-over every controller as it updates."
"It was not proactive communication."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features."
"Larger capacity and more storage ports would be the two things I'd like to see."
"In the next release of the solution I would like to see Vormetric native block encryption."
"There is also room for improvement in the PowerMax architecture and hardware itself. They should design the PowerMax on the basis of PCIe 4.0. I would like to see the possibility of an NVMe drive that operates on PCIe 4.0 and not PCIe 3.0."
"There are definitely some improvements that can be made to the CloudIQ."
"I would like them to continue improving the management tools and continue moving towards a RESTful API versus CLI."
"I would like to see the rack change. They have defaulted to the standard rack, so our fiber cables are crowded when we shut our back door."
"PowerMax's software is highly stable, but we faced two hardware issues in one year. We had a failure of the storage director module, and the physical disk failed on another occasion. Dell EMC should improve its hardware quality."
"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."
"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."
"The NVMe integration could be improved."
"In the next release, the solution could have better integration and if we can host assets on the cloud, such as NetApp has the NetApp volumes, which we can host on the cloud directly called NetApp CVO (cloud volume ONTAP). Dell EMC should come up with something purely on the cloud rather than manage services."
"The management should be improved and the GUI interface could be better and easier."
"XtremIO is coming to its end of life."
"They can improve the product by providing an HTML5-based interface instead of the Java GUI based application."
"This solution is geared toward enterprise-level companies. Small and medium-sized businesses would find it extremely expensive."
"Ease of use is key in the converged and hyper-converged world that requires administrators to have both hypervisor and storage skills."
"It is very expensive to scale. You have to buy an additional system to extend from one disc, for instance. It is scalable, but extremely expensive to do so."
"The solution needs to be simplified. When you integrate your storage with other systems, could use a little bit of automation."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while Dell XtremIO is ranked 25th in All-Flash Storage with 48 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while Dell XtremIO is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "Simplified storage provisioning for us, enabling us to assign any volumes in two to three minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell XtremIO writes "Suitable for high IOPS and helps get backup in ten minutes ". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, whereas Dell XtremIO is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, NetApp AFF, INFINIDAT InfiniBox and VMware vSAN. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell XtremIO report.
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