We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and SolidFire 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 compression and deduplication features help to make the best use of the capacity."
"It is fast and reliable. It works."
"The console is simple to use. It has good performance. It is easy to install, understand, and manage, with a good ratio of deduplication and compression. It is doing its job."
"The solution helps to simplify storage."
"The deduplication and compression rates are beyond impressive."
"The solution offers amazing performance."
"It's actually very stable"
"We consume less physical storage because of the solution’s deduplication and compression."
"It allows us to protect our data using different data centers and replicate bi-directionally between our two main data centers."
"The optimization of the cache memory of each engine and the use of persistent memory."
"Key features include performance, replication time, and dedup and compression."
"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."
"The smaller footprint of the device has been really nice. We have gone from eight bays to one bay. Having one floor tile in our data center has been pretty awesome. A lot less power and HVAC cooling is being consumed."
"The SRDF site-to-site replication for the volumes is the most important feature for us. That enables us to do site recovery and replication for our VMware infrastructure."
"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."
"It is efficient and very simple for our administrators to use."
"We can just buy them, scale them as we need on demand, and we don't have to spend so many front end cycles on designing the architecture."
"SolidFire has seamless performance for the nodes and extensions. I also like the tool’s scalability. The product’s performance does not get affected when we scale either up or down. This is not the case with other products."
"I would say in terms of architecture and in terms of functionality, the product is quite good."
"We can add a node, we add compute, we add storage, and we've had really good luck with that."
"It is very easy to scale up SolidFire."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its scalability."
"Overall performance of the solution."
"Being able to provide quality of service as promised."
"FlashArray's capacity for forecasting should be improved because it needs to be a bit more current. I think it's bundled with the deduplication and other compression factors. We need more user interfaces for forecasting in this software and more interfaces need to be integrated with this array management tool."
"We would like to integrate it more with our backup solutions."
"There are scenarios with very specific functionality around VMware integration particularly to do with the way we'd like to manage LUNs in VMware. The tools are pretty good but there's room for improvement there."
"In terms of the future, I have been excited by some of the copy data management stuff that they're talking about building into the environment. There are feature sets where I've done a lot of automation work. So, I am always looking forward to extensions of their API. They're also talking about a phone home centralized analytics database being used as a centralized management console with a list of new cloud features, but this doesn't seem finalized."
"The connectivity needs improvement. You do not have the possibility to have a file and block connectivity at the same time on the same machine. It has limited ability to do so."
"I want to learn more about command line usage which I have not explored much yet. However, there are many automated solutions for repetitive tasks. I would like to see additional features like performance monitoring, configuring of alerts, and the customization of alert thresholds in the next release."
"Having something native in the Pure Storage ecosystem would make it integrated and in one single company, and we wouldn't have to work with multiple organizations."
"Its price could be cheaper. It is not the cheapest one out there, but I'm not directly involved in the figures and negotiations."
"There are some stability issues that we just recently experienced. We hope the next release will solve these problems."
"Dell should work on their marketing strategies to make the product more visible on the market. They should promote the product's compatibility with IBM, as not everyone knows it."
"There is some room to grow, especially with some of the installation quirks."
"The REST API needs improvement. We are a very big automation company, and this would be big for us."
"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."
"I believe it would be of great benefit to work on the customization of the pricing structure for different enterprises and their specific needs."
"If you go to Pure or you go to NetApp, they deliver in one month. If you go to Dell or HP, they will take up to six months for delivery. This is not a business model for today."
"We had challenges again with the initial setup. I don't know if there was a gap during the requirement-collection phase, but the box was partially delivered to us with missing parts and it delayed the implementation by about 60 days. It was not as smooth as I would have hoped."
"They could make the mNode more user-friendly. Now you need to configure and add nodes by CLI and it’s not really easy to manage. If they created a web interface to do the management of the mNode, that would be great!."
"The user interface needs to be improved. Much of the client feedback involves comments such as "Oh, it's hard to navigate through.""
"It would be good to provide administrative access at the root level to be able to do things with the system, if need be."
"Though it is a stable solution, its users may face some security issues at times...The security provided by the solution is one area that can be improved."
"SolidFire should start from two nodes instead of the four nodes. That's the only thing. In a lot of solutions, we have to use four nodes, that's the better thing. But as a starting point, two is better. That's why their starting point is expensive."
"The technical support is really bad and has to be improved."
"The upgrade process could be better."
"The inclusion of more protocols and interfaces would make it easier to integrate with other products."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while SolidFire is ranked 19th in All-Flash Storage with 33 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while SolidFire is rated 8.2. 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 SolidFire writes "A versatile storage solution suitable for various workloads in cloud environments providing scalable architecture, granular Quality of Service and consistent performance". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and Dell XtremIO, whereas SolidFire is most compared with NetApp AFF, Dell PowerStore and VMware vSAN. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. SolidFire report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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