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Dell EqualLogic PS series vs IBM XIV comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 2, 2025

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

Dell EqualLogic PS series
Ranking in Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)
7th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM XIV
Ranking in Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)
11th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.4
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) category, the mindshare of Dell EqualLogic PS series is 2.7%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM XIV is 1.6%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Dell EqualLogic PS series2.7%
IBM XIV1.6%
Other95.7%
Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)
 

Featured Reviews

HansThilen - PeerSpot reviewer
A highly scalable and astoundingly stable solution offering its users an extremely good technical support
Regarding an area to improve, I would say that from Dell EqualLogic family, I can't buy Dell EqualLogic PS series. I can't buy any more solutions provided by EqualLogic, so the solution will have to make certain improvements in the future. Since we can't buy anything from EqualLogic in our company, we plan to move to another solution. Since I can't buy it anymore, I don't receive any updates on the solution. Also, this is the last year in which one can buy support for the solution.
Ajith Kandaramage - PeerSpot reviewer
Good value for money but issues with modular scaling
IBM XIV's most valuable features are NVME, especially when it comes to de-duplication, compression, and responsiveness I've been using IBM XIV for two and a half years. IBM XIV is stable. IBM XIV's scalability is adequate for our requirements, but because it's modular, you can't scale to larger…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution can scale."
"Dell EqualLogic PS series is a highly stable solution."
"Its high availability. It has a lot of redundancy and good management software as well as good alerting."
"It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"Technical support, when we had access to it, was very good."
"​It has contributed to the implementation of virtualization and all its benefits.​"
"If you have one datacenter fail, the VMs will start to run inside the other data center."
"You can always trust it. It is stable."
"Very easy to produce reporting data (Snaps). Very easy and fast for provisioning devices and Remote mirroring."
"The performance and robustness of the systems are very good."
"IBM XIV's most valuable features are NVME, especially when it comes to de-duplication, compression, and responsiveness."
"Hands down, this is the easiest storage platform on the market to manage."
"Installation is amazingly easy."
"As it spreads, a chuck of 1MB across the board means using all available spindles on the backend."
 

Cons

"The replication efficiency needs to be improved."
"There is no option for mixing RAID types in one device."
"If I need to have more space or more capacity, I need to replace the product. It would be ideal if we could scale without replacing the box itself."
"The product is reaching the end-of-lifecycle."
"The solution is out of date and the new version has a lot of advanced features."
"I can't buy any more solutions provided by EqualLogic...Since I can't buy it anymore, I don't receive any updates on the solution. Also, this is the last year in which one can buy support for the solution."
"Individual file recovery would be a nice additional feature."
"Dell EqualLogic PS series could improve the performance because in our hybrid configuration the read speed is faster than the write speed."
"Until the drive is replaced, the pool_resizing is locked."
"I would rather have a web GUI served directly from the unit, and a CLI accessible directly through SSH."
"The change form synchronous mirroring to asynchronous (and vice versa) without reconfiguration from scratch would be helpful."
"IBM XIV's scalability is adequate for our requirements, but because it's modular, you can't scale to larger requirements."
"I encountered stability (performance) issues during enclosure or disk rebuild. Also some power supply issues due to malfunctions of ​circuits. Sometimes "internal" Snap sessions hang and consume pool capacity."
"This product was not a good fit for our organization as we have a ton of latency sensitive applications and XIV was not able to keep up with IO + latency demand."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It seemed expensive at first, but the durability lowered the cost of ownership dramatically over time."
"All features are out of the box. The license will be in the virtual, OS, or application layer."
"Dell EqualLogic PS series can improve its scale-out feature. Sometimes the customer has a limited budget for storage expansion. When they want to expand their capacity, they need to buy a complete controller plus storage capacity, which sometimes is out of their budget. If Dell EqualLogic PS series support could scale up the environment in which only hard drive extension controllers should be supported, then customers can expand within a lower budget."
"There are annual maintenance costs beyond the original licensing period."
"Price-wise, the solution is cheap. I rate it a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is very cheap, and ten is very expensive."
"I didn't buy it. It was another person seven years ago. So, I don't really know, but all storage platforms cost a lot of money. It is probably in the mid-range, but you get what you pay for."
"Licensing is pretty straightforward."
"I don't think I would say that the product is less expensive...The product's price is not an issue for our company, considering the relationship we have with Dell and the customer support we receive."
"No-license-required policy, unlike others where you need a license for everything. Just pay once and forget about licenses."
"Licensing is straightforward."
"If you are going to use the product behind an SVC, IBM will price the units lower, since you are likely not to use any of the advanced copy services."
"We have a five-year total cost of ownership where we pay an initial amount and then annually for maintenance."
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Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise7
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Dell EqualLogic PS series?
The technical support for the solution was really good.
What needs improvement with Dell EqualLogic PS series?
An improvement that could be made is to have a storage solution with all SSD hard disks, as we currently have a Dell EqualLogic PS series with traditional hard disks. It's not simple to replace a h...
What is your primary use case for Dell EqualLogic PS series?
Dell EqualLogic PS series is the storage of our server, which serves our use case. The deployment of Dell EqualLogic PS series takes about five days.
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Also Known As

EqualLogic PS series
XIV
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

FAW Foundry, AW Engineering, Unimat, eLongNet Information Technology, BDO Brasil, Odyssey Space Research
Celero, NaviSite, Technische Universit_t Mªnchen, Netflix Inc., Muhr und Bender KG, Pelephone Communications
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell EqualLogic PS series vs. IBM XIV and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.