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Dell PowerMax NVMe vs NetApp FAS Series comparison

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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (15th), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
Dell PowerMax NVMe
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (8th), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (3rd)
NetApp FAS Series
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
108
Ranking in other categories
Deduplication Software (4th), NAS (3rd), Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature
One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.
Haseeb Khalid Sheikh - PeerSpot reviewer
End-to-end NVMe capabilities helps improve availability, performance, and capacity
The solution's most valuable feature is the data reduction ratio. You can store a 5:1 ratio of your data in Dell PowerMax NVMe. For example, if you have 200 terabytes of usable capacity, you can save up to five times of data on that capacity. That means you can save one petabyte of data on just 200 terabytes of usable capacity. The solution's end-to-end NVMe capabilities have improved our operations. Everything is fast, and you don't have to map your storage to old hybrid storage technologies. Our organization has experienced positive change, and the solution has improved our uptime, availability, performance, and capacity.
Paweł Jabłoński - PeerSpot reviewer
Used for VMs with replication a feature, but need upgraded SSDs
We use this solution. I configured and updated it. Of course, I was also a user of applications that store data on that storage. We already have an SSD solution. So, rather than planning to go with an SSD solution, we are focusing on expanding it. If a company wants to deploy something new, it should choose a product with SSD, and NVMe disks. Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"The tool's valuable features are speed, security, data compression, and reliability. Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen. It helps us to save money and resources."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"Dell PowerMax NVMe's tech support is good."
"The tool is a fast-performing asset. It can perform millions of transactions within a second. I like the tool's architecture as well."
"The performance is very good on our servers. It's superior. And the QoS capabilities for providing work congestion protection are also important because about 99 percent of our servers are production servers."
"It is efficient and very simple for our administrators to use."
"I am impressed with the tool's reliability since we see a few hardware failures with it. Also, the solution's replication configuration is good."
"We are using the solution's application and snapshot feature."
"We're consolidating two to three arrays down to one which means that our data center footprint has decreased by like 90%. So we're saving 90% of our space, and it also is much better on power and everything else in our data center. And on top of that, the performance is much, much better than our older arrays."
"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's a stable product. No issues there."
"In NetApp FAS Series, I appreciate the visibility."
"It has a very good implementation of the Active Directory services, so implementation into a Windows network is easy."
"At the moment, we use NetApp SnapMirror to replicate data to another filer at an offsite location for backup. So, I like this feature."
"They are very satisfied with NetApp and continue to use NetApp and upgrade to new solutions."
"The solution is easy to use."
"The ONTAP tools make managing VMware easier."
"The most valuable features are compression and dedupe."
 

Cons

"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"Managing data isn't difficult for me. The performance is usually perfect, but we sometimes have capacity problems."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics should not incur extra charges."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"I would also like to see a real-time, graphical view of metrics. I don't know how far back in time we can look, but if we could see the performance from two months or three months back, and how it is performing now, that would be helpful."
"When it comes to Oracle and database workloads, data reduction could be a little bit better. Some of the competition, like Pure, have post-processes which do additional deduplication and compression on the backside; everything is in-line and then they do a secondary process. It would be a good option if you could start getting 5:1 or 6:1 data reduction on database workloads."
"There is room for improvement in adjusting into the existing infrastructure easily without much of the technical contribution."
"The solution should integrate better with OpenShift and Kubernetes architecture."
"I would like them to continue improving the management tools and continue moving towards a RESTful API versus CLI."
"There are so many configurations in the tool that cannot be done by anyone who is not a Dell personnel."
"The tool is costly compared to other similar products. The product's pricing needs to be improved. I would like the product to include the replication feature in its future releases."
"Dell PowerMax NVMe is costly compared to other solutions."
"Its operating system is very cumbersome. However, after you set it up, it runs pretty smoothly. Its file system is not very dynamic. It is very static."
"When we were going through all the MFA hardening and the anti-ransomware setup, I gave some feedback to our executive. The MFA process for getting that set up on the AFF systems was cumbersome compared to some of our other systems."
"We're supposed to have used NetApp FAS Series for replication, but then one of the nodes failed, and then it's taken us some time to bring it up."
"Its licensing cost can be improved."
"The one aspect of the solution that's negative for us is also more unique to us due to the fact that we did a MetroCluster. The tiebreaker piece that does the monitoring of the two different locations, and determines if one is not talking to the network normally (or if it's truly down) is a little difficult. It feels like it was not designed from the beginning to fit well into the other pieces. It feels like it was thrown in at the last minute and it is not smooth."
"NetApp FAS Series should introduce an FTP application for the broadcast and post-production market."
"It may need more flexibility to fight with other competing arrays."
"Installation of the additional switches and ETP could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."
"The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits. We don't regret purchasing it."
"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."
"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."
"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
"The tool's pricing is cheap; I rate it a six to seven out of ten. Most of our sales are not subscription-based. We sell the hardware, and customers keep using it. They only renew the service part annually. The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there."
"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."
"Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet."
"The pricing might be a bit high for small organizations, so it's more suitable for larger enterprises."
"The PowerMax appliance pricing was reasonable. Dell EMC quoted us a substantial discount."
"Our costs for the product are three million."
"The price is okay."
"Support pricing is very high. Our support contract is about to expire and Dell EMC provided us with an extremely high renewal quote. It was four times more than the support contract for our previous EMC VNX solution."
"The price is on the market. It's not inexpensive, but it's available on the market."
"One area for improvement, one that everybody always comes to, is price... it's still quite expensive to purchase these big arrays... For us, the pricing doesn't make Dell EMC uncompetitive."
"Negotiate hard and consider the commercial advantages/benefits to Dell EMC for onboarding your product."
"I've sold arrays for as little $20,000 USD and as high as $300,000 USD."
"NetApp FAS Series' pricing is competitive."
"Cost effective storage for all performance levels (including all-flash)."
"We purchased it for four years, and it wasn't expensive. It was reasonable. Every company has a different agreement with NetApp. We got everything we wanted with all the bells and whistles and all the features and functionalities."
"The product is on the expensive side."
"It is a moderately low-priced platform."
"It's not cheap, but at the same time, it's also inexpensive. It's somewhere in between."
"I don't recall the price, but in general, pricing can always be better."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Educational Organization
55%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.
What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...
What's the difference between DELL EMC Powerstore and Powermax NVMe?
Dell PowerStore is an all-solid-state midrange storage system. It has many internal elements taken from other Dell of...
What do you like most about Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe?
First, it's an enterprise storage solution. This is very important for us. Another important feature is replication.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe?
Dell offers various pricing models, including a pay-as-you-go option where storage is provided without upfront charge...
Which SAN product would you choose: IBM FlashSystem (FS9500) vs PureFlash Array/X NVMe vs PureFlash Array/XL NVMe?
Have you considered a NetApp FAS Storage for your NAS needs? I am sure it fits very well.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp FAS Series?
The pricing of NetApp FAS Series is not cheap, but in comparison to other vendors, NetApp FAS Series is affordable be...
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerMax
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Rackspace, Open Line
Children's Hospital Central California, Plex Systems, PDF PNI Digital Media, Denver Broncos, PDF KSM Legal, Clayton Companies, Virginia Community College
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. NetApp FAS Series and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.