Dell PowerMax NVMe vs NetApp NVMe AFF A800 comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and NetApp NVMe AFF A800 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.
To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. NetApp NVMe AFF A800 Report (Updated: September 2023).
735,432 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"On a scale of one to ten, where ten is the most comfortable pricing, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.""Support has been helpful.""The solution is very reliable.""We've been using FlashArray's snapshot for backups. Their replication across sites and response time are also excellent.""The management features are well organized and they have a very good dashboard.""The most valuable features in Pure Storage FlashArray are deduplication and active cluster.""This is the best all-flash storage array on the market.""The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is its high stability level."

More Pure Storage FlashArray Pros →

"We are most interested in cloud utilization.""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 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 allows us to protect our data using different data centers and replicate bi-directionally between our two main data centers.""The compression and deduplication are always on. We get more than 4:1 capacity savings using them. The efficiency benefits from compression and deduplication are through a specialized hardware module within the storage itself, and that means there is no overhead to the compression and dedupe.""We like the compression, dedupe, and I/O on the PowerMax. They are better than on the XtremIO.""The UI is very easy to use. We can add volumes and manage them easily.""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."

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"You can easily scale up, and scale-out.""The storage features are valuable.""Low latency is the most valuable feature.""During the use cases of the solution, its reliability and suitability are the best.""The product can be scaled vertically as well as horizontally.""NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is easier to use than some other solutions and the UI is very good to use for day-to-day activities. Overall, the solution has good technology.""Over the eight years, we've been using NetApp with ONTAP, we've never lost a bit of data, and we've only experienced a few minutes of downtime in that entire time."

More NetApp NVMe AFF A800 Pros →

Cons
"It would be good to have metrics of the box's performance so we can see what it delivers, but currently, I can't see what it's actually doing.""The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in.""Its price could be cheaper. It is not the cheapest one out there, but I'm not directly involved in the figures and negotiations.""It is way in excess of what we need. If anything, we could see a bit more speed. I'm just comparing it with what some of my colleagues who are implementing their own systems do.""It is a bit expensive.""Pure Storage FlashArray could improve in the area of cryptographic information in the consoles. The user-friendliness could improve. The Pure Storage FlashArray team should come and log into the system with their maintenance credentials and then pull out the information as evidence of cryptography.""We would like to be able to connect to data tape for backup, specifically to the LTO backups.""Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features."

More Pure Storage FlashArray Cons →

"Some of the management features could be simplified and that's probably the main thing they need to address.""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.""I would like to see more development in the cloud environment. It would be good if it comes in the cloud kind of setup.""The tool needs to improve its performance. Today's applications are demanding a response rate of one millisecond or below. The product should also look into AI integration.""We brought up this question to the implementation engineer. We were comparing use cases where a customer is using RecoverPoint, then goes to PowerMax. In our previous setup with XtremIO, we were using RecpverPoint and keeping snapshots for 30 days, every few seconds. With PowerMax, I requested this for every 15 minutes, keeping it for a week. The engineer's answer was, "There will be too many snapshots. It might slow down the system." This is specifically for the use cases where there is RecoverPoint. While PowerMax works with RecoverPoint, and you can use it, there should be some way where you can have even more snapshots and not to worry about performance and system cache.""They can make the GUI better, especially for the ones that come out of the box. We did encounter a bit of difficulty in setting up the storage. We had to deploy Solutions Enabler on a Linux machine to be able to fully interact with the storage. They need to upgrade the web interface for the management of the storage that comes out of the box. The management interface for NFS is also a bit old and not very intuitive.""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.""Dell PowerMax NVMe needs to increase storage and improve scalability."

More Dell PowerMax NVMe Cons →

"The support can take a few days to have a response. However, the response that we do receive is very informative.""Stability is an area with a certain shortcoming where the solution needs to improve""The technical support has room for improvement.""Sometimes, it takes a while to get somebody competent on the other end of the line. They do have engineers in multiple time zones around the world. However, their level-one support is not always the best.""The product’s UI could be better.""The initial setup is complex.""Increasing the RAM, and including physical cords would be beneficial."

More NetApp NVMe AFF A800 Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "When we bought the unit, we bought per capacity. So, the licensing is per capacity, and the only thing that we have to buy every year or every three years is maintenance. Included in that maintenance is the upgrade of the controllers every three years at no cost to us."
  • "We consume it as a service, and that's actually something we really like, or at least I really like from the technical perspective. That's because it means there is no hassle when we need to upgrade arrays to add capacity. We just interact directly with technical counterparts, and we say, "Hey, we're filling up," and they say, "All right, here's another data pack." They ship it in, and we install it. So, the as-a-service model has worked very well. Given the outstanding data reduction rates, it has improved our profitability because we're selling allocated volumes as part of the cloud service or recovering those costs from our tenants. It is very efficient, but that has offset the premium price. It started out that way, but over time, as we've added capacity, the price per gig has gone down a lot because we have a lot of it."
  • "There are no fees for licensing. The hardware is paid for only once."
  • "I think that the pricing is less expensive compared to other standard products in the market today. Even the support contract and maintenance services cost less when compared to market-leading products like EMC."
  • "You can pay extra for Evergreen support, which gives you free upgrades when new features are introduced."
  • "The best features come included without any additional cost."
  • "We purchased a license to use this solution and we pay for the storage ourselves."
  • "The price of the solution is not expensive."
  • More Pure Storage FlashArray Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Its price is competitive, but they need to have a different price for West Africa. They can do better with the price point to allow us to scale even more. We wanted to migrate our entire storage infrastructure to PowerMax, which would require us to buy more capacity, and from the price point, it didn't attract us."
  • "The PowerMax appliance pricing was reasonable. Dell EMC quoted us a substantial discount."
  • "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."
  • "It is high-end storage and it is a bit expensive, but it is doing what it is meant for: running business-critical applications or latency-sensitive applications..."
  • "The pricing for this solution is good compared to other products in the market."
  • "The price is on the market. It's not inexpensive, but it's available on the market."
  • "In terms of price-performance, it beat out other competitors when we were taking a look and comparing it to the market. That was one of the biggest driving points for us."
  • "The price is okay."
  • More Dell PowerMax NVMe Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The solution is expensive."
  • "There are licenses for the use of this solution, such as commercial licenses."
  • "I rate the product’s pricing a seven out of ten."
  • More NetApp NVMe AFF A800 Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure… more »
    Top Answer:Data deduplication is one feature I found to be the most valuable in the tool...Stability-wise, I rate the solution a… more »
    Top Answer:FlashArray is a premium solution, having all-inclusive licensing including future functionalities, and being end/to/end… more »
    Top Answer:Dell PowerStore is an all-solid-state midrange storage system. It has many internal elements taken from other Dell… more »
    Top Answer:Dell PowerMax NVMe's tech support is good.
    Top Answer:The cost of the solution is quite noticeable, but it provides a good fit regarding the price of the hardware and all of… more »
    Top Answer:The product can be scaled vertically as well as horizontally.
    Top Answer:The product’s UI could be better. At present, it needs improvement in terms of visualization.
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerMax
    NetApp NVMe, AFF A800
    Learn More
    Overview

    Pure Storage FlashArray is the world’s first enterprise-class storage array that runs exclusively on the nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) protocol for memory access and storage. It represents a totally state-of-the-art type of storage technology. It offers users shared accelerated storage that delivers cutting-edge features in the realms of performance, simplicity, and consolidation. Pure Storage is fresh and modern today and will be for the next decade. Without forklift upgrades or planned downtime, Pure Storage takes the work out of storage ownership and delivers unprecedented customer satisfaction.

    Pure Storage FlashArray is built with simplicity and reliability in mind. The solution can be implemented and optimized in hours, as opposed to other similar solutions that can take days. It has no moving parts, which removes areas where it could potentially be vulnerable to suffering errors. It is highly stable and gives users the ability to manage system shutdowns in a way that  prevents data loss.

    Benefits of Pure Storage FlashArray

    Some of the benefits of using Pure Storage FlashArray include:

    • A much higher level of speed than similar pieces of technology. Pure Storage FlashArray maximizes the speed at which data can be transferred while at the same time minimizing system latencies that might slow the transfer down. Additionally, it offers users quick memory read and data access speeds.

    • A higher bang for your buck in terms of the storage capabilities you get for the money you pay. They are smaller in size than more standard storage technologies, but they offer flash memory, which enables users to store larger amounts of data than the current standard.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Pure Storage FlashArray is a highly effective piece of storage technology which stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its overall robustness and the value that it offers by way of its reliability and ease of use. It provides users with many valuable features that allow them to maximize what they can do with this solution. Pure Storage FlashArray’s reliability and ease of use make it a highly valuable solution. 

    PeerSpot user Prabakaran K., a technical consultant at Injazat Data Systems, notes the robustness of this solution when he writes, "FlashArray has many valuable features. It's very user-friendly and it has high availability, so there is comparatively less downtime. During maintenance, there is no shutdown procedure, so you can directly power off the Array and manage the shutdown process without any data loss, which is a unique feature. Managing replication and data migration is also very easy."

    PeerSpot user Jason D., a cloud solutions architect at a tech services company, notes three features that make this solution valuable when he writes, "We've had different types of storage, and three things of this solution are valuable. The first one is its outstanding performance. The second one is its stability. In the about three years that we've had it, we've had component failures, but we never had a service interruption or any data loss. The third one, which is really critical, is that it is super easy to use in terms of provisioning, storage, and managing the arrays. I'm able to maintain a multi-site environment with a couple of dozen arrays with a single mid-level storage admin."

    Dell EMC PowerMax is the world’s fastest storage array. With end-to-end non-volatile memory express (NVMe), real-time machine learning, seamless cloud mobility, and up to 350GB per second bandwidth, PowerMax features high-speed smarts to power your most critical workloads. PowerMax is true modern scale-up and scale-out storageת designed for mission-critical applications of today and tomorrow – including databases and transaction processing applications as well as real-time analytics workloads that demand uncompromising uptime and extremely low latency.

    PowerMax consists of two models, PowerMax 2000 and 8000. The PowerMax 8000 delivers industry-leading performance density with up to 7.5 million IOPS5 per rack and 187,000 IOPS6 per U (rack unit). PowerMax supports mixed open systems, mainframe, IBM i, block, and file environments. The PowerMax 2000 is the entry point into mission-critical storage, high availability, and delivering robust data services in a safe, secure compact package.

    PowerMax systems incorporate the most current and robust end-to-end NVMe technology with industry-standard NVMe flash drives, NVMe storage class memory drives, and FC-NVMe host connectivity via NVMe over Fabrics. PowerMax SCM, powered by dual-port Intel® Optane™ technology, offers rapid-fire fast performance and secure low latency ideal for electronic trading, real-time analytics, high-performance databases, and big data workloads.

    Features of Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe

    Robust architecture with amazing performance combines demanding mixed workloads.

    • Built-in machine learning automates data placement for maximum performance with no additional management cost.
    • Very secure end-to-end dynamic encryption safeguards digital assets with 3.5:1 data reduction, guaranteed by Dell Technologies.
    • Seamless cloud mobility pushes data from PowerMax to AWS, Azure, Dell EMC ECS, and PowerScale for long-term retention on lower-cost object storage.

    Benefits of Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe

    Powerful Architecture

    • Designed for speed – robust multi-controller scale-up, scale-out architecture with built-in end-to-end NVMe.
    • Performance optimized – up to 350GB/s sustained bandwidth2, under 100µs read latency3.
    • Efficiency without compromise – global inline data reduction with guaranteed 3.5:1 average DRR4.

    Simple Operations

    • Intuitive storage management – provision storage in less than 30 seconds.
    • Workload consolidation – outstanding consolidation of block, file, mainframe, IBM i storage on a single array.
    • DevOps automation and containers – workflow automation and streamlined IT processes (vRA, vRO, CSI, CSM, Kubernetes).
    • Non-disruptive data migration – initiate data migrations from older arrays to PowerMax in three simple steps.

    Trusted Innovation

    • Mission-critical availability – proven six nines availability and the best replication for business continuance, disaster recovery (BC/DR).
    • Deep VMware integration – mission-critical availability and the most efficient scalability for VMware Virtual Volumes deployments (64,000 vVols).
    • Flexible consumption – several options, predictability, and investment protection with pay-per-use solutions and Future-Proof guarantees.

    PowerMax sets the standard for data storage today. It is uniquely, intuitively designed with a multi-controller, active/active scale-out architecture, an industry-standard, end-to-end NVMe. Inline, global dedupe and compression add outstanding efficiency to your data center, even while scaling. Additionally, PowerMax offers you the best in remote replication, proven six nines of availability, and end-to-end efficient encryption so that your data is always secure and your resources are fully optimized.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Ahmed K., a senior storage systems engineer at a pharma/biotech company, says Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe has “secure, fast performance, and good reporting capabilities.”

    Nikolay M. a lead system administrator at Central Hospital of Civil Aviation shares that with PowerMax, “we have not yet hit the ceiling in its efficiency, performance, and scalability… Now, with PowerMax, everything runs smoothly.”

    “We don't have to manage much at all. It really is like a set it and forget it solution. My storage engineers love the system. It is a lot less work than our previous systems… We are saving dozens of hours per month for our storage team, and that is a real cost in our business," adds Paul C., a Senior Solution Architect at Rackspace.

    Your data is a gold mine. Get the most out of it - faster - with AFF A800. Designed for NVMe media, further accelerated with NVMe/FC connectivity to the host, AFF A800 all-flash systems deliver an incredible sub-200 microsecond latency. Providing more than 11.4M IOPS and 300GB/s throughput in a single cluster, AFF A800 redefines the limit of what’s possible with artificial intelligence and deep learning.

    Offer
    Learn more about Pure Storage FlashArray
    Learn more about Dell PowerMax NVMe
    Learn more about NetApp NVMe AFF A800
    Sample Customers
    Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
    Rackspace, Open Line
    Information Not Available
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Healthcare Company12%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Computer Software Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization36%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    REVIEWERS
    Healthcare Company24%
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Retailer10%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Government7%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Healthcare Company29%
    Real Estate/Law Firm14%
    Security Firm14%
    Wellness & Fitness Company14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Manufacturing Company15%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Healthcare Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business16%
    Midsize Enterprise44%
    Large Enterprise40%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise21%
    Large Enterprise66%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise64%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise25%
    Large Enterprise63%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise10%
    Large Enterprise68%
    Buyer's Guide
    Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. NetApp NVMe AFF A800
    September 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. NetApp NVMe AFF A800 and other solutions. Updated: September 2023.
    735,432 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 7th in All-Flash Storage with 26 reviews while NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is ranked 20th in All-Flash Storage with 7 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.6, while NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "Allows us to define different service levels for storage groups to prioritize our workload at the infrastructure level, and provides remarkable value in terms of compression and deduplication". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp NVMe AFF A800 writes "Very easy to manage, highly stable and offers robustness of the CLI, API, and GUI ". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and Pure FlashArray X NVMe, whereas NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is most compared with Dell PowerStore, HPE Primera, NetApp AFF, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series and Dell Unity XT. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. NetApp NVMe AFF A800 report.

    See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors and best NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.

    We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.