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Dell PowerMax vs Dell VMAX All Flash comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 18, 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

Pure FlashArray X NVMe
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
15th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
Dell PowerMax
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
7th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
84
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (3rd)
Dell VMAX All Flash
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
24th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerMax is 4.0%, down from 4.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell VMAX All Flash is 0.7%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
 

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.
Moin-Shah - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamless management and exceptional performance facilitate efficient data handling
I have not faced significant problems or challenges with Dell PowerMax NVMe during this time, although one area for improvement is its user-friendliness, as it's a bit engineer-oriented. Specific knowledge and expertise are required to manage it properly, which some users might find a bit challenging, yet it's not a big deal for me. With user experience in mind, an improvement for Dell PowerMax NVMe could be clearer total capacity measurements from snapshots and clones, which should be more visible for better planning. Additionally, a template script from PowerMax could assist customers in easily integrating their API-interconnected systems without needing extensive knowledge. To improve regarding scripts, I recommend that if a customer wants to automate snapshots from other systems, Dell can assist by providing plug-and-play integrated templates that allow customers to drag, drop, modify, and connect with any target system for generating snapshots without logging into the storage directly.
BrijeshKumar - PeerSpot reviewer
With an easy initial setup phase, the tool is useful for multi-site replication and DR
The configuration part of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required. If the product is up and running after, if it goes down, my company has observed that there are multiple failures that occur in the tool, so it needs to be reinstalled from scratch. The tool should have an automated feature or an automated option to handle the aforementioned scenario, which one can simply go and reset, after which the tool should be reinstalled with the same configuration.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"The database workloads are pretty fast because I frequently move data from here to there."
"The solution is scalable."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"Everything, especially the VMs inside, is pretty fast."
"It offers competitive performance, and the Evergreen storage model of Pure fits well with my organization."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"It has dramatically cut down the footprint in our data center and reduced the amount of raw disk capacity that we needed to purchase."
"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerMax NVMe is its replication feature."
"It's faster and more resilient."
"The best feature is the protection - PowerMax NVMe is volume-based and replicates data, so it's very comfortable for us to use."
"Dell PowerMax NVMe has good scalability and performance."
"Uptime by far is the most important thing, and also the replication ability (SRDF). Most of the customers who need this type of availability also want the protection of multiple data centers, and it is able to easily switchover workloads to their other data centers."
"The solution's snapshot capabilities and replication are very good features. Snapshots are allowing us to quickly build analytical models directly from production data. This gives us amazing insights into market trends and allows us to build more effective trading algorithms. Replication offers us unparalleled levels of resilience."
"I have been highly satisfied with the resiliency and scalability of the solution."
"It works very well."
"The ransomware protection feature is housed in a separate unit, specifically addressing the top twenty most critical threats."
"The product's initial setup phase was good."
"We haven't experienced any outages or core-level issues in the last ten years, making us comfortable with the storage solution."
"The snapshot feature has been precious for our testing processes, application development, and managing testing environments due to its efficiency and ease of use."
"The most valuable features of VMAX are its performance and GUI interface."
 

Cons

"I would like to see some AI features that would allow arrays to intelligently identify threats or unusual behavior in the data pattern and give an alert."
"It is on the expensive side."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics should not incur extra charges."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"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."
"Setting up PowerMax with VMAX is always complex."
"The solution should integrate better with OpenShift and Kubernetes architecture."
"The technical support is lacking. We are working with Dell EMC to get some better understanding of this."
"Dell PowerMax or Symmetrix is a block-level storage and unified storage, supporting both NAS and SAN. One area for improvement would be integration with public cloud services."
"I would like NVMe to be end-to-end in the next release. Right now, it is not end-to-end."
"We have had some trouble with the VMAX-to-PowerMax migration, but the VMAX box will be powered down after the migration. The PowerMax boxes are working fine and we don't have any issues with them."
"Support of the product can be slow and an administrative challenge: planning, scheduling, and overseeing data center access for a Dell EMC rep. One improvement could be to enable a self-maintenance option. The requirements that we go through to get Dell EMC onsite to replace failed drives, power supplies, and other small redundant parts can be unnecessarily complex. If simplified, they could send us the parts, then we could replace them much faster, more easily, and truly within the SLA parameters."
"There is room for improvement in the centralized administration."
"The scalability of VMAX is somewhat limited, especially in terms of cache scalability."
"The configuration part of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"The scalability of VMAX is somewhat limited, especially in terms of cache scalability. We've had to procure additional engines to address this limitation."
"Improvements are needed in both partition recovery and scalability."
"We encountered some challenges during large data migrations that could be addressed for smoother transitions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."
"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."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."
"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."
"The product is expensive."
"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."
"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."
"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."
"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..."
"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."
"Negotiate hard and consider the commercial advantages/benefits to Dell EMC for onboarding your product."
"The cost is expensive. While VMAX now has good pricing, PowerMax is a little expensive."
"I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe a five out of ten for pricing."
"The pricing is comparable to other vendors."
"The tool is very expensive."
"We hope that with the combination of both NVMe and SCM the next PowerMax will be much cheaper that the one which we acquired."
"It is not a cheap product."
"The price falls within the mid-range, neither inexpensive nor high-priced."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Government
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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?
When comparing Dell PowerMax NVMe with other vendors, such as IBM enterprise solutions, the price is relatively higher.
What do you like most about Dell EMC VMax?
The product's initial setup phase was good.
What needs improvement with Dell EMC VMax?
The scalability of VMAX is somewhat limited, especially in terms of cache scalability. We've had to procure additiona...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Rackspace, Open Line
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerMax vs. Dell VMAX All Flash and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
855,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.