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Dell PowerScale vs Dell PowerStore comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 7, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
5.9
Dell PowerScale offers cost-efficiency and scalability benefits, though some face user adoption challenges and higher initial costs.
Sentiment score
5.3
Dell PowerStore offers substantial ROI through data savings, improved infrastructure, cost efficiency, and ease of management and upgrades.
Something such as Dell PowerScale puts us ahead of all of our competitors because of the speed at which we can iterate while we are on set.
Chief Executive Officer at Orbital Virtual Studios
Despite being more expensive than Huawei, it is stable and most enterprises accept the price due to its stability.
Senior System Engineer at Atlas Security
In terms of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) specifically, we have seen a return on investment due to faster performance than our last few storage arrays, and the general usability is a lot better.
Storage & Data Protection Specialist at General Dynamics Land Systems
If you purchase storage with 300 terabytes, you can easily achieve one petabyte of effective capacity.
Regional Sales Manager at New Horizon Computers
It's been trouble-free the entire time, with very high performance, as it has been designed and built properly.
Storage Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We have seen a return on our investment in Dell PowerStore; definitely our cost per terabyte has been very good compared to some of the other vendors that we would have been using previously, and our performance benchmarks have exceeded what we were expecting.
Director of Global Platform at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.2
Dell PowerScale support is responsive and knowledgeable, but users report delays with first-level assistance and varying engineer efficiency.
Sentiment score
6.8
Dell PowerStore customer service is valued for responsiveness and expertise, despite occasional delays and post-merger quality decline.
Support online is definitely a ten out of ten.
Associate Business Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
When we face issues, we raise a ticket through the valid portal, and they respond immediately and assign a local engineer to coordinate the support process.
Senior System Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Dell's technical support a ten.
System Support at City of North Las Vegas
I would rate the technical support of Dell PowerStore between nine and ten out of ten.
Solution Architect at CDA
They're responsive, knowledgeable, and have a quick turnaround.
Systems Engineer at a government with 11-50 employees
On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Dell support as a ten, focusing on that aspect alone, because it's what allows me to sleep at night.
Head of IT at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.8
Dell PowerScale offers seamless scalability, enabling growth and efficient data management with flexible on-premises and cloud integration.
Sentiment score
6.7
Dell PowerStore offers scalable, flexible expansion options with NVMe enhancements, ideal for organizations seeking ease of use and VMware compatibility.
We started on PowerScale with around about 300 terabytes and are now two and a half petabytes, still on the same file system.
Storage Architect at a educational organization with 10,001+ employees
That's really saved us in certain areas as we didn't have funding to expand Dell PowerScale (Isilon) until next year, which is why we utilized the cloud pools functionality to offload.
Senior Infrastructure Specialist at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
As an unstructured data storage solution, writing into it and accessing it from the other nodes is highly scalable with no issues.
Senior Technical Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
We have approximately 100,000 people using it in our company, which demonstrates the scale at which we are utilizing Dell PowerStore.
Cloud Infrastructure Delivery Lead at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It has built-in health monitoring, and management is supported with VMware plugins, SNMP protocol, and it provides an HTML5 graphical interface.
Manager Solution Consulting at Accops Systems Pvt Ltd
The ability to add capacity in single drive increments is important to my organization, as it provides flexibility beyond the usual vendor-defined packs.
Technical Architect at Capgemini
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Dell PowerScale excels in stability, reliability, adaptability, near-perfect uptime, and effective data protection, despite occasional support issues.
Sentiment score
7.8
Dell PowerStore is highly reliable, with strong uptime, robust support, minimal issues, and exceeds enterprise stability expectations.
Since we have good protection levels, the data is secured and replicated across the disks.
Associate Business Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Even if a node goes down, other nodes can respond and provide data back to the user without issues.
Storage Platform Engineer at Expedia Group
I can confirm that we have experienced six years of zero seconds of downtime.
Technical Engineer at the company in service is
When I removed all the cables, it failed over within five minutes.
Consultant
It's quite stable and reliable in general.
Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
I have not experienced any downtime, bugs, or glitches, and it's much better than previous technologies.
Storage Backup Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Room For Improvement

Dell PowerScale requires better pricing, intuitive interface, easier deployment, enhanced performance, security improvements, and advanced cloud and AI integration.
Dell PowerStore users seek better pricing, NAS capabilities, integration, flexibility, UI design, support, analytics, and security features.
Firmware or software updates become effortless with Pure, but with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), we must evaluate or conduct trial runs to ensure that these operations will not harm our customer's system; their software is not adequate.
Senior Ai Architect at Logicalis
It should be made more user-friendly in the sense that if I manage it, I should be able to deploy it without having to have a lot of interaction from support.
Manager, Information Technology at a transportation company with 11-50 employees
Regarding Dell PowerScale's AI capabilities, I believe its governance and security are more important for financial or government sectors, so governance and security will require additional upgrades and hardening.
Storage engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Security including AI support, with more flexibility and less user intervention, would be valuable.
Chairman & CEO at DIGIT MONTENEGRO D O O
AI capabilities would also increase the security side of the array by easily identifying any bugs or known issues so we can fix them very quickly.
Storage Administrator at a logistics company with 10,001+ employees
More detailed performance insights and predictive analytics would help resolve issues more proactively.
Dy General Manager at a outsourcing company with 51-200 employees
 

Setup Cost

Dell PowerScale offers high pricing but justifiable value for enterprise users due to features, scalability, and flexible licensing.
Dell PowerStore provides a comprehensive but costly licensing model, with discounts for partners and savings from data compression.
It's quite expensive for the amount of storage we have.
Senior Infrastructure Specialist at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Cheaper nodes will cost less, while higher performance nodes will be pricier.
Storage Platform Engineer at Expedia Group
Costs align well with what it delivers, making it a fair price for a powerful tool that meets all our needs.
Tv Systems Technical Supervisor at a media company with 501-1,000 employees
Based on my experience, the cost of Dell PowerStore for around 500 GB of capacity is very competitive compared to any other platform in the market.
Director at Wipro Limited
I asked for a new quotation on a server, and it is quite expensive; it is really expensive.
Responsable Plateformes Et Cloud at a media company with 5,001-10,000 employees
We question that quite often because they have been increased by thirty to thirty-five percent every quarter for unexplained reasons, and that definitely does not go down well with customers.
Sr. Sales Consultant at Teccle Group
 

Valuable Features

Dell PowerScale offers scalable storage, multi-protocol access, efficient data protection, and user-friendly integration for diverse workloads.
Dell PowerStore offers ease of use, VMware integration, high performance, data reduction, cybersecurity, and automated management for enhanced efficiency.
Dell PowerScale offers high scalability and stability as well, making it a valuable solution for enterprises.
Senior System Engineer at Atlas Security
In our AI initiatives, Dell PowerScale (Isilon) plays a significant role in data analysis, data fusion; principally, it is involved in data analysis, data extraction, and statistical analysis.
Senior Technologist at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
Single files are limited to four terabytes in our configuration, however, the system can support up to 16 terabytes, so we can scale based on that too.
Systems Engineer at Unisity LLC
The faster the back-end storage, the quicker the entire application performs.
System Administrator at a mining and metals company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I consolidated all the data into a single dashboard accessible via Dell PowerStore Manager, which improves performance and IT infrastructure.
Manager, IT Infrastructure at SNSKIES PVT LTD
Due to the low latency on IOPS, it helps us with our critical apps that cannot afford delays.
Site Reliability Engineer at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Dell PowerScale
Ranking in NAS
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
114
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (1st)
Dell PowerStore
Ranking in NAS
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
250
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (7th), Enterprise SAN (1st), All-Flash Storage (1st), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the NAS category, the mindshare of Dell PowerScale is 12.9%, down from 16.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerStore is 8.1%, down from 10.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
NAS Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Dell PowerScale12.9%
Dell PowerStore8.1%
Other79.0%
NAS
 

Featured Reviews

Santosh Bharadwaj Rangavajjula - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
File sharing has supported collaboration and disaster recovery but security support still needs work
Dell PowerScale can improve specifically for AI workloads, particularly on the MCPs. I would add that we have not seen an official MCP from Dell PowerScale and are relying on open source. It would be valuable to have an MCP server that we can set up directly with them. Regarding Dell PowerScale's AI capabilities, I think its governance and security could be better. We have Superna that we buy along with Dell PowerScale, but we are seeing very big problems with integrating it. Superna is primarily for the security use case, as we want to prevent cybersecurity attacks and ransomware attacks. If Dell is providing this as a supplementary feature, it should provide better support. Regarding Dell PowerScale's AI capabilities, I do not see much accuracy and reliability of output. This is actually a security problem because Dell does not provide official MCP servers while most other vendors are providing it. This forces us to rely on open source, which is not secure. Dell PowerScale plays a role in my organization's AI initiatives as we want to use the Metadata IQ functionality from Dell PowerScale; however, there is not enough support and extensive documentation for us to be able to do this.
reviewer2304864 - PeerSpot reviewer
Vmware Windows Senior Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Resilience has supported proactive management and secured audit readiness across multiple sites
The resilience in Dell PowerStore benefits my company from an auditing perspective because we know we have that resilience in place. I see Dell PowerStore playing a bigger role in the future because we are starting to use it more, and that is pushing it. The biggest return on investment for me when using Dell PowerStore is scalability. Scalability is key. I can amplify that scalability is the biggest return on investment because we have redundancy between two sites; if something goes down, we have to manage it, but we want to do it proactively.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise70
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business83
Midsize Enterprise49
Large Enterprise124
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
I think the price is reasonable. We procured this during the time of COVID, around 2022, and the price was very competitive. If you are looking for technology, there will also be a price associated...
What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
The disadvantage that I felt is not hardware-related. I feel that Dell needs to focus on the service aspects. Once they sell this hardware to customers, customers also expect service from them. Del...
What is your primary use case for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
Dell PowerScale is used for keeping our company data. Continental is an automotive company, and we keep recording files on a petabyte basis. We have globally around more than 200 petabytes of Dell ...
What do you think about Dell EMC PowerStore? Is it actually a new product?
PowerStore is flexible, scalable, simple, and performant with market-leading economics for a wide range of legacy and next-gen apps. It is only Flash and can support many workloads from today's app...
How does Dell's EMC PowerStore compare with its EMC Unity XT?
Dell EMC PowerStore is a unified storage platform that has the added benefit of being scalable. The automated management of resources feature provides a more simple administration. I found the flex...
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 offerings and integrated into the PowerStoreOS. The installation and setup have a ...
 

Also Known As

PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon
PowerStore
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

OMRF, University of Utah, Translational Genetics Research Institute, Arcis, Geofizyka Torumn, Cyprus E&P Corporation, Colburn School, Columbia Sportswear, Harvard Medical School, University of Michigan, National Library of France,
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Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerScale vs. Dell PowerStore and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,939 professionals have used our research since 2012.