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Dell PowerScale vs FileMage comparison

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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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
232
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
Dell PowerScale
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
107
Ranking in other categories
NAS (1st), File and Object Storage (1st)
FileMage
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.4
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (20th)
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
RahulSharma8 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Platform Engineer at Expedia Group
Unified file sharing has simplified multi-tenant access and has delivered seamless data replication
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) includes its replication features; when we decommissioned our old Isilon cluster, we migrated all of the data to a new cluster, and it was pretty seamless. All you have to do is create the certificates and make those certificates available to the target cluster, then initiate a few jobs. The inter-cluster replication feature, called SyncIQ, allows you to set up all of the jobs and move your data entirely, either timely or all at once. Another suitable feature is the ability to back up your directories; you can take snapshots for all of your directories, and in fact, I believe you can take around a thousand snapshots for a single directory. The inter-replication, geo-replication is one feature. Dell provides a variety class of hardware suitable for your workloads, meaning if your data is just lab and not critical, you don't have to spend much on the hardware; conversely, if your data is mission-critical, you can buy a high-performance node from Dell. Additionally, you can span Dell PowerScale (Isilon) cluster to a large number of nodes, and code upgrades are pretty smooth because all protocols will be upgraded under a single piece of code. Since it provides a single file system that spans across the nodes, you don't have to worry about that directory structure being separately created on individual nodes, making it a fitting solution for a data lake solution because you can access the same data from multiple protocols.
HarshShah2 - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer at Veefin Solutions Ltd.
Modern file gateway has transformed secure cloud transfers and now simplifies partner onboarding
I would like to see an enhanced web-based file manager for non-technical end-users, allowing them to easily preview or move files via GUI. I would also appreciate more native webhook destinations for event-driven automation and deeper out-of-the-box integration with identity providers like Okta for admin single sign-on. The platform is very stable and lightweight in my experience, and most improvements would be minor quality-of-life updates for administration and advanced user management in larger corporate setups. I give it a nine out of ten because I do not think it deserves a ten as it lags in some spaces, especially where large organizations are concerned. FileMage is self-hosted, not serverless, and manual high availability setup is difficult. The basic end-user web interface is a limitation. There is a lack of native complex workflow automation, so I think nine is appropriate.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This solution has helped my organization by cutting down on provisioning time. I used to have to provision a VM and it would take ten minutes. Now, it takes thirty seconds."
"Very stable; no worries about how much it can handle."
"Do it. I have zero reservations about recommending Pure to anyone who is looking for some really good all-flash."
"I have never experienced an outage with the product or had any support that was below excellent."
"It saved a lot of space, as far as physical space in our data center."
"We have seen a good reduction in the amount of total storage space that we're using because of the deduplication."
"We have seen savings in our storage, and the speed of deployment has gone from several days to a few minutes, reducing backup and restore times from 93 days to minutes and simplifying storage for us."
"The money I saved by not renewing maintenance on the Dell EMC devices paid for the Pure Storage devices."
"Operational efficiency with Dell PowerScale is relatively easy to operate."
"The solution has simplified management by consolidating our workloads, and rather than managing all the different workloads on different storage arrays and Windows Servers, we just have one place per data centre where we manage all their unstructured data, saving us time."
"Our users are able to easily roll back snapshots without going through IT."
"I assess the stability and reliability of Dell PowerScale as top-notch, as the only issues we have ever had are just failed drives, which is to be expected."
"The guaranteed performance, combined with the scalability through its scale-out capability, makes it an excellent choice."
"It has saved me from having to hire one person over the last six months, and our IT team has gotten about 40 percent of its time back."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has powerful security, which makes it a very reliable storage solution for our content, and also the support and observability of our system; the call home feature is fantastic because when it presents an issue, Dell automatically opens a ticket regarding any warnings or alerts, allowing us to have a complete view of our system's health."
"Dell PowerScale helps us in terms of providing desired performance that meets the expectations of our end customers."
"FileMage has positively impacted my organization by drastically modernizing our file transfer infrastructure, eliminating storage maintenance overhead, closing security gaps associated with legacy FTP setups, and significantly reducing vendor onboarding time."
"FileMage has positively impacted our organization by drastically modernizing our file transfer infrastructure, providing security gains associated with legacy SFTP setups, and significantly reducing vendor onboarding time."
"FileMage is an amazing way to bridge old legacy vendor requirements with modern cloud bank architectures without risking mainframe security, making it a good gateway."
 

Cons

"The initial setup was a little complex. We had some initial issues with the design and had to help correct some of the white papers for it, but it wasn't your standard use case."
"It goes at about 95 percent, so we have had some performance issues. It is hard to clear them."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"The difference in pricing could become a problem for Pure because the commoditization of the solutions could lead to a different price being a problem."
"A year ago they promised that they would be able to read through the database encryption with more metric and they have not delivered on that patch, which is significant because it gives us back so much more storage room. We want to be able to read through the encryption."
"We haven't seen ROI."
"Pure Storage's logs could provide more visibility to the end-user. The logging algorithms are different from those of other vendors. For example, Cisco's logs provide extensive troubleshooting data, whereas Pure Storage logs offer limited information. We have to contact support to get more information."
"They could improve the price."
"Perhaps if there was a local chatbot built within the system or on the dashboard where we could directly ask for anything on the OneFS, it could help us."
"We're still fairly new with it. It's been a pretty positive experience thus far. However, they could improve implementation, as we had to rack and stack it ourselves."
"From the disadvantages perspective, if I need to replace a drive, I must shut down that node."
"The pricing is expensive, but I think it's a fair value because it does manage itself."
"It is a bit higher priced than some of the other systems."
"There is room for improvement with the updates. It can take a significant amount of time to do a major OS update."
"I have experienced a RAM failure in some of the nodes of Dell PowerScale (Isilon), and that required hardware replacement."
"The existing integration is there, but the only negative point I see about Dell PowerScale is mainly the pricing perspective because it is not intended for SMBs, but for enterprise customers."
"I give it a nine out of ten because I do not think it deserves a ten as it lags in some spaces, especially where large organizations are concerned."
"FileMage can be improved in a couple of areas where it lags for heavy banking setups."
"To improve FileMage, I would appreciate seeing an enhanced web-based file manager for non-technical users and more native webhook destinations for event-driven automation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership."
"It is light years beyond anything else with the same price point."
"The pricing is very attractive and it delivers performance for the money."
"My organization has a yearly license, but I believe that Pure Storage FlashArray has capacity-based licenses as well. I'm definitely happy with the pricing."
"While it comes with a higher price tag, this investment often translates to significant improvements in performance."
"Pricing is very competitive, and it's better than other competitors."
"Because the price is a bit higher than other products, the data reduction equalizes the price with amount of the data reduction."
"There are no licensing fees or other costs."
"I always want things to be less expensive. However, I would say the pricing is fair. Their costs are in alignment with their competitors. It is a good value for the money."
"We use the TNA approach which is a great opportunity for us to better manage the licenses based on how much consumption is available for the different customers so we can use that approach and scalability."
"It's a high-cost offering amounting to three or four million Swedish kronor, or about $400,000 or euros, for approximately 480 terabytes of storage."
"It is a really expensive solution."
"Price was also a significant factor in our decision to go with PowerScale. The team at EMC, now Dell EMC, came through with a highly competitive offer that tipped the scales towards their solution. There was only one other solution around the same price point, but it could not match PowerScale on features. That other solution is no longer on the market."
"The pricing is expensive, but I think it's a fair value because it does manage itself. It definitely is much simpler than any of the other scale-out storage platforms that we've looked at in the past."
"The only drawback for us is that it's a large upfront investment. This was a huge decision for a startup company to make. It took a bit for us to get over the line on it, but we have not regretted it."
"We paid an additional fee to have Dell's ProDeploy Plus team implement it."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
Construction Company
38%
Comms Service Provider
18%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Transportation Company
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise160
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise66
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I find the pricing of Everpure FlashArray to be quite high compared to other storage solutions; however, the reliabil...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
I believe we have covered the most important features; the architecture of Pure Storage is essential, and features su...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
The on-premises solution with Dell PowerScale, when we buy directly from Dell, is economical. We have done some level...
What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
Dell PowerScale can improve in speed and IO throughput. Additionally, it could benefit from more integration options ...
What is your primary use case for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
My main use case for Dell PowerScale is for S3 or NAS. Dell PowerScale plays a role in my organization's AI initiativ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FileMage?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has shown that the setup process was incredibly fast. I was up ...
What needs improvement with FileMage?
FileMage can be improved in a couple of areas where it lags for heavy banking setups. Because we process files origin...
What is your primary use case for FileMage?
Our main use case for FileMage is to completely modernize our ingestion tier. I was a mainframe developer at a bank w...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
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. FileMage and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.