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Dell PowerScale vs Huawei FusionStorage comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

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
231
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)
Huawei FusionStorage
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Storage (16th), File and Object Storage (24th)
 

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.
Wondwossen Abebe Kebede - PeerSpot reviewer
Program and performance manager at Ethio Telecom
Reliable platform that integrates well with different IT infrastructures and systems
The product integrates well with different IT infrastructures and systems in the telecom sector. Our partners manage services, including detailed integration and migration-related operations. The platform upholds the uptime and reliability of our business applications. We classify our systems into different tiers, ranging from machine-critical to business-critical, and FusionStorage helps us run all the services. It delivers a remarkable uptime of 99.9%. With our expectations for continuous service availability, we are operating 24/7. In cases where system interruptions occur, it enables rapid restoration, ensuring a prompt return to normal service levels. I rate it an eight 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

"It helps us maintain uptime much better than other solutions we've used in the past, and the support is extremely quick and responsive."
"This improves our organization because we can just set it up and we forget about it, everything works, and we do not need to worry about storage or bandwidth issues."
"I use all the features of this solution and I find them to be easy to use and functional, such as the compression and capacity to expand."
"We are very happy with the data deduplication and compression ratio that we have on the platform."
"The product cheaper compared to other solutions concerning the technology that they are using."
"From an intangible standpoint the lack of care and feeding is notable and freed up the Storage Team to do other things."
"Everpure FlashArray is probably not cheap storage, but it provides great performance, scalability, and everything a customer needs."
"The biggest return on investment for us is not having to do a swap out of the arrays every five years."
"PowerScale is one of those things that will grow in your environment; once you start it with one thing, you'll learn that it can do much more, very quickly."
"I can certainly recommend PowerScale for mission-critical workloads, it is a powerful but simple platform with little administration overhead."
"The stability of the solution is good."
"With Dell PowerScale (Isilon), it uses not just a terabyte but petabytes of data, storing a large amount of data takes within minutes, and you can bring it down to seconds as well, as it does not take much time to upload or copy the data here and there, and upgrades also do not take much time."
"We have been using it for a little while now, and what we have seen is that the NAS performance is quite good, and the ones we are using for data integration and AI factory are working very well as well."
"The solution provides massive performance, scalability, efficiency, and ease of management."
"The solution allows me to use SSMDS to store data for end users and share it within different locations."
"The solution can scale well; it has an automatic tiering system and you can have 60 petabytes of storage, offering very powerful scaling."
"It is a stable solution."
"The product has a very simple GUI-based management platform and it is very simple to use. There is a very easy step-by-step configuration procedure that guides you through, and you can configure it very easily."
"Provides easy access to our data."
"This is a good solution and we haven't had any issues with it."
"Huawei FusionStorage does well in its basic functions and offers broad utility."
"The solution’s most valuable feature is its performance."
"In cases where system interruptions occur, it enables rapid restoration, ensuring a prompt return to normal service levels."
 

Cons

"Many high-end platforms from other vendors like Dell EMC or Hitachi, their backend has Active/Active architecture, unlike Pure Storage FlashArray which doesn't utilize an Active/Active architecture on the backend."
"Its price needs improvement. Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution."
"The solution is not cheap."
"I would rate this solution an eight because we have had outages. The commit times went very high in the database. The whole array went down so our customers were down for around eight hours. This was a very big outage which could have been our fault because we didn't do the upgrade in time."
"In the next release of the solution I would like to see Vormetric native block encryption."
"I would like a feature to integrate with external or cloud solutions. For example, if I want to use this storage for a backup from the cloud, I want to have integration with the cloud vendors, such as Microsoft, Oracles, or Amazon. It could be available as an API to allow seamless integration. Additionally, the solution could improve by having native integration with a cloud provider, such as VMware or Microsoft, this would reduce the need to use third-party solutions to complete the task."
"I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable."
"They could improve the price."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) could improve in terms of having some problems with using IPv6 and IPv4 on the same namespace at the same time, which is one of our biggest problems as you have to do some really bad workarounds to get that working."
"From the disadvantages perspective, if I need to replace a drive, I must shut down that node."
"The solution’s interface and pricing could be improved."
"Improvements could be made to reduce the costs and the high level of knowledge needed to maintain and use them. We had old hard drives with moving parts in Dell PowerScale, and due to this, we must switch to a more efficient environment with all-flash."
"Dell PowerScale is strong overall, but a few areas such as OneFS, QA, and reporting could be more intuitive, especially when analyzing detailed performance and capacity information."
"The product needs to improve CLI since commands are complex. The search option is also difficult since you must give the full path."
"The deployment of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is not really complex but depends on the hardware deployment."
"Because of the magic that it does 'under the hood,' it is very difficult to find out within the system where all your storage is going. That's a little bit of a ding that we have on it. It does so much magic in order to protect itself from drive failures or multiple drive failures, that it automatically handles the provisioning and storage of your data. But by doing that, finding out why a file of a certain size, or a directory of a certain size, is using more storage than is being reported in InsightIQ, is very difficult to discern."
"The solution’s support could be improved."
"Their cloud services could be improved."
"I'd like to see better product maturity including their branding on the cloud environment. Their cloud services are not up to that of AWS, Azure or Oracle cloud platforms."
"The initial setup and installation is not that straightforward. It should be made easier and the time to install should be reduced."
"I hope for improvements in the product's processing ability and performance."
"The product needs improvement in terms of affordability."
"The problem with Huawei is that it generally oversells. As a principle, Huawei does not educate the partner or the end user enough to scale up their solution correctly."
"The only thing I really know about the initial setup is that currently the installation is not that straightforward."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In comparison to the competitors, Pure is very price-competitive for the future functionality that it provides."
"I'm good with the licensing. Of course, pricing can always be less... It's actually not a bad pricing model, considering I don't have to rip-and-replace."
"The guaranty that Pure Storage provides when you purchase it doesn't meet the overall capacity needs to provide extra storage, if needed. Thus, it is not meeting our expectations."
"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."
"The pricing is an issue. However, being all-flash, it will always be sort of expensive."
"The licensing is $100,000."
"The price, in general, is around $100,000, however, I know it costs more."
"Our licensing is on a yearly basis. So, every year, we renew. We could do a three-year contract, but right now, we only do a one-year."
"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."
"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."
"Dealing with the product costs and licensing areas is getting easier since Dell is simplifying the licensing process and licensing packages offered to users."
"The solution's licensing cost varies based on capacity and performance requirements."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is an expensive solution."
"The price of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is reasonable."
"It is an expensive product with a high storage capacity suitable for large data requirements."
"If one is a cheap solution and ten means it is a very expensive product, I would rate the price as two or three."
"It is expensive but might be optimal based on the partnership."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
7%
Construction Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business71
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise159
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise65
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
 

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)?
There should be some enhancement where Dell PowerScale can have block level functionality or block storage kind of fu...
What is your primary use case for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
We use Dell PowerScale for our object scale and different kinds of storage, including both object storage and file st...
What is your primary use case for Huawei FusionStorage?
Huawei FusionStorage provides a scalable, high-performance, and highly available distributed storage solution designe...
 

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,
China Merchants Bank, Liaoning, Zhejiang
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerScale vs. Huawei FusionStorage and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
914,109 professionals have used our research since 2012.