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Dell PowerScale vs MinIO comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

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
7.0
Number of Reviews
99
Ranking in other categories
NAS (1st), File and Object Storage (1st)
MinIO
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (6th)
 

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.
Abdelrahim-Ahmad - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Scientist at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
Provides good object storage functionalities
MinIO should provide an easier subscription model for companies that don't have a huge amount of data. Our company has a maximum of 100 terabytes of data. The solution should provide more bugging tools in the open-source version to encourage people to buy the support services. It's not an easy decision. If I go to the management and tell them that I need to buy a service, there should be an easier subscription model for companies that don't have huge amounts of data. For me, getting a subscription for 15,000 a year for a system already in production might be a bit hard. I think MinIO supports a minimum of one petabyte or 100 terabytes of data. Since we don't have such huge amounts of data, buying a subscription for the solution is a bit difficult. Hence, we're only using the open-source version for now. If MinIO becomes really crucial for our business, we could ask the management to get a subscription.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The speed is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way."
"The most valuable feature is its speed."
"I cannot imagine my workflow without Everpure FlashArray because I do not have any other type of storage in use."
"The job of support for the storage engineers dramatically changed. We know more quickly the automation of the provisioning. We can now focus on things that bring more value to the company than just managing storage."
"This was our first all-flash storage enclosure, so we saw huge boost in performance for all of our servers."
"Pure Storage is an amazing solution."
"The snapshot feature is valuable. It protects data based on the policy."
"It has allowed us to have more consistent quality controls. It has also allowed us to expand the number of servers in clients processing and accessing data, allowing us to get a lot bigger projects out the door."
"The most valuable feature we started using, beyond the initial scope for the solution, is the multi-protocol system that allows you to access the same set of files using different network protocols like NFS or SMB. PowerScale’s Unified Permission Model ensures that data security and access permissions are honoured regardless of whether the client is a Windows desktop or a Linux server"
"On a scale of one to ten, with one being worst and ten being best, I would rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) a ten."
"Overall, the hardware itself, and the OneFS file system, are the best selling points, combined with the delivery and the installation."
"My experience with Dell as a vendor is pretty good; they are probably one of the best in the industry."
"The reliability and stability of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is good, with no downtime."
"We would highly recommend PowerScale; we've been very happy with our overall experience."
"PowerScale helped free up our employees' time to focus on other business priorities. There are now automated jobs such as backing up and replicating data, that reduce the footprint we have. Those types of tasks were previously done manually."
"With MinIO, we managed to go forward with our cryptocurrency mining project."
"In the current market, when you have so many options for object storage, MinIO is completely open source and an all inclusive package offering you both stability and scalability and its most attractive feature is the S3 plugin which is very similar to AWS."
"MinIO can work with attributes and folders, and it has the ability to use a stream approach for files. I have moments that should work exclusively. It also has some management features you can use, like exclusive locks that you can perform on one record or a collection."
"Reliable erasure coding."
"I feel MinIO is the best solution to recommend to anyone who requires on-premise S3-compatible storage."
"The initial setup was straightforward as MinIO provided good support documentation and took a couple of days to complete."
"Saves a lot of time in generating and managing documents."
"The features that I have found most valuable with MinIO is its coding bit rot protection and how it distributes the workload over all the servers."
 

Cons

"Had some issues with Purity not being entirely compatible with VMware ESXi."
"The only issue is the pricing. Because we have competition, our customers always take another brand and say they can save their investment."
"A three wave application or multi wave application synchronization would be an improvement."
"I would like the ability to swap out the network adapters into it. So, without taking out the whole controller, I would like to be able to swap adapters. This would make things easier."
"The solution is expensive."
"I would not say anything because we still do not use Everpure FlashArray fully."
"Once, before Pure went public, we were a member of their customer advisory board and beta tested replication. One requested enhancement yet to manifest is the scheduling of snapshot replications."
"It's expensive, but you get what you pay for."
"One downside of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is that it is really complicated to configure."
"It would be nice to see tools like Superna Eyeglass built into PowerScale."
"The pricing could be reduced."
"We had some issues with level 1 support. We had to fight with them on repeated issues. There is room for improvement in level 1 support."
"The technical support is average. There are certainly not the best that we have ever dealt with, but far from the worst ones."
"The solution lacks a cloud version."
"I would like to see increased reporting and statistics functionalities."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a little bit pricey, and its pricing could be improved."
"The only downside I see is that you do not have a complete picture of an object."
"The monitoring capability is really bad and needs to be improved."
"MinIO can sometimes crash because of the dependency in underlying OS software layers."
"I think the product tends to be more oriented toward Kubernetes and lacks documentation for people who don't want to use it, so they could improve their documentation."
"The documentation of the solution should improve."
"Documentation could be improved."
"I feel there is a lack of good addons to integrate without having to use third-party applications."
"MinIO should provide an easier subscription model for companies that don't have a huge amount of data."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I don't know the exact cost but it's around $1,000."
"For pricing, you have to take into account their performance on deduplication and compression in a $/GB comparison."
"Price per terabyte is substantially higher than their competition. We would like to see it drop."
"Price is about the only thing that's wrong with it. A little bit better pricing would be great."
"It is light years beyond anything else with the same price point."
"Pure is not a cheap product. It is not something that is inexpensive. But, the total cost of ownership tends to be lower than with other solutions, because you don't need a lot of expertise, you don't need a lot of training or very expensive engineers or very expensive consultants."
"Pure Storage has not helped to reduce our HANA licensing costs."
"The pricing of Pure Storage is all-inclusive. It is very fair, and very easy. In comparison, Dell EMC has licensing that needs to be added if you wan to work in a complex environment or in specific functionalities."
"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 is an expensive solution."
"Our company finds the pricing high, but it decreases over time."
"Pricing for this solution is reasonable."
"Dell PowerScale is expensive on the start-up side but we can recoup those costs quickly by not having to reapply the savings to other equipment."
"It is a really expensive solution."
"The price of the solution can fluctuate. The price can be competitive or other times not. The price of the solution could be better."
"The solution is expensive; it is not the cheapest solution out there. If you look at it from a total cost of ownership perspective, then it is a very compelling solution. However, if you're looking at just dollar per terabyte and not looking at the big picture, then you could be distracted by the price. It is not an amazing price, but it's pretty good. It is also very good when you consider the total cost of ownership and ease of management."
"MinIO is a free open-source solution."
"We use the solution's open-source version."
"We use the solution's open-source version."
"My company hasn't tried the version of the solution where we need to pay to use it."
"This is an open-source solution but I am using the licensed version."
"This solution is open source so it is free."
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Top Industries

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

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 Business29
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise55
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise9
 

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)?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Dell PowerScale has been expensive. Setup costs or provisio...
What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
For improvements, we can focus on enhancing performance, upgrading the nodes, and accessing data through Isilon for m...
What is your primary use case for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
Dell PowerScale is our main NAS environment storage where we create CIFS and NFS file shares for users.When users req...
How does Red Hat Ceph Storage compare with MiniO?
Red Hat Ceph does well in simplifying storage integration by replacing the need for numerous storage solutions. This ...
What needs improvement with MinIO?
* Rolling upgrades, vs. upgrading and restarting all daemons at the same time, which is risky and impactful. * Remov...
 

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,
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerScale vs. MinIO and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
909,099 professionals have used our research since 2012.