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Dell PowerScale vs Quantum ActiveScale 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
233
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (2nd)
Dell PowerScale
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
114
Ranking in other categories
NAS (1st), File and Object Storage (1st)
Quantum ActiveScale
Average Rating
7.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (27th)
 

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.
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.
reviewer1272210 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Workflow is very easy to manage and maintain with user friendly operations and functionality
I use Quantum ActiveScale for broadcast, specifically for archiving. I'm the manager of our company.  The operations and the functionality are very simple. Workflow is easy to manage and maintain. I'd like to see more integrations with different systems and for the product to be more scalable. If…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It simplifies the overall management. We don't have to worry about storage anymore."
"In terms of performance, I find Everpure FlashArray's performance is better than the competition; the price is a little bit higher, but performance is outstanding, as expected."
"The ease of management is one of the most valuable features of this solution. I would have also said that it's pretty fast but now our SQL servers are starting to beat it up pretty bad."
"The dashboard is nice. It is easy to manage compared to other storage solutions such as Dell EMC."
"Everpure FlashArray has positively impacted my organization, particularly in performance and reliability, as we've had good improvements, making our applications run faster and giving us more confidence that they will not crash."
"We tested our VDI environment on this array and it performed flawlessly and boosted the user experience."
"The performance is great."
"It is simple, powerful, and a beautiful solution."
"I assess the stability and reliability of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) as perfect, as we haven't had any hiccups with it so far."
"For five years, I have not lost any data, and I can access whatever data I fed in the first year as if it were fresh today, which is what makes it special."
"What I like the most about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is that the storage capacity is very high."
"The solution is extremely easy to manage. This is its most valuable feature."
"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."
"The solution's flexibility for supporting various data workloads while keeping them protected is great."
"The solution can scale well; it has an automatic tiering system and you can have 60 petabytes of storage, offering very powerful scaling."
"The solution provides massive performance, scalability, efficiency, and ease of management."
"The technology is stable which is good."
"Quantum ActiveScale is a reliable solution."
"Workflow is easy to manage and maintain."
"The operations and the functionality are very simple."
 

Cons

"Organizations with security concerns that prevent cloud utilization would benefit from a wider range of instruments available for offline operation. Currently, the limited selection of on-premise instruments hinders Pure Storage FlashArray's ability to compete effectively with other vendors."
"The price of this solution is high and should be lowered."
"We have not had a good experience with the IBM device."
"Currently, the solution fails to support file screening."
"The initial setup of the product is complex."
"It falls far short of protocol support."
"The negative aspect of Everpure FlashArray is that migrations can be somewhat complicated."
"Enhanced documentation and beginner-friendly guidelines would benefit users with less configuration experience."
"A recent development is, that there's a key feature coming out in OneFS 9.3, however, when you then try to get to 9.3 or 9.4 of the OneFS, it's been pulled from the download of the Dell website and we're referring back to 9.2.1 as the target code."
"Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us."
"We see room for improvement in Dell PowerScale (Isilon) because we need personnel to effectively utilize all our infrastructure; it's not easy to find skilled people to work on AI and data analysis."
"The downside of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is that if we are replacing a drive, sometimes in the worst-case scenarios, some of the other drives will also go to the SmartFail state."
"Beyond containerized storage support and software updating, I have had very bad experiences with Dell PowerScale (Isilon) because they present more issues than other storage options, even when compared with NetApp."
"I would like to see more testing before a release of Dell PowerScale is put out to customers. This has always been an issue, as it is never possible to just install the latest release because there is always going to be a significant bug in it."
"The price of the solution could be reduced."
"I believe the support engineers need to improve their skills."
"I'd like to see more integrations with different systems and for the product to be more scalable."
"We would like to see a self-sufficient installation."
"Lacks some ability to integrate with different systems."
"The setup is very complex, it took 18 hours for the first setup."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"They have a standardized fee; it's been the same price for 10 years straight. I am happy with the price — I think it's good."
"Cost-wise, it's been very effective."
"The price was more favorable than Dell EMC."
"Price is about the only thing that's wrong with it. A little bit better pricing would be great."
"Cost-wise, I imagine that the product's price would probably give you a nosebleed if you were a younger company."
"Price per terabyte is substantially higher than their competition. We would like to see it drop."
"You can pay extra for Evergreen support, which gives you free upgrades when new features are introduced."
"There are no licensing fees aside from the support."
"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 general cost for a system like this is expensive. The total cost depends on your use case. You need to pay for every additional feature that you use."
"The price of the solution can fluctuate. The price can be competitive or other times not. The price of the solution could be better."
"We paid an additional fee to have Dell's ProDeploy Plus team implement it."
"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 price of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is reasonable."
"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."
"Quantum ActiveScale is open-source."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Media Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise161
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise70
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?
When comparing cost, I find that the cost is either the same or slightly higher, but that is returned by the ease of ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
The only thing I think could be improved is price. The price is the main concern for our customers.
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 compe...
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 th...
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 fil...
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Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon
ActiveScale, Quantum ActiveScale Object Storage, ActiveScale Object Storage
 

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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