Dell PowerStore vs Dell SC Series comparison

Dell PowerStore and Dell SC Series are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Dell PowerStore is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.7, while Dell SC Series is ranked #18 with an average rating of 9.0. Dell PowerStore holds a 17.3% mindshare in AFS, compared to Dell SC Series’s 0.8% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Dell PowerStore users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Dell SC Series users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Dell SC Series and Dell PowerStore compete in the storage solutions market. Dell PowerStore appears superior due to its advanced features, which justify its higher price.

Features: Dell SC Series offers robust automation, data replication, and cost-effectiveness. Dell PowerStore provides advanced data analytics, integrated AI capabilities, and cutting-edge technology that appeals to tech-savvy users.

Room for Improvement: Dell SC Series needs better scalability, higher performance under heavy loads, and improved performance flexibility. Dell PowerStore requires more streamlined firmware updates, an enhanced initial setup process, and software optimization.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell SC Series is praised for straightforward deployment but experiences occasional customer service delays. Dell PowerStore is noted for smooth deployment and consistent high-quality support.

Pricing and ROI: Dell SC Series is considered cost-effective with good ROI despite higher upfront costs. Dell PowerStore, though more expensive, delivers higher ROI due to its innovative features, offering long-term value against initial costs.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerStore vs. Dell SC Series Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerStore vs. Dell SC Series

April 2025

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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

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerStore is 17.3%, up from 16.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell SC Series is 0.8%, down from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill

Sales Manager at Multicomputos PR

Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature

One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.

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Brian Ricci

President at Pinnacle Computer Services, Inc.

It's constantly enhanced and has impressive reliability and data compression

The maintenance is a bit expensive. The service and support are there for three years, but after the third year, it is pretty pricey for renewal. I hope Dell addresses that. Everything is pricey these days anyway. It is not like the old days of Compellent. We used to be able to see the metrics for our customers. On Compellent, we could look up that customer and see all the metrics. That is not allowed for us now. We cannot do that anymore. I have to be explicitly allowed by the customer to do that, and some companies' security does not allow that.

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Steven McClendon

Data Center Server & Storage Administrator at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Superior platform with excellent snapshots and cost-saving auto-tiering

I'm a big fan of the SC Series platform. Its feature set is superior to some of the other platforms. The snapshots on SC are excellent, allowing for multiple snapshot schedules for any one system. The auto-tiering functionality intelligently moves new data to the highest performance tier and then progresses it down to less expensive tiers over time, providing cost savings for customers.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."

"Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."

"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."

"The solution uses newer technology for deduplication and compression."

"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."

"It has good, reliable, fast storage."

"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."

"Everything, especially the VMs inside, is pretty fast."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"Dell PowerStore has good value for money and some scalability features that are better than other products."

"Moving and optimizing workloads within the cluster is quite easy based on my experience with Dell PowerStore."

"Pricing is very good. It's very competitive against those of all the others that I looked at in the marketplace, such as Hitachi, IBM, HP, and Pure. Dell is right there in the mix as far as providing the best price point as well as meeting the performance requirements that we have."

"The most valuable feature is that it is easy to use this frame. I am a SAN administrator, but I was able to train my colleague, who had only been a VMware administrator, on the PowerStore in about half a day. Now he's autonomous in assigning volumes and creating data stores..."

"Dell PowerStore's compression and deduplication technologies are a big help for our organization. It's saving us a lot of storage compared to what we were previously using."

"The most valuable feature is the encryption in the loop because we can manage data center data from a different perspective, reducing the space used while growing data using the same equipment."

"The PowerStore's compression ratio is even higher than the Unity system."

"PowerStore's compression ratio is a valuable feature for our VMs because it gives us a lot back."

More Dell PowerStore pros

"One of the most valuable features is the capability to switch between all-flash to hybrid, which have have actually done for one of our arrays. We started with the hybrid, with the limited if I'm not mistaken, and then over a period of time, we swapped all the hybrids with the SSDs. This was one of the big features because it gave us the capability to not stick with just one kind of media. Secondly, since it has sorted clustering, we were able to bring in the newer boxes and have it all clustered together. These were the two main features that we really looked into, which benefited our use case from an expansion/growth perspective. Another valuable feature is the ease of management."

"The process of reallocating data from fast disks (SSD or SAS) to slow disks (SATA) gives you better performance and better use of resources."

"I find this version to be more budget-friendly compared to products from other vendors. This aspect greatly benefits my customers. It's highly advantageous due to its affordability. The operational aspect is also noteworthy. Additionally, its availability and performance are commendable. The speaker are also equally powerful."

"The setup is straightforward."

"It was very easy to install, maintain, and provides excellent manageability."

"This solution is easy to use."

"It has good dedupe and compression. Also, the built-in data migration capabilities are pretty good, as is the federation. When we started migrating the workloads from different storage platforms, like NetApp and XtremeIO, it helped us in moving to that direction."

"It is easy to use, expand the hard drives, add storage, and set up replication."

More Dell SC Series pros

Cons

"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."

"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."

"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."

"We need better data deduplication."

"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."

"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."

"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."

"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"Pricing must also be considered, as Dell PowerStore is quite expensive compared to competitors in the market like HPE Alletra, Huawei Dorado, or Hitachi storage, for example."

"Dell PowerStore should offer more cybersecurity and warehouse data security."

"After the smooth launch of the product in our company, only the areas around upgrades are a bit problematic. In our organization, we face difficulties when updating the product."

"The support team doesn't always provide adequate assistance. So, there is room for improvement in the support."

"The cost of technical support is high."

"Dell PowerStore has just caught up to some of the competition by introducing METRO nodes a few months ago while the competition has had the feature for years."

"The pricing could be lower. It is very expensive."

"It doesn't support SSD or Flash."

More Dell PowerStore cons

"The tool's pricing is high and not suitable for medium companies."

"From a performance point of view, it's getting a bit old."

"In the future, I want any box that comes on-premises to have the provision to integrate with cloud storage."

"What I understand is that this is a 13 year old architecture, so it has lived its life and they're phasing it out. Honestly, we were initially struggling with the integration with VMware (but it was fixed with the VMware 6.5) and, then, it was around a 10GB network. At that time, it had the longevity to go to 100GB as well. It got us thinking about, when we go into the containerized architecture, what do we need to do to fix the infrastructure?"

"The connection should be better integrated with the network to offer a better view of the system."

"Licensing, especially on the storage line, could use some simplification. It's not terrible, but, for example, with the Isilon series, they've gone to completely a la carte. A la carte is very difficult to traverse, as to what you need. It would be more beneficial, at least from my point of view as a customer, if they did it more like car companies do, where there are package lines"

"While there's always room for improvement in everything, I can't really think of a specific feature of the solution that requires immediate attention."

"Snapshots in VMware. You can’t do snapshots since the storage itself does that. Therefore, some apps (Veeam, for example) don’t work well with this kind of tiering storage."

More Dell SC Series cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits. We don't regret purchasing it."

"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."

"They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."

"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."

"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."

"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."

"Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"We are currently using Dell PowerStore for our smaller storage and there is no competition for pricing."

"In terms of licensing, my organization has Dell Technologies End User License Agreement (EULA), but I don't know exactly how it works, though it is a big bundle of licenses for Dell Data Domain, Dell EMC Unity XT, Dell PowerStore, Dell ECS, and all such kinds of storage arrays."

"The solution’s pricing is always too high."

"The price is high compared to the Tunisian market."

"The price is not cheap, but it's worth it for the features you get from the storage. If you can afford it, you are probably buying the best solution that you can have for this virtual environment."

"Dell PowerStore charges for the hardware warranty every three years. The price will depend on the storage model or how much hardware it has."

"The solution's price was comparable to other products for the use case, size, and setup."

"It is very expensive though when you get to this point of using the 3000 with a client. They will start to think about using another vendor. There are a lot of solutions similar to PowerStore in regards to networking capacity and their prices are very cheap compared to PowerStore."

More Dell PowerStore pricing and cost advice

"We have reviewed many platforms over the years. It is probably the best solution for its value."

"We have found the solution to be affordable."

"The pricing of Dell EMC Compellent is competitive."

"Always keep in mind, this is not just a enclosure with disks is a complete SAN as a service. There is software, license, and storage in one single solution."

"We were able to afford two tiers of flash storage at a price where the competition was giving us one tier or just a handful of discs."

"The maintenance is usually pretty good. It's not like some of the others where they increase it in the fourth, fifth, or sixth years."

"It's absolutely affordable. Again, not having to do a forklift upgrade like some of the others have had to do in the past, it's very affordable for our customers and they continue to buy."

"It's a very affordable solution."

More Dell SC Series pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

21%

University

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

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What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...

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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...

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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 managem...

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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 of...

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What do you like most about Dell SC Series?

I find this version to be more budget-friendly compared to products from other vendors. This aspect greatly benefits ...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell SC Series?

Cost considerations are crucial when choosing between solutions like Dell and NetApp. Sometimes Dell offers better pe...

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What needs improvement with Dell SC Series?

In the future, I want any box that comes on-premises to have the provision to integrate with cloud storage. If I want...

See all answers

Comparisons

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 17% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 15% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 8% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 7% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

HPE Alletra Storage vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 14% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 14% of the time

Dell PowerVault vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 9% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 9% of the time

More Dell PowerStore Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Dell SC Series

Compared 10% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell SC Series

Compared 9% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell SC Series

Compared 9% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Dell SC Series

Compared 6% of the time

HPE Primera vs Dell SC Series

Compared 6% of the time

More Dell SC Series Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

April 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerStore

April 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Dell SC Series

April 2025

Download Dell SC Series product report

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

PowerStore

SC Series Storage, Compellent

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

Pure Storage

Dell PowerStore stands out for its high performance, flexibility, and easy integration with VMware. It offers notable data compression and deduplication capabilities while providing powerful NVMe support and machine learning to optimize IT operations.

Dell PowerStore is designed to offer a comprehensive approach to IT infrastructure by enhancing performance and simplifying management. It is particularly suitable for companies that require scalable solutions to increase compute or capacity independently. Featuring built-in intelligence, PowerStore allows efficient storage consolidation and reduced footprint, while integration with CloudIQ enhances monitoring and analytics. However, there are areas for improvement, such as stability, enterprise features, and the user interface. Pricing is high, and support responsiveness needs attention. Organizations primarily use PowerStore for VMware environments, storage, and data protection, supporting high-performance databases and VMware workloads. It is utilized in data centers for disaster recovery and hybrid setups.

What are the key features of Dell PowerStore?

Flexibility: Independently scales compute or capacity
High Performance: Offers powerful NVMe support and machine learning
Integration: Easily integrates with VMware
Data Efficiency: Provides data compression and deduplication
Simplified Management: Built-in intelligence for efficient storage management

What benefits should users consider?

Performance Optimization: Enhance IT operations with machine learning
Scalability: Increase compute or storage capacity as needed
Integration Potential: Improve efficiency with VMware and CloudIQ
Data Protection: Reliable for disaster recovery and hybrid environments

In industries like IT, finance, and healthcare, Dell PowerStore supports efficient data management and enhances infrastructure performance. Organizations leverage it to manage extensive data, streamline virtualization processes, and facilitate migration from legacy systems, while integrating cloud and on-premises infrastructures for improved operations.

Dell Technologies

Dell EMC SC Series arrays provide a unified platform for the ultimate in performance, adaptability and machine-driven efficiency. SC Series software delivers modern features that help you meet aggressive workload demands using the fewest drives necessary. With an open, future-ready design, SC Series storage integrates seamlessly with applications and infrastructure, enabling you to scale on a single platform and add capabilities without forklift upgrades.

Dell Technologies

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Information Not Available

TGen, Frost Science, Gerrie Electric

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerStore vs. Dell SC Series

April 2025

Free Report: Dell PowerStore vs. Dell SC Series

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerStore vs. Dell SC Series and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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