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Dell PowerStore vs Dell SC Series comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
1.0
Pure FlashArray X NVMe reduces costs, enhances performance, and offers quick ROI with efficient management and cost-effective upgrades.
Sentiment score
6.9
Dell PowerStore offers significant ROI through improved performance, cost savings, and efficient storage management, enhancing productivity and minimizing overhead.
Sentiment score
9.3
Dell SC Series offers cost-effective virtualization, ease of management, and significant savings through flash disks, boosting ROI and user satisfaction.
By opting for the gold subscription every three years, you get a free upgrade to the latest controller release.
If you wait more than seven years to buy another one, you get a return on your investment.
If you purchase storage with 300 terabytes, you can easily achieve one petabyte of effective capacity.
It's been trouble-free the entire time, with very high performance, as it has been designed and built properly.
We have reduced infrastructure but the same performance.
Users were very happy when I bought it, as it significantly lowered disk response times.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.1
Pure FlashArray X NVMe support is praised for responsiveness, effectiveness, and proactive issue resolution, despite some challenges with reach and follow-up.
Sentiment score
6.1
Dell PowerStore's customer service is responsive and knowledgeable, with most users satisfied despite occasional delays and global consistency issues.
Sentiment score
7.2
Dell SC Series support is highly rated for its responsiveness, knowledgeable staff, and effective issue resolution globally.
With Pure FlashArray X NVMe, we need to escalate the issue and get an account manager for its resolution.
We also had one outage where a controller of one of the products had failed and had to be replaced on-site.
Customers always have their issues resolved promptly.
If necessary, they will search for a specialist within their Dell network who we can approach with our questions.
I would rate the technical support of Dell PowerStore between nine and ten out of ten.
They're responsive, knowledgeable, and have a quick turnaround.
Advanced support offers instant replacement without delays.
Compared to other companies, Dell SC Series offers one of the best support experiences in my career.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.1
Pure FlashArray X NVMe offers scalable, stable performance, easy management, and simple upgrades, with some cost and scalability limitations.
Sentiment score
7.2
Dell PowerStore is praised for seamless scalability and flexibility, easily supporting upgrades and diverse organizational needs.
Sentiment score
6.1
Dell SC Series offers flexible, scalable storage for businesses of all sizes, though some note cost and controller limitations.
You cannot increase capacity if latency is present.
It is highly scalable.
It is suitable for both medium-sized and enterprise businesses.
The solution's scalability is a ten out of ten.
The customer likely exceeds 20,000 users globally.
You can create as many tools as needed, providing scalability based on the use case.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Pure FlashArray X NVMe is highly stable, reliable, and efficient, offering seamless upgrades and proactive component replacement in critical environments.
Sentiment score
7.7
Dell PowerStore is praised for its stability and reliability, with high user ratings and effective support mitigating minor issues.
Sentiment score
8.9
Dell SC Series is stable, cost-effective, with minimal downtime and maintenance, praised for replication and reliable performance despite setup complexities.
During the eight years, there have been no problems such as hardware failure or stopping.
I would rate the stability of the solution as a ten out of ten.
I would rate the stability of the product at seven out of ten.
When I removed all the cables, it failed over within five minutes.
There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze.
I would rate the stability of Dell PowerStore as ten out of ten.
In storages, stability is the most important aspect, even before performance.
 

Room For Improvement

Pure FlashArray X NVMe needs improvements in price, UI, analytics, software features, integration, and management tools for better competitiveness.
Dell PowerStore needs enhanced replication, stability, integration, user interface, pricing, support, monitoring, and documentation for improved user experience.
Dell SC Series needs improved user-friendliness, technical support, integration, scalability, and features like compression, automation, and cloud compatibility.
Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe.
We would appreciate a built-in transparent failover in the next release to eliminate the need for a separate metro cluster.
I'm eagerly anticipating the roadmap's promise of introducing multiple controllers, which could significantly boost scalability and resilience.
If you want to delve into where your I/Os are going, the reporting might need more in-depth information to make informed decisions.
In my organization, we have had to go through two weeks with no replication, which is not very handy for our production environment.
Something needs to be done with the caching to ensure that if some issue occurs, there needs to be an ability to disable caching during maintenance to make it static, safe, and good.
Dell PowerStore, which supports NVMe over TCP, is different and not very affordable.
In the future, I want any box that comes on-premises to have the provision to integrate with cloud storage.
 

Setup Cost

Pure FlashArray X NVMe is costly but valued for performance, inclusive licensing, and reasonable support fees compared to competitors.
Dell PowerStore offers value with performance and deduplication; pricing varies by market, with potential expansion cost concerns.
Dell SC Series offers competitive and scalable enterprise storage, with varied pricing and discounts for partnering users.
While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits.
The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there.
Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products.
Likely the cost is $400,000 whereas IBM may be $250,000.
Based on my experience, the cost of Dell PowerStore for around 500 GB of capacity is very competitive compared to any other platform in the market.
There's no need to pay for a license; it's all-inclusive.
Sometimes Dell offers better performance for less money.
 

Valuable Features

Pure FlashArray X NVMe is favored for its high performance, reliability, scalability, and future-proofing across diverse environments.
Dell PowerStore excels with VMware integration, AI management, efficient storage, and NVMe speed, enhancing scalability and energy efficiency.
Dell SC Series provides performance, auto-tiering, and replication with ease of management, scalability, high availability, and strong support.
Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator.
The platform's robust features include excellent sustainability tracking, and a comprehensive dashboard offering insights into IOPS, bandwidth, performance, and virtual activities.
Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen.
The solution promotes data reduction, often meeting the compression ratio.
The PowerStore's compression ratio is even higher than the Unity system.
The deduplication part of the solution is valuable since, as a user, you get more space for less money.
The storage also lowered the response time of disks across the entire farm, making it a great product for operational efficiency.
I can mix and match the drives, using older mechanical devices and the latest SFP drives in a single solution with different enclosures.
 

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
14th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
Dell PowerStore
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
119
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (4th), NAS (1st), Enterprise SAN (1st), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (1st)
Dell SC Series
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
17th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
Frame-Based Disk Arrays (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerStore is 16.8%, up from 16.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell SC Series is 0.8%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Jaehoon Oh - PeerSpot reviewer
Supports efficient storage management through volume snapshots and offers reliable non-disruptive upgrades
I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could be enhanced. I can see the performance statistics in the Pure Storage console, but it does not show the performance by 4K byte unit. It displays IOPS and bandwidth, but IOPS is about real use, and I want to know how many IOPS are currently running in 4K byte units. I cannot see that IOPS because most storage systems report their performance by 4K byte unit. I want to see Pure Storage performance by 4K byte unit to compare with other storage or other internal NVMe SSD.
Hassan_Zaki - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrated AI and clustering enhance storage operations effectively
I promote and recommend Dell PowerStore for all workloads to my clients and customers. Most of my customers have one appliance per site. Approximately 80% of my customers have Dell PowerStore implemented in their data centers. We always use CLS as another Dell solution for cybersecurity and data security. The CLS is integrated with the Data Domain, PowerProtect Data Domain, not with Dell PowerStore. Windows, Linux, and some customers use Red Hat or SUSE. We have many operating systems working with Dell PowerStore in the same environments and data centers. CloudIQ and Storage IQ are used by some customers, but Apex AIOps has not been widely adopted yet. Dell PowerStore has integration with VMware and Kubernetes. Most workloads work fine and have very good integration with Dell PowerStore, except for one or two specific workloads in the market. On a scale of one to ten, I rate Dell PowerStore a nine.
RafaelGamaluis - PeerSpot reviewer
User interface offers clarity and detailed information while technical support consistently delivers
The best features of Dell SC Series are stability and replication. The replication solution is excellent, and they have a solution named Live Migration. It is a robust platform. The interface and the GUI (graphical user interface) for administrating the Compellent are exceptional, with abundant information that is very clear. The management capabilities are excellent, and the stability of our storage hardware is remarkable.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
8%
Government
6%
 

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.
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
PowerStore
SC Series Storage, Compellent
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Information Not Available
TGen, Frost Science, Gerrie Electric
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerStore vs. Dell SC Series and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,481 professionals have used our research since 2012.