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Dell PowerStore vs Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 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
6.6
Dell PowerStore offers positive ROI through cost savings, enhanced performance, efficient deduplication, and valued lifecycle and feature enhancements.
Sentiment score
5.7
Most are satisfied with ROI, acknowledging its benefits, though improvements are possible, as it efficiently enhances backend operations.
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 seen a return on our investment in Dell PowerStore; definitely our cost per terabyte has been very good compared to some of the other vendors that we would have been using previously, and our performance benchmarks have exceeded what we were expecting.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.2
Dell PowerStore support is responsive, professional, and reliable, though some users note language barriers and response delays.
Sentiment score
6.7
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse support is responsive and expert, though users sometimes need online resources for faster solutions.
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.
I would rate my experience with technical support around six on a scale of 1 to 10 because I have not had a particular experience with technical support.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.1
Dell PowerStore offers scalable solutions with NVMe technology, supporting storage growth but may have cost concerns for some users.
Sentiment score
7.2
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse excels in scalability, integration, and expandability, though improvements are needed for large data sets.
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.
I give the scalability an eight out of ten, indicating it scales well for our needs.
As a consultant, we hire additional programmers when we need to scale up certain major projects.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Dell PowerStore is praised for reliability and performance, despite minor software issues, earning high satisfaction ratings from users.
Sentiment score
8.0
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse is praised for its stability, reliability, and quick issue resolution, despite time-consuming extensive dataset processing.
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.
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse is stable for us because it is built on SQL Server.
 

Room For Improvement

Dell PowerStore users seek improved integration, enhanced functionality, better pricing, user interface, security, support, and enterprise-ready features.
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse presents complexity, compatibility challenges, performance issues, high costs, and requires improved in-memory analysis and updates.
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.
It would be better to release patches less frequently, maybe once a month or once every two months.
Addressing the cost would be the number one area for improvement.
When there are many users or many expensive queries, it can be very slow.
 

Setup Cost

Dell PowerStore pricing is high but justified by features, competitive licensing, scalability, and overall market alignment.
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse's pricing varies by needs; Azure integration can be cost-effective, but technical support costs extra.
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.
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse is very expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Dell PowerStore offers flexibility, performance, ease of use, data protection, and cost savings with reliable architecture and machine learning.
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse offers performance, integration, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness for large data management and business intelligence.
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 columnstore index enhances data query performance by using less space and achieving faster performance than general indexing.
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse is used in the logistics area for optimizing SQL queries related to the loading and unloading of trucks.
There's a feature that allows users to set alerts on triggers within reports, enabling timely actions on pending applications and effectively reducing waiting time.
 

Categories and Ranking

Dell PowerStore
Ranking in Data Warehouse
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
129
Ranking in other categories
NAS (1st), Enterprise SAN (1st), All-Flash Storage (1st), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (1st)
Microsoft Parallel Data War...
Ranking in Data Warehouse
10th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Dell PowerStore is 1.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse is 1.5%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Dell PowerStore1.5%
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse1.5%
Other97.0%
Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Eoin O’Brien - PeerSpot reviewer
Improves cost efficiency and significantly while boosting workload performance
We have realized several benefits from using Dell PowerStore; we migrated to the current Dell PowerStore models from tiered storage, and now we're using all flash. The dedupe and compression has been a big benefit for us versus the old storage that it was running, and we've seen the performance of all flash for our storage services. My company finds particular features within Dell PowerStore valuable, primarily the cost benefits for the performance that we get out of the platform. We've definitely seen the benefit on that side of it, including the cost per terabyte, and the support from Dell has been excellent as well. We haven't had any issues with it, so it's been very reliable as a platform for us. The performance metrics I use to measure success with Dell PowerStore are all IOPS and throughput. We are not using it with AI workloads on Dell PowerStore, so it's primarily just customers running IaaS, however, it is important that it's reliable and performs well, and we get that from Dell PowerStore. Dell PowerStore has supported growth and operational success for my business; a key driver at the moment is consolidation, and the dedupe and compression ratios allow us to standardize on a single platform. This has helped improve our operational metrics and overall operations, as we now have only one vendor to support and one set of storage arrays to manage. We have a very clear path into support and escalation if there is an issue, and we are not dealing with multiple vendors.
HassanFatemi - PeerSpot reviewer
Has handled large volumes of data effectively but still needs cost flexibility
There could be improvements on the cost side of Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse because it is still considered to be quite expensive by a lot of users, and many companies are not interested in solutions with parallel data warehousing due to this expense. Addressing the cost would be the number one area for improvement. Additionally, I have not worked recently with it, so I don't know if this feature already exists, but if it doesn't, having an elastic feature that adjusts the service's power dynamically based on the workload would be beneficial instead of fixing the power at a specific level.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
22%
Insurance Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Performing Arts
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business41
Midsize Enterprise27
Large Enterprise61
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

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 next-gen apps. It is only Flash and can support many workloads from today's app...
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 management of resources feature provides a more simple administration. I found the flex...
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 offerings and integrated into the PowerStoreOS. The installation and setup have a ...
What do you like most about Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse?
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse provides good firewall processing in terms of response time.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse?
There could be improvements on the cost side of Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse because it is still considered to be quite expensive by a lot of users, and many companies are not interested in so...
 

Also Known As

PowerStore
Microsoft PDW, SQL Server Data Warehouse, Microsoft SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse, MS Parallel Data Warehouse
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Auckland Transport, Erste Bank Group, Urban Software Institute, NJVC, Sheraton Hotels and Resorts, Tata Steel Europe
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerStore vs. Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.