Dell PowerStore vs NetApp E-Series comparison

Dell Technologies and NetApp are both solutions in the NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays category. Dell Technologies is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.7, while NetApp is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.5. Dell Technologies holds a 20.2% mindshare in N, compared to NetApp’s 2.9% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 2024

Dell PowerStore and NetApp E-Series are competing in the enterprise storage solutions market. Dell PowerStore's advanced scalability and data-centric architecture seem to give it an edge, especially in scenarios requiring comprehensive features. NetApp E-Series is preferred for its high performance and seamless integration.

Features: Dell PowerStore offers dynamic storage capabilities, intelligent automation, and modern infrastructure adaptability, allowing flexibility for diverse workloads. It is data-centric and adaptable, enhancing operational efficiency. NetApp E-Series provides high efficiency, reliable performance, and is designed for workloads with specific needs for throughput and low latency, making it suitable for dedicated applications focused on performance and reliability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell PowerStore streamlines deployment with inclusive configuration and adaptive architecture, suitable for various environments. It has well-regarded customer support for proactive assistance. NetApp E-Series integrates easily into existing systems, excelling in performance-rich settings, with a simple and effective deployment process. Both offer robust customer service, focusing on distinct deployment efficiencies.

Pricing and ROI: Dell PowerStore requires a higher initial investment, justified by its extensive features and adaptability, providing long-term value for evolving needs. NetApp E-Series is more cost-effective for specific high-performance applications, ensuring quick ROI in environments prioritizing throughput and reliability. Dell's pricing targets those seeking comprehensive features, while NetApp is cost-efficient for targeted uses.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerStore vs. NetApp E-Series Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerStore vs. NetApp E-Series

December 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 January 2026, in the NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 4.0%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerStore is 20.2%, down from 23.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp E-Series is 2.9%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Dell PowerStore	20.2%
Pure FlashArray X NVMe	4.0%
NetApp E-Series	2.9%
Other	72.9%

NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays

Featured Reviews

Jaehoon Oh

Chief Technology Officer at Lambda256

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.

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reviewer2304864

Vmware Windows Senior Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Resilience has supported proactive management and secured audit readiness across multiple sites

The resilience in Dell PowerStore benefits my company from an auditing perspective because we know we have that resilience in place. I see Dell PowerStore playing a bigger role in the future because we are starting to use it more, and that is pushing it. The biggest return on investment for me when using Dell PowerStore is scalability. Scalability is key. I can amplify that scalability is the biggest return on investment because we have redundancy between two sites; if something goes down, we have to manage it, but we want to do it proactively.

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Milan Budimir

IT-Techniker at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Have struggled with timely expert support and faced communication challenges during critical maintenance tasks

As an AZ3 technician with experience in that direction, when I call them, I do not call the first-level support as it is something I do not need. I call them because I am not able to resolve that mistake or when the behavior of the machine is not normal. If you need an auto support message from the customer machine, you can get them from the first level, but most of the time, they do not know what an auto support message is, and everything stops there. You have a few of them when you call, and when we are replacing something in NetApp E-Series. StorageGRID is different, but with NetApp E-Series, you need to grab information from the node that is actually down; in most cases, the node is not in loader. It is entirely gone. You can try to reseat it, maybe boot it up, but in most cases, when it is down, it stays down. You call support for that, and that is when you lose two or three hours.

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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

"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"It offers competitive performance, and the Evergreen storage model of Pure fits well with my organization."

"I use the tool for Oracle databases, Oracle virtual machines, and Oracle Linux databases. I'm on the storage side, not a database administrator."

"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"Dell PowerStore has supported the growth and operational success of our organization by reducing the footprint, rack space, power consumption, and the resources needed to run the backend storage, which has been consolidated into just 2U, thereby enhancing efficiency."

"Dell PowerStore is very simple to implement, and its user interface is very simple."

"The solution's technical support is excellent. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten."

"The biggest trust element is people are very happy to depend on a Dell infrastructure."

"With Dell PowerStore, we have achieved twenty percent savings compared to the previous solution."

"The pricing of Dell PowerStore is quite on point and very competitive overall."

"I've tested quite a few storage systems, and I find Dell PowerStore really highly suited to modern, diverse environments."

"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is the speed."

More Dell PowerStore pros

"The product is easy to use."

"Customers go for the E Series if they need backup storage because it is cheap."

"The overall experience has been positive."

"If we select the best use case for NetApp E-Series based on its intended purpose, I would rate it a ten."

"The Snapshot feature is actually widely used; it is a feature that only NetApp E-Series has and it is quite good."

"My customers are satisfied with the performance."

Cons

"I would like to see some AI features that would allow arrays to intelligently identify threats or unusual behavior in the data pattern and give an alert."

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

"Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive."

"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."

"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."

"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."

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

"There are some challenges with data encryption and reduction."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"There are crashes from time to time. We had a controller problem once where something broke."

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

"From the price perspective, I think it should be less expensive to better position it against vendors such as IBM or Hitachi, since sometimes it is hard to sell it due to higher pricing."

"When we go to buy or populate more drives in the storage array, they're so expensive. If they could lower the cost for components, we would definitely expand them more and be more inclined to buy more storage units, but it's currently a price crunch for us."

"Dell PowerStore can improve the integration with VMware."

"As a partner, I'd like to be added to each customer's CloudIQ to take a look."

"I have not seen anything specific. The only thing I can think of that needs improvement is the price."

"Improvements could be made in the replication solutions of Dell PowerStore. Even though replication between Dell PowerStores is possible, high latency connectivity is problematic."

More Dell PowerStore cons

"Though the performance is there, if NetApp wants to be competitive with the others, it must improve their business continuity."

"Getting through first level to second level takes two hours minimum."

"The solution must provide more training courses."

"With NetApp E-Series, when we are running active-active NAS4, sometimes due to either an issue or a bug, we experience failures. At least twice yearly, we have seen this issue. When it occurs, we lose critical systems such as MQ."

"NetApp should add more production lines to the E series so we can make flexible solutions more easily."

"Regarding error handling in NetApp E-Series, because it is a cost-effective but not an intelligent storage solution, the error handling is not sufficient."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."

"The tool's pricing is cheap; I rate it a six to seven out of ten. Most of our sales are not subscription-based. We sell the hardware, and customers keep using it. They only renew the service part annually. The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there."

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"Dealing with the licensing part of the product is very simple, especially considering the fact that we don't have many licenses associated with the tool."

"The pricing structure and licensing model of Dell PowerStore are pretty decent. It's pretty competitive."

"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 pricing structure and licensing model of Dell PowerStore are very good and I like it. We chose it because it was reasonably priced and met our requirements"

"Licensing is very simple. Everything is included in the basic license. There are no concerns about having to pay to add a feature. Everything is there."

"The price of Dell PowerStore could improve. The price should be managed more compared to Huawei Dorado or IBM All-Flash series."

"As compared to others, PowerStore is cheaper."

"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."

More Dell PowerStore pricing and cost advice

"The price is reasonable for NetApp E-Series."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

21%

Comms Service Provider

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	15
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	12

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	50
Midsize Enterprise	34
Large Enterprise	75

No data available

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?

The price of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is very expensive, though I do not know the actual price because I am using the E...

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What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could ...

See all answers

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 NetApp E-Series?

The product is easy to use.

See all answers

What needs improvement with NetApp E-Series?

Regarding scalability, I think there is no problem. While there is always room for improvement in any product, to my ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for NetApp E-Series?

We sell NetApp E-Series as engineered machines like FlexPod, which is used where high throughput and native storage p...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerMax vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 13% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 9% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 8% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 7% of the time

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HPE Alletra Storage vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 14% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 11% of the time

Dell PowerVault vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 9% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 8% of the time

NetApp ASA vs Dell PowerStore

Compared 1% of the time

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Seagate Exos X Series vs NetApp E-Series

Compared 24% of the time

NetApp ASA vs NetApp E-Series

Compared 22% of the time

NetApp AFF vs NetApp E-Series

Compared 17% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs NetApp E-Series

Compared 11% of the time

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs NetApp E-Series

Compared 11% of the time

More NetApp E-Series Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

December 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerStore

January 2026

Download Dell PowerStore product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp E-Series

December 2025

Download NetApp E-Series product report

Also Known As

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

PowerStore

No data available

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 is a scalable, high-performance platform supporting both modern and traditional workloads, enhancing IT operations with AI-driven automation and advanced data reduction features.

Designed for flexibility, Dell PowerStore integrates seamlessly with VMware, providing robust security and high IOPS. Users benefit from fast NVMe storage, intelligent data management, and scalable performance to handle diverse workload demands. However, improvements are needed in replication, enterprise functionalities, and UI complexity. Stability and support issues highlight the need for enhanced monitoring and pricing strategies.

What are the key features of Dell PowerStore?

Advanced Compression: Optimizes storage capacity effectively.
Data Deduplication: Reduces redundant data, improving efficiency.
Scalability: Easily adjusts to growing business needs.
VMware Integration: Enhances virtualization performance.
AI-Driven Management: Simplifies IT operations.
NVMe Storage: Provides fast, reliable access to data.
Robust Security: Ensures data protection.

What benefits does Dell PowerStore offer?

High Performance: Supports demanding applications with high IOPS.
Flexible Design: Adapts to changing workload requirements.
Cost Efficiency: Promotes ROI through data reduction and scaling.
Enhanced Management: Streamlines operations with AI and integrations.
Improved Data Handling: Efficiently manages databases and storage.

In industries like finance, healthcare, and IT, Dell PowerStore is critical for VMware virtualization, high-performance databases, and backup storage. It supports hosting virtual machines, mirroring storage, and handling SAP and Oracle databases effectively. Its role in hybrid and on-premises setups showcases its adaptability and integration capabilities for mission-critical tasks.

Dell Technologies

NetApp E-Series offers a flexible, high-performance storage solution ideal for handling intensive data requirements. Designed to optimize capacity and improve data availability, it supports diverse sector needs.

NetApp E-Series is a purpose-built system engineered to deliver fast, consistent performance. It is best utilized in environments requiring high-performance workloads where speed and efficiency are crucial. Users appreciate its reliability and scalability, which contribute to effective data management. The system is known for its efficient storage capabilities, providing robust data protection and seamless integration with existing infrastructure.

What are the key features of NetApp E-Series?

Scalability: Supports expansion to accommodate growing data needs seamlessly.
Performance: Delivers high-speed processing for demanding applications.
Integrations: Easily integrates with existing IT environments, enhancing operational efficiency.

What benefits and ROI should users look for?

Cost Efficiency: Offers competitive pricing with long-term savings through energy-efficient designs.
Reliability: Provides consistent uptime, minimizing disruptions and improving productivity.
Flexibility: Versatile deployment options cater to specific performance and capacity requirements.

NetApp E-Series is widely implemented across industries ranging from healthcare to finance, where it supports critical data-intensive applications. Its deployment in environments such as scientific research and media production highlights its capacity for handling high-speed data access and reliable performance.

NetApp

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerStore vs. NetApp E-Series

December 2025

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