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Dell PowerStore vs Panzura CloudFS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 18, 2025

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
6.8
Dell PowerStore provides cost savings, improved performance, efficiency, and a positive ROI through effective data management and storage optimization.
Sentiment score
5.1
Organizations experienced enhanced resilience, doubled performance, and productivity gains by adopting Panzura CloudFS, solving past file storage issues.
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.
Previously, we had latency issues with syncing up files between offices. Files were not locked, leading to overwrites which cost us literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost time and revenue.
We saw the benefits of Panzura CloudFS immediately because our remote offices were able to share files immediately after the product went live.
Panzura CloudFS saves us a significant amount of time frequently.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.0
Dell PowerStore's support quality varies by region and service level, with mixed reviews on responsiveness, expertise, and resolution times.
Sentiment score
6.8
Panzura CloudFS support is praised for quick, expert assistance despite occasional delays, receiving high ratings from users.
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.
The support staff and the number of people they have on staff right now are truly good.
When we have a priority-one issue, we typically receive a call within 20 to 30 minutes.
I would give the support for Panzura CloudFS a ten out of ten because they are responsive and helpful.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.1
Dell PowerStore offers scalability with easy expansion, NVMe technology, and flexible upgrades, meeting diverse enterprise demands efficiently.
Sentiment score
6.8
Panzura CloudFS is highly scalable, effortlessly supports many users across locations, with seamless deployment and dedicated support.
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.
Unlimited users can access the system without issues.
From our original entry with Panzura CloudFS, we have added an additional seven sites, and deploying those additional nodes was very seamless and did not take any effort.
The latest version, 8.0.2, has better ease of decommissioning filers and bringing new ones online.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Dell PowerStore is highly stable and reliable, praised for performance and seamless integration with minimal significant issues.
Sentiment score
6.1
Panzura CloudFS is highly stable with rare outages and improved reliability, earning high user ratings overall.
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.
I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.
We have never had their system crash on us.
There were times with file lock issues between filers, causing various anomalies, but with their ongoing development, these issues have improved.
 

Room For Improvement

Dell PowerStore needs better VMware integration, enhanced features, cost efficiency, improved user interface, and refined support and documentation.
Panzura CloudFS needs improvements in performance, compatibility, pricing, dashboard, alerting, licensing, Active Directory reliance, NFS service, and support.
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.
When something goes wrong somewhere, there should be a little bit better alerting with issues before they become a big problem.
The GIS data formats, such as a geo database, have been found better kept outside of Panzura CloudFS.
It would have been nice if they had offered them in increments, of 5, 10, 15, or 20 terabytes than having to get a whole chunk of 25 terabytes again for licensing purposes, which is a little costly.
 

Setup Cost

Dell PowerStore is costly but justified by performance, scalability, and features, with competitive cost-per-compute and inclusive licensing.
Panzura CloudFS pricing is higher than competitors, lacks granular licenses, but offers negotiation flexibility and transparency.
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.
It did require us to purchase new hardware, however, that was not overly expensive.
They should consider more attractive pricing for companies of our size.
Overall, it is quite costly compared to NetApp and similar solutions.
 

Valuable Features

Dell PowerStore is valued for its ease, flexibility, performance, NVMe support, VMware integration, scalability, reliability, and cost-effectiveness.
Panzura CloudFS enhances workflows with high availability, security, and seamless collaboration, reducing storage costs and boosting productivity.
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.
It is very reliable and very quick.
It helps us increase network resilience. We have a primary object library stored in the cloud and have Panzura Mirroring which allows us to place data in a secondary cloud for added resiliency.
There is no degradation of speed because these filers have cached the data, and they are constantly swapping metadata and updating with each other, which is a very attractive method of getting us to use these applications.
 

Categories and Ranking

Dell PowerStore
Ranking in NAS
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
120
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (4th), Enterprise SAN (1st), All-Flash Storage (1st), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (1st)
Panzura CloudFS
Ranking in NAS
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
File System Software (2nd), Cloud Storage (6th), Cloud Storage Gateways (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the NAS category, the mindshare of Dell PowerStore is 12.2%, up from 11.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Panzura CloudFS is 3.0%, up from 2.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
NAS
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Roger Clark - PeerSpot reviewer
Handles file locks effectively enabling seamless remote collaboration in global teams
It has not reduced the data storage cost. We have been trying to come up with a plan internally to archive project data at a certain time frame. However, our data continues to grow, so at the point of 25 terabytes, we had to buy another 25 terabytes license to exceed that threshold. It would have been nice if they had offered them in increments, of 5, 10, 15, or 20 terabytes than having to get a whole chunk of 25 terabytes again for licensing purposes, which is a little costly. It would be nice if Panzura offered data in increments instead of 25 terabytes per license. They have done a pretty good job of development from the point of offering new products. Pricing seems to be high for certain things, such as the audit feature of Panzura Data Services. It would be nice to see who deleted that 100 gig of data out there. They should make the pricing plan more attractive for a company of our size. We have almost 700 employees over the southeast from Texas to Florida and up to Tennessee, so we are a pretty big region.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
6%
Construction Company
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 are the products that Panzura provides?
Panzura offers four main products: CloudFS, data services, smart apps, and global services. They call this "all-in-one solution" and it's for end-to-end cloud data management. Why is it called that...
What kind of industries does Panzura serve?
Hello, I think businesses from all industries that have their data on a cloud can benefit from Panzura. Especially if you have offices in various locations or your employees are working from home a...
Why was Panzura acquired? Is the acquisition going to cause a change?
I think Panzura may change in a positive direction now that it's been bought by Profile Capital. That's a very big investment company for technology businesses and I think it's an opportunity for ...
 

Also Known As

PowerStore
Panzura Freedom
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Petrofac, Komatsu, HCA Healthcare, Vanguard, Disney, Pokemon, US Department of Justice, Gensler, Fluor, AFRY, Milwaukee Tool, Navy Federal Credit Union, TechTarget
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerStore vs. Panzura CloudFS and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.