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Dell PowerStore vs SAP IQ 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
6.2
SAP IQ boasts high ROI with substantial hardware savings, low maintenance costs, though some users lack authorization to confirm it.
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
5.6
Customer service is 24/7 but varies in quality; technical support lacks experts, causing slow escalation and limited advanced assistance.
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.
It seems very difficult to get proper advanced assistance on advanced or complicated problems.
The quality of support from SAP is very good; if it's a known problem, they will have a knowledge base, so we will get immediate assistance.
 

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
7.4
SAP IQ offers scalable solutions with Simplex and Multiplex architectures, accommodating vast data volumes across PCs or servers.
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.
SAP IQ is actually quite effective when it comes to scalability.
We can span the read and write load into multiple nodes, and that scalability is there.
 

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
6.0
SAP IQ is stable, effectively managing complex transactions despite occasional issues, making it a reliable choice for implementations.
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.
It's usually something external, such as lack of disk space or problems arising from the integration to other systems.
 

Room For Improvement

Dell PowerStore users seek improved integration, enhanced functionality, better pricing, user interface, security, support, and enterprise-ready features.
SAP IQ faces challenges with high costs, inadequate training, stability issues, and integration limitations, impacting performance and adoption.
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 there is an issue, the error messaging we get is not always sufficient to do a fast and solid fix.
It is easy to deploy SAP IQ; the implementation and installation are easy.
 

Setup Cost

Dell PowerStore pricing is high but justified by features, competitive licensing, scalability, and overall market alignment.
SAP IQ is cost-effective with various licensing models, though price understanding and negotiation are essential for optimal implementation.
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.
 

Valuable Features

Dell PowerStore offers flexibility, performance, ease of use, data protection, and cost savings with reliable architecture and machine learning.
SAP IQ features column-based architecture, high compression, rapid queries, large-scale data handling, and integration with SAP BusinessObjects.
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 feature I appreciate the most about SAP IQ is the compression, which is very good; we cannot compare with any other type of EDW.
The most valuable feature of SAP IQ for us is that it works very effectively with the SAP BusinessObjects which we use it with.
 

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)
SAP IQ
Ranking in Data Warehouse
14th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Relational Databases Tools (26th)
 

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 SAP IQ is 2.6%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Dell PowerStore1.5%
SAP IQ2.6%
Other95.9%
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.
Tejas Raj - PeerSpot reviewer
Columnar database, so pulling records is easy but there isn't enough documentation for installation
I've seen very few SAP IQ systems in recent years. So people are moving away from SAP IQ In the last three years, I've rarely encountered customers using it. Fewer systems with SAP IQ usage among our customers. Most of them have moved on to HANA. There are parallel products, and there are also viable alternatives from AWS, so many have migrated to those.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
36%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

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 Business7
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise15
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP IQ?
IQ implementation costs about three thousand dollars. It's less expensive compared to alternatives like Teradata Base in terms of transactional efficiency.
What needs improvement with SAP IQ?
When it comes to SAP IQ, the areas that could be improved or enhanced include the error messaging and the locking capabilities, as that's where we often encounter problems. When there is an issue, ...
What is your primary use case for SAP IQ?
Our usual use cases for SAP IQ is that we have a Software-as-a-Service architecture where this database is the foundation for our SAP BusinessObjects platform. This is where it's getting its data f...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

PowerStore
Sybase IQ
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
ASR Group, Citrix, State of Indiana, PocketCard Co. Ltd.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerStore vs. SAP IQ and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.