Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Dell PowerStore vs SolidFire comparison

Sponsored
 

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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
15th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
Dell PowerStore
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
112
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (4th), NAS (1st), Enterprise SAN (1st), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (1st)
SolidFire
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
28th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
33
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 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 17.1%, up from 16.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolidFire is 0.2%, down from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature
One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.
Brian Ricci - PeerSpot reviewer
It's constantly enhanced and has impressive reliability and data compression
The maintenance is a bit expensive. The service and support are there for three years, but after the third year, it is pretty pricey for renewal. I hope Dell addresses that. Everything is pricey these days anyway. It is not like the old days of Compellent. We used to be able to see the metrics for our customers. On Compellent, we could look up that customer and see all the metrics. That is not allowed for us now. We cannot do that anymore. I have to be explicitly allowed by the customer to do that, and some companies' security does not allow that.
Ramil Cerrada - PeerSpot reviewer
A versatile storage solution suitable for various workloads in cloud environments providing scalable architecture, granular Quality of Service and consistent performance
The most significant benefit lies in its exceptional performance, driven by its Flash-based architecture. This enhances routing speed and, consequently, database performance. The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance which is particularly valuable for tasks like data mining, where quick results are essential.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"We are satisfied with the performance as it is significantly faster compared to traditional storage options."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"It offers competitive performance, and the Evergreen storage model of Pure fits well with my organization."
"Dell PowerStore is very simple to implement, and its user interface is very simple."
"In the five months we've been running Dell PowerStore, it's been 100% uptime with no issues at all, so it's been excellent."
"Dell PowerStore has good value for money and some scalability features that are better than other products."
"Its flexibility is valuable because we have had some moments where we had to adapt, and it has been quite flexible."
"The most valuable aspects of Dell PowerStore are integration with VMware and reliability."
"The most impactful feature is the data reduction."
"It's unified storage, so it can cover file, SAN, and block both. It's good storage; it gives good IOPS and less latency."
"The most valuable feature is the functionality of the integration between the storage and the domain."
"SolidFire provides seamless performance across your storage system when you need to scale up. Other storage systems do not do that."
"The simplicity of it."
"I would say in terms of architecture and in terms of functionality, the product is quite good."
"SolidFire has seamless performance for the nodes and extensions. I also like the tool’s scalability. The product’s performance does not get affected when we scale either up or down. This is not the case with other products."
"It's a very compact device. For a medium-sized business, it's very helpful because the device is efficient and very fast."
"If you buy the solution for its specific purpose it will work well."
"We can add a node, we add compute, we add storage, and we've had really good luck with that."
"The system efficiency is excellent overall."
 

Cons

"We need better data deduplication."
"Managing data isn't difficult for me. The performance is usually perfect, but we sometimes have capacity problems."
"The software layer has to improve."
"Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"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."
"To improve, they could enhance their attitude and empathy by putting themselves in the shoes of the other person when providing support."
"Many customers are looking for a cyber recovery feature included in PowerStore. We would like to see this added in a future release."
"The design needs to be something similar to Pure Storage. It would be beneficial if there are different color or lighting options for different product casings."
"It would be helpful for us to have support for the S3 protocol because our main competitor has the S3 protocol in their system."
"We used to be able to see the metrics for our customers. On Compellent, we could look up that customer and see all the metrics. That is not allowed for us now. We cannot do that anymore. I have to be explicitly allowed by the customer to do that, and some companies' security does not allow that."
"The support is not very good."
"Sometimes they have equipment in stock. Sometimes they don't, so they have to arrange it from somewhere. That's been a challenge, and it's a negative point from a support perspective."
"I have experienced some downtime with Dell PowerStore, particularly due to a bug with Emulex HBAs during an upgrade process."
"There is room for improvement with a focus on creating a centralized storage system, functioning similar to AWS."
"One of the challenges we faced while using SolidFire was that the product line that we were using in our company was discontinued."
"When you set up the nodes, we have to serial into each one of these nodes to configure the IP ranges. It's still very easy, but it's time consuming."
"We have a large fiber channel infrastructure, and that's one area that we haven't seen implemented in SolidFire, its more iSCSI."
"A little better segregation of the multi-tenancy. Right now, it's just VLAN-specific, that's all you can do."
"For example, the ease of use with the reporting. Right now it's not impossible, but you have to know Sequel. It's a little time consuming to get those customized reports in there."
"The upgrade process could be better."
"You don't have business continuity with SolidFire. I think it could be a nice feature to have in the future."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."
"The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits. We don't regret purchasing it."
"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."
"The licensing is on a yearly basis."
"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."
"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."
"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."
"PowerStore's pricing is reasonable."
"The solution's price was comparable to other products for the use case, size, and setup."
"Dell PowerStore charges for the hardware warranty every three years. The price will depend on the storage model or how much hardware it has."
"We are happy with the pricing that we get from Dell."
"There's still a cap on the upgrade path, where you can consume all the engines within the frame before you have to go to another frame... Normally, we exceed the IOPS on the frames before we can ever exhaust the storage, so anything they can do to help us avoid stranded storage capacity, capacity that we couldn't get to, would be beneficial."
"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."
"In the pricing and licensing department, the product is always too expensive."
"It is expensive compared to one of its competitors."
"On a scale where one is a high price and ten is a low price, I rate the solution between three and four. It is an expensive solution."
"The price of this solution is more expensive than others."
"Based on what I heard from other people, its price was on the higher side."
"It might be considered expensive, but when evaluating performance, it represents good value online because you pay for what you get."
"We would probably use SolidFire more, except we're getting more bang for our buck with our purchases of ONTAP right now, and the deal we made with NetApp, so it's more of just a cost decision"
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which All-Flash Storage solutions are best for your needs.
857,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
38%
Computer Software Company
20%
Real Estate/Law Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

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 SolidFire?
The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance w...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolidFire?
It might be considered expensive, but when evaluating performance, it represents good value online because you pay fo...
What needs improvement with SolidFire?
There is room for improvement with a focus on creating a centralized storage system, functioning similar to AWS. This...
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
PowerStore
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Information Not Available
California Public Utilities Commission, RFA, 1&1, Ultimate Software , Endicia, ezVerify, MercadoLibre, Sungard Availability Services, ServInt, Elastx, Hosted Network, Colt, Crucial, iWeb, Datapipe, Databarracks
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerStore vs. SolidFire and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
857,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.