We performed a comparison between Dell PowerStore and SolidFire based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The most valuable feature of this solution is the support."
"Pure is simple to set up and manage on a day-to-day basis."
"Performance, deduplication, compression, and fast response time for requests from servers and applications."
"The most valuable feature is test performance. It helps us store large amounts of data along with providing us faster retrieval of data."
"The speed is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"The first year, we started out with one or five terabytes and it took what was 20 terabytes of storage down to less than one terabyte."
"It helps us maintain uptime much better than other solutions we've used in the past, and the support is extremely quick and responsive."
"For us, the most valuable feature is the compression and deduplication. Being able to deploy a three to one ratio for storage is absolutely critical in today's world with the growing need for storage and the growing need for more space."
"The solution is stable."
"The most valuable feature is that it is easy to use this frame. I am a SAN administrator, but I was able to train my colleague, who had only been a VMware administrator, on the PowerStore in about half a day. Now he's autonomous in assigning volumes and creating data stores..."
"The solution is easy to use and has good performance."
"PowerStore is easy to use. All the drives use soft encryption. To upgrade it, you download the app, and it runs by itself. It's very easy to deploy, share, and create volumes."
"I find all of the Dell PowerStore features to be valuable."
"Typically, high-performance and high-availability features, such as application snapshots and remote and local replication, are highly valued."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"It has its own file formatting protocol, which saves a lot of space."
"The simplicity of it."
"The system efficiency is excellent overall."
"I would say in terms of architecture and in terms of functionality, the product is quite good."
"We can add a node, we add compute, we add storage, and we've had really good luck with that."
"Individual settings you can put on each individual volume, if you want to do that."
"It's got full API functionality and the performance is pretty steady."
"The scalability and being able to implement it quickly."
"If you buy the solution for its specific purpose it will work well."
"I would like to see them lower the costs."
"We have not seen a reduction in our TCO nor have we seen ROI."
"They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet. This might be an area for additional focus as it would play into scalability, because the very nature of object storage is that it's infinitely scalable."
"The price of the solution can improve."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"I'd like to see a move towards individual VMs for what the performance of each VM is in a VD infrastructure. I can see the overall volume, but I would love to see things in a more granular level on the VM side."
"I would like to see support for NVMe, end-to-end."
"It needs to improve its price."
"There is no Synchronize replication feature on the storage."
"The upgrades themselves are running fine, but after the upgrade is when we have a problem. With the update to 1.4, we had a head crash. They told us, 'This is a known issue. Please upgrade to 2.' We upgraded to 2 and, one week later they told us, 'Yeah, there are some issues in 2.0.0. You can lose data. Please upgrade to 2.0.1.' Overall, they need to make the system stable."
"I have not seen anything specific. The only thing I can think of that needs improvement is the price."
"It's also only supported with a limited amount of switches."
"We are happy with the service in general. The only thing would be the price of the platform."
"The cost of technical support is high."
"You cannot delegate permissions."
"Reporting is an area that could be improved. It's very simplistic sometimes, and some of the very technical guys on my team want to see more of the details and be able to massage the report a little bit better."
"They could make the mNode more user-friendly. Now you need to configure and add nodes by CLI and it’s not really easy to manage. If they created a web interface to do the management of the mNode, that would be great!."
"The technical support is really bad and has to be improved."
"There is room for improvement with a focus on creating a centralized storage system, functioning similar to AWS."
"You don't have business continuity with SolidFire. I think it could be a nice feature to have in the future."
"So feature-wise, I would say more reporting tools that could be merged into it."
"SolidFire should start from two nodes instead of the four nodes. That's the only thing. In a lot of solutions, we have to use four nodes, that's the better thing. But as a starting point, two is better. That's why their starting point is expensive."
"I would like to see integration with the cloud, number one. Being able to spin SolidFire in the cloud."
"They could do a file-based NAS: SolidFire NAS-based. It's probably not its niche, but that is our direction, not to use block, and it's block. Solid state block is what it is."
Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage with 46 reviews while SolidFire is ranked 19th in All-Flash Storage with 33 reviews. Dell PowerStore is rated 8.6, while SolidFire is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Dell PowerStore writes "It has a very strong NAS that can support a lot of big, heavy environments". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolidFire writes "A versatile storage solution suitable for various workloads in cloud environments providing scalable architecture, granular Quality of Service and consistent performance". Dell PowerStore is most compared with Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, NetApp AFF, Dell PowerMax NVMe and HPE Nimble Storage, whereas SolidFire is most compared with NetApp AFF and VMware vSAN. See our Dell PowerStore vs. SolidFire report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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