Dell VMAX All Flash vs HPE Primera comparison

Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Dell Technologies is ranked #28 with an average rating of 8.0, while Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #11 with an average rating of 7.9. Dell Technologies holds a 0.8% mindshare in AFS, compared to Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s 3.1% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

HPE Primera and Dell VMAX All Flash compete in the high-end storage market. While Dell VMAX All Flash is considered superior due to its features, users are more satisfied with the pricing and support of HPE Primera.

Features: HPE Primera reviews highlight its performance, reliability, and AI-driven insights for predictive analytics. Dell VMAX All Flash is praised for its scalability, robust performance, and advanced features such as data reduction and encryption. While both products offer high-end features, Dell VMAX All Flash stands out in scalability and advanced data management.

Room for Improvement: Users suggest HPE Primera could improve in terms of more flexible licensing and enhanced automation capabilities. Dell VMAX All Flash reviews indicate a need for better integration with third-party applications and a more intuitive management system.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: HPE Primera is reported to have a straightforward deployment process with excellent customer service. Dell VMAX All Flash, while also praised for good deployment, receives mixed feedback on customer service responsiveness.

Pricing and ROI: HPE Primera is noted for its competitive setup costs and strong ROI as per user reviews. Dell VMAX All Flash, despite higher setup costs, is considered worth the investment due to its comprehensive feature set, delivering a solid ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell VMAX All Flash vs. HPE Primera Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell VMAX All Flash vs. HPE Primera

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 All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 1.4%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell VMAX All Flash is 0.8%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Primera is 3.1%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
HPE Primera	3.1%
Pure FlashArray X NVMe	1.4%
Dell VMAX All Flash	0.8%
Other	94.7%

All-Flash Storage

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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Arjun Sadsivam

Solution Architect at a agriculture with 10,001+ employees

Performance and interface improve data processing speeds but require complex configuration

The most valuable features of VMAX are its performance and GUI interface. We have seen significant improvements in technology over the last four to five years. The snap feature, along with deduplication, has notably enhanced our data processing speeds. We haven't experienced any outages or core-level issues in the last ten years, making us comfortable with the storage solution.

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Roberto Rodrigues

Solution Consultant at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

Used for shared storage and has good scalability

Recently, we had many issues with HPE Primera storage, mainly in the leveling process, which caused many problems for the customers. In this architecture, the full application running over this storage gets stuck when one disk fails. We noticed that one leveling process, ungrouping process, and grouping process took around 12 hours to conclude. It was not a good experience. The main issue was that we dimensioned the solution to 1,300 IOPS. The solution has 10 + 2 spare disks, and when one disc fails, the application gets stuck because the IOPS moves to 5,000 IOPS when it happens. We noticed some specific limitations with the solution's graphical interface, which was not rich. The solution's main problem was the grouping and ungrouping process. We confirmed that the problem was with HPE Primera by stopping the whole application while labeling. No IOPS was consumed from the application to the storage, even though the IOPS was 5,000. This means that 5,000 was just for the leveling of one disk. If two disks had failed, the problem would have been bigger than we experienced.

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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."

"The best features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe include the volume snapshot capabilities, which allow us to save most of the storage space by volume snapshots periodically."

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

"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."

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

"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"The most valuable features of VMAX are its performance and GUI interface."

"It works very well."

"The product's initial setup phase was good."

"The ransomware protection feature is housed in a separate unit, specifically addressing the top twenty most critical threats."

"The snapshot feature has been precious for our testing processes, application development, and managing testing environments due to its efficiency and ease of use."

"We haven't experienced any outages or core-level issues in the last ten years, making us comfortable with the storage solution."

"The greatest advantage is the support when we encounter incidents, as HPE's support is highly responsive."

"HPE Primera has good integration. All the users are using HP servers and some systems, such as Synergy, which integrate well into the solution."

"HPE provides good support through their customer service."

"The system is stable, particularly with mission-critical solutions in place."

"HPE Primera is scalable."

"The most valuable feature of HPE Primera is its performance and simple replication."

"It serves as the primary storage in my production environment."

"It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution."

More HPE Primera pros

Cons

"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."

"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."

"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."

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

"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."

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

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

"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"Improvements are needed in both partition recovery and scalability."

"The scalability of VMAX is somewhat limited, especially in terms of cache scalability. We've had to procure additional engines to address this limitation."

"There is room for improvement in the centralized administration."

"We encountered some challenges during large data migrations that could be addressed for smoother transitions."

"The scalability of VMAX is somewhat limited, especially in terms of cache scalability."

"The configuration part of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."

"Primera should be more user-friendly."

"I would like to see improved training offered with HPE Primera."

"The initial setup is not straightforward."

"Recently, we had many issues with HPE Primera storage, mainly in the leveling process, which caused many problems for the customers."

"The solution could improve by having seamless migration from other storage systems. The process should be made easier."

"The IOPS and throughput could be better. That's the only drawback compared to other vendors."

"The solution's compression ratio feature could be improved."

"Price is always important in Turkey, so HPE could lower the price to keep it competitive. It's not as competitive as other solutions in this market."

More HPE Primera cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"It is not a cheap product."

"The price falls within the mid-range, neither inexpensive nor high-priced."

"The cost is $75,000 for a three-year contract."

"Because it has high availability, the cost is above average. The cost depends upon the sizing, and every customer has a different size. It is slightly above average in terms of cost compared to its competitors, but the value add was that they could know what their maintenance cost was going to be going forward. They knew what their renewal or expansion costs would be."

"HPE Primera service is cost-effective."

"The pricing for HDD was good."

"I rate the product's price a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."

"The price of this solution is good for medium-sized and large businesses."

"Licensing fees are billed on a yearly basis and the cost of GreenLake service is included."

"There is only a one-time license purchase needed and no additional costs. If HP could reduce the training cost, then that would be advantageous to the seller."

More HPE Primera pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

16%

Healthcare Company

Government

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	19
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	14

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...

See all answers

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 like most about Dell EMC VMax?

The product's initial setup phase was good.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC VMax?

The pricing provided by EMC is reasonable.

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What needs improvement with Dell EMC VMax?

The scalability of VMAX is somewhat limited, especially in terms of cache scalability. We've had to procure additiona...

See all answers

Which would you choose - HPE Nimble Storage or HPE Primera?

HPE Nimble is a versatile synced WAN San solution. It is easy to use and doesn’t require much training for admins. Th...

See all answers

What's the difference between HPE 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Primera?

HPE Primera has many great features but one of the best is that it is very easy to deploy. From an overall perspectiv...

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What do you like most about HPE Primera?

For over a year, I have not seen any downtime in the product.

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 18% of the time

Dell PowerMax vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 12% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 10% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 10% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 8% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerMax vs Dell VMAX All Flash

Compared 63% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs Dell VMAX All Flash

Compared 9% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell VMAX All Flash

Compared 8% of the time

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs Dell VMAX All Flash

Compared 7% of the time

Huawei OceanStor vs Dell VMAX All Flash

Compared 7% of the time

More Dell VMAX All Flash Competitors

HPE Alletra Storage vs HPE Primera

Compared 29% of the time

HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs HPE Primera

Compared 25% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs HPE Primera

Compared 7% of the time

HPE Nimble Storage vs HPE Primera

Compared 6% of the time

NetApp AFF vs HPE Primera

Compared 5% of the time

More HPE Primera Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

January 2026

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

All-Flash Storage

January 2026

Download Dell VMAX All Flash product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE Primera

January 2026

Download HPE Primera product report

Also Known As

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

No data available

Primera

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 VMAX All Flash is utilized in hyper-converged solutions like VxRail deployments, critical for Data Domain in backup tasks. It supports multi-site replication, disaster recovery, banking IT operations, and high-performance applications.

Dell VMAX All Flash plays a key role in data-intensive environments due to its robust capabilities in storage, data protection, and high throughput tasks. It is crucial in hyper-converged solutions and VxRail deployments, facilitating multi-site replication and disaster recovery. Its applications span across banking and other critical IT operations requiring high performance. The system's ability to support efficient data compression and provide ransomware protection addresses significant security concerns. Multi-site replication and redundancy safeguard data even during power outages or hardware failures, while the snapshot feature aids in testing, application development, and environment management.

What are the key features of Dell VMAX All Flash?

Compression: Efficient data compression capabilities.
Ransomware Protection: Tackles ransomware threats effectively.
Multi-site Replication and Redundancy: Ensures data safety during power outages or hardware issues.
Snapshots: Aids in testing, application development, and environment management.

What benefits should users look for in Dell VMAX All Flash reviews?

Data Protection: Enhanced data security with ransomware protection.
Performance: High throughput for demanding applications.
Reliability: Multi-site replication and redundancy for critical operations continuity.
Support: Adheres to IP strategies with excellent customer support.

Dell VMAX All Flash is critical in industries like banking, where it supports IT operations requiring high performance, and in environments demanding stringent data protection measures. Its role in multi-site replication and disaster recovery makes it invaluable for business continuity and critical data security across sectors.

Dell Technologies

HPE introduces HPE Primera, a new storage platform designed to deliver superior simplicity, availability, and performance for mission-critical applications
HPE Primera advances the HPE Intelligent Data Platform, a portfolio of products and solutions designed to help customers transition from delivering storage to unlocking business value with intelligent data

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Dell VMAX All Flash vs. HPE Primera

December 2025

Free Report: Dell VMAX All Flash vs. HPE Primera

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