Our modern world creates mountains of virtual data. Organizations store this data for day-to-day operations, as well as for future use, on storage arrays, devices that thus become vital to business. Vendors offer many different storage solutions that vary in available features and performance, choosing among those offerings is not easy.

To help buyers make more informed decisions, we conducted two studies involving the Dell PowerMax 8500 array. In a research report using publicly available information, we compared the Dell PowerMax 8500 array to the Pure Storage FlashArray//XL170. We also went hands-on in a study in which we tested the Dell PowerMax 8500 vs. a current array from another company we call Vendor E.

The public information available on the Dell PowerMax 8500 indicated that it had multiple advantages over the Pure Storage solution: it was more expandable, had significantly greater effective capacity and stronger performance, offered mainframe support for secure compatibility with legacy applications, and provided verified suitability for secure environments.

Similarly, the Dell PowerMax 8500 performed better than the competing array, offered better I/O performance for simulated OLTP and data workloads, delivered more efficient data reduction, and took snapshots with next to no performance impact.

Refer to our studies for more information.