Welcome to the NVMe Era: PureStorage’s Take on Dell’s New PowerMax

PureStorage’s Matt Kixmoeller published a blog titled “Welcome to the NVMe Era: PURE’s Thoughts on Dell’s New NVMe PowerMax,” offering a detailed analysis of EMC PowerMAX from Pure’s perspective.

The blog notes that Pure welcomes EMC’s entry into NVMe SSD storage, that NVMe SSDs now account for about 20% of Pure’s business, and that PowerMAX is not a native end‑to‑end NVMe design, suffering from low space‑utilization efficiency.

Pure argues that Dell’s heavy investment in NVMe is largely a rebranding effort: PowerMax is essentially a renamed VMAX all‑flash array with PCIe NVMe interfaces replacing SAS, but many underlying architectures remain unchanged.

Key technical observations include:

The two products share almost identical controllers, with only CPU frequency differences.

Pure is disappointed that cache‑hit design does not fully exploit NVMe flash capabilities.

Despite using NVMe SSDs, bandwidth performance shows little improvement, suggesting under‑utilization of the NVMe advantage.

Deduplication and compression rely on external AIC cards rather than native I/O paths, adding complexity.

The so‑called AI‑driven automatic storage tiering is actually an older VMAX feature.

Pure’s “non‑disruptive” data migration is presented as a strength, but the need for manual upgrades remains.

The article also reflects on the market confusion caused by multiple Dell EMC products (PowerMAX, Unity, SC/Compellent, Xtremio) and the challenges customers face when evolving their storage infrastructure.

Pure emphasizes that NVMe storage must go beyond raw speed; it should consider application elasticity, feature set, and space efficiency, avoiding the pitfalls of earlier flash‑only solutions like Fusion‑io or DSSD.

Finally, Pure highlights its own FlashArray//X’s superior space utilization compared to PowerMax/VMAX and hints at upcoming higher‑efficiency products, while encouraging broader industry adoption of NVMe SSDs.