Dell Targets Rivals Pure Storage And Vast Data As AI Race Heats Up

Both Pure Storage and Vast Data have fired back at Dell’s claims that its latest storage configurations use up to 72 percent less power and 80 percent less rack space to run the same Nvidia infrastructure.

With its latest storage releases, Dell Technologies is taking dead aim at Pure Storage and Vast Data, saying its PowerScale storage array uses 72 percent less energy, 80 percent less rack space, and eight times fewer switches than competitors to run the same Nvidia technology.

The comparisons were presented to media and analysts on Oct. 17 to show Dell’s superiority in running Nvidia infrastructure on its storage devices, but mentioning competitors by name is unusual for Dell.

A Dell spokesperson told CRN that the “Vast Data and Pure Storage callouts” were too important to keep quiet.

“In this case, we felt it was important to be direct with customers about the specific technical advantages PowerScale offers for AI workloads, particularly around networking, efficiency and power demands,” the spokesperson said. “When the differences are this material to customer outcomes, we think it’s more helpful to be explicit rather than speak in generalities.”

Dell, Pure Storage and Vast are locked in a battle to win enterprise storage deals, while steering those customers towards a return on value for AI infrastructure, Advizex CEO C.R. Howdyshell said. In an era when those customers are coming to the table with concerns around AI bottlenecks, Howdyshell said arming partners with the best data around power, space and cost are critical to winning deals.

“I believe from a Dell partner perspective, it’s the right move. I would expect the competition to follow suit on that. We’re seeing a lot of good strong activity with Dell. Customers still want to know what’s best for them. They want partners to be able to come in and articulate ‘Why Dell?’ and all the elements of power and different pieces and parts of the solution. The partners who can articulate that will have the best results with customers.”

Two storage reseller partners who did not want their name or business information used told CRN that Pure Storage has been aggressively targeting Dell and in many cases winning those deals.

“Pure has been eating Dell’s lunch,” said the partner. “Every year for the past few years Dell has laid off sales people, and then Pure comes in and hires some of them. It makes them very motivated to take share from Dell and win those deals.”

In the storage presentation, Varun Chhabra, Dell Technologies senior vice president of infrastructure marketing, hammered home points about Dell storage using less physical space in the data center, fewer networking switches and less electricity than its rivals.

“Vast requires almost 2x more rack space, and Pure Storage requires almost 5x more rack space to achieve the same benchmarks compared to PowerScale,” Chhabra said. “And then, on the networking side as well, Vast Data and Pure Storage require 28 to 32 backend switches to support the Nvidia infrastructure. PowerScale completes the same workload with just 4. That’s 4 backend switches, so it’s up to eight times fewer switches.”

The product in question, the PowerScale F710, which is Nvidia Cloud Partner-certified, and certified for Nvidia DGX SuperPOD, comes as a 1U form factor, and uses 887 watts at peak power consumption, according to Dell’s specifications sheets. As power has emerged as the bottle neck to AI deployments, Chhabra said the ability to deliver strong performance at scale with Nvidia’s infrastructure is a “huge competitive differentiator” for Dell.

“(It uses) 41 percent less power than Vast Data and 72 percent less power than Pure Storage, significantly lowering operational costs, allowing organization to be able to divert resources – whether its power, or dollars or rackspace – to other parts of their AI infrastructure,” Chhabra told listeners.

When contacted by CRN, both Pure Storage and Vast Data disputed Dell’s Nvidia storage advantages. Vast called it “misrepresentations” and “marketing math.”

“When environments are configured apples-to-apples for production requirements, customers repeatedly choose Vast for total efficiency and simplicity – not for cherry-picked stats,” Vast told CRN.

Vast Data entered the market in 2018 as a software-defined storage offering that was built to handle massive quantities of unstructured data inside high-performance compute and high-integrity parallel file systems used in research and by enterprises operating at the top end of the infrastructure stack, the company told CRN.

The privately held New York City-based company began selling products to manage structured data 18 months ago to open its total addressable market. Its next-generation storage fabric is delivered on top of hardware from OEMs including Lenovo, Dell, HPE, SuperMicro, and Cisco, a company executive told CRN.

“This presentation and its metrics rely on selective, lab-grade configurations of multiple clusters – creating pools of capacity and performance that the customer will be hand balancing forever – and don’t reflect how customers actually deploy AI infrastructure,” Vast told CRN. “Counting switches and rack units and comparing to outdated reference designs while ignoring resiliency, operability, and whole-system outcomes is marketing math – not engineering.”

While Dell has won praise, deep product partnerships and main stage visits from Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, Vast Data has also been one of Nvidia’s darlings as it builds data fabric for AI systems. Huang heaped praise on its platform and people in an October 2024 sit-down with Vast founder and CEO Renen Hallak.

“The ground-breaking work that we do together, from accelerating the data plane to now bringing AI to the data plane … each one of these expands the reach of accelerated computing, expands the reach of AI,” Huang told Hallak in the interview. “It’s been a great eight and a half years working together and I look forward to the next 80 years working together.”

Pure Storage also fired back at Dell’s claims.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Pure Storage said Dell products need four-times the rack space and three times the power draw to mimic the efficiency of Pure Storage’s Pure Flashblade//Exa.

“At AI scale, the differentiators go well beyond raw performance, it’s about density, power efficiency, and operational simplicity. For context, supporting a 16,000-GPU environment with Pure Flashblade//Exa requires just 37 rack units and approximately 40 kW of power. Comparable configurations from Dell typically need more than four times more rack efficiency and roughly three times the power draw,” the company wrote in reply to CRN.

In September, Pure Storage told investors it has gained 13.2 points of market share since 2013, while Dell has lost 4.5 percent in the same time frame.

Dell is still the worldwide market leader in storage, according to IDC data Dell presented in October. In External RAID it holds a lead with 24-percent of the market. In high end it leads with 36-percent. In midrange it is first with 23-percent.

Its narrowest market-leading position is in unstructured data where it holds a one percent margin. That is also the area where VAST is gaining traction. Dell storage has also faced sales headwinds. In three of the last six quarters that leading storage line up has seen flat or declining sales.

During the most recent quarter, Dell’s storage sales declined 3 percent to $3.9 billion. Sales also declined 5 percent in the second quarter of fiscal year 2025 ended August 2, 2024, and was flat in the first quarter of 2025, which ended May 3, 2024.

Inside that same timeframe, Pure Storage has grown revenue by double-digits in five of those six quarters, with one quarter reaching 9 percent growth.

In its most recent earnings call, Pure Storage said it grew sales 13 percent to $861 million year over year, improving by $97 million. Pure also placed higher than Dell in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant rankings for Enterprise Storage Platforms and in Infrastructure Platform Consumption Services.

“FlashBlade//Exa delivers over 10 TB/s of performance within a single namespace and up to 3.4 TB/s per rack, levels not yet publicly matched by other systems,” Pure Storage wrote to CRN. “It also scales seamlessly beyond 40,000 GPUs through native 400 GbE connectivity. These design efficiencies are what enable our customers to progress from pilot to production-scale AI without expanding their data-center footprint or energy budget.”