Dell Pushes AI Factory, Knocks Rivals
Blocks & Files, Monday, July 13th, 2026
Dell competitive intelligence blogs attack VAST Data and rival AI Factory storage designs on power, rack space and database maturity.
Dell Senior Director for Competitive Intelligence Jon Hyde published three blog posts targeting rivals in the AI Factory storage market, especially VAST Data.
Hyde claims Dell PowerScale delivers equivalent NVIDIA benchmark performance while using 72% less power, 80% less rack space and 8x fewer backend switches than competitor reference designs.
He argues disaggregated, storage-embedded AI stacks demand excessive backend network switching that burns power and floor space before GPUs even engage.
He also contends VAST Data's "database" is really a distributed index lacking mature SQL optimization and governance found in Snowflake or BigQuery.