Dell PowerStore Reviews

Our use case for Dell PowerStore involves a cluster with VMware, where we have all open systems, Windows and Linux, with all that data residing in Dell PowerStore. We have SQL data, many databases, and other types of data.

Dell PowerStore has helped us consolidate the data into small boxes. Before, we had a lot of space used in our racks and data center. With Dell PowerStore, we reduce the space and power consumption.

This is a medium-scale solution, and in our country, we use Dell PowerStore for medium-scale data center solutions. 

We have done two replication solutions where we use the Dell PowerStore capability to replicate between them. These are the case scenarios we do for basic consolidation VMware. 

In Telco companies where we use Dell PowerStore, the IOPS we obtain in certain consolidations is very high. We used to use Unity and could get approximately 100k thousand IOPS in a typical consolidation with four hosts and one data in one storage. With Dell PowerStore, we're getting close to 200,000 IOPS, which has doubled our performance.

Compression, deduplication, and speed are excellent features that we get with Dell PowerStore. The real good IOPS are particularly notable features.

With the compression deduplication of Dell PowerStore, it becomes a real business advantage as people don't need to invest so much in hardware. The initial investment might sound high, but when you get five times the deduplication compression, the numbers show customers are getting a good deal for their money. At the same time, they get 4X, 4 6, 4 9s on the quality of service, making it a reliable solution for clients.

The migration from Unity to Dell PowerStore is seamless without requiring high-level technical migrations. We can replace a 10U solution with a 2U solution in Dell PowerStore. Initially, I was surprised because I wasn't really calculating the benefits of compression and deduplication, and it seemed expensive. However, once you see the 2X, 3X, 4X compression capacity, it makes sense and proves to be a good deal. 

Customers react positively to the Dell PowerStore solution, and the energy consumption and space consolidation are beneficial features.

The solution is good and we feel comfortable with it. It's a process of continuous improvement, similar to our experience with Unity. As we complete more installations, our efficiency improves.

The primary use case for Dell PowerStore was for our disaster recovery site at our secondary data center. 

The equipment there was already eight years old and we really needed to replace it. We couldn't get finance to back us with a big deployment and substantial funding. So we determined that we needed something that could run our critical tasks if our main data center goes offline. 

While it's running particular tasks of secondary importance at that data center, it can also take the load of the critical systems that we're doing on daily backups and weekends' full backups.

The most valuable features of Dell PowerStore include the completion through or the integration with OpenManage, where it can communicate and send back critical alerts or issues from a storage standpoint, heating, cooling, and all the typical management aspects. That's a time saving. It's all under one window. I can look at the servers, I can look at the storage, and I can see if there are any alerts on anything if it's all green, versus having different management windows to go back and forth between.

I've realized cost savings from switching to Dell PowerStore from Nimble. There definitely has been cost savings since the integration and everything we're doing is easier on our internal time to manage. 

I'm saving approximately 20% of time managing and running it, which is easier having it all under one access panel.

Going to all NVMe storage, the abilities for the access time and the latency with Dell PowerStore's all flash storage is fantastic. Before, we had spinning disk with front-ended SSD cache. Now we're all SSD, making it very fast.

We have some legacy apps, including our biggest ERP system that we're migrating from, which isn't even SQL server-based; it's a ProvideX database. We're considering a data warehouse and examining ETL options to get that data into a format that AI can analyze. Dell PowerStore and those PowerEdge servers have substantial capacity for that.

Dell PowerStore has features that specifically cater to the needs of our medium company. We're standardized with our network core at 10 gigs, however, they can go to 25 gigs. If we need changes, we're not ripping and replacing; we're simply changing some GBICs and fiber interfaces. Dell PowerStore itself can accommodate faster connections. I appreciate that we won't be forced into obsolescence within the first year.

One of the big performance metrics I use to measure success with Dell PowerStore is latency. The read and write latencies dropped significantly over our old system. With our Nimble storage, we had between 14 and 40 millisecond access times on some of our busier runs. Dell PowerStore rarely goes above five milliseconds. It's significantly faster, with most operations being sub-millisecond.

We are using Dell PowerStore for different kinds of workloads. They use Dell PowerStore for mission-critical or high-performance purposes. 

We have customers all across the globe and in different verticals, including manufacturing, healthcare, and finance. HCL Tech provides Dell PowerStore, and we also create a service model for end customers similar to storage as a service that Dell offers. There is a big contract between HCL Tech and Dell Technologies through which we use these Dell PowerStore devices and create storage as a service to support our end customers across the globe.

Our team is validating Dell PowerStore for some Gen AI use cases, but we are still working on that as it's not finalized.

We mainly work with 3000 and 5000 models. We don't work much with the entry level models.

We are using these storage devices in our data center or our Colo facility. We offer storage as a service, and it helps us to maintain our SLA, which is very important. There should be no P1s. Dell PowerStore provides ease of work.

We get efficiency. There are cross-replication features with the additional hardware. That gives the additional edge in terms of performance throughput. There are some other features as well to help us meet our customer requirements.

One customer on their old hardware had a DRR of only 2:1, but with Dell PowerStore, they got a DRR of 5:1. That's the level of efficiency they get. On the existing hardware, I would have to deploy one petabyte storage box to address customer requirements, whereas with PowerStore, I only need 500 terabytes of usable capacity to address the same requirement. That helps us to reduce our overall rack, space, or power requirements.

We create unified storage boxes for various workload requirements of our customers. We are able to get better efficiency for different workloads. We can easily showcase to customers the capability or value proposition with Dell PowerStore to address multiple workloads and provide efficiency on the storage side. With other platforms, I have to use specific protocol-based devices, not the unified one.

Performance-wise, it's completely fine. Be it database workload, apps, VMs, or any other workload. We were able to address the same. For one of the customers, we were using different workloads in the same box. We were able to meet the expectation for our end customer in terms of IOPS or throughput. We didn't face any challenges. It gives us high DRR even if we have multiple workloads.

It is easy to use. With the same portal, I can manage everything.

Dell PowerStore has many use cases, such as in banking and virtualization, especially database projects. 

Regarding use cases, since it's flash storage, it's NVMe class flash storage, so it covers most of the cases in the industry. You can use it in mid to enterprise-class banking sectors; some customers are even using it in core banking, virtualization, and these kinds of workloads. Some other use cases are also being implemented since this is very common storage.

Many people really appreciate Dell PowerStore, and they choose it since, especially from a brand perspective, it's very strong. Dell has been in Gartner for the last 10 years or so, and it contributes majorly to the market. 

In Pakistan, Dell has a physical presence along with Huawei and IBM, so we can say Dell has a very reasonable presence in Pakistan. Many customers are using it, which is one of the reasons why customers still believe in Dell PowerStore products. 

The good thing about this storage is that it is NVMe storage and provides very good compression and data reduction ratios. If you purchase storage with 300 terabytes, you can easily achieve one petabyte of effective capacity. That's the value Dell creates; you invest less, and you get a better ROI.

It's unified storage, so it can cover file, SAN, and block both. It's good storage; it gives good IOPS and less latency. 

Dell PowerStore is mainly used as a core storage platform for scale-out and file storage with NVMe storage. 

Clustering multiple Dell PowerStore appliances is straightforward from a presales perspective, with everything managed from a single dashboard. 

The data resiliency features include single or double drive resiliency for quick recovery from drive failures. The NVMe SSD drives enable fast data rebuilding, replacing traditional RAID systems.

It provides efficiency. The solution uses NVMe platforms and NVMe drives, making it very fast when writing data. While NVMe can be costly, Dell enables always-on data reduction, which means data will be deduplicated with thin provisioning and compression to ensure efficient use of the platform.

With deduplication and compression always on, it offers data efficiency and saves space, which can lead to fewer rack requirements. It can be easily consolidated into half of the space, in turn reducing the power and cooling needs. It reduces the overall footprint by reducing the amount of data that we are managing.

Regarding security, Dell PowerStore includes integrated features such as encryption and anomaly detection to reduce attack surfaces. 

The performance has been good. I haven't had any complaints from customers.

The solution offers tight integration with VMware, Kubernetes, and containers through numerous APIs and tools. Tasks can be performed from vCenter or PowerStore Manager.

Our specific use cases for Dell PowerStore at my company include all of our VMware virtualization, six clusters of five or six hosts each, Oracle clustered databases, and SAP hosts, totaling about 60 physical hosts hooked up to each unit, with performance being very good, and we are very happy. 

Currently, I do not have any AI use cases for Dell PowerStore yet. We might plan to implement AI use cases for Dell PowerStore, as I've been learning about it, and would say that most likely in the next six months, we're going to do a pilot using Dell PowerStore with some other hardware as well.

The most valuable features of Dell PowerStore for us are the top performance, which is very fast and efficient, and the user interface, which is very intuitive and easy to use for maintaining or creating LUNs or whatever else we might need to do. 

The benefits I have seen from using Dell PowerStore so far include taking advantage of Dell's Anytime Upgrade. It is now renamed but remains the same thing. Last November, I upgraded both units to the 9200s with no outage, and it was really amazing, along with the full Fiber Channel support, as our previous storage used to be FCoE, an older Fiber Channel technology. Now it's Fiber Channel 32, making Dell PowerStore instrumental in that.

Dell PowerStore is used in my company for storage for virtual machines and backups, and we are growing into working on doing stuff with large language models and AI. At the moment, we do not use Dell PowerStore for AI, but we're expanding into that business case. 

The business case for us when we actually do expand with Dell PowerStore involves real-time analysis of phone calls, providing solutions to our customer base when they connect in with problems related to X, Y, and Z. Here are some solutions you can try to reporting code review, and all the things.

The overall solution of Dell PowerStore benefits our organization by offering affordable and expandable products that meet the needs we have as we grow since we are a three-year-old company and our growth pattern has just been skyrocketing.