We performed a comparison between Dell EMC Powermax and Dell EMC PowerStorebased on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, our reviewers consider Dell EMC PowerStore to be a superior solution. The setup is simpler, and although the price is on the higher side, most users consider it to be worthwhile for the high performance.
"We removed the need to observe whether we ran into issues with the performance of disks or number of IOPS. Previously, our Oracle Database would throw us performance errors. Now, with PowerMax, everything runs smoothly."
"PowerMax NVMe has made it a lot easier to understand how much we are able to provision. It has made it a lot faster to provision new things. 90% of my time for provisioning has been reduced. Also, it has made it very easy to understand and see everything behind it versus the older heritage, where Dell EMC was very convoluted and hard to get working. Things that used to take an hour, probably now take five to 10 minutes."
"This platform is reliable in supporting our data availability. We now have a higher performing platform and have been able to consolidate our workloads into one single platform."
"They're basically tanks. You could take a baseball bat to the thing, and it's still going to keep running and doing what it's supposed to do. We've had a couple of part failures, and you can pretty much replace any part on that thing at any time during the day in the middle of production without worrying about anything happening."
"We find the service level option to provision storage very valuable. The ability to define different service levels for storage groups helps us in prioritizing our workload at the infrastructure level."
"You can use PowerMax for all workloads and consolidation. We have used it to scale thousands of VMs."
"The UI is very easy to use. We can add volumes and manage them easily."
"The best feature is the protection - PowerMax NVMe is volume-based and replicates data, so it's very comfortable for us to use."
"You can add compute and capacity independently. We have sized the solution based on our current needs, but in the future we can choose to increase capacity if we grow our activity in the market. And if we have more business in our monetary system, we can increase compute. The ability to choose what we increase is a good feature."
"This solution is very useful to us as we use it internally for all of the services that we need. We use it as a lab and we showcase new technology to the customers and how it can help them going forward."
"For access from virtual machines, iSCSI, and NFS, it is very good. It helps increase performance."
"The simplicity and ease of use have been very valuable features. I have a very small team, and only half of the team is well versed in the HP product. Whereas if I bring PowerStore in, everyone can learn it because it will be new on the floor."
"I have found the most valuable part of Dell PowerStore is the price."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"Gives us flexibility, performance, and ease of use. It also has some very good compression capabilities. We were looking for a solution that was easy to install in our VMware environment, that was flexible. PowerStore X is a type of a VMware cluster that you install inside your environment. If you have a VMware environment, like we have in production, it's easy to install and use."
"The most valuable feature is that it is easy to use this frame. I am a SAN administrator, but I was able to train my colleague, who had only been a VMware administrator, on the PowerStore in about half a day. Now he's autonomous in assigning volumes and creating data stores..."
"Although they call it unified storage where you have SAN and NAS, with a NAS implementation on top of a SAN, the NAS implementation is a little complicated and clumsy. As SAN, as block storage, it is very powerful... If they could provide a very good NAS implementation, it would be better, so that customers don't have to look for other simple solutions for NAS."
"I would like to see more development in the cloud environment. It would be good if it comes in the cloud kind of setup."
"If you go to Pure or you go to NetApp, they deliver in one month. If you go to Dell or HP, they will take up to six months for delivery. This is not a business model for today."
"We have had some trouble with the VMAX-to-PowerMax migration, but the VMAX box will be powered down after the migration. The PowerMax boxes are working fine and we don't have any issues with them."
"Some of the management features could be simplified and that's probably the main thing they need to address."
"If the solution had more power-saving capabilities, it would be quite nice."
"There is also room for improvement in the PowerMax architecture and hardware itself. They should design the PowerMax on the basis of PCIe 4.0. I would like to see the possibility of an NVMe drive that operates on PCIe 4.0 and not PCIe 3.0."
"I would like a more informative CloudIQ for iOS. What you can see via the web UI significantly differs from what you can see via the web application."
"It was very new when we first deployed it a year ago. Even the upgrade processes and knowing what to expect, as well as documentation, could be more robust."
"The upgrades themselves are running fine, but after the upgrade is when we have a problem. With the update to 1.4, we had a head crash. They told us, 'This is a known issue. Please upgrade to 2.' We upgraded to 2 and, one week later they told us, 'Yeah, there are some issues in 2.0.0. You can lose data. Please upgrade to 2.0.1.' Overall, they need to make the system stable."
"I do not like having to use VPLEX for synchronous replication, as opposed to having the store software built-in."
"The NAS part is very poor. It's very basic. Even Dell EMC has said that to us. We are waiting for version 3 of PowerStore for that. This must be improved and it is in the roadmap."
"It's also only supported with a limited amount of switches."
"We are looking for the Dell PowerStore to become more mature to maximize our use cases."
"Could be improved by including a synchronizing feature for the file systems."
"More demonstration and training options are needed."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 20 reviews while Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 20 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while Dell PowerStore is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "CloudIQ ensures that all our arrays are properly communicating so we can see performance and storage capacities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell PowerStore writes "Saves us power and floor space, and we can quickly assign new data stores for our developers' VMs". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray, IBM FlashSystem, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series, whereas Dell PowerStore is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray, IBM FlashSystem, HPE Nimble Storage and NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS). See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell PowerStore report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors, best All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors, and best NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.
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