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.
"I use all the features of this solution and I find them to be easy to use and functional, such as the compression and capacity to expand."
"It upgrades in place which means we'll be using it well into the future."
"We put a fair amount of stress on it because we run sequel workloads and we run web applications where the same web files are hit over and over. We have had almost zero stability issues with that SAN, that has been really great for us."
"The predictive performance analytics is a very good feature, as our system is performing better than before."
"The console is simple to use. It has good performance. It is easy to install, understand, and manage, with a good ratio of deduplication and compression. It is doing its job."
"The simplicity of it. The performance is good, but the simplicity is the best thing. Storage management is quite complex, but Pure Storage is easy to manage."
"We are very happy with the data deduplication and compression ratio that we have on the platform."
"It is always out of the box, and ready to use."
"It is very stable. We expect superior performance and reliability from this particular storage system."
"Dell PowerMax NVMe has good scalability and performance."
"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."
"It allows us to protect our data using different data centers and replicate bi-directionally between our two main data centers."
"The PowerMax software and CloudIQ let us get an inside view of our compression and compaction, as well as our usage of the storage."
"The high availability that other systems don't have. In other systems, there is an owner in the storage processes. But for PowerMAX, there is no owner. All the process storage is passed to all nodes without ownership. So, there is no response feature in the storage in PowerMax. In the other systems, there is a response, which is a very nice feature. No systems have such a feature."
"The stability is great. It is five nines."
"The optimization of the cache memory of each engine and the use of persistent memory."
"Dell PowerStore is an easy and fast tool to work through our company's data."
"The deduplication functionality provided by the solution is fairly good. The speed offered by the product is enough for our organization."
"It provides a big benefit when upgrading a new VMware environment. For example, in a big environment with 10 to 30 ESXs, you can take everything and put that into PowerStore. So, it is cost-effective, which is very important and has been massive for us. You reduce almost 80% from the hardware and work directly from PowerStore. Building hardware, especially in a big VMware environment, is a big issue for my organization."
"Dell EMC PowerStore is scalable."
"The administration tools take advantage of machine learning and make recommendations to the admins, and that makes the administration easier."
"Has a great mapping feature."
"It has its own file formatting protocol, which saves a lot of space."
"There is no complicated configuration for queries and calls. You just create a model and go."
"Areas for improvement would be the financial operations. In the next release, I would like to see a NAS protocol included."
"As partners, we should have the option to download the software, rather than have to go back through Pure to obtain it."
"We would like to see more development on their Copy Automation Tool (CAT) for Oracle, as well as better integration for our customers running Oracle VM."
"CIFS and SMB Shares cannot be mounted directly."
"Automation could be simplified."
"The price could be better."
"It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays."
"It's not so scalable. It's got moderate scaling capabilities right now. The clustering technology needs a bit of work, they need to improve that."
"The price cap of Dell PowerMax NVMe is very high."
"We have issues that we don't know about, which Dell EMC fixes."
"The initial setup was a little bit complicated."
"The initial setup could be easier."
"Support of the product can be slow and an administrative challenge: planning, scheduling, and overseeing data center access for a Dell EMC rep. One improvement could be to enable a self-maintenance option. The requirements that we go through to get Dell EMC onsite to replace failed drives, power supplies, and other small redundant parts can be unnecessarily complex. If simplified, they could send us the parts, then we could replace them much faster, more easily, and truly within the SLA parameters."
"I would like them to continue improving the management tools and continue moving towards a RESTful API versus CLI."
"PowerMax's software is highly stable, but we faced two hardware issues in one year. We had a failure of the storage director module, and the physical disk failed on another occasion. Dell EMC should improve its hardware quality."
"I hear from people on my team that they would like improved reporting. While there are some decent tools for doing reporting, they would like to see a lot more built-in functionality. This way when they are logged into the interface everyday doing basic management tasks, they could also see some statistics on what is their storage pool usage and will be their projected usage with their current data growth. They want to be able to see more detailed stats on how they are using the system and have forecasting."
"The price is on the higher side."
"When you create a case on Dell's support website, you don't always get someone who is experienced in the kind of systems you need help with...making it an area where Dell's support team needs to make improvements."
"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."
"There is no Synchronize replication feature on the storage."
"Could use some additional automation."
"Reporting is an area that could be improved. It's very simplistic sometimes, and some of the very technical guys on my team want to see more of the details and be able to massage the report a little bit better."
"I have not seen anything specific. The only thing I can think of that needs improvement is the price."
"You cannot delegate permissions."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage with 46 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while Dell PowerStore is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "Simplified storage provisioning for us, enabling us to assign any volumes in two to three minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell PowerStore writes "It has a very strong NAS that can support a lot of big, heavy environments". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor Dorado, Dell XtremIO and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, whereas Dell PowerStore is most compared with Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage and Huawei OceanStor Dorado. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell PowerStore report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors and best NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.
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