We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and Dell XtremIO based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage Arrays solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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."
"You can use PowerMax for all workloads and consolidation. We have used it to scale thousands of VMs."
"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."
"The uptime is the most valuable feature."
"Based on our experience with VMAX, there isn't any hardware failure or something like that in PowerMax. Performance-wise also, everything is fine. We haven't faced any performance issues or any hardware failure. Its performance is great as compared to VMAX. Its I/O per second rate is higher than the old model."
"Technical support has been excellent."
"We are most interested in cloud utilization."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Dell EMC XtremIO is the data protection (DP) group, it is one of the most advanced features in these types of arrays. The dedupe and compression that this array provides both do a superb job."
"A valuable feature of XtremIO is that, in terms of administration, it's simple and manageable."
"XtremIO is very stable."
"The Metro clustering and solid-state performance, are the most valuable features of this solution."
"The performance is good, which is important."
"Dell XtremIO is good for databases and huge workloads."
"Xtrem10's features are more simple to implement. The integration and interface are also good."
"Some of the management features could be simplified and that's probably the main thing they need to address."
"We brought up this question to the implementation engineer. We were comparing use cases where a customer is using RecoverPoint, then goes to PowerMax. In our previous setup with XtremIO, we were using RecpverPoint and keeping snapshots for 30 days, every few seconds. With PowerMax, I requested this for every 15 minutes, keeping it for a week. The engineer's answer was, "There will be too many snapshots. It might slow down the system." This is specifically for the use cases where there is RecoverPoint. While PowerMax works with RecoverPoint, and you can use it, there should be some way where you can have even more snapshots and not to worry about performance and system cache."
"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."
"Firmware updates are a bit painful because you have to involve their support, as opposed to having the ability to do it yourself."
"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."
"It's a relatively new product, but for the next release I would like to see higher bandwidth on the front-end adapters. This would allow even greater scalability for critical workloads and consolidation for non-critical workloads. The hosts may not require that level of I/O performance today. However, it allows us to scale physical non-cloud environments without large investment."
"We would like more documentation, a guide to the features of the PowerMax."
"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."
"If you are looking at flash storage solutions, XtremIO doesn't offer any unique features. Most of my customers are migrating their workload from XtremIO to other formats because of this."
"Dell's technical support could be better."
"XtremIO is coming to its end of life."
"Scalability is something that can be improved because there is an issue when it comes to mixing versions."
"I would like to see the ease of deployment and built-in Metro clustering."
"In the next release, the solution could have better integration and if we can host assets on the cloud, such as NetApp has the NetApp volumes, which we can host on the cloud directly called NetApp CVO (cloud volume ONTAP). Dell EMC should come up with something purely on the cloud rather than manage services."
"XtremIO needs to be lower priced. It also needs better endpoints and scalability."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 20 reviews while Dell XtremIO is ranked 18th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 7 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while Dell XtremIO is rated 7.2. 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 XtremIO writes "Useful data protection group, effective compression, and stable". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray, IBM FlashSystem and HPE Primera, whereas Dell XtremIO is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell Unity XT, NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) and INFINIDAT InfiniBox. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell XtremIO report.
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