We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and Huawei OceanStor 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 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."
"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."
"The compression and deduplication are always on. We get more than 4:1 capacity savings using them. The efficiency benefits from compression and deduplication are through a specialized hardware module within the storage itself, and that means there is no overhead to the compression and dedupe."
"You can use PowerMax for all workloads and consolidation. We have used it to scale thousands of VMs."
"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."
"There is no management overhead involved in optimizing performance. It does it so well on its own. We don't have to manage much at all. It really is like a set it and forget it solution. My storage engineers love the system. It is a lot less work than our previous systems, which weren't bad by any means. There is not nearly as much management as before. So, we are saving dozens of hours per month for our storage team, and that is a real cost in our business."
"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."
"The SRDF site-to-site replication for the volumes is the most important feature for us. That enables us to do site recovery and replication for our VMware infrastructure."
"This is a stable storage system."
"The most valuable feature of Huawei OceanStor is the hybrid applications."
"The pricing is very reasonable."
"OceanStor is cheaper than Dell EMC, and its management interface is quite simple."
"Huawei OceanStor is stable."
"The setup and the price are the most valuable and not the features related."
"It is easy to use, deploy, communicate and manage this solution."
"The support is excellent."
"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."
"They can make the GUI better, especially for the ones that come out of the box. We did encounter a bit of difficulty in setting up the storage. We had to deploy Solutions Enabler on a Linux machine to be able to fully interact with the storage. They need to upgrade the web interface for the management of the storage that comes out of the box. The management interface for NFS is also a bit old and not very intuitive."
"If the solution had more power-saving capabilities, it would be quite nice."
"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."
"Firmware updates are a bit painful because you have to involve their support, as opposed to having the ability to do it yourself."
"I think management is where PowerMax is weakest. We're still managing it like we managed EMC arrays in the early 2000s. There's a slicker, fancier GUI that does more things, but at the end of the day, you still have to dig into the command line and issue a lot of the same commands that we still were using almost 20 years ago."
"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."
"We did experience a little latency with this solution."
"In the future release, Huawei OceanStor should improve on what they already have. It is a good solution."
"I would like to see more iterations and direct integration with other solutions."
"The security could be a bit more robust."
"The solution could improve by having better integration."
"CFS integration is one area where OceanStor has some room for improvement. The CFS on OceanStor is dedicated, so it's not integrated with the existing active directory domain."
"Technical support could be more helpful."
"I would like to see the next generation all-flash, which could be combined."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 20 reviews while Huawei OceanStor is ranked 16th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 8 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while Huawei OceanStor 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 Huawei OceanStor writes "Its management interface it's quite simple". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray, IBM FlashSystem and Huawei OceanStor Dorado, whereas Huawei OceanStor is most compared with Huawei OceanStor Dorado, NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS), Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray and Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Huawei OceanStor report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.
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