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Dell PowerMax pros and cons

Vendor: Dell Technologies

4.4 out of 5

85 reviews
97% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Dell PowerMax offers reliability with minimal downtime and advanced data protection. It excels in reducing physical footprint, cooling costs, and enhances data center efficiency. Users enjoy high IOPS with reduced latency and enhanced storage management via CloudIQ. Replication delivers cost savings, though deduplication needs improvement. Initial setup is complex and post-merger support can be slow. NVMe should expand and pricing requires adjustments compared to competitors.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Dell PowerMax is valued for its superior performance and reliability, offering unparalleled uptime and stability.

Its deduplication and compression capabilities provide significant cost savings and efficiency.

Replication features including SRDF ensure high availability and disaster recovery preparedness.

NVMe technology enhances input/output performance, crucial for demanding applications.

Dell PowerMax excels in scalability and flexibility, catering to varied enterprise storage needs.

CONS

Deduplication and compression need improvement, with a goal of achieving higher ratios.

Initial setup complexity poses a challenge, even for experienced personnel.

NVMe should be fully end-to-end, with support for NVMe over Fabrics.

Technical support and SLA compliance require enhancements, particularly in response times.

Pricing and cost remain significant concerns, necessitating customization options for enterprises.

Dell PowerMax Pros review quotes

VV

Senior Solutions Architect at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

May 8, 2019

Key features include performance, replication time, and dedup and compression.

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Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

May 8, 2019

The number one most valuable feature is reliability. I want to go home at the end of the day and come in the next day knowing it works, especially since we have storage offshore.

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RL

Robert Lopez-Portillo

Director of Enterprise Infrastructure at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

May 8, 2019

It is a true, stable product.

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Member of Technical Staff at Cisco Systems, Inc.

May 8, 2019

It significantly simplifies storage.

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Enterprise Infrastructure Services, Storage Service Manager at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

May 8, 2019

The compression and deduplication are the most valuable features because of the cost savings.

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Storage Architect at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

May 8, 2019

For the migration process from the older VMAX arrays to PowerMax, we VMotioned everything. It was easy.

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ER

Elias Riveros Malky

Regional Alliance Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Oct 8, 2019

It is efficient and very simple for our administrators to use.

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System Engineer at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees

May 8, 2019

It has reduced our footprint in different physical locations.

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JB

Senior Storage Engineer at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

May 8, 2019

The PowerMax software and CloudIQ let us get an inside view of our compression and compaction, as well as our usage of the storage.

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reviewer1087239

Manager Cloud Operations at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

May 29, 2019

It has dramatically cut down the footprint in our data center and reduced the amount of raw disk capacity that we needed to purchase.

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Dell PowerMax Cons review quotes

VV

Senior Solutions Architect at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

May 8, 2019

I'd like to see the dedup and compression improve. Two to one is not very good. We should be getting something like three, four, or five to one.

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Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

May 8, 2019

I would like to see the rack change. They have defaulted to the standard rack, so our fiber cables are crowded when we shut our back door.

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RL

Robert Lopez-Portillo

Director of Enterprise Infrastructure at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

May 8, 2019

The initial setup was a little bit complicated.

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Free Report: Dell PowerMax Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Dell PowerMax. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2025.

879,259 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Member of Technical Staff at Cisco Systems, Inc.

May 8, 2019

There is some room to grow, especially with some of the installation quirks.

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Enterprise Infrastructure Services, Storage Service Manager at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

May 8, 2019

Since the merging of EMC and Dell into Dell Technologies, there has been a hurdle that they've had to overcome, and they're not over it yet. It takes two to three times longer for things to get fixed than it did when they were separate companies. That is something that has to be fixed.

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Storage Architect at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

May 8, 2019

The initial setup was complex, and we had experienced people working on it.

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ER

Elias Riveros Malky

Regional Alliance Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Oct 8, 2019

I would like NVMe to be end-to-end in the next release. Right now, it is not end-to-end.

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System Engineer at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees

May 8, 2019

Setting up PowerMax with VMAX is always complex.

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JB

Senior Storage Engineer at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

May 8, 2019

The initial setup was complex. ESRS is a very complex solution to put into our environment, because it requires external access to the Internet. That's a very tough thing for us to do, because we are a PCI and PII company. We store a lot of data for people which is personal. Therefore, going out to the Internet is not our preferred path.

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reviewer1087239

Manager Cloud Operations at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

May 29, 2019

The REST API needs improvement. We are a very big automation company, and this would be big for us.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 82)

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