Dell PowerMax Reviews

We run a Medicaid data warehouse on a massive enterprise Oracle shop. Therefore, we have a lot of Oracle on PowerMax. We run a big analytics for the New York State Department of Health using Oracle Big Data.

Because of the Big Data analytics, we require immense IOPS, which the PowerMax handles quite well. Our sole purpose in life is to provide endpoint analytics.

We consolidate a lot of various disparate storage arrays into one enterprise solution.

We primarily use Unisphere for managing and monitoring.

Enterprise Cloud Storage is the most valuable feature, along with the data services which come with it, plus the deduplication and compression.

We are very interested in NVMe over Fibre Channel, which I understand is on the horizon. We would like to see that come to fruition in its ability to traverse the Fibre Channel SAN.

The solution is rock solid.

It is a solid platform.

The technical support is very good. We have the ESRS call-home function, and it's been rock solid since day one.

I have always used Symmetrix and VMAX. Then, it was just a natural progression into the PowerMax solution.

The initial setup is very straightforward. We had a team come in and get everything setup. It was handled very professionally. We had a project manager assigned to the account. It was very smooth.

We used the PowerPath solution for the migration, which allowed us to seamlessly migrate from one storage array to another.

We have impeccable uptime in our data center with very strict SLAs. We have had zero downtime.

We run a big Oracle shop, as well as VMware, which is very high performing. It exceeds our needs.

Our costs for the product are three million.

We looked at Hitachi and NetApp, but it really boiled down to our relationship with Dell EMC and the portfolio of the product.

This solution’s architecture influenced our buying decision because of all the data services incorporated, especially the LAN technology. This allows us to replicate from one site to another.

Our SLAs are extremely tight, and we've had zero issues. I would highly advise going with the PowerMax.

Typically, when we are doing PowerMax, it is for applications that we need maximum performance, but also maximum reliability. So, Dell EMC has a lot of other products that can do very high performance, but there are not a lot of other products in the market that can reach the reliability and the availability that PowerMax can.

The use case goes back to when you need that ultimate uptime, where you can't ever have an application go down. We see this a lot in healthcare applications. We also see a lot of miscellaneous other database applications that need to be up all the time for running web services and service providers.

We definitely have situations where we have multiple siloed storage arrays, especially like higher-end VMXs or mid-range storage. So, we have four or five arrays that we can go and take those and put it on one high performing PowerMax, then deliver it to scale and grow.

Uptime by far is the most important thing, and also the replication ability (SRDF). Most of the customers who need this type of availability also want the protection of multiple data centers, and it is able to easily switchover workloads to their other data centers.

I am looking for ease in usability going forward. PowerMax is super powerful, but because it's been around for so long, there is some complexity in configuration and getting the right SLAs set up that you want. I feel like this could be simplified. I would like to see some improvements from there to avoid having to hunt and peck through an interface to do something that I feel should be relatively simple.

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 great thing about PowerMax is from a reliability standpoint, everything is redundant. Uptime is six or seven nines.

PowerMax can grow quite a bit. The design with how storage controllers and engines scale out in regards to storage lets you scale your performance pretty linearly, though not as high as some things, like some of the hyper-converged solutions, but it's pretty nice.

The tech support has been great. One of the good things with PowerMax, as much as the new branding and everything has come about since Dell and EMC merged, but the actual product history goes back really far. So, there is a ton of expertise from a support perspective within the organization. 

There is a lot of knowledge out in the community as well, without having to directly engage Dell EMC support. A lot of times you can find community assistance for common problems and configuration needs.

We haven't done very many migrations from VMAX3-AFA to PowerMax, just because they're close enough in numbers and performance. However, we are seeing a lot of movement from earlier generation VMAX to PowerMax. I even have some customers who are still on the DMX era that were moving over to PowerMax. That is going to be a big difference for them.

Our PowerMax solutions have met all of their requirements that we had when we threw workloads at them.

There are very few other products on the market which I've run into that can give performance at this level of availability.

We do a lot of managed services. Where we get a lot of use from the data is we gather a ton of statistical data about our customers: How they're growing and using their own data. Therefore, we have a lot of metadata about our own customers that we have to sort through. From a consolidation standpoint, it's nice to have all of that in one place. It comes back to performance. We have to be able to pull from a lot of different customers, and do it simultaneously.

I find that PowerMax is improving performance for workloads, like VMware, SAP, Oracle, and SQL Databases.

Our primary use case is blocked storage.

The smaller footprint of the device has been really nice. We have gone from eight bays to one bay. Having one floor tile in our data center has been pretty awesome. A lot less power and HVAC cooling is being consumed.

We have all of our large Oracle databases along with a lot of order processing for our warehouses, which ship out clothing, currently on PowerMax.

The data reduction has been very impressive.

There are definitely some improvements that can be made to the CloudIQ.

CLI and Solutions Enabler need improvement. While it's been around forever and it's proven that it works, it can be cumbersome to operate and train some storage admins on it. Also, if you haven't been using it for a while, it can be complicated.

The stability is extremely simple. 

From a Unisphere standpoint, it has gotten a lot easier to manage. I can train some of our admins quickly on how to utilize and provision storage. The complicated aspects of Solution Enabler are still there for guys, like myself, who like to utilize the old school way.

It's as scalable as any other legacy array.

We were previously using VMAX, and it was the end of their lifecycle.

Our performance requirements were that it was an all-flash array multicontroller, and it has been great. We always go for multicontroller architecture. 

The initial setup was very easy. We set it on the floor and powered it in and up. The BIN file was already written, so we didn't have to wait on our local customer engineers to write the BIN for us. 

We have upgraded and already added disks, which was pretty easy to do. The BIN files were quickly modified to accept those disks, which is pretty awesome.

I deployed it myself.

We used post-base migration, which was pretty straightforward, which is not too complicated. I wanted to use the new SRDF-integrated migration method which is integrated with PowerMax, but we didn't get a chance to use it.

It beats the Unities and XtremIOs. Compared with those products, it's been good.

We're integrated pretty tightly with Dell EMC, so there was really no exploring outside of Dell EMC.

The new version of the Unisphere Solution Enabler is really good.

It is a very straightforward workhorse of our block storage portfolio. It is one of the best block storage arrays out there. It is a very solid machine that has been around. 

Our primary use case is data storage, compression, encryption, all in one device. So we need all those things.

We're consolidating two to three arrays down to one which means that our data center footprint has decreased by like 90%. So we're saving 90% of our space, and it also is much better on power and everything else in our data center. And on top of that, the performance is much, much better than our older arrays.

The most valuable feature is the performance and compression. The most useful tool is CloudIQ.

Stability of the new PowerMax from what I've found is a lot better than the older version of the VMAX or EMC Dell array. That's one of the reasons why we've purchased more of them going forward. I think it's going to be a pretty prevalent storage array in our environment.

All of our applications are running on mission-critical applications. We've always been a Dell EMC shop, we've always run all our critical applications on there, and this is just a better and more improved product, so we're just continuing with the cycle that we've had for 20 years.

It's very scalable. It can grow much larger than I probably would utilize, but I don't like to put all my data in one box. The scalability is enormous in the PowerMax.

We haven't had to use tech support customer service. We've had a couple of little things come up, but for the most part, they've been pretty stable, so we haven't had any issues.

We don't have a vast I/O performance database or application suite, so the old arrays were taking care of that part. But we see the milliseconds to microseconds response time in the new variety.

We have purchased some professional services to do NDM migrations. We haven't done any yet, but we will be doing that in the next quarter. From everything I've seen and looked at, and I'm going to take a few more sessions on it. I think it's going to be much easier to migrate data from the old to the new.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution based on a compression standpoint and the overall cost by reducing our footprint and fitting more data into a single file, it just made sense, and it's been working great for us so far. And MVME had a considerable influence on my decision to go with PowerMax as well the ability to encrypt and compress at the same time.

The initial setup was straightforward. From a hardware stand-up getting ready to go perspective, it was very straightforward. Our internal processes held it up. It wasn't anything that Dell held it up with. It went well.

The new Unisphere for PowerMax is beneficial in collecting that data although I have not started using the app IQ or, I don't remember what it's called. The alerting, they gather all the data, and I can use my phone and look at an app, and it can tell me right there that my environment is good that day or whatever and it sends me alerts. So, I haven't started using that, but I plan to when I get back, so it just makes the management a little bit easier looking at the whole environment.

No, we didn't implement through a vendor we go direct through Dell. And the experience was excellent. We have a great relationship with our Dell sales team as well as their support and customer service organization.

Our ROI on this is much higher than it was previously with the arrays that we had. Being able to consolidate three arrays into a single footprint has made it much easier and cost-efficient.

From a TCO perspective, we saved a lot of money by getting the over rate consolidating two into one or three into one, so we saved a ton of money on the total cost of ownership over the next four years.

We have multiple solutions, but we're mostly an HDS F-Series company as well as Dell EMC.

From what I've heard people seem to think that the cost of the array is prohibitive. And I would tell them to look at the ROI and do their cost analysis on it because from what I've found, cost per gigabyte is much lower than what it was for previous arrays as well as the overall cost of ownership in the reduction of the footprint in the data center is enormous.

On a scale from one to ten, one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate the product an eight or nine. So far it's been great.