Dell PowerMax Reviews

My role involves being a system integrator, providing optimal solutions to various sectors like public, airlines, banking, and commercial financial, all within Dell's technology portfolio.

Investing in Dell PowerMax has impacted our operational costs positively, although the actual savings depend on factors like the experience of the engineers implementing the product and the support level chosen.

Dell PowerMax NVMe has been a significant enhancement for data handling in my industry. Its improved security features and data calculation capabilities make it a valuable solution for our customers. The most critical feature of Dell PowerMax NVMe for performance enhancement is its strong network support and integration with other vendors, along with its efficient use of hardware components like CPU and memory. Data reduction technologies in PowerMax have been highly beneficial for our company, allowing us to optimize storage and reduce costs by consolidating files

The one area for improvement in Dell PowerMax NVMe would be to align the features of the on-premises version with those available in the cloud, as this would provide added value and flexibility.

I have been using Dell PowerMax NVMe for the past eight years.

I would rate the stability nine out of ten.

I would rate the scalability ten out of ten.

The support has been great.

Positive

The decisive factor in choosing Dell PowerMax over other storage solutions was its ease of use and suitability for enterprise-level data management. It aligns well with the needs of big organizations and offers robust features for AI-driven projects and machine learning initiatives.

Setting up and configuring Dell PowerMax NVMe typically takes about three days. However, if there's migration involved from existing systems to the new PowerMax, that process can extend to around one to two weeks, depending on the complexity and scale of the migration project.

Deploying PowerMax has been straightforward and flexible, especially in integrating with other technologies and vendors.

The pricing might be a bit high for small organizations, so it's more suitable for larger enterprises.

I highly recommend Dell PowerMax NVMe for enterprise-level data management.  My experience with Dell PowerMax NVMe has been excellent, especially compared to other vendors I've worked with in the past, such as VMware, Cisco, and Oracle.

Overall, I rate the product a ten out of ten. 

I would like to see more security features and improvements in the platform's ease of management. Sometimes, it isn't straightforward to understand, especially for new users.For example, if there are power issues and the system needs to be shut down, we need to connect with the support team and go through several steps. There are complications to powering down the system.

The backup features need enhancement. 

I have been using Dell PowerMax NVMe for three years.

The product is stable. I rate the stability as nine.

In our organization, three admin executives use the product. Regarding customers, there are many users since we provide municipal services. 

We haven't had much experience with technical support, but we did have some upgrades to the core system and firmware. The support team was very cooperative and responsive. We had some issues with timing, but the team was adaptable and worked to schedule maintenance events to suit our time zone.

We didn't face many challenges during setup, but the implementation team resolved some initial issues. We received some knowledge transfer, basic training, and orientation regarding the technology. Overall, the solution was successfully implemented.

Dell's team implemented the system; some products were configured and installed in our environment. We also received knowledge transfers from them. 

We used to use an HP storage solution. After we switched to PowerMax, performance significantly improved across the whole environment. About 95% of our services run on virtualized servers with Dell containers. With SAN storage, like PowerScan or Microsoft products, we saw multiple performance upgrades on the virtual machine side.

The lead application is the most valuable feature. The reduction of consumed space was significantly higher than with the previous solution.

NVMe technology gave the database servers a huge performance boost compared to the previous environment. Database admins were very happy with the improvement.

I rate it an eight. 

Our database and client records are stored in EMC. 

I am impressed with the tool's reliability since we see a few hardware failures with it. Also, the solution's replication configuration is good. 

The tool needs to improve its performance. Today's applications are demanding a response rate of one millisecond or below. The product should also look into AI integration. 

I have been using the product for four years. 

I would rate the product's stability a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the product's scalability a seven-point five out of ten. We have encountered controller failures while scaling the solution up. Controller failures occur when we expand to 85-90 percent since they are unable to handle the load. My company has around 40,000-50,000 users for the product. We manage about 260 petabytes of storage with a team of 25 people managing it. 

We have platinum support from Dell. We didn't face many issues with the support team. They take some time to go back to the engineering and R&D and come up with a solution. That's the only delay I have seen with them. 

The product's setup is simple since EMC is in the industry for many years. The vendor is always with us during the setup process. They do the major activities of setting it up. Our engineering folks take care of the rest of the parts. 

Dell is expensive compared to other products and I would rate its pricing a four out of ten. 

I would rate the solution a seven out of ten after considering factors like cost, stability and performance. 

We are using the PowerMax for our core banking solution, ERP, and our payment systems, as well as middleware, ATM, and the most critical banking systems.

The main improvement for us is that we have seen up to 12x performance improvements after moving from earlier, mid-range Dell EMC storage to PowerMax. Some of our reports, which were long-running, are now completed in a few minutes. Something that would take two hours is completed in 15 minutes and that has improved productivity. 

We also used to get timeouts from our storage, but now, after migrating to the PowerMax, there are no timeouts because the latencies are in microseconds, compared to the milliseconds of our old solution.

Our bandwidth requirements have been reduced because of the compression and the dedupe that we are getting with the built-in SRDF. It is bandwidth-optimized. And the best part is the reverse replication. Suppose you activate your DR. When you have to come back to the main array, only the changes are synced. That is unlike many other products. Here, only the changed tracks need to be updated, making the reverse replication very fast.

Also, by enabling the compression and deduplication, we get a very good level of compression and dedupe, of 4:1, which means if you have 40 terabytes, you only need to buy 10 terabytes. There are cost savings there. And by default, thin provisioning is in place, which also gives you at least a 40 percent reduction. And because of the bandwidth optimization, the link required for the DR replication is also reduced, meaning you are saving on the bandwidth costs. We have easily saved 50 percent.

Overall, you are getting very high-performing and reliable storage.

The most important feature is the performance, because we have four directors, all of them Active-Active. (PowerMax directors support multiple functions including front-end I/O modules).

It is highly available because it has multiple controllers. All of them are unlike some of the traditional storage arrays, where you assign certain LUNs to certain controllers. Here, everything is Active-Active. You don't assign a particular disk or LUN to a particular controller. All the controllers are servicing all of the LUNs. So from an availability point of view, we don't even know if a particular controller or director has failed. And all the spare part replacement, including controllers, can be done online while systems are working. We don't need to do it during off-peak hours. We can do so during normal working hours because the performance you get from the service, due to the other controllers, is enough to take care of any failed components.

There is also a Call Home facility configured, so the system can send out alerts to the Dell EMC support team. They can dispatch spare parts based on these alerts, so it is a fully integrated system.

Another valuable feature is the DR replication technology, which is based on the Dell EMC SRDF solution. It provides a very good level of near-real-time replication. It supports synchronous as well as asynchronous. When it comes to activating the DR, it is very easy.

Then there are the compression and deduplication which 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.

In addition, the solution supports IBM Power Systems, Solaris, VMware—almost everything is supported. That's important to us because we are using multiple hardware flavors including IBM Power Systems, SPARC machines, and HPE Onyx. All of these are different classes of machines, and we have different operating systems. We have Linux and Windows on physical and we have it running on VMware. Oracle virtualization is also supported. It supports a wide combination of specialized technologies and hardware.

And the built-in QoS capabilities enable you to drill down to any particular QoS levels and define the type of performance you'll have: diamond, platinum, or gold. The result is that different performance levels can be set for individual disks. Using the QoS functionality, we can vary the performance or prioritize it based on the criticality of the performance needs.

Another nice feature is the CloudIQ app. You can even monitor things using the app on your mobile. Every five minutes, the performance statistics and the system diagnosis data are sent to the cloud and you can access them sitting anywhere. You get these statistics at your fingertips.

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. However, even though NAS is provided as a feature, I don't think many customers will be using a PowerMax as a NAS because NAS is normally meant for file servers or some kind of archival storage. 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.

I have been using Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe for one and a half years.

We don't have any issues with the stability. It is rock-solid.

It is scalable. We recently did an upgrade. You can keep on adding disks within a shelf or even attach additional shelves.

Also, the NVMe scale-out capabilities are very important. Although we are using SSD, all-flash drives, the backend is NVMe. It is quite fast. The IOPS requirements will never reach the max. It is also future-looking storage because it supports storage class memory (SCM). That is where you can utilize the full benefits of the storage solution. Currently, we are not using SCM because it is quite expensive. At the moment, we don't need it, but the storage backend is already NVMe and the controllers are connected using InfiniBand for very high bandwidth.

It's also very easy to add or expand disks in very few steps. Everything can be done online, even the firmware updates, meaning that you don't need any downtime. It's all seamless.

Dell EMC's technical support is excellent. The backend support is very strong, just like the implementation team. They have a dedicated team for PowerMax, like they used to have for VMAX or Symmetrix.

Positive

We were using a Dell EMC mid-range storage solution before. 

It is a complex system, but the engineers and architects behind the implementation are well-versed. They're very technically competent. They're on top of the prerequisites, and there are a lot of those. For a first-timer customer the setup will be difficult, but they will help you. The implementation team is very strong. They're very clear on what needs to be done and how to do it. For us, it was a very clean implementation. We didn't have any hiccups.

It is not a one-day job. It is not a very easy installation. It requires the experts. But Dell EMC makes sure that you get a certified, real expert to do the implementation. It doesn't get done through a partner. Dell EMC themselves send their engineers for the installation.

It is high-end storage and it is a bit expensive, but it is doing what it is meant for: running business-critical applications or latency-sensitive applications like ATM payments, and those kinds of core banking systems.

There may be customers who don't utilize all the compression features of competing products, thinking they may slow the system down. I know certain customers who have bought competing products, but they keep the compression and deduplication disabled by default, or even the encryption, because they create additional overhead. That means that with those solutions, you need to have more capacity than what you need with PowerMax. The guarantee with PowerMax is that there is no compromise on performance, even if you enable compression, deduplication, and encryption.

This particular model of storage is considered Tier 0 storage for the most mission-critical applications, the applications that require a very high level of reliability and low latency. It's also for the types of applications that require real-time replication across different sites. The solution is suitable for mission-critical applications and not for archiving, because it is not cheap.

We currently use it to power our Oracle databases, especially for our core banking solution. We also use it for storage. We provisioned the storage from PowerMax for various VMs that we created for the applications in that environment.

We use the NVMe SCM storage tier feature, and that's how we're able to do the service level capability (SLA). We have storage class memory as a part of our deployment, and we have about 10% of our storage sizing allocated to storage class memory. With that, we are able to create different service levels for the disk groups or loans provisioned from this storage.

It most definitely helps in improving storage-related performance in our environment. The way our core banking solution works is that we have what we call ODS blocks. So, for leveraging that SLA, we were able to implement some kind of priority for those ODS blocks. Oracle had said that this is something for which their Exadata has a special way of doing, but based on my own assessment, we are able to achieve relatively similar levels of performance by using PowerMax.

Before we deployed this solution, we used to struggle with processing about 100,000 transactions in 10 minutes. We are now able to process about 350,000 or more transactions. These are conservative figures. We did hit much more than that, but conservatively, we are able to see about 300% performance improvement as compared to the SSD storage that we had previously from IBM. We have metrics to show that. The performance is different, and it is better than what we were used to.

We are in our ideal environment in which the storage double acts as our UAT and our test environment. So, we've seen remarkable deduplication in that environment because we are able to expand the footprint much more than what we are able to do in production. The production environment is a bit more controlled, but in our DR UAT environment, we are able to stretch those capabilities. The metrics that we see and the number of environments that we're able to create is quite remarkable.

It provides NVMe scale-out capabilities, which is pretty awesome. We currently have a plan to scale up. We started off with about 100TB. Based on the performance that we've seen, we're consolidating more workloads on the storage. We need to scale up a bit, and we find it very valuable to be able to do that. The ability to scale out and scale up marginally depending on what you want is quite valuable to us.

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.

We also find the compression technology of PowerMax very valuable. In some instances, depending on the kind of data that we have, we can attest to compression ratios of about 9:1, which is very valuable.

The NFS feature is also quite useful for us in our environment. We're able to deploy the NFS capabilities to resolve some of the use cases that we identify.

Its efficiency and performance have been remarkable. It could be because we've not been able to break the limits of what we have. The PowerMax 2000 that we have can do about a million IOPS or so if my memory serves me well. Our use case at the moment isn't stretching as much as that. So, for us, performance has been remarkable in terms of meeting expectations. It has been much better as compared to what we used to have. We see responses to application requests, especially database request queries, in microseconds, as advertised, and even that in some ways gave us a bit of a challenge because the applications couldn't cope with the speed of the response of the storage. So, it was new learning for the providers of the application. The performance has been remarkable. We've seen data within microseconds as advertised. In terms of the IOPS, we've not been able to fully exact the limits, but so far, so good. We are pretty comfortable with that. As we grow organically, we will see more performance and we will be able to drive, but in terms of compression and deduplication, we have received remarkable value.

In the last one year, we haven't had any issues with the availability of the platform, the storage, and the extension of our data. The encryption or data address feature is also there. Even though we've not fully utilized that, it's comforting to know that capability is available for us to explore. We've not had any storage level outage in terms of the data not being accessible within the agreed service. So far, so good.

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.

We deployed PowerMax for our core banking solution in October last year.

It is pretty stable. We've not had any incidents around this storage in the last one year. I can't recall any major incidents. The storage supports our core banking solution, which is always in use. We have 24/7 banking services, and the solution has been pretty stable.

We are able to scale. There are plans to procure more capacity so that we can consolidate other workloads to this storage.

It was top-notch, and it still is top-notch. They're quite responsive. They have a team of knowledgeable people, and they were quite supportive all through the implementation. They still keep in touch to see how we're faring. I would rate them a nine out of 10.

We were using SSD storage from IBM. We moved because of multiple things. One reason was the cost. Another reason was the SCM offering advertised by Dell, which was coupled with the AppSync feature of this storage that allowed us to create clones of our databases for UAT, development, and test purposes. So, the features that we desired in the environment were:

• Cost and performance
• The ability to have database clones without necessarily increasing the footprint of the storage required.
• The ability to create service levels for the storage or for disk groups created from the storage. It was critical for us because of the consolidated environments in which we wanted to use the storage.

With professional services from them, it was straightforward. The only issue was that some of the management and out-of-the-box capabilities needed a bit of work to make it as easy as possible for system admins to provision clones from the storage. Aside from that, the setup was pretty easy and straightforward.

We did the most part in about two weeks or less. Some of the delays must have been from our end because of a few requirements. We had the production site and the DR site, and it took about two weeks. After the arrival of the infrastructure, we did the entire project in about six weeks. The setup of the storage took about two weeks.

For its maintenance, we have a team of three system administrators who also act as storage admins.

I believe we have seen an ROI. It took us about eight months to see a return on investment. The way I gauge it is that the ROI started coming in when the storage gave us what our previous capability couldn't in terms of:

• The ability to do more transactions
• The ability to see the effects of things like compression and duplication
• The ability to create and extensively use the storage to create multiple environments as desired

All of these pretty much started coming in when our data footprint increased and our transaction volume also increased.

Its price is competitive, but they need to have a different price for West Africa. 

They can do better with the price point to allow us to scale even more. We wanted to migrate our entire storage infrastructure to PowerMax, which would require us to buy more capacity, and from the price point, it didn't attract us.

We reviewed a few other solutions. NetApp was one of them. What made us go with Dell was a combination of the offering that we saw and the price point at which that was being offered to us by Dell. So, the combination of the offering in terms of the storage features and the fact that Dell offered us competitive pricing at that point were the main reasons.

At the time we were choosing this product, they and a few others were the only ones boasting of having a true NVMe experience. At that point, they had also introduced the SCM into the mix that lowered the platinum latency to about less than 0.04 milliseconds. Those were the things that really attracted us to this storage solution.

I would advise others to go for it. It is highly recommended for storage for enterprise-level and mission-critical IT workloads. It has fully met the expectations based on what is available in the market and from its competitors. They can do better with the price point to allow us to scale even more, but in general, the solution meets our expectations because one of our goals was to achieve a fine balance between the performance and the cost, and it seems we've been able to get that with PowerMax.

It has not enabled us to consolidate open systems, mainframe, IBM i, block and file, or virtualized data with cloud-connected storage because we've not had use cases for these. Our use case has mainly been traditional in terms of:

• Having data or raw disk groups allocated to all core databases.
• Using the disk for virtualizing VMs for creating virtual machines. We are allocating storage to a physical host that we virtualize with VMware to be able to create a virtual context. 

In terms of the built-in QoS capabilities for providing workload congestion protection, I would give it a 4.5 out of a five. The 0.5 point is because sometimes we see, even from the dashboard, that the defined SLAs are violated. It is only for brief moments, and it could be because of any reason, but for the most part, the QoS service works. 

We have not used its CloudIQ features. That was one of the things that actually attracted us to it, but we didn't get to deploy it. If we review the notes again and find that we aren't exhausting what's at our disposal, we'll take it up again. Because of remote work and the sheer fact that the platform has been pretty stable without any issues, the administrators are comfortable with what they can get periodically, so they're not really bothered with checking on the mobile or checking the storage so often.

We deployed SRDF but didn't utilize it fully. We use it for some of the use cases that have better tolerance for any latency issues. We also did the setup for MetroDR but didn't utilize it fully. It is because there is a bit of doubt around the infrastructure that we have in our country. So, MetroDR has not affected our storage and network bandwidth requirements because it has not been aggressively used.

I would rate Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe a nine out of 10.

We are using the solution's application and snapshot feature.

The solution should include more AI features to make it smarter.

I have been using Dell PowerMax NVMe for a couple of years.

Dell PowerMax NVMe is a very stable solution.

The solution has limited scalability. Around three users use Dell PowerMax NVMe in our organization.

I rate the solution’s scalability a seven out of ten.

The solution’s technical support is good.

Positive

Operation-wise, the deployment takes 20 minutes. Our process may take longer for approval. It may take a couple of days.

IBM and Hitachi are Dell PowerMax NVMe's competitors. I would recommend the solution to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Our clients are using PowerMax for scaling, for example, for cases with banking details and public records. They're already using it on the enterprise level. Moreover, the clients need to use strong and more expensive batteries to meet all the different tool groups and applications that are running on it. This solution provides flexibility to handle huge amounts of data, even with different sites and branches. 

Some features could be better. I think if we can integrate PowerMax with the public cloud, it would be safer as we can have the service without any data on-premises or in the public or hybrid cloud.

And we can remove all the data from on-premises and the public cloud. This would make migration and data recovery quicker.

There is room for improvement in terms of integration with various service providers for public clouds. It would be beneficial to integrate with AWS, Azure, Microsoft, Oracle Cloud, and other service providers. 

This integration would enable a more comprehensive and open solution, catering to multiple vendors and applications, particularly in Azure cloud. This would enhance the overall customer experience and provide more flexibility.

We are working with the PowerMax 2000 and PowerMax 8000. We have been stable with multiple customers for several years, ranging from two years to more.

It is a very stable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten. 

In terms of percentage, we can give it a nine for its performance. Nine out of ten. Our clients are different businesses with varying infrastructures and different project sizes. 

They fall into the medium budget category and have multiple choices. Some projects are huge, covering different branches or partnerships, including public projects. So we can definitely showcase this product in an enterprise environment.

The customer service and support team is very good. Whenever I open a case with Dell, they are available to assist us at any time. I'm very satisfied with the support team.

Positive

The initial setup is easy. The deployment depends on the infrastructure sizing, the number of clusters, and the amount of data. For example, you need to consider if it is greenfield infrastructure or if there is a migration from the existing infrastructure to the new solution. This calculation is regarding the solution and the infrastructure savings.

The solution has already been decided with the technical team from our side. But there are other infrastructure elements we need to migrate, providing value. It may require some downtime, so it might take multiple days.

This product's solution is already flexible, and we can implement it in a few hours. It's already adaptable for implementation. And already, some of our customers have mentioned the product and its capability to use it.

An implementation engineer, as a technical engineer, will assist with the technical configuration. There are multiple choices. We might need one engineer for each product, depending on the integration. And for the cluster, it's usually multiple engineers. It's a team effort.

Moreover, when it comes to maintenance, if we are already using it, we can raise any new issues and open cases with the vendor's billing team to double-check. For example, if there is any issue with one or two ports, we can utilize this feature.

The pricing depends on the integration and the solution required. It can be handled with the configurator, and it always ensures minimal specifications at the minimum cost to meet customer needs. It's already cost-effective compared to other vendors. So, the price is okay.

I would recommend using the solution. We have implemented it in a price-sensitive environment, especially for small businesses. I recommend this product for its specific use case, which is related to our SQL data, and banking accounting. This product handles this case well. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We currently use PowerMax NVMe for our file server and all our VMs. It is a SAN, so all of our storage or data sits on it. It is just a great storage appliance.

With the SCM memory, it has been set it and forget it. It is being used as a cache drive. There is very little configuration for us to do. We just know that it is working.

PowerMax NVMe's QoS capabilities give us a lot of visibility into taking a look at what could be a potential performance issue. However, because it is so fast, we haven't really noticed any slowdowns from the date of deployment even until today.

It is a very good storage appliance for enterprise-level, mission-critical IT workloads because of its high redundancy, parity drives. It gives us the ability to not worry about our data. Or, if something were to go wrong, e.g., a drive pops, then we have our mission-critical warranty. We get a drive the same day, then get it swapped by the next business day at the latest.

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 cost of the entire solution
• Their dedupe rates
• Ease of use
• Simplicity

Data availability is very high. Data security is also very good. There are a lot of encryption methods available.

We use the solution’s NVMe SCM storage tier feature. There is almost no overhead or management time involved. It was kind of set it and forget it.

The visibility within the storage resource tools or understanding the utilization of the SCM memory have been pain points. We know they are being used, but it is hard to actually see them within the actual GUI.

Firmware updates are a bit painful because you have to involve their support, as opposed to having the ability to do it yourself. This is probably for the best because you don't want something to go sideways while being the only person working on this and not having external support for it.

We have been using the physical appliance for 2.5 years.

It is a very robust, stable machine. We have had no worries whatsoever.

At this time, scalability is not applicable. I understand it is very easy to scale up. You just add on the drive shelf, then connect it in. That is really it. Now, you have all these drives available to you.

It is being used every single minute of every single day. The IOPs, the throughput data, is about 525 megabytes per second. So, it is actively being used at all times of day.

As time goes on, the usage of it will increase. That is just the nature of it being our primary storage array.

The technical support was very good. There have been no real issues. Any questions we have had, they were able to answer and assist with. There have been no problems whatsoever.

Because it is NVMe, it is extremely fast. It is a lot faster than our old SAN. It is hard to compare it to others in the market, only because we have never owned other products within the same generation. We switched to PowerMax NVMe because of aging hardware.

Prior, we were using a regular 7200 RPM disk. As a result, it was extremely slow. The upgrade to NVMe has been much appreciated by the company. Things that used to take four to five hours are now taking 15 minutes, if that.

It was a pretty complex process in the beginning: migrating data, verifying everything is good to go, standing up our volumes, and things of that nature. Once everything got going, it was a lot easier to understand and manage.

Deployment took about two weeks’ time, not including transfer times. With transfer times, it was closer to a month.

We set up our PowerMax, attached the source to VMware, and then migrated all of our VMs off of our old storage array into the new one. Once we verified everything was good, we turned off the old storage array and went from there.

We did it through Dell EMC ProDeploy, which is their professional services for this type of work. Our experience with them was very good. There were a couple of hiccups here and there, but it was more related to what was shipped to us, opposed to an actual hiccup with the implementation process.

We have seen an ROI based on time saved by being able to use a faster storage array versus our really slow, old one.

In terms of price-performance, it beat out other competitors when we were taking a look and comparing it to the market. That was one of the biggest driving points for us.

We did look at HPE Nimble Storage as well as Pure Storage. Pure Storage was probably the biggest competitor. At the time, we just wanted something that was a little bit more tried and true versus a new player in the storage array game.

Pure Storage did offer a couple of very niche tools related to SAP. PowerMax NVMe just came in very aggressively with their pricing, and that ultimately won them the business. 

PowerMax NVMe is very energy intensive, in terms of electricity. You need to spec that out properly. Just because it can fit in the rack doesn't mean it will work by sitting in the rack. You will probably need additional power, specifically just for PowerMax NVMe.

It isn't important at this very specific moment that the solution provides NVMe scale out capabilities. However, it will be once we decide to add more drives into this and expand our storage.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10). There are definitely areas of improvement, but everything comes down to time and cost.