Dell PowerMax Reviews

Dell PowerMax NVMe is an enterprise array that gives you maximum throughput. It's not a mid-range or small array. Dell PowerMax NVMe can handle a minimum of one petabyte.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerMax NVMe is its replication feature. The replication was configured directly on the array, and we didn't need any separate replication switch.

Dell PowerMax NVMe will have one administration login for DBA. So if you log in, the DBA can see the performance of the database in the storage area level. I have not seen this feature in any other storage vendors.

Dell PowerMax NVMe is costly compared to other solutions.

I have been working with Dell PowerMax NVMe for three years.

We didn't experience any downtime or shutdown with Dell PowerMax NVMe. I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe a nine out of ten for stability.

Dell PowerMax NVMe is a scalable solution. I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe ten out of ten for scalability.

The solution's technical support is really good. Dell PowerMax NVMe's technical support is our benchmark with all other support vendors.

Positive

I have worked with other solutions like Hitachi, HP 3PAR, and IBM storage. Dell PowerMax NVMe makes it easy for a technical or non-technical person to see the performance. If you need to dig deeply into the performance analysis, you'll have more options in Dell PowerMax NVMe than other vendors.

The solution's initial setup was easy because an implementation engineer helped us with everything.

It took two to three hours to deploy Dell PowerMax NVMe.

I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe a five out of ten for pricing.

You need proper technical knowledge to use Dell PowerMax NVMe. A classroom session will help users acquire more technical knowledge to explore and use the array. So it's not easy to dive deep in without technical knowledge. An instructor-led session would be helpful for users before using the array for the first time.

Overall, I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe a nine out of ten.

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.

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 are using this solution as our main storage. We use it with VMware, as well as our databases. We are customers of Dell and I'm a team lead for network and infrastructure. 

I like the operability and easy scalability of this product. It's also easy to integrate with all of our systems. It has high speed and a good name in the market. The accounting is good, easy, be accessible. 

The solution is quite expensive and I believe Dell should examine their prices because they are currently very, very high.

I've been using this solution for two years. 

The solution is stable. 

It's very easy to scale this product. 

The technical support is good, whenever there's an issue they figured out the problem and repaired the faulty part.

Positive

The initial setup is easy; our deployment took a few days. Dell carried out the deployment for us. We have around 2,000 users in the company. 

The cost depends on the capacity that you're using so every use case will have a different price. 

It's important to think about your workloads and define them. All right. I'd also recommend comparing prices, both within and outside Dell. 

Feature-wise the solution is perfect but because of the price, I rate this solution seven out of 10.  

We are most interested in cloud utilization.

We would like to improve the delivery model. They don't have the delivery terms today. If they improve this area, everybody would be happy.

For the Romanian and Eastern European markets, we have long delivery times, and even if we have a solution, we don't have the products, and we don't know what to install. For the time being, manufacturers must enhance the delivery of all items while they have them.

If you go to Pure or you go to NetApp, they deliver in one month. If you go to Dell or HP, they will take up to six months for delivery. This is not a business model for today.

I have been working with Dell PowerMax NVMe for 10 years.

Dell PowerMax NVMe is a stable solution. The performance is good.

Dell PowerMax NVMe is a scalable solution.

It is suitable for enterprise customers.

They are now experiencing problems with Dell's specifications. They have a typical reporting period of five days and nine hours each day till Friday. 

Right now, on the enterprise side, they want 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It is not available in Romania, which is why you need to retain inventories or have some replacement components on hand to accomplish this type of integration with other vendors.

I am also working with HPE 3PAR. I am just looking for a place to get some 3PAR components. But nobody has it right now.

We are the HP Platinum partner in Romania, and we are now looking for a place to purchase documents from Europe.

Previously, we worked with Cisco, Lenovo, and Pure. The advantage was their delivery.

We don't an advantage. 

The consumer requests something that they do not have with the brand today. 

If it is storage, a server, or power, and we have it, they will purchase it. 

They do not wait for Dell, HP, or Cisco. It is the same for both. If you have Dell on hand, we will purchase it. If it's HP, they'll buy it. It. They don't care about the brand anymore.

The installation of Dell PowerMax NVMe was easy.

Deployment time depends on the customer's request since if you have a solution with a cluster or include VMware or a solution or disaster recovery, we can provide it in two days. But, in any case, it depends on the project and your relationship with the customer.

The price is on the market. It's not inexpensive, but it's available on the market.

The cost is determined by the solution. It's not the greatest option.

You built the solution and rely on the customer's requirements, on the budget since they know the price of the product, they know the service to the client and it's the same if it's HP, Dell, or Cisco. It is how the solution is created and implemented. 

Today, the client is asking for SLA and uptime for the critical months rather than the important months themselves. This is the most crucial. They don't care if it's from Dell, HP, or Cisco; they just care about this one.

I don't have any requirements. I am now really unhappy with the delivery, therefore I don't have any arguments or recommendations to make. 

If we receive the goods, everything will be okay. When we are working, we have something. We are now dissatisfied with our needs. Simply provide the delivery. It is more important now.

We are partners with Dell.

I would rate Dell PowerMax NVMe an eight out of ten.

I am the solution administrator for Telcel. I use it to analyze the host and for data availability. It is a useful tool for me. I use it a lot every day. It is used for mission-critical operations.

We use the PowerMax SRDF/Metro Smart DR to replicate information on some servers that are important to our company. We use it as a backup from each box and it helps to reduce our storage costs.

It is important that the product provides NVMe scale-out capabilities. We support many things with the product and we need to know what the architecture is. It makes things very simple for us.

The data security and availability are pretty good. We have many clients connecting to the box, which means security is very important. This is true when it comes to remote support. The compliance is very good.

The performance is very good on our servers. It's superior. And the QoS capabilities for providing work congestion protection are also important because about 99 percent of our servers are production servers.

I have been using Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe for about four years.

It's very stable. 

We have had some trouble with the VMAX-to-PowerMax migration, but the VMAX box will be powered down after the migration. The PowerMax boxes are working fine and we don't have any issues with them.

We plan to increase our usage of the product.

Dell EMC's technical support is pretty good.

Initially, we had Dell EMC VMAX 800 and then VMAX 20K and 40K all-flash. We have recently installed a couple of PowerMax 8000s, and our migration program includes going from VMAX 20K to the PowerMax 2000 and 8000.

The setup was pretty easy. We are a team of three people who handle storage and the deployment was not complex. We had no problem with it. It took us about eight hours.

We received help from EPS Consulting.

We use the PowerMax SRDF/Metro Smart DR, and the bandwidth is excellent but the equipment is in the same location.

Overall, I don't see much that they need to do to improve the product. It's very good.