Dell PowerMax Reviews

Our mission-critical environment is on the PowerMax.

It does what it's supposed to.

• The All-Flash array
• Performance
• Reliability

Our operations team would say that the GUI needs improvement.

You taking an island-of-storage and just creating another.

The scalability is acceptable and what we expected.

The technical support has been A plus.

We chose this solution because we wanted to go with the All-Flash array.

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

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

We considered Dell EMC and NetApp.

There is nothing that is not there.

We use it for virtualization and consolidation of our data lakes.

We are using PowerMax for SAP and Exchange to run the company. 

We have two sites and two data centers. So, we use SRDF to do transfers and fail overs.

The data services, especially SRDF, are its most valuable features.

We are using Unisphere for monitoring. REST API is great for configuring the storage system.

Accessibility to new users needs improvement.

The stability is great. It is five nines.

It scales far beyond what we need, so I am good with that.

The technical support is great. It is a high-end system, so the support should be high-end as well.

We previously used mid-range solutions that just didn't scale.

We used to have a whole bunch of arrays. Now, we have consolidated them onto PowerMax. 

We were looking at All-Flash Arrays that have one submillisecond latency all the time. That is what PowerMax delivers.

The initial setup was complex, as it is a complex system and you have to learn a lot.

We worked directly with Dell EMC for the deployment.

We have seen ROI.

We looked at Dell EMC and Pure Storage.

Look at it. Don't be afraid of its complexity. It has great performance.

Data is core to our business. Have an array with our data on it is very important to the business.

It has reduced our footprint in different physical locations.

The health checks and problem solving are its most valuable features.

The stability is good. We never have any issues.

The scalability is great.

The technical is very good. It is easy to contact someone. They have a great team that helps us.

Our performance requirements were that it has to be always stable.

Setting up PowerMax with VMAX is always complex. The support from Dell EMC helped made a difference.

Dell EMC helped us with the deployment.

It is a really good product. We never max out on the performance.

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.

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.

It is reliable at the end of the day.

It is not complex for us because we have done so many of them. We have a lot of people with experience now.

We also considered Pure Storage.

It is a product that people take for granted.

It is for our corporate ERP systems and databases.

We specifically use it for our PowerHA on IBM i. We were able to move away from a middleware solution for high availability, going right to snapshots and data replication on arrays.

Managing and monitoring PowerMax arrays from a performance, capacity and health checks perspective is easy with Unisphere and CloudIQ. I have CloudIQ on my phone, so I could pull it up and see the state of my arrays right now.

• The interface
• Unisphere
• SRDF
• Deduplication
• Compression
• Encryption
• The general physical footprints are pretty small compared to previous systems.

The most reliable part of it is its redundant in frame. My impression is that it is very stable. We haven't had this solution out there for very long, but we haven't had any issues with it yet.

I am impression with the scalability. Right now, we are implementing two three-engine PowerMaxs with about 500 terabytes of data, which will replicate to each other. 

If we need to scale up, it's easy just add another engine and some more drawers. It's non-disruptive, so that is also good.

We haven't really had to use technical support. It is pretty much set it up and let it go, like plug and play. I'm sure if we had any issues that we could get in touch with support pretty easily. We use ESRS for our call-home, and a lot of times, Dell EMC will respond to the issue before we even know it.

We were using generation one of XtremIO, which had some limitations on number of initiators. It didn't have native support for IBM i. There were just a number of limitations with XtremIO that we don't have now with PowerMax. So, we were pretty consolidated on our previous platform XtremIO, then we migrated from XtremIO to PowerMax.

Our corporate ERP systems of databases are all mission critical. We chose to move to this platform from XtremIO because we wanted a smaller footprint with much more capacity with all of the data services that we got out of XtremIO. We also wanted the ability to use PowerMax in our PowerHA environment with its higher availability.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was almost like set it and forget it. We were very satisfied there.

We were using a process that includes Data Domain. We are not using Open Replicator or any other tools. We are taking images of our data and putting it on Data Domain, replicating it to the new site, then rehydrating the data, which makes it easy.

We went with Dell EMC directly for the deployment.

Our application requires five milliseconds of latency or less. We are seeing about 250 microseconds of response time, so that beats our expectations by five times.

I would definitely give it a shot. It is so easy. Dell EMC has been so good with us in terms of evaluating the product and seeing it run side-by-side against other products and vendors. So, it has been great.

We were pretty satisfied with what we got.

We work in robotics and we need better response times. Our primary reasons for buying this solution are our SQL and Oracle databases, to improve the performance in running queries and their response times.

It has simplified our operations when it comes to troubleshooting. We're on-call every time there is an issue and I can show them, 100 percent, that there is no problem on the storage side. I can show them there is no issue here.

The solution has helped to improve our services, in the medical field.

The response time, compared to XtremIO, is far better.

I would like to see better provisioning of storage from PowerMax, as well as automation. If you have a cluster with 15 datastores you have to back and select everything for report groups, as an example. You have to create 15 datastores and bundle them in a storage group. If there was some automation of this process, a script or a workflow, to configure everything, that would be great.

Unisphere could be improved and I would also like to see a real-time, graphical view of metrics. I don't know how far back in time we can look, but if we could see the performance from two months or three months back, and how it is performing now, that would be helpful.

It's stable, like VMAX, which has been pretty stable for the last few years.

We had XtremIO but we have been a Dell EMC user for a long time. The solution's architecture influenced our buying decision because of the performance and storage growth. With XtremIO we have had storage growth issues.

The setup is pretty straightforward. With VxBlock 1000, everything is pre-installed.

The application folks are happy.

We didn't look at other solutions.

I would recommend this product. For us, this is the best product.

It has the ability to consolidate storage.

It is a true, stable product.

We have really good support for our data center and compute.

We had a multitude of storage systems, like Dell EMC Compellent, that we needed to consolidate. A Compellent would take an entire rack space.

The initial setup was a little bit complicated.

PowerMax has been great for us.

We are doing SRDF/A.

We acquired PowerMax for virtualization with PowerVC, which is the IBM product for virtualization. We're still in the PoC phase. While we initially acquired it for the PowerVC solution, we hope to deploy everything on it once we finish the PoC.

The data in our environment grows very quickly. Other solutions were a little bit slow, but with the PowerMax, there isn't going to be any negative impact.

Unisphere 9 has good functionality compared to version 8 or version 6. PowerMax, with version 9.02, which we installed recently, has some very good features, such as CloudIQ.

The performance is really good.

I also like that there is integration for automation. We are using the API for Unisphere with PowerMax and it's pretty amazing.

The deduplication and the reduction of data are some of the keys we are looking for because our data is growing so fast. We need a solution to minimize the data.

The NVMe integration could be improved.

Whether it's the older version of VMAX, or VMAX All Flash, or PowerMax, all these series are pretty amazing in terms of stability. This is electronics, so nothing is 100 percent perfect.

It's pretty expandable.

We haven't used any tech support for this product.

We used the PowerVC solution with VNX but that didn't work very well. We're doing a PoC with PowerMax and it's working very well compared to VNX. 

The setup wasn't complex because we have already deployed a number of VMAXs in our environment and they are pretty much the same.

We are buying it directly from Dell EMC.

We did not go with this solution for the consolidation because in the banking environment we have to isolate the various applications. It's a requirement of the business.

I would rate PowerMax at nine out of ten. I have used many different storage systems, all the major VM technologies, but I find that with Dell EMC there are no issues.