Dell PowerStore Reviews

Name: Dell PowerStore
Brand: Dell Technologies
Rating: 4 (35 reviews)

Vendor: Dell Technologies

4.2 out of 5

35 reviews

277 followers

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Dell EMC PowerStore is a midrange next-generation data storage solution. It is designed with a data-centric, intelligent, and adaptable infrastructure and helps consolidate storage and virtual server environments. The Dell EMC PowerStore platform includes two major configurations, including PowerStore T and PowerStore X. Dell EMC PowerStore enables you to deploy the appliance and consolidate data and applications and supports both flash and SCM Optane devices.

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Featured reviews

Ken Boyer

Director Global Storage at IQVIA

May 3, 2022

The systems I currently have in place are old, and their support is running out. They're at the end of their life cycle. One of the key improvements that PowerStore is going to bring is that it will enable me to shrink the physical footprint. I'll be going from 5 physical HP arrays, which are about 12 racks in size, down to 4 PowerStores, which can fit on one rack. As a result, I'll be able to shrink the footprint, save power, cooling, etc. I will also be able to improve the existing performance and longevity of the platform. When we put the PowerStore in for the Oracle database, it was previously on NetApp. The staff wanted to do snapshots but also clone, and then be able to clone from a clone to add it to another system. PowerStore enabled them to do just that. They not only got their performance back to where it needed to be from previously being on the NetApp array but also got some of the feature functions that they require for the application.

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Bill McKee

Service Owner, Platform Services at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

May 4, 2022

My team was involved in the deployment. I know we had the pro deploy services that did a lot of the work for us. It took a little while to get updates done. It sat for a few months before our data center was ready to put it in. Other than that, the deployment went pretty seamlessly. Once we actually had all the prereqs done, it was deployed within a week, it was probably just a few days even between the two sites. There were a couple of months of waiting, however, that was more on our side. These were two new Greenfield data center builds. It was like starting from scratch with a partner and now we're migrating workloads into them. It wasn't integrating with anything that existed. There was one person on my team who was coordinating with outside organizations to do some implementation work for us. He was a cloud/storage engineer. In terms of maintenance requirements, there's one person who looks after things. We've got it integrated with CloudIQ from a management standpoint. It largely tells us when things need to happen, however, one person keeps up with updates, new firmware, and those kinds of things.

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Jacques DUVERNOIS

Technical Team Leader for Servers and Storage at Orange

Apr 25, 2022

The NAS capabilities have room for improvement. Currently, when you buy the PowerStore T model, you have a choice of using only block—it's block-optimized—or you can buy it as a unified frame. With the latter, you can access the frame using either block—Fibre Channel or iSCSI, and on the other side you can access it using IP protocols, like NFS or CIFS. This is the NAS part and, currently, the NAS part is very poor. It's very basic. Even Dell EMC has said that to us. We are waiting for version 3 of PowerStore for that. This must be improved and it is in the roadmap. We have other NAS solutions, but if someone wanted to have a unified frame, this is not the right solution, currently. That's why it's not a 10 out of 10. When we will have version 3 of PowerStore's operating system, in less six than months, my rating will probably go up.

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Pricing

"The price is not cheap, but it's worth it for the features you get from the storage. If you can afford it, you are probably buying the best solution that you can have for this virtual environment."
"There's still a cap on the upgrade path, where you can consume all the engines within the frame before you have to go to another frame... Normally, we exceed the IOPS on the frames before we can ever exhaust the storage, so anything they can do to help us avoid stranded storage capacity, capacity that we couldn't get to, would be beneficial."
"When we compared it with the other solutions, the pricing of PowerStore was equal. The pricing is good."

Valuable Features

"Gives us flexibility, performance, and ease of use. It also has some very good compression capabilities. We were looking for a solution that was easy to install in our VMware environment, that was flexible. PowerStore X is a type of a VMware cluster that you install inside your environment. If you have a VMware environment, like we have in production, it's easy to install and use."
"The administration tools take advantage of machine learning and make recommendations to the admins, and that makes the administration easier."
"The way you're able to manage all your PowerStores as one solution is very good for us. PowerStore enables you to federate or cluster multiple appliances with automated load balancing. In terms of management, it's helpful that we can do it from a single interface where we're able to manage multiple PowerStores. When you have multiple PowerStores it works intelligently by running the workloads based on the needs of the infrastructure."

Room For Improvement

"Where the system needs to improve is by adding more enterprise features like replication on other sites. We would also like it to be much more aligned with the VMware version. For example, today we have two different versions of VMware ESXi running to keep the PowerStore online. It would be better if the software cycling was faster."
"The setup process could be improved. We had some issues regarding configuration and the time it took to do things. It wasn't specifically the people we worked with, but more the process and how it's done. They can work on that."
"The only area I can highlight for improvement is that the 4:1 data reduction target has not been reached. This may be due to an issue with Dell EMC's initial analysis of data compression. As a result, we have had to add new physical disks to reach our goal of total available disk space."

Pricing

"The price is not cheap, but it's worth it for the features you get from the storage. If you can afford it, you are probably buying the best solution that you can have for this virtual environment."
"There's still a cap on the upgrade path, where you can consume all the engines within the frame before you have to go to another frame... Normally, we exceed the IOPS on the frames before we can ever exhaust the storage, so anything they can do to help us avoid stranded storage capacity, capacity that we couldn't get to, would be beneficial."
"When we compared it with the other solutions, the pricing of PowerStore was equal. The pricing is good."

Valuable Features

"Gives us flexibility, performance, and ease of use. It also has some very good compression capabilities. We were looking for a solution that was easy to install in our VMware environment, that was flexible. PowerStore X is a type of a VMware cluster that you install inside your environment. If you have a VMware environment, like we have in production, it's easy to install and use."
"The administration tools take advantage of machine learning and make recommendations to the admins, and that makes the administration easier."
"The way you're able to manage all your PowerStores as one solution is very good for us. PowerStore enables you to federate or cluster multiple appliances with automated load balancing. In terms of management, it's helpful that we can do it from a single interface where we're able to manage multiple PowerStores. When you have multiple PowerStores it works intelligently by running the workloads based on the needs of the infrastructure."

Room For Improvement

"Where the system needs to improve is by adding more enterprise features like replication on other sites. We would also like it to be much more aligned with the VMware version. For example, today we have two different versions of VMware ESXi running to keep the PowerStore online. It would be better if the software cycling was faster."
"The setup process could be improved. We had some issues regarding configuration and the time it took to do things. It wasn't specifically the people we worked with, but more the process and how it's done. They can work on that."
"The only area I can highlight for improvement is that the 4:1 data reduction target has not been reached. This may be due to an issue with Dell EMC's initial analysis of data compression. As a result, we have had to add new physical disks to reach our goal of total available disk space."

These insights are based on the in-depth reviews provided by peers to help you make a better buying decision.

Download our Dell PowerStore Buyer's Guide for additional reliable information.

Learn more about Dell PowerStore

Dell EMC PowerStore Offers:

Value
Flexibility
Simplicity

Dell EMC PowerStore Features

Some of the most powerful Dell EMC PowerStore features include:

Data-centric design: Dell EMC PowerStore is designed to optimize system performance, scalability, and storage efficiency to support any workload.
Intelligent automation: Intelligent automation helps simplify management as well as optimize system resources. Through a programmable infrastructure, it also enables you to easily monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot the environment.
Adaptable architecture: Because it has an adaptable architecture, Dell EMC PowerStore is able to provide speed and application mobility and offer flexible deployment models.
Scalability: Dell EMC PowerStore can be scaled up and scaled out.
Data-in-place upgrades: By providing data-in-place upgrades, you gain a modernized infrastructure without any downtime involved and without impacting applications.

Dell EMC PowerStore Benefits

Some of the benefits of using Dell EMC PowerStore include:

Flexible deployment: Dell EMC PowerStore is made to modernize the core, edge, and cloud without disruption, leading to flexible deployment.
Pay-per-use: Dell EMC PowerStore offers a range of flexible purchase options.
Any workload: Because Dell EMC PowerStore is designed to leverage next-gen innovations, it can work with any workload.
Programmable infrastructure: Dell EMC PowerStore streamlines application development and also automates storage workflows through integration with VMware and a broad ecosystem of leading management and orchestration frameworks, enabling you to provision services directly from the application tool sets that you use most frequently.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Dell EMC PowerStore users who are currently using the solution.

PeerSpot user Maurizio D., who is a CTO at Universita' degli Studi di Pisa, says it "Gives us flexibility, performance, and ease of use. It also has some very good compression capabilities. We were looking for a solution that was easy to install in our VMware environment, that was flexible. PowerStore X is a type of a VMware cluster that you install inside your environment. If you have a VMware environment, like we have in production, it's easy to install and use."

Another PeerSpot user, Jorg L., who is an IT Administrator at a construction company, mentions "For access from virtual machines, iSCSI, and NFS, it is very good. It helps increase performance."

"The administration tools take advantage of machine learning and make recommendations to the admins, and that makes the administration easier," says a Chief Information Officer at a computer software company. He also comments that “Overall, we've benefited from the dedupe, compression, and replication, the advanced technology, of this frame. It's all better than what we had in the previous generation of XtremIO appliances, and above what we were getting in the Dell EMC Unitys.”

Dell PowerStore was previously known as PowerStore.

Dell PowerStore is the #1 ranked solution in best All-Flash Storage Arrays and best NVMe All-Flash Arrays. PeerSpot users give Dell PowerStore an average rating of 8.4 out of 10. Dell PowerStore is most commonly compared to Dell Unity XT: Dell PowerStore vs Dell Unity XT. Dell PowerStore is popular among the large enterprise segment, accounting for 59% of users researching this solution on PeerSpot. The top industry researching this solution are professionals from a computer software company, accounting for 18% of all views.