Dell PowerStore Reviews

We use the PowerStore for our development environment. The frame is a repository for all our VMware infrastructure data stores and the applications that live on those data stores are mainly real-time voice applications in call centers.

We use it with Cisco switches and it's pure block only.

Thanks to the duplication and data savings, we have a lot of capacity available to us in the PowerStore. That lets us use and consume logical capacity, which can be done very quickly compared to having to install physical resources inside the PowerStore. The data reduction process is very efficient resulting in very high data reduction if you compare the PowerStore to legacy frames from Dell EMC. This is a very good benefit for us. We were able to very quickly connect new servers and instantly have capacity on the frame because of the data reduction. Moving forward, we can add more disks inside. We plan to have seven drives added in the coming weeks. So we are able to independently add servers, even if we don't have the actual physical capacity on the frame itself.

We have also seen a lot of savings because of the data reduction efficiency, which is currently 4:1 or 5:1.

We will also decommission old frames, and the maintenance contracts on those frames are very expensive. We will save some money as a result and we will also realize some power savings. We also have some environmental-related "green" engagements in Orange, and PowerStore is helping us go in that direction.

There are also space savings because the old frames are using a full rack while the PowerStore is only a 2U unit with almost the same amount of data being stored on it. That is very good. 

So it will save us floor space, energy, and money on maintenance contracts.

Our development team is very happy with us, from an admin perspective. When they query us for more capacity, we are very quick to respond and provide them with resources. If they want to deploy new machines, for example, we can quickly assign new data stores that those VMs will rely on. We have saved a lot of time thanks to the PowerStore.

And because the performance of the PowerStore is very high, we can connect many servers on the same frame, instead of having to multiply frames, side-by-side, to get enough power to serve our IOPS. We are working on real-time applications, so we can't afford a response time of more than 10 milliseconds or 15 milliseconds as a maximum. We can't support a greater lag in a call center. The PowerStore now is less than a millisecond, and that is with more load on it. On one VNX we have two or three VMware clusters with four or five ESXis per cluster. On the PowerStore I have, say, 10 clusters and each has about eight ESXis.

The most valuable feature is that it is easy to use this frame. I am a SAN administrator, but I was able to train my colleague, who had only been a VMware administrator, on the PowerStore in about half a day. Now he's autonomous in assigning volumes and creating data stores, et cetera. I don't have to help him anymore. That is the beauty of this unit and it's due to the effort Dell EMC put into the GUI.

The VMware integration is very good. It integrates all the vSphere interactions when you create your data store, directly from the PowerStore GUI, into your VMware cluster. My colleague who was the VMware administrator is now able, in one shot, to provision his storage and automatically create a data store relying on this storage. That has freed up some of his time.

Another important feature is the power of this frame. It's very powerful. We have almost less than a millisecond of response time, all the time, even during backup windows. That's very good compared with the VNX, of which we have two. We also have a Unity connected on this same SAN for the same kind of application. We did a comparison among the three models of frames, the VNX, which is rather old, the Unity full flash, which is not so old, and the PowerStore. PowerStore is really on top of all of them.

Of course, it enables us to add compute and capacity independently. We add a lot of VMware clusters in our SAN thanks to the PowerStore. We are going to decommission the old VNXs because it's better adding capacity on the PowerStore than keeping the old models.

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.

The PowerStore was introduced in June of last year and I adopted the first one in Europe, in August last year, so we have had it for about seven months.

It is very stable.

The issue we had with PowerStore was due to being a very early adopter. We got a better version of the PowerStore operating system, but the upgrade that came after that, relying on the better version, was not easy to run. We decided to reinstall the PowerStore with a fresh, new, official operating system.

So the stability of the initial PowerStore was good enough for production, but not as good as we would have expected for this kind of frame. The four PowerStores we have that were installed with an official release are very stable. 

We faced issues, but that was normal because the PowerStore was totally new at that time. No one had experience with it. When Dell EMC came onsite to install our first one, it was the very first in Europe.

There are two ways to scale. You can scale up and out. You can easily add shelves to add more physical capacity to your appliance. If that's not enough, you can add an appliance to your federation. It's very easy.

We are on the T model, not the X model. It's pure block and we are external ESXi-connected. We need a lot of servers because we have more than 100 developers working on this frame. They all need their own clusters because there are different applications under development. An X model would not have been enough.

In the future, if the PowerStore 5k is not powerful enough, we could upgrade it to a 7K or a 9k or the new 7200 models that are coming out in a few months. But the magic is that we could do that with the data in place, inside the frame, keeping the drive. That is one of the highlights when it comes to simplifying things.

As a very big company and as a partner, we have a particular kind of access to support. We have a dedicated global account manager. All we have to do is snap our fingers and we have the guy on the phone. The quality of support is okay. I can also access the product manager of the product. I am Dell EMC-certified, so it's very easy for me to access support documentation.

Sometimes, their support doesn't really understand the customer's position. For example, some weeks ago we had an issue on a frame. Dell EMC engineering focused on what was really happening instead of trying to bypass the problem. They didn't succeed in recreating the issue we had in their lab, so they were using our infrastructure as their lab. It was a development environment so it was not harmful for production. But in the end, it was a time-consuming issue for us.

Positive

You don't have to worry about the deployment. It's already done for you when the frame is powered up. That is another aspect of how it simplifies your implementation. Dell EMC comes onsite to do the initial power-up of the frame itself. After that, we do everything by ourselves.

Aside from that—and this is important—because we were early adopters, there were some features that were mandatory at the time, and they complicated the initial deployment a little. The top-of-rack switches that are mandatory when you use a federation are no longer needed if you use a single appliance. That was our case. At the time we deployed our first PowerStore, we had a single appliance, but we needed the top-of-rack switches to be set up for a potential future connection with other appliances, if we wanted to go to a federation.

Now, with version 2 of PowerStore, you don't need to deploy top-of-rack switches if you have a single appliance. That can be done later on, if you go to the federated setup. This is a very good improvement because many customers have a single appliance. It's so powerful that you probably don't initially need a federation. Now, you don't need top-of-rack switches set up but used for nothing.

Because ours was one of the first PowerStores, Dell EMC took a day to deploy it. Afterward, for the other PowerStores we have deployed in the data center, it took less than half a day. With the last one we will deploy, which should happen next week, we will not have top-of-rack switches. There will be no connectivity to set up and no Fibre to run, so it should take two hours.

We had to migrate data out of the legacy frame we previously had to go to the PowerStore, but it was very easy because all was done on our side on our servers, so it was very quick.

We have definitely seen ROI due to our data savings as a result of the data reduction. Instead of buying one-to-one drives, we buy half a drive.

Licensing is very simple. Everything is included in the basic license. There are no concerns about having to pay to add a feature. Everything is there. 

Because we are a big partner, we get good prices from Dell EMC. They know we will resell their technology, so I'm not in a good position to discuss the pricing that applies to non-partners.

We have almost the entire portfolio of Dell EMC products, from VNXs to PowerMax. We also have some other vendors, of course, but they are not as powerful as this one.

My advice would be don't hesitate. It's a good frame. It's doing what it is designed for. It serves IOPS very well. The data savings are very important and the response time is very short. There are always tricky situations that come up, but honestly, since our PowerStore went live, I don't have to worry about the storage for this environment. The VMware guys are independent. They don't need me anymore.

We accepted the risk, due to the fact that it was a relatively new platform, when we went with PowerStore. We were totally aware of that fact. That is why we put the first one into our development area, and not production. Even if we have more than 100 developers working on it, any problems would affect developers, not production. We understood there could be costs because having 100 developers not doing anything during a day costs money. But PowerStore didn't disappoint us. We are very happy with it. We now have four in production.

We are a Dell partner, so we also resell PowerStore to our end-users. When we initially built this frame, we wanted, say, 100 terabytes, but they persuaded us to only buy 40 terabytes of SSD or NVMe drives because of the savings that they said we would see from the data reduction efficiency. The program they gave us was that if we didn't achieve that kind of data efficiency, they would provide us some disks for free.

We were using Dell PowerStore as a block device for VMware infrastructure and in iSCSI Target for a couple of secret server clusters installed at a hardware level. Apart from that, regarding the workload, which is currently more or less 40% for SQL Servers and 60% for the production of VMware machines. We have a small workload on VMware machines to manage a typical number crunching machine and application server. Now, we have six machines running a couple of MongoDB servers. Honestly, our bottleneck is not the PowerStore. Our actual bottleneck is the networking size because we noticed how we got some barriers in LACP algorithms, indicating we have two mixes on every motherboard> However, we are not able to fulfill the double connection. We also have a part of our experience infrastructure, but instead of 25 gigabit, it functions on 10 gigabit. Sometimes, during evenings or on Fridays, we use Rubrik for protection when we run it. When Rubrik works against Dell PowerStore and MongoDB, along with SQL Server, we noticed that PowerStore's QLC is normal while its CPU and compression levels are good. But, we do face a delay in CAPA and the server. So definitely, we noticed that maybe we need to upgrade everything to 25 gigabit, and still, if it doesn't work, then we may consider FortiGate's networking. Dell Compellent was our storage before, and now we are pushing the Ethernet to the maximum with PowerStore.

Three years ago, I was a little scared about PowerStore because I have been working with storage solutions for many years and have a habit of maintaining additional storage machines, firmware, interfaces, and so on. I noticed that PowerStore is a totally virtualized solution. PowerStore runs container, docker, and so on, and the firmware is managed in a different manner, which is a good point for total virtualization of the firmware and so on. But on the contrary, it's like a black box for me. It is different to work on PowerStore compared to IBM. I worked in the past with IBM ESS 800 Shark Storage. The type of super virtualization in PowerStore is a startup feature. A digital machine is present inside the storage server when this startup feature is launched. This digital machine can be managed entirely remotely, with an automatic download available from Dell. We started with the solution's initial version three years ago, and now we are working on one of its latest versions.

Now we are not pushing the PowerStore to its maximum capability, so we are down in respect of the limit of PowerStore we use in our organization. For now, the slackness is ours, not PowerStore's. I'm not able to tell what can be improved since we are not pushing to its maximum speed. Also, we haven't experienced any downtime, and we switched from primary to secondary and so on, and there has been no problem. Initially, we had some problems with the firmware, and it was a serious problem. But, after six months, we upgraded two or three times, after which we didn't experience any problems. So, we never faced any problems or significant failures for two and a half years. We have a double installation, including primary and secondary ones. Also, in the initial six months, even if we had some errors, we never got a stop error. We never stop. Hence, we never stop the protection system. We only have a secondary type of error, which is for one of the parts of the solution but never for the software side.

The only thing is that with PowerStore, we don't have a solution for the file object. Because of this, we have been investigating Zephyr and another solution. We are also thinking of not buying anything in our data center. We are also evaluating a proposal from a provider named Wasabi, which provides an alternative to Amazon S3. Also, we want to follow a totally different approach so that there is no more spending or investments inside our hardware infrastructure, and we depend on just pushing it with the help of an external provider. Vaulting is another approach we may opt for, but we may not do it now since we are using Rubrik for vaulting. A good improvement for PowerStore would be to have an embedded vaulting feature. Currently, two providers of block devices offer vaulting capabilities, allowing for signing within multiple objects or on a partition. In such cases, this feature would be beneficial if you want to freeze a part of your storage or apply differential computing. This strategy involves preparing a disk for a machine and deploying ten machines based on multiple basic installations.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for more than three years. I am a customer using the solution.

The stability has been excellent in the last two years after the initial six months. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

I am unable to comment on the solution's scalability since we have no plans in our company to scale up and also because we are only using half of the potential of the solution. I cannot tell if adding another node to the solution is easy or not.

The solution's technical support is excellent. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

We were previously using Dell Compellent in our organization. Before that, I worked in a different company using HPE 3PAR.

The initial setup was complex and difficult, and we had to rely on the assistance of an Italian partner in Bologna under the name Cinetica. We initially planned for four days over two weeks, with two days set aside for the first week to prepare all the necessary networks for networking and another two days for the second week to start up PowerStore. However, the process took more than ten days, and we received a machine with firmware series one dot from Dell's headquarters. I cannot recall if it was one dot zero one or one dot zero two, but we encountered an issue during the initial setup. After completing the initial setup, we immediately switched to Dell PowerStore Version 2. If the machine had arrived with pre-installed PowerStore Version 2, we might not have encountered this initial problem. The main issue arose in the mapping and network features from the volume exposed by PowerStore, including MLAG, LACP, and the corner configuration in the internet reports. A large number of cables and fiber also made it difficult to align the procedures, with a ton of files on the console level.

If I were to install the latest version of the solution in 2023, with the last firmware and its additions, the setup process could be more reasonable. It would be possible to start the entire high-availability solution in four days with a double installation. However, the complexity is also related to the fact that if all production environments require at least a couple of PowerStore solutions, even if only one can be purchased, it is normal to have a high-vulnerability environment. I rate the setup process a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.

Regarding the deployment process timeline, during the dry run testing, we created an initial copy of a portion of SQL Server storage that Compellent was managing. During this phase, we were required to run the exact production workload without any interruptions to the production environment. This phase took us approximately one month. After completing the dry run, we decided to copy the storage from Rubrik to restore all the data to the logical number allocated to PowerStore. We then made adjustments because it was an iSCSI target, which meant changing the worldwide domain in the iSCSI target for the SQL Server machine.

Our organization spent two months considering its budget and economics. We got TRESIO and Excel's expected storage size and special compression, and because of this, we could save some money since the compression is working very well. In the end, we bought a solution that was half the size of the initial solution, and we got a compression ratio of about five to one, which was a win-win solution. With compression, we were able to have a solution within our company's budget. We include a clause in the contract with Dell that states if the compression ratio is not met, we will adjust the workload accordingly. In this scenario, Dell support will provide additional hard drives free of charge to be added to the PowerStore. There was Dell's competitor on our side, and they were supportive of our decision to give hard drives to buy to improve the functioning.

It's important to note that we evaluated another option quite different from a manufacturer, CentOS. However, we cannot say that we were able to make a fair evaluation between a small manufacturer and Dell, as economics played a significant role in our decision-making process. If I can freely test other environments, I would test solutions from IBM and Lenovo. IBM is a large manufacturer, and CentOS is a competing technology. VMware provides a software-based shared mapping storage technology, which emulates disk storage. CentOS is attempting to emulate VMware's vSAN technology.

It isn't easy for me to rate the solution because inside my infrastructure, PowerStore is the biggest one, and the other storage solutions we use only for secondary and unimportant projects using storage like NETGEAR. It is very difficult to give an evaluation considering my current infrastructure because I have only a PowerStore in my company. Earlier, I was able to make comparisons because I was using HPE 3PAR and IBM solutions in my previous company. Dell PowerStore is better than HPE 3PAR since there are a lot of changes and updates needed in 3PAR. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

We use it to host all the VMware workloads in production. It has all the types of workloads that any data center would have, from AD to file servers as well as SQL, Exchange, and BI. It holds all our high-tier VMs.

PowerStore helps to simplify IT operations. At the site where it is installed, we have consolidated two tiers with the high-IOPS and lower tiers. We have enough capacity with lower power consumption and enough performance to handle the required overload.

It gives us the capacity and the performance we need. Before, things were on 10K disks, while this is flash. There is a very big difference. Previously, we were connected directly, with a back-to-back connection between servers and storage. Now, we have multiple servers connected to SAN switches and those switches are connected to the storage. For sure, the performance of the system is sky-high. In terms of IOPS we are fully satisfied by the PowerStore.

We use the solution’s built-in VMware hypervisor to run VMs and virtualized applications, directly on the storage appliance. We manage multiple sites and we don't have enough teams to allocate support at all sites. So our support team handles all our sites. It's very important for us to have a consolidated infrastructure that we can manage remotely, without needing someone available locally to do the patching/power-up/creation and life cycle management tasks. Having this box, along with the integration with VMware, and VMware's capabilities, gives us what we need.

I like the performance of the PowerStore. When you talk about PowerStore, it's mainly about flash systems and high-end IOPS. The 1000T is a midsize box, in terms of the way the vendor positions it, but it is more than enough for our needs. At the site where it is located, there are about eight servers connected. The high IOPS support our needs. It is very performant.

We have an issue with the integration of this box and VMware. I have downloaded so many books from Dell EMC's website. We created the volumes as VVols. The information they gave us said we would directly see the capacity. Unfortunately, that is not true. You only see it after you put data on it. When you create the volume but there is no data, you don't see how the actual capacity grows. This is peculiar regarding this box.

We installed it at the beginning of September, about three months ago. By the end of September it was put into production with all the loads we required.

It is stable, but we have only operated it for less than six weeks, which is not that much. But performance-wise it is giving us what was promised, so far.

Because we have changed the topology of our data centers' interconnectivity and the data movement between sites—we have multiple sites in multiple locations and countries—we asked Dell EMC to give us additional expansion for the box, but with disks at the lower tier. In that way, we are insuring our investment in this box and doing a consolidation. But it also means we don't need to buy high-end disks for it. We may go with 10K disks for the lower-tier data.

I think we will go for a second box like this one in the near future, but in a different location.

When I tried to open a ticket with the Dell EMC team, during the installation phase, they kept bouncing me from one support center to another, from the United States to France to wherever. I ended up preferring to finish the installation without continuing the case. Dell EMC's support case management wasn't really set up to suit our needs. When I gave them the serial number of the box, they said, "Ah, it's a PowerStore. It's not this department, you need a different department." The support is not very well structured.

In addition to the licensing issue I mentioned, we also opened a ticket concerning the dedupe and the data showing on the storage interface. No one answered so we escalated it to our partner and they escalated it to a consultant.

Overall, support is not smooth when it comes to the portal and the standard support system. I had to go to our reseller to ask him to get us the information we needed.

To be fair, I spent a huge amount of time working with IBM, versus only the two to three months on Dell EMC. But knowing Dell EMC as a brand, as a competitor to IBM, I know it can do much better in terms of support and awareness of customers' needs.

Neutral

We were not searching for a particular brand. We were searching for storage that would be delivered ASAP with a certain IOPS capacity. And, of course, pricing was part of it. The vendor that sold us this box said they were able to send it right away. From that point, the discussion went to Dell EMC versus ordering IBM. Our discussions about how to move forward with our storage took at least four to six weeks. If we had then put in an order with IBM, it would have taken at least another six weeks. So we would have had a 10 to 12-week process. We didn't have this luxury. We couldn't wait that long, so the decision was based on the time of delivery.

We will move everything off our old Lenovo storage that is now four or five years old, and that will be used for backup only. All our production VMs will be on the flash and all the less important pieces, like the file servers, will be on the 10K disks.

During the installation phase, the licensing part was not straightforward. It was very difficult for the technicians, who are not trained Dell EMC technicians, to do the licensing because the information on their website is not straightforward. You can't find your way easily. You spend some time getting the information. So the licensing activation was a little bit tricky for us. Maybe the installation issue was due to our lack of knowledge, but the licensing part and the escalation need to be smoother. Eventually, I had to pass this task to our business partner and they did it for us.

There is a web interface for LAN creation, host mapping, and digital capacity. We created it as a VVol, mapped it to the box, and started moving data from the old Lenovo to this box.

Because my background is not Dell EMC, it took us about two to three days to finish not only the boxes but the installation of the SAN switches as well. We had to migrate all the data from the old Lenovo to it, and we had to do work related to the ESX servers.

We only used internal resources.

I was a technical manager for about 20 years in a company that is a business partner for IBM. My "DNA" is in IBM. However, when I shifted to my current company, they have multiple types of hardware vendors, both IBM and non-IBM. Before the acquisition of the Dell EMC PowerStore 1000T, I did a comparison with information from IBM sources, from Dell EMC sources, and from neutral sources. At that time I downloaded information from IT Central Station. After that, we acquired the box.

I would like to wait another few months before giving any advice about the product, to see if there are any other hassles or any issues. But if someone is considering going with PowerStore, I would say yes. It's a good box.

Ultimately, it's about performance, capacity, and price, as opposed to AI learning et cetera, the same as it has always been.

I was not concerned about the fact that it is a relatively new platform because the Dell EMC brand is number-one in the market.

I use it to solve a problem for a customer when he has a big VMware ESX environment with virtualization. You can solve a big problem with money or a lot of hardware since you can take the virtualization from PowerStore. Inside PowerStore, on the operating system level, you can use virtualization with VMware ESX or something like it. So, you don't need any hardware.

My company does backups and security. We use a lot of OEMs. We use Dell because they have the strongest product, especially in Israel.

Hybrid environments are very important for our disaster recovery issues. By default, we have 50% to the public cloud, with either Azure or AWS, and 50% on-prem. If it is on-prem, then it is a PowerStore. In Israel, 90% is deployed on-premises.

PowerStore is used in Israeli universities since they have big environments with a lot of vendors. They take all the versions from the 500 to the 3000. It is also used in IT companies with 1,000 or 2,000 employees that have a lot of traffic with heavy loads. There are a lot of people in Israel who love to work with Dell.

It provides a big benefit when upgrading a new VMware environment. For example, in a big environment with 10 to 30 ESXs, you can take everything and put that into PowerStore. So, it is cost-effective, which is very important and has been massive for us. You reduce almost 80% from the hardware and work directly from PowerStore. Building hardware, especially in a big VMware environment, is a big issue for my organization.

It brings us a lot of security, creating security between the containers. Then, we can separate an environment for security. You have IDS, IPS, the firewall, etc., but if you take the environment that you built on the containers then it creates a different security.

I use the security between the rack server and PowerStore. Or, we use a connection with the fiber channel. It also separates the network from the SAN storage. This is the most important security when you are connecting storage to PowerStore for any environment.

1. The level of virtualization is a big feature. This is the most important thing in PowerStore. 
2. PowerStore has a very good replication tool. 
3. It has a good NAS environment. It has a very strong NAS that can support a lot of big, heavy environments. 
4. The container and its ability to connect directly to the cloud. We can use a lot of workloads and get all the workloads that we need. For example, we can get VMware directly from PowerStore and move it to the Cloud or any other containers. This is an added value of PowerStore. If you want to solve a workload problem, this is the best way.

Once you build an environment based on a container, it is a big benefit because you can take the workloads from the cloud directly to on-premises and vice versa. It is a big benefit, especially in an environment based on VMware, a virtualization environment, and heavy storage.

OpenManage Console is the best tool that Dell has. It is a great thing. We use it to configure the networking. It helps you realize what you need to discover. It is a little bit heavy. However, after that, it is a very user-friendly tool. It can connect to any vendor, switch, storage, etc. I would rate OpenManage Console as nine out of 10.

On downtime, it is okay. I would rate it as seven or eight out of 10. There are a few things that Dell has to change, fix, or upgrade. 

The storage could be improved. I would like a feature for how to best secure an appliance and the storage since we are connecting the container to the public cloud. I would like them to develop another level of security, making it more secure than from what they have now. 

I have been using it for a year to a year and a half.

I would rate stability as 10 out of 10.

It is very scalable.

When you are trying to scale in or out with a system, you can see the return on investment.

In general, Dell technical support is very professional. They have a good SLA. We have had a few cases that I personally use them to support, and they are great, especially the on-call. They are very professional and have very fast reactions. I would rate them as eight or nine out of 10.

Positive

We previously used Unity and VNX, and Unity especially belongs in the past.

The initial deployment was very straightforward.

If you need to install the system and upgrade the existing environment, that can take around half a day. If you don't need to install it, then it can take around an hour or two.

Be very professional when designing the system and ensure your environment fits with the PowerStore.

Two people can do the entire deployment project in Israel. You take the storage, place it on the rack, and start to install it to make the volumes, view, and networking. In the most bigger, complicated cases, it takes around two or three people.

If you use PowerStore as a virtualization environment and don't buy a rack server, then the solution is very cheap since you no longer need to buy the hardware or server for the ESX.

The big pricing issue is with capacity:

• If we use the 500 or 1000, the licensing and pricing are reasonable. PowerStore can compete with any vendor and the price isn't that expensive. 
• It is very expensive though when you get to this point of using the 3000 with a client. They will start to think about using another vendor. There are a lot of solutions similar to PowerStore in regards to networking capacity and their prices are very cheap compared to PowerStore. 

Dell has very good rack servers that are all on PowerStore, e.g., R640 and R740. These are the best servers that we have with our virtualization environment. This is the best hardware that you can use today. When it comes to servers and storage, there are a lot of vendors. NetApp is also a very good vendor in the world of storage, but there are some added values with PowerStore that I can't see on other vendors, such as the virtualization where you can take all your ESXs and put them inside PowerStore. I don't see this with other vendors.

It is a very good tool for networking, storage, and working with the rack server. I would recommend this solution to other people. They should just take it.

I would rate it as an eight out of 10.

We use it for machines from VMware vCenter which we keep separate from the PowerStore. It is only the storage. They are connected with iSCSI and NFS. We have no virtual machines directly on the PowerStore.

We are very impressed by the power of the system. We have gained performance for all our virtual machines and our system is running very fast.

Another benefit, for us, is the dedupe rate.

For access from virtual machines, iSCSI, and NFS, it is very good. It helps increase performance.

Also, the live dedupe application is very good.

In the first weeks, we had some problems with the dedupe. According to the warranty, we should have had a dedupe rate of at least two and we had not reached this value. We got an additional hard disk to match the planned capacity of the system and this helped a lot. We got to a dedupe rate of 1.9, and this was very good.

What we are missing is the monitoring. We cannot implement the health check of the system in our monitoring system. We have to open the PowerStore GUI every day.

Also, we have tried to install a separate virtual machine to integrate PowerStore to vCenter. VMware then provides a virtual machine with Photon OS. We have done this integration two times and it has run for some weeks. Then it stops working and I don't know why. We have not used it again. It has nice features and has saved a lot of time and creates a good integration, but it needs to be more stable.

Overall, they need to make the system stable. Again and again, we have problems with upgrades. The upgrades themselves are running fine, but after the upgrade is when we have a problem. With the update to 1.4, we had a head crash. They told us, "This is a known issue. Please upgrade to 2." We upgraded to 2 and, one week later they told us, "Yeah, there are some issues in 2.0.0. You can lose data. Please upgrade to 2.0.1." Overall, they need to make the system stable.

I try to avoid updates for such important, central systems. They require downtime for the whole company, as this is our only storage. It's not good to do so many upgrades. I have used other storage systems and, with them, it was never necessary to do so many upgrades in one year. Last year, I did four upgrades for the PowerStore but I have never done four upgrades over the lifetime of other storage systems. They have run four, five, or six years, sometimes more. I have never patched so often as I have with PowerStore.

We have been using Dell EMC PowerStore since December of last year, so almost a year.

The problem is the stability. We have a single system and on three occasions we have had unplanned head reboots because of a software failure. The positive side is that there was no impact as a result because there are two heads. It's not good to reboot a head, and we have submitted tickets about it, but the performance and the failover have been good.

We only have a single machine and we are currently using half of the hard disk slots. We have asked for an upgrade for the rest of the hard disks but, from my point of view, it costs too much. We have 12 to 15 hard disks inside and if we try to upgrade only the hard disks, it costs the same as the complete system. This is something I don't understand. It makes no sense. Buying 16 hard disks with storage costs about €40,000 and buying only 16 hard disks costs the same.

Dell EMC's first-level technical support is very fast and they communicate well. Sometimes they explain things so I can understand why something is working the way it is. But currently, we have a ticket at the second level and for two weeks I have had no answer. 

The issue is that each day we get a message from the storage, every three hours, telling us the network connectivity is lost. I don't know if this is true or not, and whether it is a failure. That is the ticket at level two but I have had no information about its status.

Neutral

I have used NetApp as well as HPE in the past. In this company, they replaced NetApp with PowerStore because the NetApp system was slow. The dedupe needed much improvement. If they stopped the dedupe, then the system power would go down. And the backup procedure took a lot of time. With PowerStore we have reduced the time for the backup by half or more.

In terms of the decision process to go with PowerStore, I was not working here at the time. After I started the company said, "Okay, in two weeks we are getting new storage. Please integrate it into our infrastructure." I know they needed a more powerful storage system and they wanted an upgrade option for the system.

The integration of PowerStore into our existing environment was very straightforward. We had an external partner that helped us, but we had prepared the system in a test environment. We took that system and put it into the production system in about eight hours and the system was running. We then started to migrate the machines. It was a good implementation process and very fast.

We have two administrators of the solution. They are working with the system full-time handling requests to change hard disks or volumes, and they create new volumes. Across the company we have about 300 users using virtual machines and virtual desktops that are stored on the PowerStore.

The performance of PowerStore is good, but I don't feel the software is completely ready. We have upgraded the system and have had failures on the system. I have never seen as many head crashes on other systems as we have had on the PowerStore in the last year. The system is fast but not stable enough.

I would not buy the system again. You should wait some years until the software is ready and doesn't have a new software release every two months.

We have two appliances — a primary and a secondary — and they are synchronized, so all the volumes are replicated. If the primary appliance goes down, we can get functions on the other side. When it's writing on one side, writing is disabled on the other side. In the event of disaster recovery, we can enable writing, and then we can do anything from there.

PowerStore simplified everything because we have a duplicate copy of all the volumes on the primary side. If anything happens, we can get data from the other side. It also takes hourly snapshots. If anything gets corrupted, we can recover using the snapshots. It's easier for our business to create volumes and allocate space on a volume. You don't have to go through the hassle of zoning the volume and doing everything else. It's simple.

PowerStore is easy to use. All the drives use soft encryption. To upgrade it, you download the app, and it runs by itself. It's very easy to deploy, share, and create volumes. It's active, so you can have two nodes on one appliance. If Node A goes down, you still get node B at the bottom running. 

I would rate PowerStore's machine learning and AI eight out of 10 because customer automation is very easy. It's just a click of the button, You can also use what they call Cloud IQ, which is an online storage and monitoring software. If you log on to the internet, you can check on your plans to see how much space is left. Cloud IQ analytics software is free as long as you have an account with Dell.

Dell's built-in intelligence is the best because it can also calculate how much data is needed for storage beforehand and if you need to add more drives or anything. The built-in intelligence can adapt quickly to changing workload requirements. We were able to migrate from IBM storage by uploading an image. With other devices, it's sometimes hard to migrate from different forms of storage, but PowerStore was very quick. We didn't have any downtime because once we were able to create the image, we just had to do a cut-over on the other side. 

Pretty soon it's going to be Meditech certified, so it's going to be able to run Meditech. Right now we are using a different solution to run Meditech, but once it gets certified, we'll be able to move from the other appliance. VMware integration is very easy too. PowerStore gives us leverage, we can tell how much space is allocated to the VM and what's happening on a VM.

We just installed PowerStore this spring.

PowerStore is highly stable. If one node goes down, it's going to alert you at any time. And then since you're using Cloud IQ, you can see all the alerts and everything. You can install Cloud IQ on your cell phone, so you'll get a notification on your phone.

You can scale PowerStore. If you look at the cost of getting a next-generation XtremIO, we can get two PASTs for the cost of one XtremIO, so it's cheaper to get the PAST. It just came out. It's new, so I don't know about the usage out there, but for us, it's a small beast. It does everything.

Dell's support is perfect. I rate Dell's support nine out of 10. You call them when you have an issue, and they'll get back to you within 24 hours. If it's a serious issue, they respond in four hours. The system itself does a lot. It lets you know when it needs to be updated. And if the upgrade fails, you can just revert to the previous version. This happened once, but we tried again and I didn't have to revert to the older version. 

Positive

Before PowerStore, we were using IBM SVC. We switched because we are getting more virtualized. PowerStore is a new solution, but we were not concerned about switching because we went through a third party called SIS, and they've already installed a couple of PowerStore storage devices in different hospitals. If you look at the DS 7000 in the data center, it's a rack. There are maybe four racks for the same storage solution on one parcel. So it also minimizes space. We only have one 2U rack and it's running like 96 terabytes. 

PowerStore is easy to install and deploy. It takes less than a day.

The price is on the higher side. It's alright relative to what PowerStore does. 

I'll rate Dell EMC PowerStore 10 out of 10. I haven't had any issues with it since we've installed it. PowerStore is easy to adapt, and it's straightforward to use. You cannot even make a mistake on anything because it's going to make sure you confirm everything before you go to the next step. I haven't seen anything that needs to be improved yet. If I compare it with what we were using before, this one is genius.

We use the very first one we added for a very pinpointed solution for a high-performance Oracle database. We've added four more, and they're going to be used primarily to migrate away from HP systems.

Our environment is 80% to 90% virtualized VMware. We have some pretty heavy workloads, whether it be SQL databases or Oracle databases working on the PowerStores right now. It's about three petabytes in size.

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.

The simplicity and ease of use have been very valuable features. I have a very small team, and only half of the team is well versed in the HP product. Whereas if I bring PowerStore in, everyone can learn it because it will be new on the floor.

Also, the simplicity of the administration, snapshot capabilities, and its replication are other features of PowerStore that I've found to be valuable.

Reporting is an area that could be improved. It's very simplistic sometimes, and some of the very technical guys on my team want to see more of the details and be able to massage the report a little bit better.

We originally added our first PowerStore about a year ago.

I haven't thought about the stability of the product, which means that it's working. That says it all. As a manager of the environment, if I'm not thinking about it on a daily basis, then that means it's doing what it's supposed to be doing.

I haven't really had to scale PowerStore as of yet, but it does have the scalability features that I need. I'll be able to scale up when we do grow.

Dell's support staff is very proactive. They were with us every step of the way to make sure that we were plugging everything in properly and making sure that everything is fully redundant during deployment.

With regard to post-deployment support, if we have any needs and call them, they respond within minutes. So, I would rate them ten on a scale from one to ten.

Positive

We replaced HP and NetApp with PowerStore because we wanted to reduce the physical footprint.

Deployment is very simple. I think we were up and running in less than a day.

Dell helped us with our deployments. They use ProDeploy, and we used it for one of ours that's overseas.

Normally, my data center team does all of the rack and stack and cabling. I share all those requirements with Dell to make sure that they understand that we're following best practices. We can plug it in, and do it all online.

The rack space I'm saving alone is an ROI because I'm able to then use those racks for more servers.

Power and cooling are big factors for us because we're trying to shrink the footprint as we move things over to the cloud.

Performance-wise, if I can have jobs that used to run for ten or eleven hours cut down to three or four hours, then that allows everyone to be more productive.

Pricing is very good. It's very competitive against all the others that I looked at in the marketplace, such as Hitachi, IBM, HP, and Pure. Dell is right there in the mix as far as providing the best price point, as well as meeting the performance requirements that we have.

I looked at IBM and Pure Storage during the last purchase cycle. The reason that PowerStore won that purchase was the pricing. They definitely set the bar high as far as pricing is concerned. Going with PowerStore would also help me to shrink the environment.

Don't shy away from the higher-end workloads. You don't necessarily have to go with a big iron box like PowerMax when PowerStore will suffice. It will then allow you to save some dollars and also meet the performance requirements that you have.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate PowerStore at ten.

We're addressing performance issues in our data center as well as the data duplication features to make sure we can be efficient in how we're storing data.

The main improvement has been storage efficiency. The price per gig of what we're able to store has been the biggest aspect the business has seen.

Some of the new features that are coming out, like vVols support are valuable. We're very excited about it. Currently, the features of replication and deduplication have been very important to us.

We've just heard that in the second half of this year, they will come out with support for vVols and the storage replication of those, which are new features. We're very excited about those. We've been waiting for them for a while.

It was very new when we first deployed it a year ago. Even just the upgrade processes and knowing what to expect, as well as documentation, could be more robust. We had folks that helped us through, however, we did have some bumps and bruises along the way.

I've been using a solution for just over a year. 

The stability has been solid for us since we deployed it. We haven't had any issues to speak of. A part failed somewhere, but it didn't cause any user impact, however, that's been the extent of it.

We tend to think of the users being our applications that are in there. However, in terms of the total global footprint of users, we've probably got 40,000 end-users, and probably 500 applications that run on top of it.

We are considering increasing usage. We have two other global data centers where it'll be deployed and then about 120 remote sites that we're just looking at now, whether we should make PowerStore our standard there or stay with the current unity.

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.

We did have outside assistance. We had Presidio as part of that deployment and we also had Dell's ProDeploy services. Both were very positive. They helped us understand both the prerequisites and what we needed to get started and then got us up and running effectively.

In terms of ROI, I don't have a good measure of it, however, I do know that we've seen definite improvements when we just compare what we've done in the past to what we're doing now. We've definitely seen improvements in terms of price per gig.

The great thing was the guarantee that came with it of the four-to-one deduplication ratio. That really helped with the pricing as well as the anytime upgrades. From a TCO standpoint, we were really able to see some benefits.

We did a bake-off between NetApp, Pure, and Dell. We've used EMC and then Dell storage solutions in our environment for years and have a proven relationship with the organization, as well as the product's capability.

We have a private cloud within our two new North American global data centers. We've looked at connectivity to both AWS and Azure, however, we really don't have any storage replication heading there at this point.

I'd rate the product nine out of ten. With the new features that'll be out in a few months, it just continues to get better.

I like this solution. This was built more from the ground up with new features in mind. In particular, some of the capabilities that are coming out in the near future are really going to set it in a class above what the others have to offer.