Dell PowerStore Reviews

We use this solution for VM and some AI storage. It's mostly an internal use server. We use it for the lab, and customers can access it. We use iSCSI on it. 

This solution is very useful to us as we use it internally for all of the services that we need. We use it as a lab and we showcase new technology to the customers and how it can help them going forward.

The interface is very easy to use and easy to install. Everything essentially comes with it. All of the software is there for us.

I do not like having to use VPLEX for synchronous replication, as opposed to having the store software built-in.

We have been using this solution for one year. 

This is a stable solution. 

We use the 500T model which is not scalable but there are other options that offer scalability from Dell. 

The technical support for this solution is really good. I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. We did all our prerequisites before the Dell representative came on-site to help finish it off. It is a plug-and-play setup. I was the only person involved in setup and deployment. I made sure that all the information needed was provided to Dell. The only maintenance that has been needed so far is some software upgrades.

We implemented this solution with help from Dell. 

The licensing for this solution is good and is in the mid-range tier. It matches the old UDXT platform.

PowerScale does everything you need it to do. That said, the advice I have is to determine what you need it for upfront because there are some decisions you have to make upfront and if you don't make them then, you'll have to restart later on.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We were in need of a new enterprise storage solution for our virtual machines. We use it for primary systems and processes, so for us it's very important.

The built-in intelligence adapts quickly to changing workload requirements. It works as we expected it to work. It doesn't give you a view into how it's doing it because it's doing it in the backend, but up until now, every process has been working perfectly fine.

The biggest benefit is that we have an enterprise storage solution we can rely on. It does simplify storage operations. It's easy to manage.

In the few months that we have used it, the performance has been great.

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.

The solution's machine learning and automation work well when it comes to optimizing resources. It does inline deduplication which means that the net the amount of storage you have available is bigger. It can do all kinds of optimization in the system itself and that works very well.

We have been using Dell EMC PowerStore for about three months.

The most valuable features of PowerStore are its scale up and scale out. We are able to scale up if we need more space or more power in the current PowerStore setup, but we can also scale out if we want to put in an extra one beside it or in another data center.

Technical support for Compellent was a lot better because for Dell EMC the PowerStore is a new solution and they don't have a lot of people here in the Netherlands with the right knowledge to work on it.

Having said that, I don't have many concerns that it's a new solution. Other people do have concerns about that, but I believe in the knowledge of Dell EMC. Also, it's not 100 percent new. It's based on another hardware system, so I have no concerns.

Before, we were on Dell EMC Compellent hardware, and that was based on a tiering principle whereby we used quick and slower storage. We had more and more issues with that because it was a little bit outdated, around five years old. We were looking for a new solution to house our infrastructure.

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.

I'm not satisfied with the process they used to do the setup and the timeframe within which everything was done. For example, there were things which we needed to do together with Dell EMC. There were three meetings for doing three specific things, but we could have done them in one meeting. That's why the duration, from the moment we bought the hardware until we were able to use it, was two or three months. We had expected that we would be able to use the hardware quicker. But because of the implementation process, it took us longer than we wanted.

Three months is too soon for us to see ROI.

When we compared it with the other solutions, the pricing of PowerStore was equal. The pricing is good.

I don't know what the names were because I was not 100 percent involved in the selection process, but there were two other vendors we looked at.

One of the main differences was the way they do inline deduplication. In the backend, PowerStore does all kinds of smart things. The result is that with less physical storage being used, we are able to host more data. Also the fact that PowerStore is completely NVMe-based means performance is great, thanks to the technical architecture.

The solution enables you to add compute and capacity independently, although in our environment we cannot add compute. We are able to add storage and that works, although we have not done so because we have only been working with PowerStore for three months and haven't needed any extra capacity yet.

Only three people work with PowerStore in our company, and they are all system administrators.

I'm happy with the choice we made. I can recommend PowerStore because the technical architecture is based on NVMe. They have a good USP. There are other vendors who also have NVME-only systems, but I still recommend PowerStore.

We do a lot of cloning of databases for either troubleshooting or to stage and prepare implementation. We are a SaaS provider in the real estate industry and we're either using the PowerStore to help expedite things in our development environment, or we're using it to help troubleshoot any problems that we have.

We have north of 13 petabytes of storage in our environment.

PowerStore has enabled us to add additional storage to that we hadn't planned on, which allows us to defer the purchase of some additional storage.

We've really improved the amount of storage that we're able to effectively utilize because of its better deduping. It has about a 50 percent better dedupe rate, with its intelligence, than we had been previously getting. 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.

My guys have told me that the administration tools take advantage of machine learning and make recommendations to the admins, and that makes the administration easier.

We've been using Dell EMC PowerStore for about six months.

We've had no issues with the machines since turning them on.

The machine supports "six nines" of availability. Anything they could do to push it closer to "seven nines" of availability would be extremely beneficial.

It scales both horizontally and vertically.

The support has been phenomenal.

We replaced an older, high-performance storage device that was very expensive. With PowerStore, we were able to achieve the IOPS, and we were also able to get a data compression rate significantly above what we had expected. We were able to retire that older, very expensive piece of storage by bringing in the PowerStore. It's been faster and cheaper than we had expected, per terabyte.

Another reason that we were after this machine was PowerStore's VMware integration. We're a very large VMware customer. Some 98 percent  of our workload runs on VMware.

The setup was very straightforward. We bought it with the setup from Dell EMC support. We bought it, they shipped it, and a Dell EMC engineer coordinated with my storage engineer. We set it up and then did the data migration. On these particular frames, we needed very little help. It all went very seamlessly.

We had a couple of data center engineers involved, as well as a couple of storage admins, and a storage architect.

Our storage administrators took very limited training to get up to speed on the machines.

Dell EMC was involved and the experience was very good. They showed up when they were supposed to, all the pre-work was done. They did the post-work, and there were no concerns from our team.

We exceeded the business case of the device that we had. We were able to add more workloads to the environment than the business case allowed, and we are still migrating more. So our cost per IOP and our cost per gigabyte have been substantially lower than our business case.

We did a very competitive analysis on the pricing and compared it against the tradeoffs of the other storage products that we had previously bought, and we found PowerStore to be favorable on a cost-per-compute basis.

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. I would like more flexibility to increase the number of engines on the frames. 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.

We've looked at several other solution environments, including Pure, HPE, as well as Violin and a couple of the other vendors that rate high in industry reviews. For us, with our large dependence on VMware, if we can get a cost-competitive solution from Dell EMC, with their ability to support VMware, we end up with a whole lot less finger-pointing in the mix.

You can add compute or capacity independently, meaning it has greater capabilities than the Unitys that we had been targeting for our non-SaaS environment, and it has performed admirably.

Clearly test out the workloads and don't necessarily be afraid because it's a new device. Work with Dell EMC to get a great contractual solution that will protect you with the new technology. This new technology does perform. It's a great performance machine.

Although it's a relatively new platform, I was fairly confident in Dell EMC technology's support for the environment and in the performance that we had had with other machines. I felt there was very little risk in the migration to this solution, and we were really excited about the improved capabilities.

In terms of PowerStore's built-in VMware hypervisor, we really haven't used it at the edge, although I can see its capabilities there. As a SaaS provider, we generally provide in the center. For the targeted workload that we have, it's performing substantially better than we had expected within our business case.

We're very happy with the machine. It has multiple CPUs per storage frame, which is better than the predecessor machine, and there is a RAM increase as well. We got what was advertised and even a little bit better than what was advertised.

We've been very excited by the capabilities of the appliance, to the point that the person who runs the infrastructure for me is now looking for a proposal to consolidate all of our non-VMAX work on PowerStores. The performance and the administration of the machine have been great and we're looking at how we can get additional returns on this targeted workload.

We are using Dell PowerStore for block storage. We store all the virtualized environments, such as ERP, virtual machines, Oracle, and SAP-based Virtual Machines. We use storage for all our blocks.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is the all-NVMe flash storage. This is the most powerful feature of this series. It supports compression and duplication leads.

We are looking for the Dell PowerStore to become more mature to maximize our use cases.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for approximately two years.

Dell PowerStore is stable. All solutions have some issues, but overall it works well.

Dell PowerStore is scalable.

We have 15 to 20 people using the solution in my company. The amount of use of the solution depends on the project we are in.

Once you deploy this solution in an environment from scratch it can be challenging. However, if the sizing and the planning are good, then the challenges can be covered upfront.

I rate the initial setup of Dell PowerStore a four out of five.

The price of Dell PowerStore could improve. The price should be managed more compared to Huawei Dorado or IBM All-Flash series.

I rate Dell PowerStore a ten out of ten.

I'm a systems engineer and we have a partnership with Dell. 

This is an interesting solution and I find the mapping to be a great feature. 

I would like to see more automation and more analytics in this product.

We have deployed this solution to our customers over the past six months. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. Each of our customers has around 30-40 users. 

Dell provides great customer service. 

The initial setup is very easy. 

I love this product and hope to work more on it. I rate it 10 out of 10. 

They use Dell PowerStore to build virtualization.

I have found the most valuable part of Dell PowerStore is the price.

I would like to see a Snapshot feature. Currently, it is unable to occupy the capacity. 

I have been using Dell PowerStore for three to four years.

Dell PowerStore is a very stable solution.

It is very easy to scale and we have all different sizes of customers.

Technical Support is very good.

I worked with Nimble but prefer Dell PowerStore because you just increase your SSD or hard drive in relation to the IPS. Nimble has an advantage because you can have a fixed IPS with the controller.

Dell PowerStore charges for the hardware warranty every three years. The price will depend on the storage model or how much hardware it has.

Competitors all focus on the all-flash solution. If any customer wants to buy their all-flash storage, besides Dell PowerStore, they can also consider Pure Storage. I would rate Dell PowerStore an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is virtual machines and file server databases.

We have found the duplication compression feature very valuable.

The product could be improved by including a synchronizing feature for the file systems.

We have been using this solution for ten months and we are currently using version 1.0.

The solution is stable. I rate it an eight out of ten.

The solution is scalable.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used vendors the first time we deployed and deployed it in-house the second time. It took us half a day to complete the deployment.

I rate the licensing costs a seven out of ten.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. The solution is good, but a synchronizing feature could be included to improve the solution.

We use this solution for customers who are looking for NFS and SMB file shares with faster access, migrating from the existing Unity and VNX onto PowerStore. We use this solution for consolidation. 

We are an implementer of this solution for our customers. It allows our customers to access the file shares quickly and easily.

The supportability of SCME drives for faster data access from PowerStore and is the most valuable feature. 

Many customers are looking for a cyber recovery feature included in PowerStore. We would like to see this added in a future release. 

I have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution.

I would rate the customer service for this solution an eight out of ten. 

The initial setup is straightforward. The time it takes to deploy this solution depends on what a customer is looking for. It usually takes between two to three days. We start implementation by gathering the customer requirements before going on-site and completing the implementation.

This solution allowed us to consolidate our storage efforts and operate with less of a footprint.

We did not evaluate any other options as I am a Dell partner.

From a technology perspective, this solution is up to date and supports NVMe.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.