Dell PowerStore Reviews

We use this solution for storage. I'm an enterprise architect. 

It's a versatile box that has different kinds of protocols that can be switched off and on. They have their own encryption which is good. It also has its own file formatting protocol, which saves us a lot of space.

A downside of Powerstore is that it can only do thin provisioning. I had trouble finding articles on the internet about it. When I was looking for information on switching features on and off there was not a lot available. 

I've been using this solution for several years. 

The solution is stable. 

The scalability is good. 

We have a bit of a challenge with technical support. We didn't purchase any support but it would have been really appreciated if Bell would have provided some minimal support for us. 

The initial setup is quite straightforward although we had to make quite a few adjustments. There was some trial and error but we got there in the end. Some additional documentation around that would have been good.

I believe the ROI is good although I haven't checked it. 

I believe the price point is quite good. 

I like this solution, it has everything you need for enterprise-grade storage. It supports all the protocols. It is much more reliable and efficient than the normal HPD.

I rate this solution seven out of 10. 

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 are especially active in the mid-market and use Dell PowerStore for block storage situations and general-purpose storage platforms.

PowerStore was the promise our customers needed to go further with the evolution of technology. It is also a platform with container architecture that is up to date with actual technology requirements. That is important to our customers.

CloudIQ provides us with one cloud-based platform and integration with APIs. It is a must-have in actual management platforms.

Moving to the cloud has reduced our on-prem footprint.

The most valuable aspects of Dell PowerStore are the promising roadmap, and the interesting features to come. In the beginning, it was limited in the number of features but as time went by the feature came as promised. Now it is an enterprise corporate storage platform. There has been a good evolution.

We have not seen an ROI and it would be good to have an ROI calculator made available by Dell.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for three years.

Dell PowerStore does what it promises with no stability issues.

The technical support is okay. Our customers especially in Europe tend to have interesting local contacts that can be a problem. 

We previously used EqualLogic but switching to Dell PowerStore felt like the natural evolution since EqualLogic reached its end of life.

I would rate Dell PowerStore nine out of ten. PowerStore is a platform we focus on for the middle markets, which is important in Europe and it does what it has to do. Combined with other Dell solutions like PowerScale it fits the needs of most customers.

In the last two versions, PowerStore has improved on everything it needed to and is now an enterprise-grade platform. It is keeping up with new evolutions like AI which is the most important thing. The position between PowerScale and PowerFlex is important as well.

We are a multi-vendor partner, so we propose solutions to customers based on their needs and likes.

Dell PowerStore is the main storage product we use for our customers. When we sell storage products, Dell PowerStore is always the first one we propose.

Dell PowerStore has helped our customers have a stable storage solution that never goes down.

We use CloudIQ to analyze and predict when the storage will fill up.

Dell PowerStore is good at reducing energy consumption.

We have seen a four-to-one reduction in our footprint for data consolidation.

We use Dell PowerStore with VMware to plug into vCenter. The integration allows us to create data stores from VMware itself.

The software upgrades are all included for no additional charge.

Dell PowerStore has just caught up to some of the competition by introducing METRO nodes a few months ago while the competition has had the feature for years. 

I have been using Dell PowerStore since its release in 2020.

Dell PowerStore is extremely stable.

The technical support has significantly improved from where it was two years ago.

Positive

We previously used Dell Compellent but it wasn't stable and Dell PowerStore was replacing it so we eagerly switched.

The implementation is always good except for sometimes having to link PowerStore to the correct CloudIQ because the sales organization doesn't provide us with the correct ID.

For our customers, Dell PowerStore is a one-time installation that keeps running with minimal non-disruptive maintenance.

We evaluated HPE but PowerStore does what it needs to do and there is no need for other products.

I would rate Dell PowerStore nine out of ten. For a ten they need to surpass their competition.

Our environment consists of a VMware cluster of two, three, or four hosts in a single location.

I would advise my peers to go for it and utilize Dell PowerStore.

We primarily use the solution as a POC. We have Extreme IOs that we're looking to replace, and this was brought in as a potential replacement for them.

For our scenario, it doesn't really fit the bill for where we're trying to go. The unit's fine. Unfortunately, it's a relatively greenfield type of product and we're looking for something with a little more robustness that's been in the field more. PowerMax works great, of course, and that's probably what we're going to go to instead. We just decided Power Store was just not going to fit the bill for what we needed. We needed something with a higher tier in the end.

The support is very good. 

For smaller shops, the solution is useful. 

We felt like this was just kind of a mix of Extreme IO and Unity. We weren't happy with Unity, which is why we weren't going to use Extreme IO. It seems like they just kind of merged two products and made this solution and while I'm sure it's great for smaller shops, we are not a small shop. 

It needs more mature code. 

The VASA plugins for ESX could be enhanced. My understanding is that that is in the roadmap.

I've using the solution for about a year. 

I'd rate the stability at a three or four out of ten. It could be more stable.  

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the solution at a six for scalability.

We've been quite happy with support. they are very good. 

We're trying out PowerMax, and will likely move in that direction instead of sticking with this product.

We have not witnessed any kind of ROI while using the solution. 

The pricing could be better. I'd rate it four out of ten. 

For new users, I would heavily suggest they evaluate their environment with real-world loads, not synthetic loads, when considering the solution.

I'd rate the product five out of ten. 

We are using Dell PowerStore primarily for SAP applications as block storage, for replication across different locations.

We see a lot of value in the investment. Primarily, it's quite cost-efficient, and with the latest NVMe technology, we see the performance of this has improved compared to the previous generation VNX or Unity array.

When compared to Pure Storage, Dell PowerStore's cost was quite attractive.

The UI should be a little more user-friendly to manage. 

We want to see additional public to private cloud adoption features included if they are at all possible.

I have been working with Dell PowerStore for approximately one year.

We are working with Generation One, and we are looking for Generation Two.

Dell PowerStore is very stable.

Dell PowerStore is scalable. We can add multiple engines to it.

We have 200 users in our organization who use this solution.

We have not contacted technical support.

At the moment, I am using Pure Storage and NetApp All-Flash Storage Arrays.

We have worked with TCS. We chose it because of NVMe and the performance-enhancing technologies it offers.

We worked with HPE Alletra and Pure Storage.

Because HPE Alletra was not unified storage, we chose Dell PowerStore because it was.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It took less than a day to deploy.

This solution does not require any specific maintenance.

We carried it out using OEM and other methods.

We purchased it with a five-year warranty.

When compared to the technology that has been evaluated earlier or has just come onto the market earlier, it provides a good value for the money. Since the price is significantly lower and performance features have improved. That being said, I would recommend this.

I would rate Dell PowerStore a seven out of 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.

I use Dell PowerStore in my company as a storage system.

Dell PowerStore is an easy and fast tool to work through our company's data.

Dell PowerStore is not a powerful tool. From an improvement perspective, Dell PowerStore needs to be a more powerful product.

There are certain shortcomings with the technical support team of Dell PowerStore, where improvements are required.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for five years.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

My company is a bulk user of the product and has around 100 users of Dell PowerStore, consisting of eight to ten IT engineers, and the rest are administrators.

My company plans to increase the use of the solution in the future.

With the technical support team of Dell PowerStore, my company faces certain language barriers.

Negative

The product's initial setup is easy.

I rate the product's initial setup a six on a scale of one to ten, where one is an easy setup phase, and ten is a difficult setup phase.

The solution can be deployed within two to four hours.

One person is required for the deployment of Dell PowerStore. Two people are required for the maintenance of Dell PowerStore.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

Dell PowerStore is not a cheap solution.

I would not recommend Dell PowerStore to those who plan to use it.

As the price of the product is high and it is difficult to contact the support, I rate the overall tool a seven out of ten.