Dell PowerStore Reviews

We use Dell PowerStore for virtualization.

Our customers implement PowerStore for its performance and the possibility to utilize AI in the future.

CloudIQ improves efficiency by allowing our customers to manage their systems from one place.

PowerStore does not consume a lot of power which is great for our enterprise customers but in Italy, our customers are usually small and medium businesses and are not too concerned about the power consumption because they only run two PowerStores.

Some of our customers have seen PowerStore's four-to-one data reduction. This has reduced our customer's footprint by three to one.

The most valuable feature is the functionality of the integration between the storage and the domain. Also, the possibility of having snapshots and synchronous replication is valuable. This is helpful for our enterprise customers because they need to replicate their data.

The most important thing is for Dell RND to continue to be innovative. 

Dell PowerStore currently only allows us to copy data from our main production system to the disaster recovery site. Dell PowerStore needs to add two-way replication to include data from the DR to the production site.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for four years.

Dell PowerStore is stable.

Dell PowerStore scalability is good because we can change parts and the controller if required. The parts are swappable.

We have used the technical support and professional services of Dell. They have been good to work with.

I have also worked with HP and IBM storage solutions but most of my customers are already Dell users and prefer PowerStore.

Although I don't have direct experience with the deployment, our technician has told me it is simple and can be done with a few clicks.

Our customers see a return on investment in terms of time savings because the setup is simple. The initial cost may be higher for PowerStore than some others but the life cycle is longer which makes up for it.

The price is right. The software features are included in the pricing without any additional purchase requirements.

I would rate Dell PowerStore nine out of ten.

We're evaluating the product. We're evaluating various storage platforms. We're looking for ACI, block, and file storage. 

One of the biggest factors for us is security. We want to make sure we're as secure as possible.

We're a Dell shop to begin with, in our architecture. There are benefits to keeping Dell as the main brand and staying consistent. Dell is the product of choice in our shop.

The simplicity and performance are great. It meets a lot of our objectives.

We're still trying to figure out the cyber-resilient data approach to security. We're checking all the boxes from a performance perspective; security is a big factor and we're looking into it. It's very interesting.

We do use Cloud IQ. It's still new to us. We use it a lot for lifecycle management for our PowerEdge cache management. It's good for firmware and patch management. We're hoping we will be able to automate a lot of those activities (versus doing everything manually).

The overall energy consumption is good. We're saving on our consumption. It's more economical compared to other products and technologies. It has a slight edge; however, it may not be overly significant. It does make sense if you have multiple PowerStores. It would have multiple savings, depending on the amount you use. 

We've condensed our footprint and become more efficient. We've reduced our footprint by 50% at least.

The integration with VMware is great. That's our biggest play on-prem. 

From an air gap perspective and data protection, I'd like to see more immutable backups. We'd like to see some improvements on the security side. 

I'm currently in the evaluation period. It's been six to 12 months.

I haven't seen any issues with stability. From the performance we've experienced, we haven't had any problems.

I did deal with support at the outset. We're a big Dell company, and we love the support and account managers that help facilitate things.

Positive

We're currently evaluating Dell and Pure Storage. We're more of a Dell shop and are leaning towards Dell. I see the benefit and value of Dell.

The initial setup was user-friendly. The product is simplistic. The UI makes it easy to navigate.

It's cost-effective.

We are not using the solution for any AI-driven workloads. However, we know it's coming. It'll position us better in the future.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We mainly use the solution for virtual server infrastructure and block storage (not file storage use).

The main challenge we addressed was having some kind of mid-range all-flash array. It's one of the best use cases. 

The budget is good. It's really good, price-wise. It's cost-effective.

We have some VMware use cases for VMware infrastructure and it is good for that. We can use it for its data reduction capabilities. We have moved from 1.48 to 1.27. 

It offers good snapshots.

We use Cloud IQ for analysis. It's simple to quickly check and you don't have to be near the array to do so. 

The cyber-resilient data approach is good. It has all the features we need as a security company. The read-only snapshots are great.

There could be better reporting. We should be able to do some better metrics and they should be stored for longer so we can do better investigations. 

I've been using the solution for about four years. 

The stability is good. However, the sizer is not quite right. From my experience, the same number with the same read/write ratio and the same log size is off compared to my own notes. It's stable, yet the CPU utilization is higher. Sometimes, we need to move stuff off of it since we can see it's being over-utilized. 

The scalability is good for our use case. Sometimes I wish the cluster capabilities were more like XtremIO.

In the last year, we've noticed that there has been a drop-off in Dell support. In the past, I've had a better experience. The merge didn't benefit the support.

Neutral

We used to use XtremIO. We didn't fully switch. We decide which to use depending on the use case and budget. Other companies offer discounts from time to time. We'll compare and have an auction to see who wins. Price is just one factor. We also evaluate the support experience, for example. 

The deployment is very easy.

We install the solution ourselves. We did not use an integrator or consultant. 

We've witnessed an ROI after switching from some other infrastructure. It identified some areas in which we could get some good reductions and could decrease the data center footprint. 

We're constantly evaluating other solutions and comparing the options for price, support, and other metrics.

We aren't really using any integrations. We also don't use it for AI-driven workloads. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's a great product. It's improving over time. When it was first released, I'd rate it four or five out of ten. However, it keeps getting better. The only problem I see is the support. 

We have a lot of Dell systems and backup repositories. We are now migrating to Dell PowerStore.

We are implementing Dell PowerStore to migrate from older systems and improve performance and security.

Dell PowerStore has helped our organizations by improving performance and reducing data and data center space. Our overall data footprint has been reduced by 40 percent.

CloudIQ allows us to manage all of the storage appliances from a single pane of glass and also magic dashboarding for better insights.

Dell PowerStore's cyber-resilient data approach is great because security is a key driver in our organization. One of our top issues is managing security and all the things that are intricate in the equipment are key to our organization.

Integrating Dell PowerStore with VMware allows us to manage storage allocation more efficiently and with greater resilience.   

The most valuable feature is the encryption in the loop because we can manage data center data from a different perspective, reducing the space used while growing data using the same equipment.

AI will be a challenge and we must manage different kinds of data with more performance and security. It's a key driver.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for one year.

We are in the process of migrating and as of now the stability of Dell PowerStore has been incredible.

Dell PowerStore has features to reduce occupancy and we can manage the use of that space differently.

We have used Dell for 20 years and one of their top priorities is to guarantee if we have an issue, we can solve it and their support has been great.

We previously used Dell EMC VMAX but switched to Dell PowerStore for increased security performance and reduced footprint.

We have a script that syncs with the things we want to achieve and typically the partners use that script to implement and it works perfectly.

For high performance, we evaluated HPE and two others.

I would rate Dell PowerStore eight out of ten. We are still in the migration phase.

We use Dell PowerStore with the VMware platform for block storage.

Our customers implement Dell PowerStore for the performance and deduplication compression ratio. For all the PowerStores that Dell deployed, I am around three dot eight or three dot six compression. It depends on the VMs and the customer's infrastructure, but it's quite good.

Our deployments are always on-premises for organizations in multiple industries, including medical and production. The environments are small, with around 20 terabytes of data or less.

We integrate PowerStore with VMware. We can't use PowerStore if we don't have a virtual platform like VMware or Hyper-V. We use VMware-certified professionals.

CloudIQ is a good tool for monitoring all our systems. It creates alerts that notify us if something is wrong and it also creates tickets automatically to Dell.

The most valuable aspects of Dell PowerStore are integration with VMware and reliability.

Dell PowerStore is an unfinished product compared to the HPE systems because it is relatively new. The synchronous replication was only added recently.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for four years.

PowerStore is stable. We install it and forget it for four years until it is time to replace it. 

We only sell one PowerStore to our clients, so there has been no need to scale but if needed more disks can be added.

The Dell support is good. The response time is good and the people are reliable. I am happy with the support.

Positive

We have worked with HPE, Huawei, and Pure Storage. Dell PowerStore is a young product compared to HPE. HPE has a lot of experience. Huawei is aggressive with pricing and has good products in Europe. Pure Storage is good but heavy and costly compared to Dell PowerStore.

For me, the deployment is easy because I'm very experienced. We had a lot of issues passing from version two to version three. I had to call Dell support each time we upgraded from version two to version three but once we're on version three, it is good.

I would rate Dell PowerStore eight out of ten.

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 primarily use the solution for storage.

The solution is very easy to implement. 

It's stable.

The solution can scale. 

Its pricing structure is reasonable. 

There is a bit less functionality than, for example, NetApp. 

You cannot monitor as well with this product.

You cannot delegate permissions. For example, in NetApp, you can give two virtual storages and give them each to a different company. In Dell, you can only have one or two admins, and you cannot give permissions independently. It should be more flexible. 

I've been using the solution for half a year.

The stability of the product is good so far. There are no bugs or glitches. It's new. It hasn't crashed or frozen. I'd rate the stability eight out of ten. 

For now, the scalability is fine. I can grow double my size with no problem. I have yet to scale, however. I'd rate the scalability potential nine out of ten. 

There are 800 people using the solution right now. 

We do not have plans to increase usage. 

If I had any issues at the beginning, it was dealt with in the presence of the integrator, and he fixed it. I have yet to contact technical support to troubleshoot.

I've also used NetApp.

Before that, we also used HPE.

The company chose Dell PowerStore based on budgeting choices.

The implementation process is straightforward. It's not complex. It's easier to deploy than NetApp. The deployment takes about six hours for a basic setup.

You just set it up and connect it to the laptop and input the details. 

The technical team for deployment and maintenance only took one system admin. 

We had the help of an integrator during deployment. 

I have witnessed ROI while using the solution. It's been good so far.

The pricing is okay. It's expensive, yet fits within our budget. It has cost us less if we compare it to NetApp. We bought the license for the whole five years. There are no extra costs.

I'm not sure of the exact cost of the solution. 

I'm an end-user. I'm an administrator of Dell PowerStore. 

We are using the latest version of the solution. 

I've been very satisfied with the product.

The solution is easy to manage and implement. It's worth the money you pay for it. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

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.

Typically, the customer uses it and we manage it. We primarily use it to host the sub server.

snapshot policy you can take a versions as a backup in less than seconds and quickly created volumes from snapshot provide more flexibility and fast provisioning 
compression and deduplication of overall hosted data maximize the benefits from the actual physical size with a ratio of 1:3 at least.

The usage of the system is very straightforward. It is simple and easy to use.

It has great snapshots. I can take a million snapshots and also schedule the timing.

There is no complicated configuration for queries and calls. You just create a model and go.

This generation of the product, overall, has been very nice. 

It is stable.

The solution can scale. 

There are a lot of features in IBM that we'd like to see in PowerStore as well. It has more deduplication and compression processes, all the storage, so that they do not depend on the tool embedded in the cluster. 

The pricing could be lower. It is very expensive.

I've been using the solution for at least six months. 

The stability is good. It is reliable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's been perfect so far.

The solution can scale. We can attach an expansion as needed. So far, seeing as how I haven't collected all of the information in regard to scaling, I'd rate it seven out of ten.

We have three storage admins. The customer likely exceeds 20,000 users globally.

The client does not have plans to increase usage at this time. 

I've contacted technical support, They are fine. They are helpful and responsive. 

Positive

We have received a new storage device from HP. It is MSA storage.

While I did not see the deployment, my understanding is that it is easy.

The price is very, very expensive. It is more expensive than IBM, for example. Likely the cost is $400,000 whereas IBM may be $250,000. This is a one-time payment to buy the device. There are no subscription costs. There are no other costs for support.

We've looked into IBM SS7 300 as well. I'd recommend it as it has many abilities. It can carry some uploads from storage clusters. 

We are service providers.

The solution is on-premises at our company and we manage it for the customer remotely via a private cloud.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.