Dell PowerStore Reviews

The use case for purchasing is that I am doing a hyper-converged infrastructure on Hyper-V. My main goal has been to really have redundancy and reliability in the system based on our production schedule. We cannot afford to have much downtime. Therefore, I needed a setup. We purchased Dell PowerStore at the same time. I needed a setup that would give me the reliability to run my operations pretty much all the time.

Our production runs from about 3:00 AM until about 5:00 PM, which is a very long production run. During that time, we have PLCs and data collection equipment on the production floor. If they were offline, that means the production is not running. Therefore, having that reliability with Dell PowerStore, with the PowerEdge, with the setup that I have, enables us to keep the production running.

For small medium-sized businesses, Dell PowerStore has supported growth and organizational success because our company has been growing for several years, and we expect it to keep growing over the next several years. Having that infrastructure behind the systems is going to definitely allow us to keep operating with our production schedule, which is very demanding as per our customers' needs, and then also improving our production efficiency and quantity through efficiencies. I see all the Dell products growing with our future needs. We have been a Dell customer for a long time, and as far as I can see, we will continue to be.

The most valuable thing for me is that what we do is not really resource-intensive. Most of our work is regular office tasks. We do not do a lot of high bandwidth tasks or tasks that require a lot of storage amount or compute power. What I am looking for is reliability and redundancy. That is built in at every level of the system. It is built in at the component level, and it is built in at the whole system level too.

I have seen a reduction in downtime. Unfortunately with the PowerEdge and the new setup, I cannot really answer that because it is so new. We have not had any downtime yet with it. Hopefully, we will not, however, so far we have not had any downtime.

I like having products from the same vendor. It reduces a lot of headaches. When you have multiple vendors, there can be finger-pointing. With one vendor, you can get a turnkey solution.

The big problem that we had with Dell PowerStore comes to pricing. There seems to be a lack of a price range in the small company, small medium company segment. There is a bit of a blind spot.

Regarding additional features, it is so new that I cannot really give a comprehensive answer. I think feature-wise, it is very feature-rich. Maybe some of those features could be paired down in order to give lower price range options for companies such as us that are not IT companies, but manufacturing companies, where IT is not at the forefront of things.

I have been using Dell PowerStore since January when we bought our first one very recently. That is our first Dell PowerStore product.

It is scalable with those needs. Our growth in that sense is not very intensive as far as storage or compute goes, but it has been scalable when we have needed it.

I assess customer service and technical support as very good. I have found them to be very knowledgeable and very responsive. I do not really have any problems there. They have been very great to deal with. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the customer service as a nine.

Positive

Before purchasing Dell PowerStore, we were using a Hyper-V cluster with the Hyper-V purpose-built servers from Dell. That product line has been discontinued now, so we had to go with Dell PowerStore instead.

I have seen some return on investment. Since we were refreshing our infrastructure, the return on investment has been that I am able to concentrate my time on high-level items rather than small-level items that come from the aging infrastructure that we had before.

There is a big pricing increase once you get to our level, and for our size company, it was almost too large when we went from previous generation products to current models. It was a sticker shock, I have to admit.

I did not consider other solutions before purchasing Dell PowerStore.

The advice I would give to other organizations who are considering Dell PowerStore is because of the price, make sure that you right-size the equipment so you are not paying more for capacity that you are not going to use. That is probably my best advice.

To assess that before purchasing, you basically have to look at a couple of things. First of all, what is your current use of storage? Then, of course, you have to figure out how this is going to grow over the lifetime of the next product. From there, as an IT manager, director, or CIO, you have to be tuned into the company's C-level perspective on what they think the growth is going to be over the next four or five years of the product lifecycle.

We don't currently have any AI initiatives; we may in the future. Right now, our business is manufacturing and very traditional. 

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Dell PowerStore a nine overall.

My customers usually use Dell PowerStore for their infrastructure workloads and for their business needs.

Customers mainly use it for infrastructure workloads.

Improving operational efficiency is one of the default use cases, and it is paramount.

The main positive impact of Dell PowerStore on organizations is the total cost of ownership, which is one main advantage.

Moving and optimizing workloads within the cluster is quite easy based on my experience with Dell PowerStore.

The clustering feature, the Metro Cluster, deduplication capability, and compression are all important and valuable based on customer requirements.

Dell PowerStore's compression and deduplication technologies are very important for customers. These features increase operational efficiency and reduce their hardware footprint.

Operational efficiency is improved based on the customer industry and how their day-to-day operations and overheads are reduced. The management capabilities of Dell PowerStore are extremely easy to use and user-friendly. The benefits include ease of management and time savings.

Customers have been able to consolidate data using Dell PowerStore by 25% to 30% at least.

The data resiliency and cybersecurity features of Dell PowerStore are just normal and would be considered medium; we need additional components such as cybersecurity vault for increased resilience.

If the data resiliency and cybersecurity features are optimized, it would be very beneficial, as it's something we look forward to.

While the workload performance of Dell PowerStore is above average compared to other storage solutions, there's always room for improvement.

Staying updated with the industry is important, though no specific improvements come to mind for Dell PowerStore's next releases.

I have been working with Dell PowerStore for about three to four years now.

I have not heard of any outages or power decreases with Dell PowerStore.

My impression of Dell PowerStore's stability is that it's quite stable.

About 10% to 15% of the time we might come across a bug and we reach out to Dell support to get it resolved. 

I'd rate stability nine out of ten. This level of stability is very important for our customers. If it wasn't highly stable, they likely wouldn't buy the product. 

Expanding Dell PowerStore, in terms of scaling up and scaling out, is extremely easy; it's all online.

Ease of expansion is extremely important for customers. This avoids any unnecessary maintenance windows and outages. There's also better visibility.

Dell's technical support is always available for us. Technical support helps in resolving issues in a timely manner, which is why we open cases.

I would rate the technical support of Dell PowerStore between nine and ten out of ten.

Positive

The compression and deduplication are quite good compared to other vendors. It helps customers increase operational efficiency. There will be less hardware to manage. 

My experience with the deployment of Dell PowerStore is that it's quite easy and straightforward, typically completed within one to three days maximum.

The initial setup of Dell PowerStore is straightforward and uncomplicated.

Operations in the government sector, hospitality, and medical data storage are all examples of implementation.

Performing upgrades is quite easy, and I didn't face any challenges in this process.

Customers manage to see ROI thanks to these features, as they reduce their hardware footprint. The reduction of capital expenditures is about 30%.

Licensing for Dell PowerStore is all-inclusive, which is a good point, though from a price perspective, it is higher priced and could be more competitive.

The pricing is based on opportunities, so it varies widely.

We're a consultant. We work with small to medium-sized businesses.

Focusing on data resiliency and cybersecurity features is crucial.

Customers are satisfied but would like to see it improved in the future.

I would rate Dell PowerStore at nine out of ten. It's a very good product.

In my role, I am both the storage engineer and administrator and architect managing Dell PowerStore. Currently, we have two 3200T models and one 3000T model, which is a Gen 1, all running Dell PowerStore version 4.0 OS. 

We use Dell PowerStore almost exclusively for high-performance workloads, mostly Oracle, Microsoft SQL, and MySQL databases.

The thing that I appreciate the most about Dell PowerStore is how easy it is to upgrade; the upgrade process is very simple, and I really appreciate how easy it is to connect my hosts to Dell PowerStore, as the environment automatically detects new fiber channel HBA ports for all the hosts that we connect to.

Dell PowerStore has simplified my workload pretty dramatically as an organization. It is very easy to manage Dell PowerStore; we have other Dell products, such as Dell Compellent and Dell PowerVault, and the PowerStore is much simpler to use. I have experienced dramatic time savings with Dell PowerStore. I estimate that I'm probably saving six to 10 hours a week in management with Dell PowerStore.

I would really appreciate the ability to implement file on Dell PowerStore after I've already provisioned the environment, as right now I have to choose between unified file and block or exclusively block when I first deploy.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for three years.

I have experienced some downtime with Dell PowerStore, particularly due to a bug with Emulex HBAs during an upgrade process.

Dell PowerStore has been able to grow with and scale with the growing needs of our organization. We started out with just the 3000T, and then we bought one 3200T, and expanded to another 3200T for our production environment, slowly expanding as we need.

I evaluate Dell support as incredibly good, as I've dealt with a lot of support companies and found their service much better than others. Dell differs positively from HPE, as HPE support tends to be extremely proactive, but not as technically skilled, making my interactions with Dell support much easier.

Positive

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Dell PowerStore was that the Dell team was very open, and their expertise makes me want to only buy Dell products, even though the university requires multiple vendors.

I do not have any AI use cases on Dell PowerStore. I'm not sure if we're planning to use Dell PowerStore for AI workloads, but we are planning to use AI in the near future. As a university, we are still trying to figure out how to implement AI in our environment. T

he feature set of Dell PowerStore is extremely robust in comparison to other storage arrays that I manage, and I would appreciate feedback that makes the Dell ME storage arrays as good as the old Dell Compellents. 

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Dell PowerStore a 9.

We use Dell PowerStore for our manufacturing or MES system and data warehousing.

Dell PowerStore has benefited our organization through cost savings. It is simple to use, and so far, it has been perfect without any issues.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is its immutable storage, which is what we are looking for. It offers high protection in terms of ransomware protection. 

The design needs to be something similar to Pure Storage. It would be beneficial if there are different color or lighting options for different product casings. Different colors are helpful when working in the data center server room.

Pure Storage is simplified. We can do a lot of things online. They have a lot of information and training. We can go through their YouTube channel. Dell should be doing more like that. The main reason why people move to Pure Storage is because it's simplified.

I've been using it for two years.

The stability and reliability of Dell PowerStore are good.

Dell PowerStore scales with the needs of our company.

Worldwide, we have 200,000 employees, and in Malaysia, we have about 20,000 employees. We are in production line use and soon will deploy it in the data center for the Asia region support.

Their support in our country is very good.

We have an account manager in our country. The account manager is very aggressive. He could be less aggressive. 

Positive

Dell is quite good compared to HPE. Over the last few years, HPE is changing. They are acquiring many companies, and it's getting too complicated. One of the reasons we are using Pure Storage is that it is very simple. I hope Dell can do something like Pure Storage. However, Dell PowerStore is cheaper than others, and their support in our country, Malaysia, is very good.

Dell and our system integrator help us with it. We provide the requirements and they take care of the setup.

Our experience with Dell has been good.

As compared to others, PowerStore is cheaper.

Overall, I would rate Dell PowerStore a seven out of ten, as it still has room for improvement.

My use cases for Dell PowerStore typically involve consolidating older storage and bringing the future of storage to our customers. Because we are a Dell partner, I sell a lot of Dell PowerStore storage, especially to modernize their infrastructure and consolidate workloads on a modern infrastructure based on Kubernetes. Dell PowerStore fits perfectly in the modern IT landscape, especially with AI. 

We talk about AI, and Dell PowerStore fits perfectly for our customers, enabling a variety of user workflows and customer workflows. For manufacturing, Dell PowerStore is perfect because it empowers and speeds up their jobs, providing future-ready storage. 

One of our customers uses Dell PowerStore for AI, which is currently still in study, aiming to develop an autonomous agent to capture payment. This system will implement a responsive AI agent based for each store, which needs to react quickly, and Dell PowerStore provides the low latency needed for such use cases, supporting not just one shop station but potentially thousands, handling large amounts of data and logs.

Customers see benefits from implementing Dell PowerStore, as it significantly speeds up their workloads. When we change the repository for our data and speed up the workload, including applications and databases, our virtual environment or private cloud speeds up. Everything about the work done in the company speeds up, from the warehouse to the offices, and every part of the company improves.

For me and my customers, the most valuable features of Dell PowerStore are the data reduction and scalability. The data reduction of 5:1 with the latest version of the software is very good because it saves a lot of money and space, allowing us to use the budget for other things. 

Another valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is its scalability, as you can add one drive at a time to grow without having to purchase multiple drives.

Connectivity is another notable feature; you can use many PCIe cards to connect to the back end. With AI and the push for faster workflows, we need to integrate 100 Gigabit cards and faster switches. Additionally, because it operates within a broader ecosystem, Dell PowerStore is very compatible with various systems, including SAP and Oracle, enhancing speed and latency for numerous use cases. I believe Dell PowerStore fits 90% of companies and meets their storage needs.

In terms of improvement for Dell PowerStore, I think data mobility is crucial. A compelling feature would be seamless mobility of data without disruption, from local storage to the cloud. It would be much easier if Dell PowerStore implemented this form of data mobility. Currently, migrating from one model to another is not very straightforward, although it's on the roadmap. Upgrading an old model to a new one can be complex, particularly when using VMware.

I do not give it a ten because other storage solutions may offer better features. For instance, Dell acquired a company called Compellent, which had a feature called live migration, allowing multiple storage-to-storage transfers, including three hops. With Dell PowerStore, you can only replicate data between two storages systems, needing a separate appliance for more complex replication, which competitors like NetApp or Pure Storage provide as built-in features. I suggest this capability be considered for future development, alongside enhancements to data security and analysis.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for about five years.

My role in using or implementing Dell PowerStore is to design the infrastructure and analyze where it fits, considering the needs of the customer. We sell a solution that perfectly fits what the customer needs, as Dell has a lot of tools to implement the right solution. Before we sell a product, we conduct thorough analysis and discuss it with our customers, which makes them happy because we provide documentation containing all necessary parameters. We explain why they need to invest in such enterprise storage, and typically our work involves analysis, selling the storage, and empowering the customer's company.

Considering ROI for customers using Dell PowerStore, the cost is important, especially with the more affordable prices of the PowerStore 500 model. The lifecycle of the product is significant, and sometimes the renewal of maintenance costs more than a new product. Thus, the product lifecycle should ideally cost less.

We started working with the first generation Dell PowerStore in 2020, and our customers are already migrating to the second generation. Dell PowerStore is currently at version 4.0, and new features are released every six months. It is Kubernetes-based storage, so it's not disruptive to upgrade the firmware; every time we update the firmware, we have new features, and our customers are very happy.

It's a long partnership since Dell initially focused solely on servers. Now, they are a powerhouse offering everything from servers to storage and clients, presenting significant opportunities for business discussions. 

I rate Dell PowerStore a nine out of ten.

My use case for Dell PowerStore is for database information and database protection.

Dell PowerStore has helped me address challenges in my organization. The old storage was too slow, while with this storage, we can recover the information very fast.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is the speed. The speed of information and the ability to recover information are exceptional. 

To be honest, I don't think I could improve Dell PowerStore..

I've used the solution for about four years. 

When comparing the stability and reliability of Dell PowerStore to the old storage, the old storage never worked properly. This solution is more stable from that standpoint. 

The scalability of Dell PowerStore is very good. It's easy to expand. Though I'm not a technician, we have added more memory twice.

I have never worked with the customer service support for Dell PowerStore.

Positive

I previously used HPE, though I don't know which specific product.

Dell PowerStore is a very expensive storage solution. That said, the speed for recovering information is amazing. I would make the product cheaper. The discounts from Dell to South America are not sufficient because we need better pricing. 

The discounts for small PowerStores are not enough to close deals since I'm a distributor. As both a user and seller, it's challenging to sell Dell PowerStore to the channel or final customers because we don't have enough discount from Dell. We need to find deals worth a million or higher, and in my country, I have never sold a Dell PowerStore worth one million dollars.

I did not evaluate other solutions besides HPE because we are distributors of both Dell and HPE. The other vendors didn't have suitable storage solutions for us.

I am only a user of Dell PowerStore. 

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Dell PowerStore a ten. It's working now, and I never find problems with this storage.

We mostly use Dell PowerStore to replace people's outdated technology. Most of the time, if it is Compellent, we use it for that. It easily outpaces Nimble, even though HPE changed its name.

We are using PowerStore 500T and PowerStore 1200T. We have multiple appliances. We have clients that have five and six now, but they are not clustering them.

We recommended Dell PowerStore to one of our clients. They have since standardized on Dell PowerStore. They are setting up a data center and chose Dell PowerStore 5200T to meet their needs. Their deployed ones were all 1200s or 1000s, and now, they are going with much bigger ones for the data center. They like having one interface and one vendor. It has been extremely good.

Overall, it is fairly straightforward. They have standardized the platform for many of their solutions because it makes it much easier to sell and support since PowerFlex and PowerStore have the same footprint. They just put a different OS on them. The standardization makes it very handy. They can hopefully drive the prices lower, but we do not see them having any competition right now.

The management is easy. Intelligence is built into it. Most of the people just set it and forget it. It takes care of itself. It adjusts itself. I am not saying that you should set it and forget it. You should be checking it once in a while, but most of our clients do not. They just set it, and if something goes drastic, such as running out of disk space, they call us, but it warns you early enough. They get a warning, and then it is just trying to get dry fast enough depending on what they are doing.

Compression has improved, which is one of the enhancements that came with an update, which is great. Dell now claims 5:1, which I do not believe, but it used to be 4:1. The compression is really good and extremely important because you do not have to buy too much, and you can grow it when you need to. Compression is probably the key feature that allows us to slay the competition. I am not aware of the competition having as aggressive compression.

PowerStore improves operational efficiency. Having the NVMe drives is much faster than having SSD drives. We are in a new world there, and the compression is inline, which is awesome. It is just a sweet ride.

We utilize PowerStore’s built-in integrations for VMware and Kubernetes or Containers. VMware integration is very important.

Updates come with enhancements. Each time we do an update, there is an enhancement, like new features, which is extraordinary. Other companies would try to charge for all that, but the enhancements just come with it. 

The maintenance is a bit expensive. The service and support are there for three years, but after the third year, it is pretty pricey for renewal. I hope Dell addresses that. Everything is pricey these days anyway. It is not like the old days of Compellent.

We used to be able to see the metrics for our customers. On Compellent, we could look up that customer and see all the metrics. That is not allowed for us now. We cannot do that anymore. I have to be explicitly allowed by the customer to do that, and some companies' security does not allow that.

I have used the solution for at least four, or maybe five, years.

The stability has been excellent. We have not had any issues with that. I have had a client that had a fire. It was a pretty bad smoke fire, and PowerStore came through it like a champ. It is still going. However, it needs to be replaced. It is on one processor until the insurance comes through. It is a 500T.

The scalability has been extremely good.

The customer service has been excellent. I would rate them a solid nine out of ten.

Positive

We have used different solutions. We moved to Dell PowerStore because it is easy.

If you look at the pricing in the field right now, are you going to buy a storage product from HPE that pretty much has a different engineer every week? Also, HPE makes their products in China, which Dell is not doing anymore. They got rid of making products in China. I believe the Dell PowerStore and PowerFlex are produced in the Northeast, so it is a US-based product. The components do not come from China. That is a very strong aspect. With the advent of AI, you need the IO that a PowerStore can give you because things are not getting any less complicated. They require more and more data every day.

The deployment is easy. With the tools that come with PowerStore, you can pretty much migrate from anything.

We are deployment-certified, and we can have everything done within two days. However, we are not Dell. We got ourselves deployment-certified because we wanted to save money on the deal, and we did not want to get sucked into the vortex of the deployment process because there is so much minutiae there.

We are a partner with Dell, and we advise our clients. We are technical advisors for our clients, and the good thing about us deploying is that we can migrate their setup over several weeks. They do not have to do it all at once like with Dell. 

The rate is always too high. Nobody likes paying for it. I have not seen a client yet who says that the price should be higher.

Initially, people look at it, but when they see what the benefits are, it is a no-brainer. We can give them good pricing at the outset.

I would rate Dell PowerStore a nine out of ten.

We were end-of-life on our current Unity 480S all-flash arrays and needed to upgrade to a newer array, and we didn't want to have to pay the extortionate costs for renewing our support for Unity.

Dell PowerStore outperforms Unity by approximately ten to one. 

In terms of performance, it performs very well. Implementation went well. The console GUI is very similar to all the other Dell flagship products, such as Dell PowerProtect Data Manager or Dell Data Domain. All of the front-end console GUIs have been brought together to provide one seamless pane of glass ecosystem, which makes it really easy to move around in the environment. When I'm managing all these systems, that helps me quickly get familiar with where things are going to be placed, which then helps me speed up and do my job a little bit more efficiently.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is Metro Volumes. It allowed us to remove our current Recovery Point/Broadcom VMware SRM licenses, which cost a fortune, resulting in significant cost savings.

The product stands on its own merit. It does exactly what it's meant to do. It's very scalable, very efficient power-wise and performance-wise.

Cost is one aspect that needs improvement, as selling the drives after purchasing the solution makes them incredibly expensive. The reason we buy it as a whole complete system is because we get such a discount on the drives upfront. When we go to buy or populate more drives in the storage array, they're so expensive. If they could lower the cost for components, we would definitely expand them more and be more inclined to buy more storage units, but it's currently a price crunch for us. Price is a deterrent to scalability.

We have been using Dell PowerStore since implementing it two months ago.

We've actually crashed the system on purpose and watched Metro do what it was supposed to do. The product does exactly what it claims. We saw that on keynotes at Dell Technologies World 2024, and to see it actually work in our data center was impressive. When I removed all the cables, it failed over within five minutes. It's remarkable to see that actually happen in practice. You hear a lot of talk, but to see the talk go into action is another thing in itself.

We have 700 to 800 people. Dell PowerStore has models such as the 500T that we have in one of our smaller data centers. This solution is more suitable for mid to large-sized businesses. As a Dell company, it's definitely growing with our needs in every aspect, from data protection to storage capacity to the workstation level.

The deduplication feature set built into Dell PowerStore helps us with current scaling for storage because it provides significant data reduction. However, when we need to grow, the price point of buying external storage and filling up new LUNs and racks becomes expensive. We try to budget our storage for Dell PowerStore ahead of time to avoid populating it with more drives later, knowing that adding another rack will be costly. If they can help offset that cost, it would be beneficial.

They provide the same great support that I always receive with all Dell products. Their support is one of the best. That's why we're with Dell.

It was incredibly easy to deploy Dell PowerStore. The deployment time from start to end was a week, which included cabling, configuration, migration of data, and everything coming together.

We've received a return on investment in the coming renewal of our Broadcom VMware licensing. In terms of licensing, we're paying less due to the implementation of the new PowerStore system into our infrastructure.

After attending Dell Technologies World 2024 and seeing the new iterations and feature sets coming out in version five, we were further convinced to go with Dell PowerStore.

There are plans for an AI implementation, a kiosk-type system, that will utilize this storage, but it has been tabled for now. It will likely be picked up at the end of our quarter or beginning of next quarter.

I would rate Dell PowerStore an eight out of ten.