Dell PowerStore Reviews

Our use case for Dell PowerStore is virtualization.

We find that Dell PowerStore scales efficiently, as we've had good success with performance, availability, and deduplication. The benefits we see when we put Dell PowerStore in include a smaller footprint; we consolidated 10 racks into two racks, going from all Cisco UCS, Pure, and Dell Compellent into one Dell PowerStore. It was a two Dell PowerStore cluster with about 26 Dell servers, so we went from 10 racks down to two, leading to major consolidation.

Dell PowerStore has provided us with great success; the overall management ease, throughput, and dedupe have been excellent, and since we've only had it for two years, I don't really have much negative feedback or things to improve upon. It's a newer technology for us, so we're still evaluating it thoroughly.

If I could add any feature to Dell PowerStore, I would say we're looking to test, but I'm not ready to answer that question because we are looking to move away from VMware and are testing out OpenStack and Zen, so we don't know how that integration would work.

The only room for improvement I would mention is that, comparing it against a legacy product we had, we were a Pure shop, and some of the data metrics we get out of Pure from a support perspective online are a little bit more robust than the Dell PowerStore metrics, but it's not a negative against Dell. I see them getting there. As they continue to upgrade Dell PowerStore, I would assume that having more analytics would be the most important piece on any platform, but Dell's done a great job with it, so that's why it wasn't a heavy concern for us.

We have been using Dell PowerStore for two years.

Overall, since we've had Dell PowerStore, we've had no issues; we've had easy code upgrades, and being a single active-passive cluster, we've had no problems. Since implementation two years ago, reliability has been good, and we have not had a need to call Dell for support. With my experience of using Dell technology products for the better part of my career, support is usually the reason you go with Dell.

Dell support on the storage side for Dell PowerStore is unmatched.

Positive

We were a Pure shop, and now we're a Dell shop on that front, and we are satisfied with it.

It was remarkably easy to deploy Dell PowerStore; it was plug and play, with no need for any kind of material, as they've done a really good job making the deployment model user-friendly.

We've seen ROI with Dell PowerStore at every level, including financial benefits and reduced power consumption, which makes it easier to manage on a single platform. The financial metrics around Dell PowerStore are significant, but I can't disclose those; however, we saw significant financial savings. Doing back-of-the-napkin math, I'd say we saw about 40% cost reduction in our overall footprints with Dell PowerStore.

The pricing for Dell PowerStore has been excellent; it's a great price per capacity.

As we move into more virtualization aspects with Dell PowerStore, I think we don't need more documentation than what they currently have available, as it's a straightforward platform that is not complex. 

Regarding success stories about Dell PowerStore, there's a lot of data out there, and the Dell teams have done a phenomenal job answering questions, so I feel they have a significant amount of resources available.

I rate Dell PowerStore a 10 out of 10.

We use Dell PowerStore for all of our file storage and our local storage in general. We have all of our VMs running on it, data backups, and file storage is a big thing for us, with everything else in the cloud.

The features of Dell PowerStore that I appreciate the most are that it just works; it's tried and true and amazing, and we never have to worry about it. 

A lot of the interface is very clean and easy to use, making it very easy to get done what we need to get done.

One of the benefits I have seen from using Dell PowerStore is ease of use. While it is one of the biggest things, another huge benefit is that we have implemented other solutions and had issues with them—hardware, software, whatever it may be—and we don't have those issues using Dell PowerStore; it just works and is very reliable.

How Dell PowerStore could be better or improved is still to be determined with AI. Currently, it suits many of our needs, and there isn't much to want out of it because they are very good and innovative with their solutions.The first thing that comes to mind for improvement would be education. While I know that some educational resources exist, knowing about them would be beneficial, and if I dealt more with our representative to get more education on some aspects, that would be helpful.

I have used Dell PowerStore off and on for 15 years, and recently, for the last two years, we have gone back with Dell PowerStore.

If I would give a rating to Dell support on a scale of one to 10, it would be close to a 10. Ten is hard because that's perfect and nobody's perfect, but I would say it's up there, around eight or nine for sure, as they are always very helpful and responsive.

What would make it a 10 is hard to say since that's a perfect score, but it ticks many of our boxes and we really enjoy working with Dell. I don't have anything negative to say.

Positive

Before we decided to go with Dell PowerStore, we did consider other solutions and used to have a different solution. Then it caused problems, so we ended up going back with Dell and implementing Dell PowerStore.

I have seen a return on my investment in Dell PowerStore. One of the biggest ways is through time savings; we don't have to mess with Dell PowerStore as it just works, and that in itself is a huge ROI.

Comparing Dell PowerStore to our previous solution, we have significantly decreased our time spent on management. 

Annually, we used to spend considerable time configuring, reconfiguring, troubleshooting, and contacting support because things weren't working. It's night and day using Dell PowerStore—we don't do any of that, which is great.

Whether Dell PowerStore supports our AI initiatives is to be determined, as we have been figuring out how we are going to implement these technologies. What we are planning to do with AI in the context of Dell PowerStore is still undecided since it's a new technology, but we are exploring options. Dell PowerStore does not have features that specifically cater to the needs of our company or industry that are outstanding among others, but reliability is crucial, and ease of management is also important. 

I see Dell products growing with our future needs. I feel very comfortable with the scalability of the Dell PowerStore solution for our long-term plans. I can expand and keep using, and scale what we need to do. We don't have any performance metrics or benchmarks in place to measure success with Dell PowerStore; uptime is significant, and it has been great.

For the size of our company, Dell PowerStore has supported our growth and operational success very well. Dell as a whole has been awesome, always there to support us. We are working on a PC refresh right now, and our representative has been very helpful, always a phone call away.

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

I use it in the financial sector for banking, specifically for core banking applications, to serve our applications. We served different types of customers, ranging from oil and gas to the financial sector, education, and healthcare. We deployed Dell PowerStore in different industry segments, such as manufacturing and retail, for example.

The most impactful benefit is the data reduction and the deduplication.

Replication is easy to implement, and you don't need higher bandwidth to do replication across sites. It's quite useful.

The most impactful feature is the data reduction. Data reduction significantly saves costs. If I purchase, for example, twenty terabytes of storage, the effective capacity gives me somewhere around eighty terabytes. I pay for ten terabytes but gain eighty terabytes or fifty terabytes, for example. It depends on the type of data I am storing on Dell PowerStore, but usually, the reduction ratio is very good. It's a fantastic feature.

I have read about the new ability to cluster multiple PowerStore appliances and it sounds like a very good feature.

Its management capabilities are very strong. It is easy to implement and very easy to manage. The interface is very user-friendly.

APEX AIOPS is quite useful. It sends helpful notifications. It tells you what bottleneck is in your storage environment. It gives you detailed orientation of  why you are you are getting a bottleneck and where the problem is. 

We have been able to consolidate data using PowerStore.

PowerStore's compression and duplication technologies are very important and useful. It's a good feature.

The data resiliency and cybersecurity are good. It covers all the aspects that modern storage should have. 

The PowerStore cybersecurity and resiliency features meet our organizational needs.

PowerStore's built-in integrations for VMware are beneficial. It has all the features that need to be integrated into the environment. It's well aligned and tightly integrated.

One challenge in clustering is that when I create a cluster, the overall pool doesn't increase. Separate pools must be created for each controller node in the cluster. For instance, if I am creating a four-node or four-controller node cluster, I will have four different pools. If I want to enhance a pool beyond the maximum capacity of one controller node, I cannot increase it and must create a separate pool. This is a drawback in Dell PowerStore clustering. 

Synchronous replication covers the entire replication process, but there are scenarios where implementing synchronous replication is necessary, and that feature is missing. Pricing must also be considered, as Dell PowerStore is quite expensive compared to competitors in the market like HPE Alletra, Huawei Dorado, or Hitachi storage, for example. It is quite expensive price-wise.

Feature-set wise, PowerStore is very rich. I think all of the necessary features are there. Price-wise, PowerStore is quite expensive compared to the competition in the market like HP Alletra, Huawei, or Hitachi storage. Dell is more expensive. 

Competitors come in with better pricing and a similar feature set. Customers who already have PowerStore are very satisfied but when it comes to new storage requirements or a tech refresh, customers consider other options as well because of the price.

I have used the solution for roughly five to seven years.

It's very stable.

Scaling up is quite easy, whereas scaling out my storage requires deployment in a clustered manner from day one. If it's not deployed in a clustered manner and I want to scale out, I cannot do so. Careful planning is required at the start of implementation to determine if scaling out will be needed in the future. If this is not addressed in time, I will have to start from scratch, which is a daunting task. There are challenges with scaling out if the environment is not prepared at the initial deployment. Otherwise, it is straightforward. It is very useful, as I can add drive storage incrementally instead of a large batch of disks each time. It is both very useful and cost-effective.

Dell technical support is very good. They reach out to me promptly, deliver replacement parts quickly, and have local depots in three different cities across the country. Overall support is good.

There are two major aspects when it comes to the setup. One is the migration from existing storage, and the other is how fast I can complete the initial setup of Dell PowerStore. From a migration perspective, Dell PowerStore has the capability to migrate data from existing storage, even from other brands. The second phase is the initial setup, which is very straightforward. In a few steps, I am ready to set it up. Then, in the third phase, configuring replication, it is very straightforward and can be done in a few clicks. In all three phases—from migration to initial setup and to replication of the DR side, or the secondary side, or a third site—Dell PowerStore is easy to install and implement.

When I plan a tech refresh, other competitors offer better pricing with similar feature sets. This is a challenge for customers who are already satisfied with Dell PowerStore. However, when it comes to new storage requirements or a tech refresh, I consider other options as well.

Normally, Dell PowerStore is an NVMe storage, but it does not offer all NVMe protocol support like NVMe over RoCE, NVMe over fiber channel, and NVMe over TCP while other competitors do offer various connectivity options that Dell PowerStore lacks. For example, it lacks F5 and NVMe over RoCE and NVMe over fiber channel. Although it's NVMe-ready storage, it is not end-to-end NVMe ready from a technical angle.

My advice to anybody considering PowerStore is that if you need a scale-out feature in the future, you should consider it from day one. If Dell PowerStore is set up as a single appliance, scaling out will not be possible. This is the main point that needs consideration. 

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

We have a large Citrix environment and a large VMware environment, virtualized server infrastructure, and we use Dell PowerStore for our medical organization, so our imaging for x-rays and all those are stored on there, along with some backups. 

We're just exploring AI use cases for Dell PowerStore currently, as we're in the early stages of it. We definitely can see the potential of helping our medical staff come to conclusions quicker, also our financial team, which can get very complex with insurance and billing, and we're looking for opportunities there. We're also looking at opportunities in my field in IT to support staff more quickly, so there's a lot of potential across the board with supply chain issues and all that kind of infrastructure.

I don't have many features to highlight for Dell PowerStore. I do appreciate the warranty support side of it. When we've had issues, it's been easy to get them rectified. 

I have realized nothing exemplary from using Dell PowerStore, except hat the user interface is clunky, and we've had issues with that. 

The interface of Dell PowerStore reminds me of the Cisco mentality where it's just boxes moving around as you're clicking; it's not easy to understand what you're trying to do, and you have to have solid documentation to navigate the system and make changes to ensure you're not jeopardizing your system as you present and remove storage and expand LUNs. 

Some other vendors in that space are innovating in that area, making lives easier for engineers, however, it seems the Dell PowerStore solution doesn't cater to that need, and I'm seeing more and more that my colleagues in other organizations are experiencing the same problem and turning to other more user-friendly solutions.

The organization has been using Dell PowerStore for 15-plus years, maybe longer.

They're very stable; our infrastructure stays up, and we very rarely have any outage, occurring approximately once every three years.

Dell PowerStore grows with our needs and scales effectively. In the past, we've expanded our usage of Dell PowerStore substantially; in healthcare, we have to keep our data indefinitely, so we're always increasing our storage.

The support for Dell PowerStore is exceptional; I would rate it at probably an eight or nine out of ten.

Positive

Dell PowerStore is slightly more expensive than some other competitors when it comes to pricing, setup costs, and licensing.

In some cases, we haven't decided to purchase Dell PowerStore; we've been going with other competitors as in some cases it's easier and slightly cheaper. 

I'm not aware of other competitors at this level, so when asked about other competitors and their AI use cases, it's early in this world for many organizations, but Dell is leading it currently. If they're going to be using AI, this changes everything regarding Dell PowerStore. If it has built-in AI at the storage layer, at least the compute for it, that's only going to enhance that situation, and if your data's on-premises, that's a game changer.

We covered the cons of Dell PowerStore; as for the pros, we have a strong relationship with Dell and that partnership, and some of the innovations we're talking about today sound interesting to me. There's a good reputation there, and we've had great success with support.

I would rate Dell PowerStore as a solution overall at a seven out of ten.

My use case for Dell PowerStore is virtualization and primary data storage.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is the ease of deployment and general use. The ease of use of Dell PowerStore means that we don't have to have as many storage admins, and general people can now use it as opposed to just having specialized teams for that. 

Dell PowerStore has freed up staff to do other things, and they don't have to focus as much on the care and feeding of things on a day-to-day basis. We save approximately 40 man-hours a month, which is significant.

Some of the issues I have with Dell PowerStore are more gripes than actual issues. I wish there were more options to fine-tune things. Some of the information requires deeper investigation to get data efficiency per data store. 

I would rather see this as one holistic view, instead of having to dive down to each one to find where a data store is not performing as well as desired.

I have been using Dell PowerStore since 2020.

Dell PowerStore has been very reliable.

I think Dell PowerStore can grow, especially because we've done in-place upgrades. We've gone from a 1000T to a 3200 live, so we were able to increase the generation from Generation 1 to Generation 2, and then also increase the performance envelope by changing out the controller.

I have used customer services for Dell PowerStore. It has been very favorable. Most of the customer service we've dealt with has been out of Oklahoma for the mid-range tier products, and I've had really good interactions with them over the years.

Positive

Before Dell PowerStore, we were still Dell customers, using Compellent and Unity. We migrated over to Dell PowerStore as an option.

Dell PowerStore is mature now, though we were very early adopters and dealt with different teething pains. It's a mature product now and the ease of use and incremental scalability makes it very attractive for mid-enterprise teams. It fits a wide envelope of use cases, from basic standpoint to high-performance workload that can run without any issues.

I am familiar with the pricing and licensing of Dell PowerStore. The pricing is currently difficult due to global circumstances. The initial attraction was ease of expansion, one thing at a time, but with tariffs there's a lot of fluctuation. The pricing itself is fine, and the fact that we can expand one drive at a time makes it easier to manage capital expenses versus investing in an entire big array.

My overall rating for Dell PowerStore is eight out of ten.

My overall use case for Dell PowerStore is amazing, and the most valuable feature is yet to be determined.

Having one go-to array is helpful. Management likes simplicity. Management likes knowing that we made a good valuable decision long term that we can grow with. For the accounting team or the purchasing team's perspective, seeing the exact same array name helps them. Knowing that through our providers, our e-resellers, we're using the same platform helps to expedite our process.

Dell PowerStore is amazing. That said, the most valuable feature is yet to be determined. 

Dell PowerStore has benefited my organization overall, and I would assess the timeframes to deploy it as efficient.

If I could improve the product in any way, I would add features that make it look nicer compared to the DisplayPort.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for an amazing amount of time.

I haven't experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues, which is amazing.

I find the solution to be scalable. It gives the impression that it can grow with my company. 

Working with Customer Success, or technical support, has been a positive experience for me, and I would evaluate them overall as amazing. On a scale of one to ten, with one being worst and ten being best, I would rate this support as a ten.

Positive

I have evaluated other solutions both inside the Dell portfolio and outside.

The deployment is expedient. The time frame to deploy maybe takes weeks. 

In terms of AI, I have done some AI initiatives that I find amazing. My organization is large, and we have a significant number of employees. My impression of the stability and reliability has been positive. 

Overall, I rate Dell PowerStore a ten out of ten.

Dell PowerStore was attached to an SQL Database that needed to have high performance, and since the application was not very well written, the only solution was to put it on flash storage. In my company, we felt that Dell PowerStore stood out for us as a high-performance storage device in the market.

In terms of how the product has helped my organization or my company's customers' organizations, I would say that the product provides its users with the hardware they need to be able to scale and grow their applications. The product is helpful not just from the standpoint of being able to deal with expanding an array's needs but also having the power necessary for the workload.

The most valuable feature revolves around expandability, especially since our company had to grow one of the appliances once. My company found the tool to be really easy to use, expand, and manage.

My organization uses Dell CloudIQ to manage and analyze Dell storage. My company has not faced any issues with CloudIQ since we mostly use it for monitoring and reporting, and it never came back to us with anything, so everything is always green there. CloudIQ has not given our company anything yet since we may not have done anything wrong to date. As per one of the recent announcements, CloudIQ has been renamed Dell APEX AIOps. Going forward, we need to remember that CloudIQ has been branded as Dell APEX AIOps.

I don't look or assess Dell PowerStore's overall energy consumption closely since it is not in a data center where one can have features to monitor power. I would assume that the product would be efficient when it comes to the overall energy consumption area, and I understand that there will be some additional power savings with the newer versions of the product and the latest hardware. There hasn't been anything associated with the product that has been an issue for our company.

In terms of the ESG values of the product, I think Dell PowerStore has been doing a good job. Dell's team has been doing its best when it comes to the area of ESG values since they talk a lot about being green and recycling while also emphasizing how they are able to take in old products and dispose of them properly, making me believe that Dell works towards a good initiative.

The challenges my company is trying to address with the use of the solution, especially in areas like workload or data consolidation, I would say that the workloads that my company is running are all VMs, so we get into a ton of consolidation in that regard. The challenge my company is trying to address with the use of the solution revolves around the area of performance. The tool has not only met and addressed our company's challenges concerning the performance area but also exceeded them.

My company integrates Dell PowerStore with VMware.

The integration process of Dell PowerStore with VMware is not as easy as how it is when it comes to Dell Unity XT, especially in terms of getting the integrations turned on. Once the integration capabilities are turned on in Dell PowerStore, the tool works very well.

Though Dell PowerStore is generally easy to manage, it is not as easy as how one can manage Dell Unity XT. There are some management issues in Dell PowerStore. I have managed several pieces of Dell PowerStore's hardware area, and I could feel that it was almost like a step back in certain areas when it came to the management interface. I haven't looked at Dell PowerStoreOS 4.0, so I can't speak about it currently.

From a feature-oriented point of view, I don't want to see anything additional in the product since it is kind of a purpose-built appliance from what I understand. The product does everything I need it to do for me.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for a year.

The product's stability has been fantastic and rock solid.

The product's scalability features have been great. My company is happy with the product.

The solution's technical support has been fantastic, especially with the CloudIQ integration. Our company has had a couple of instances where Dell's support has actually reached out to us and told us about how there is an update in the queue and how we can download it and use the update as per our convenience.

I have not used any other solutions in the past.

The product's initial setup phase was easy. The product has an easy setup phase, especially if you have experience with Dell EMC storage products. Dell PowerStore's setup process may not seem as easy as the setup phase of the tools covered under Dell EMC storage products.

Only one of the two Dell PowerStore isn't production, but the issue that my company used to face with the previous product we used was associated with the fact that its application would die every day at two o'clock in the afternoon, after which there is a need to reboot the server in order to get the product to come back up. I believe the aforementioned problem was caused by a report running at the wrong time and taxing out the database server heavily. With Dell PowerStore, even if the report runs and Taxes out the database server heavily, the tool doesn't suffer from a performance hit. With the earlier products, users had to deal with 15 to 30 minutes of downtime in the afternoons, but now that has been eliminated with the use of Dell PowerStore. I have experienced an ROI using the product, but the number to which it equates is something that I can't specify.

When it came to the pricing part, my company looked at Dell EMC Unity All Flash and Dell PowerStore. Dell PowerStore is more expensive than Dell EMC Unity All Flash. Dell PowerStore's performance metrics were way higher than what Dell EMC Unity All Flash offered. My company considered Dell PowerStore to be the best solution despite its high cost.

I have not evaluated any other products against Dell PowerStore.

The product has not really helped reduce organizational footprint and data consolidation. The data is all there, and it just keeps growing, so I don't know if there has been any data consolidation possible with Dell PowerStore.

Though there are a few areas that Dell cannot control, when you look at an all-flash storage device, one can figure out that there is some cost involved in it. Other than the costs associated with Dell PowerStore, I feel it is a fantastic product.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We are resellers and Dell partners, so we install Dell PowerStore for our customers.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is its easy-to-use feature, specifically the simplicity. What makes Dell PowerStore simple is that users don't have to worry about the storage group; they just set up the storage and are ready to go without worrying about which kind of RAID group to set up or the protection of this group, as everything is managed by the storage itself.

The first benefit of Dell PowerStore for my company is the speed and low latency with low latency working workload of the storage. The second feature is the security, because it has Secure Snapshot and other security features, ensuring the data is fast and protected in a good way.

I would improve Dell PowerStore by enhancing the replication feature because currently, users are limited to one applier, from one cluster, a Dell PowerStore cluster, to another Dell PowerStore cluster, but are not able to configure a three-site scenario. 

The second improvement would be to enable quantification of the snapshot footprint. 

The replication feature mentioned is what I find missing in Dell PowerStore.

I have been using the product for about four years.

The overall stability and reliability of Dell PowerStore is very good because I perform many upgrades without any downtime.

The solution is scalable. Dell PowerStore has features that specifically cater to the needs of small or medium business organizations because users can choose small size disks that are scalable to the smaller size of some companies.

I would evaluate customer service and tech support as fair. Nine out of ten times when I open a case, it's solved in the right time and in the right way, but there could be one out of ten times when it takes longer than expected.

Positive

Before using Dell PowerStore, I used Compellent, which is the generation before Dell PowerStore. It still has some features that are not included in Dell PowerStore, but I hope that the gap will disappear in time.

For lower budget needs, I have considered other solutions that aren't Dell, such as ME products, which are the main two products we use, choosing the right one with the right budget.

Dell PowerStore has grown with my company. We already have some customers who buy upgrades to their storage, in terms of expanding the size or buying new models. 

Dell PowerStore has supported our growth and operational success by providing a deeper discount, which is great from a selling point of view. We also received a demo unit, which is a storage we can use in a customer environment without any strings attached, so the customer can try the product before buying.

My advice to organizations considering Dell PowerStore is to start small because from both the perspective of speed and space, you probably don't need to buy a bigger Dell PowerStore because the performance is already there, even in the lower products. 

For space, you can always expand the one you have, so don't buy too much space, but the right amount for you at that time, and then expand if you need.

I would rate the overall Dell PowerStore product an eight out of ten.