Dell PowerStore Reviews

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.

As a reseller and Dell-only reseller partner organization, I have a number of customers who are currently using Dell PowerStore. It's a solution that we find is a great solution in the market. When Dell PowerStore first came to the market, a lot of our clients had VxRail with the convergence offering that Dell had. However, now with the Broadcom split from Dell with the VMware licensing, we're finding that with having Dell PowerStore with the AX nodes and the OEM Dell VMware solution built in, it's providing a very comprehensive solution to our customers. That's really helping us grow. We certainly find Dell PowerStore to be one of the best products out there in the market in terms of use cases for a lot of our customers across the board.

Because Dell PowerStore is built in with the all-flash and the NVMe platforms and the United offering it has with the single architecture for block, files, and the virtual volumes, it provides functionality and flexible functionality for our customers. They can use Dell PowerStore for various use cases. We've got customers in FinTech, in manufacturing, and in different industries as well. It's not really just suited for one type of industry; it can be used for many types of organizations.

We're in conversations with several organizations about using Dell PowerStore for AI initiatives. AI is obviously something that's more prevalent in the market and growing. We recently had a customer who had an 82-node VxRail. They had a refresh earlier in the year. Now they have Dell PowerStore with AX nodes. They have a cyber recovery solution as well, an air gap solution with a clean room. They're looking at how they can make their supply chain more efficient since they produce manufactured kitchens. A lot of it is learning what AI is capable of doing for their business and trying to see the benefits. We tend to find that FinTech organizations and companies doing trading are more interested in that type of technology. As AI matures, we will see more use cases for them.

Being a Dell-only organization, I have been working with Dell PowerStore from the concept when it first came out, replacing the Unity devices and becoming more of the go-to-market. We've been working on it from day one. We've got customers with quite a lot of data on Dell PowerStore, quite large organizations that are carrying hundreds and hundreds of terabytes of data. It's fantastic, and the customers find it very easy to use. We've not had any complaints around it being a difficult product in terms of simplicity and use. It's been great.

The fact that Dell PowerStore has cloud integration really helps. Many of our customers have hybrid cloud environments where they're holding data on-site, but also they push some of the data up into the cloud. Having that cloud integration is really useful for us. The business continuity and disaster recovery features provide robust data protection capability, including snapshotting and replication for both planned and unplanned downtime. Mixed workloads are also supported, including Microsoft SQL servers and container-based applications.

The ease of use is significant. Dell PowerStore has one GUI in terms of how to use it. It integrates very well with the data protection suites and the cybersecurity side. It's a storage platform that allows efficient data access and makes upgrades very easy to do. In the past, with a three-tier system, it was very difficult to do everything in silo, whereas with Dell PowerStore, upgrades, management, and maintenance are very easy.

With the anytime upgrade options that Dell PowerStore has, it really fits and suits our customers. They can upgrade anytime they want and add extra capacity without having the constraints of acquiring a different solution or re-architecting the environment.

What would make it perfect is addressing the occasional lack of continuity with consultants who are on projects for five to six weeks regarding Dell PowerStore. With any type of support, there will always be some types of breakage. We find the support very easy to access and helpful. A recent customer reported that the support representative was completely dedicated to helping them. The support representative was almost emotionally invested in the problem. There are some excellent technical professionals in the team who are dedicated to resolving issues.

Information regarding performance metrics or benchmarks used to measure success with Dell PowerStore is not available.

Dell PowerStore is a very reliable product that our customers love. In the early days, there were some challenges with the new product, but it's now a very mature product that works really well. When Dell PowerStore is implemented properly and integrated within a customer environment, it performs as expected. We've always had confidence with the product.

We handle deployment of Dell PowerStore as one of the highest certified Dell partners in the UK. Our success has been driven by our delivery capabilities. We've won numerous awards, including EMEA Services Partner last year. Our deployment expertise is why customers choose us. We understand the products thoroughly, can drive solution value, and implement it within networks, bringing in different applications. Our implementation skills are highly certified on these products.

Being a Dell partner for the last 12 years, we know who to contact when our customers have problems with Dell PowerStore. We've built personal relationships with teams, line managers, and senior people, which helps us get things done for our customers. Dell is a large organization that serves many customers, but we're fortunate to know who to call when issues arise. Our managed service team is very technical and can fix most problems. When customers need to contact Dell, we maintain the relationship and handle it on their behalf as part of our services.

Positive

We have seen return on investment from selling Dell PowerStore. We see significant customer loyalty towards the brand and solution. A customer we met last week who has Dell PowerStore stated that they love the solution because it works and does what they need it to do. They can sleep peacefully at night knowing it will perform without issues. This gives us customer retention and loyalty back to us as a solution provider, having full confidence that when we sell this to a customer, we can guarantee it will work and meet their needs.

I would advise potential users to definitely conduct a POC with Dell PowerStore and examine the product. It is a very comprehensive solution with capabilities that are superior to many other vendors. Dell has hundreds of case studies available for reference. Testing the product would make it difficult to choose another vendor's solution. I rate Dell PowerStore a 10 out of 10.

I use Dell PowerStore for an application. In my last work at B3, we bought Dell PowerStore for a specific corporate back-end, back-office solution for one application to solve problems with the service desk. We created some LUNs for a SQL Server and presented them to some Microsoft Windows Clusters using Dell PowerStore, but we don't use remote replication for Dell PowerStore; it's in a single, specific solution for an application attending a SQL Server.

The solution is implemented in finance. B3 is the Brazilian stock exchange, and all the solutions I worked on there for the last 15 years were in finance.

It reduces the time and complexity of the deployment process. It’s quite simple and can be done quickly. I believe it has significantly reduced the time required to deploy. Overall, the deployment process is very straightforward.

I really appreciate the management and the management console of Dell PowerStore along with features such as deduplication. It's good and sufficient.

Additionally, it's very easy and simple to use Dell PowerStore for moving and optimizing workloads within the cluster. It's just to provision the LUNs for the cluster. If we have a virtual environment like VMware, we can easily perform storage migration from a source disk to a target disk. This process allows us to transfer data seamlessly. In my previous jobs, we typically utilized tools such as Open Replicator, which is provided by Dell EMC, to move data between Dell EMC storage systems.

Furthermore, Dell's post-sales support is strong and very good.

If Dell PowerStore had more controllers, making it more reliable and resilient, it would be better. The most important thing for the customer is resilience and business continuity. When we have a failure in one controller and only two controllers, that's not good enough. If we could scale Dell PowerStore to four controllers, it would be better than what we have today.

I have worked with Dell EMC for more than 15 years, and also HPE, including 3PAR.

Dell's post-sales support is very strong and good. I trust in Dell's post-sales support. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with NetApp storage solutions, hybrid NetApp, all-flash storage systems, and Hitachi models such as USPV and VSP, but my strong knowledge is with Dell EMC, PowerMax solutions, PowerFlex, VXRail, and hyper-converged infrastructure solutions.

I have deployed Dell PowerStore just once, but I have deployed many other products such as PowerMax 200, PowerMax 8000, and others. I have deployed a lot of high-end storage platforms from EMC and Dell EMC including DMX series.

I deployed it on-premises; the model is 500T. It was very simple and easy to do. I particularly really appreciate using the Apex AIOps or the CloudIQ solution from Dell EMC as it allows me to observe all the metrics and telemetrics from the performance through the SAS portal, which I think is very good for knowing about the workloads and how the equipment is working.

When it comes to Dell solutions, I find PowerMax to be the most comprehensive option. It offers a range of features such as remote replication, security snapshots, immutable security snapshots, and SRDF capabilities—both synchronous and asynchronous. It also includes features like chip copy disk mode, deduplication, peak provisioning, and effective data reduction. There are some similarities between the two, but PowerMax has several advantages. It comes with more controllers and greater resiliency, making it better suited for critical mission environments.

I would rate Dell PowerStore an eight out of ten.

My position is a solution consultant, so I promote Dell PowerStore products or recommend the products to customers. 

Most applications or workloads can fit within Dell PowerStore, except for file serving or surveillance solutions, which require less extensive storage. 

It's the best mid-range storage on the market. It gives users the ability to scale in the future if they need to. 

The clustering feature of Dell PowerStore allows users to federate or cluster several appliances to work as single storage, which is a unique approach. 

The feature of integrated AI and machine learning enhances the usage and operations of the storage, making it one of the key features of Dell PowerStore.

Dell PowerStore has a unique deduplication and compression ratio compared to others in the market, which always comes in our favor when sizing Dell PowerStore against competitors. The deduplication can achieve up to 20X from the original storage capacity.

The pricing point must have better positioning. It is somewhat expensive compared to the competition. 

Another improvement would be to open the integrations with other vendors. Dell has unique integrations with their backup appliances; however, if they open this for other vendors, it might be a better solution for customers since they wouldn't have to purchase a Dell product for backup to have this integration with the storage. 

These two points should have enhancements.

I have been using the solution for three and a half years, since its release about three or four years ago.

We have not faced major issues with the support for Dell PowerStore.

In general, my clients use one appliance per site.

As a primary storage, it has all the features that our customers need, with only minor tweaks or enhancements needed here and there.

I'm also aware of Pure Storage. It is very similar.

The process is simple. It takes half an hour to 45 minutes to set up all the storage and go live with production data. Most implementations we do are on-prem.

Dell PowerStore receives about two or three updates per year, including software updates and firmware updates, which add new features and enhance performance without changing the hardware.

It saves money in the design of the product and solution. Users don't have to change products across their data center lifetime or projects. They can scale within the box regardless of workload or business requirements, saving the hassle of migration to a new solution. This saves money in the long run.

I compare it with Pure Storage, which is the most comparable solution to Dell PowerStore in the market nowadays.

I promote and recommend Dell PowerStore for all workloads to my clients and customers.

Most of my customers have one appliance per site. Approximately 80% of my customers have Dell PowerStore implemented in their data centers.

We always use CLS as another Dell solution for cybersecurity and data security. The CLS is integrated with the Data Domain, PowerProtect Data Domain, not with Dell PowerStore.

Windows, Linux, and some customers use Red Hat or SUSE. We have many operating systems working with Dell PowerStore in the same environments and data centers.

CloudIQ and Storage IQ are used by some customers, but Apex AIOps has not been widely adopted yet. Dell PowerStore has integration with VMware and Kubernetes. Most workloads work fine and have very good integration with Dell PowerStore, except for one or two specific workloads in the market.

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

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 store all our critical business databases and applications on Dell PowerStore, and we use it as the storage for our virtualization environment, so pretty much all our workloads from virtualization to database, it's the main primary storage for everything.

Dell PowerStore has supported the growth and operational success of our organization by reducing the footprint, rack space, power consumption, and the resources needed to run the backend storage, which has been consolidated into just 2U, thereby enhancing efficiency. We now know everything is there, as there's one GUI, and that's where it is.

The features of Dell PowerStore that I like the most include the simplified web GUI, and setting up replication to protection groups on the other site was pretty straightforward. I have presented straight-up Linux NFS shares off it as well to certain systems, which we weren't able to do on our old storage, so that was very useful.

Nothing comes to mind at the moment on how Dell PowerStore can be improved or any additional features I would like to see included in the next releases. I do not have any current pain points that I would like them to fix, although we did have one issue when an update stopped the phone-home solution, however they fixed that via support.

We've had Dell PowerStore for the last two years.

I assess the stability and reliability of Dell PowerStore as very reliable, as we've only had one alert that had an issue with it in the last two and a half years of our full operational load.

As we require additional storage, or once we hit the capacity limit, Dell PowerStore is easy to expand and add extra capacity, so it will be there for years to come.

I evaluate Dell's customer support as good, as we've always been able to upload the logs and get the parts within the four-hour deadline on the one occasion that we needed them. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Dell support a nine. What would make it a ten is that sometimes we go through an initial triage that repeats a lot of the initial triage steps that would have been done by my own engineers, so sometimes it would be nice to skip the starting point.

Positive

We transitioned from an HPE Nimble Storage and an HPE 3PAR, which are no longer supported or offered, to Pure Storage. We had also previously considered an EMC solution.

There was a general ease of deployment, as it was a fairly intuitive web GUI that was self-explanatory once it was racked.

I evaluated the market and the competition, and we settled on Dell PowerStore as our preferred NVMe flash storage solution, so my initial role was to set it up, get it configured, and get it active in the environment, and then plan the migrations to it.

I have seen some return on my investment with Dell PowerStore. You're getting rid of equipment, with the first 3PAR being a full rack, the other 3PAR being half a rack, and the Nimble being more 8U, so we've basically gone down from two rack spaces to a 2U server space. 

I have realized some money and time savings with Dell PowerStore. We're not spinning up that amount of power, and in terms of time saving, I'm sure it's performing some workloads quicker than the previous disks had to, but operational stability and 24/7, 365 operation is more what we need in our environment.

The advice I would give to other organizations considering Dell PowerStore based on my experience with it is that it has to be highly considered, as the price point was not really any better than the competitors; it was close, and it has worked out well, so stick with your account manager and they will do their best to get you a good deal.

Examples of how features benefited our organization include: previously, for the NFS, for the SIEM cybersecurity solution, we had to have a separate Linux server, where we were able to just do it straight from the Dell PowerStore GUI, so we got rid of three layers of complication and resources that weren't needed. 

I rate Dell PowerStore a perfect ten 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.

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.