I do not have any problems right now with Dell PowerStore, though I believe it can be improved.

When we talk about making Dell PowerStore even better, more artificial intelligence involved would be a feature we could use.

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One area for improvement with Dell PowerStore is the integration with our monitoring tools, which has been a bit challenging. While they provide us insights, we have had to work harder to extract detailed internal information without needing to purchase additional enterprise class management tools from Dell that feel excessive for our needs. There's a lot happening in Dell PowerStore under the surface that we don't fully manage, but I can only identify this as a potential improvement.

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One feature I would like to improve with Dell PowerStore is regarding Metro LUNs. I love Metro LUNs, but I wish to see multiple witness servers. With three data centers and three different PowerStore units, current setups force me to rely on one witness server, limiting visibility across all sites.

I wish I were enrolled in the Lifecycle Extension Program, formerly known as Anytime Upgrade. Currently, I am on Dell ProSupport Plus, which has many great advantages, but the Lifecycle program would have allowed me to keep the same head unit and refurbish some of our drives, which would have helped in the current industry climate.

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The licensing is a little bit high, but the product is very good. We don't mind bearing the price. The licensing is a little higher from the application or the product warranty-wise, but the product which we are using is pretty fine.

I can see sometimes the patches are very high in size, as per the Dell laptop or the Dell devices. The patches we got for the hardware part and firmware sometimes do not get deployed as intended. That is the reason why sometimes all the setups crash. This is the one thing I wanted to highlight: the patch management from Dell for the firmware. It will be good if they can have it a little bit sorted regarding the patches for the firmware.

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On an overall assessment, Dell PowerStore has a very good architecture, a reliable system, and its performance is good. However, I can see that the software needs to mature more. Dell PowerStore is growing rapidly, and they frequently release the PowerStore OS, but I see bugs—major bugs that can impact business operations. Whenever we upgrade to a new version, even if it is the Dell recommended version, we still encounter bugs that affect its performance. For instance, after upgrading to a recommended version, we still faced issues that disrupted our Kubernetes Rancher environment. The software needs stability , and they require more robust regression testing or beta testing before announcing it as a supporting long-term version. 

There are minimal features missing in Dell PowerStore at the moment. I feel there are a few things mainly on the reporting side. We do not get all the fields or all the attributes for a volume or for a host that we want to see in the report. For instance, if a host is added to a host group, and if I search with its host name in the compute section, it will not list it unless I search with the host group. This requires me to check the CLI to see which host group it is in before coming back to see it, as the GUI does not allow searching by host name if it is under a host group. That should be fixed because it is quite problematic.

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Regarding new capabilities, I cannot pinpoint exact improvements at this moment because the storage is constantly being enhanced daily. Dell has recently added cyber detect functionality and integration with Data Domain. These features, combined with AIOps and future-proof programs, are all included in the system. When comparing to other mid-range storages like Unity and ME5, the comparison is not favorable to those products because of Dell PowerStore's fast-moving development and frequent updates. Over the six-year period from 2020 to now, more than five or six major upgrades have been released, with continuous improvements.

The primary area for improvement involves higher-end capacity options. QLC drives, particularly for high-end capacity requirements, start at 1500 or newer platforms like 1500 and 5500, which have very high pricing compared to their capabilities. If these higher-capacity QLC drive options were available for Dell PowerStore 500T boxes, it would be beneficial for convincing customers seeking a balance between price point, large capacity, and performance-driven requirements.

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Dell PowerStore is a really great device. A potential area for improvement could be a little bit more deduplication. Some devices get six-to-one deduplication; Dell PowerStore is at five-to-one. If it could be increased a little bit more, I believe more of my unstructured data could have been reduced, which could have provided a little bit more performance. It is a pretty good device.

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Dell PowerStore can be improved by better integration between Dell PowerStore and PowerProtect, especially on the cyber resilience side. We are very interested in how they will integrate those two products. Additionally, even though we are not heavily using AI on the Dell side, we have been working with them and challenging them to turn some of that functionality into agentive AIs, where programming or configuration for different policies could be done through natural language. We want to work with Dell to speed up everyday repetitive tasks through agentive agents.

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I used to work for Dell and there were certain limitations in the past. At the current moment with current features, because they guarantee 5-to-1 dedupe and compression, they also now natively have the MetroSync capability built in to have active-active data centers. Dell PowerStore is leading edge and bleeding edge, using the latest technology. The only thing that could be improved is having the entry-level PowerStore 500T be able to do multi-clustering. Additionally, for an entry-level option, introducing something like PowerStore 500X where native virtualization workloads can be run, similar to the other models like the 1200X where containerization and virtual machine workloads can be run natively, would be beneficial.

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I do not have any input for improvements for Dell PowerStore because it is expandable and scalable. I cannot think of a newer feature that I would suggest for a next release. It meets all of our needs, and I honestly cannot think of how to improve it. In my particular use case, I cannot come up with anything that I would wish they would improve on. The UI is great, the expandability is great, the physicality of it is great, and the high availability is great. I am not even maximizing my use of it. It is well more than enough for us, and I really genuinely love to use the product. I do not have any suggestions for improvement.

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Response times have room for improvement. Basically, for after-sales support service in Bangladesh, it takes two or three working days to replace faulty parts. If this could be expedited, it would be more convenient for the end-user.

Stability could still be improved.

I have already faced competition due to the ransomware feature that Dell does not have as a built-in feature in the storage. My only challenge so far has been this. All other features and benefits are already there with Dell PowerStore, but ransomware protection is missing. My advice is to add ransomware protection first, as this is the primary concern. I have already faced competition with the NetApp brand for this type of built-in solution, and I did not get the deal because NetApp won it.

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Dell PowerStore can be improved because the entry-level 500T is still not the most adopted entry-level box. It does not have a scale-up option, and it still has only a scale-out option. That's a showstopper because with Unity now going away, Dell PowerStore becomes the only possible entry NVMe storage that is there in the Dell portfolio. Having different models which are more cost-effective to adopt, especially in challenging industries, is a key. If we can have that, then I'm sure we can do much better.

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No complexity was present with the initial setup of Dell PowerStore. It was very straightforward, but the only thing we worked on by providing IPs and details regarding where to install and switch ports where it needed to be cabled.

The deployment was done by the customer and the Dell team and one of the third parties they had. We majorly did not get involved in that.

Previously, whatever mid-range storages they had, compression and deduplication were very limited. With this, storage efficiency is there. Performance and low latency are there, majorly. This is compared to the other products. ROI is there, but not on the CAPEX side.

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If I could improve Dell PowerStore or have any additional features, I would want nothing because nothing is perfect in technology. We are always seeking the one piece of glass for everything. I know Dell is working on that through all their offerings, and I just have not talked to the right person yet or maybe it just has not been released. But integrating it into one big piece of glass along with servers and everything else would be great. A single pane of glass would be ideal. I am not saying they do not have it now, I just have not seen it yet, but if that were to be my one thing, because I know everybody has probably asked for the same thing, a single pane of glass for everything would make life easier, especially when I am managing on the back end trying to do updates and firmware without having to go to this iDRAC or that management site or this over here or that over there. We run a lean team for our IT department, so it just makes it easier on me for scheduling and planning. When I have to tell people that we are going to have an outage or they are not going to be able to access something, it will just go faster.

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There should be improvements in Dell PowerStore regarding scaling up and scaling out. When it's a cluster, provisioning is basically not automatic, and it doesn't do LUN balancing, so that automatic feature of LUN balancing between the cluster should be looked into.

I would like to see more user-friendly reporting on provisioning, LUNs, and more extensive reporting usages in the next version of Dell PowerStore, as that would help us.

Another area that should be looked into for Dell PowerStore include our current use of TLC disks; we cannot expand our cluster with a QLC disk, leading to some problems.

We primarily use Dell PowerStore for mid-range applications, and we are satisfied with its performance in that context. However, we have tested it with high-end applications that have significant performance requirements. In one instance, a single PowerStore array provided only 3 to 4 GBPS, which was not satisfactory. For applications requiring 15 or 20 thousand IOPS, PowerStore performs well. However, when an application needs around 50 thousand IOPS or 3 GBPS transfer rates, there tends to be noticeable lag.

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The model which we have selected provides us with the required features that we are looking for, so I cannot complain or say there is room for improvement at this point in time. However, this is a normal trend across the industry where we are talking about cybersecurity and cyber resiliency. We can take snapshots of these LUNs and storages, which is a common feature across all storage systems now. If I want to generalize, there should be some method of intelligence put into the storage that can identify anomalies while writing data onto the blocks. This is not just for Dell PowerStore, but this is across all industry-wide storages. Pure recently has come up with some intelligence with immutability. It would be good to see across all storage systems having such a feature where any random blocks read and write can throw an alert showing that some irregular pattern has been identified and can raise a risk to operations.

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We are currently evaluating our connectivity strategy for the new data center, as we haven't deployed a traditional Fibre Channel SAN or dedicated SAN switching yet. Instead, we are exploring more modern protocols like iSCSI and NVMe over TCP.

We are in discussions with Dell regarding official support for these over-the-fabric protocols on our specific PowerStore model. While we are still confirming the roadmap and compatibility, moving away from a traditional SAN and toward an NVMe/TCP architecture is a key point of interest for our future infrastructure.

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I would say a bit more user-friendliness and in-depth features in the monitoring interface of CloudIQ would be an improvement; sometimes it is quite difficult to find the information I want.

The insights offered by CloudIQ involve difficult parts regarding good reporting, and shared reporting is mainly the issue. You can build reports in there, but you cannot share them between colleagues, so if my colleague builds something, I need to log in with my account to see what he built.

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I think efficiency in the operation for Dell PowerStore sometimes requires opening new cases with Dell to troubleshoot some upgrades, and I need a faster response from the support team. Sometimes there is a delay from the Dell support team. I can rate them at 7%.

The price is more expensive, so I am not proposing Dell PowerStore for small customers and small organizations. I propose alternative storage solutions like Unity or entry-level storage PowerVault for these customers. However, for medium and big enterprise customers, I propose Dell PowerStore.

I do not have any issue other than the price, which is more expensive compared with other storage solutions from other vendors. If Dell could add more features and enhance existing features to be higher, it would be very beneficial.

Hypothetically, I believe Dell could add some new features in the future related to AI or automation, which would be valuable to see as additional functions.

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Regarding what I dislike about Dell PowerStore, I do not think there is anything significant. During my initial setups, when you initially deploy those, you have to choose between block-only storage or unified mode, where it has block storage and NAS storage. The only option if you choose one of those and want to change it is to reinitialize it. I wish there was some way they could make that easier to change back and forth. However, I do not think that is inherently an option. That is probably the only feature that has given me trouble in the past.

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If I had to give my recommendation on how Dell PowerStore could be improved, it would probably have to be the user interface. I was hoping that this new product would have a great simple user interface, similar to Dell Unity that we sold and used extensively. Instead, I found the user interface to be a step back from what was done with the other product, which could be tied to the whole architecture of the platform. My wish is to have a more user-friendly interface; the previous system had wizards and guides that facilitated configuration. I have used Dell storage since it was EMC, and back then, configuring the original VNX line required considerable knowledge of storage. The Unity platform simplified that, but with Dell PowerStore, it feels having to know a bit more about storage again to set up some features, which might confuse users transitioning from Unity to Dell PowerStore.

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The feature we'd like to have in Dell PowerStore is coming, which is metro-cluster over Fibre Channel. That's really the last solution we're waiting for. The advantage of Dell PowerStore is that it's developed as microservices and that it's very software-driven and very automatable as a solution. We can integrate it into modern environments like OpenShift. FC replication is something we didn't have yet, and there are many customers for whom that's a prerequisite.

We can get performance information because when Dell PowerStore array is connected and interconnected to CloudIQ, we send up all the performance metrics needed per volume. We can see perfectly how it behaves. The only thing we don't have is the ability to customize it. Since it's the array itself that manages the organization of the blocks, it's both an advantage and a disadvantage. It's easy to manage for the client, but for an admin looking for specific customization, Dell PowerStore is not the right choice.

We can customize it regarding workload usage. For example, I have a client who was on hyperconverged. I migrated him to Dell PowerStore. He told me it's so much better to customize the usage, put volumes into replication, and segment clusters. On Dell PowerStore storage array, I can very well have a VMware cluster and next to it an OLVM cluster, and manage my VMware part and my Oracle part independently to comply with licensing. Being able to segment environments on a traditional environment allows the client to better manage licensing compared to hyperconverged, which will put everything in the same basket and cause more problems. The array really allows customization if we want to do file system replication. However, if you want specific customization at the RAID group level, that's something you can't do with Dell PowerStore because that feature is handled by an automatic engine. There are admins who rather use Hitachi arrays for that, where they really want to customize their environments down to the core. Dell PowerStore doesn't allow you to do that because it's not its objective.

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To date, I did not come across multiple clustering for one of the customers. However, I have sold multiple Dell PowerStore appliances to a single customer, but they did not require clustering. They are using them for individual locations.

Certain models do not provide the NAS functionality and only provide block storage. If Dell PowerStore could increase that offering from each product for NAS functionality, it would be good.

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It could be improved to be cheaper for us. Cost versus performance is crucial, and it has to have the performance and capabilities that we need for that price point.

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From a technical perspective regarding Dell PowerStore, I am not certain what improvements or enhancements should be made because it is a really good product; however, from the price perspective, I think it should be less expensive to better position it against vendors such as IBM or Hitachi, since sometimes it is hard to sell it due to higher pricing.

Disadvantages of Dell PowerStore, apart from the price, from a technical perspective, do not exist.

For growing needs, Dell PowerStore is easy to scale, but I had an issue where if a client wants to buy additional drives after the initial purchase, the price is quite expensive because they do not get the discount from the initial purchase; thus, they should plan to buy more capacity up front.

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Some features are not easy on Dell PowerStore. For example, changing the IP is not straightforward like on Unity or other storage solutions. You must run a command in the CLI to replace the IPs, remove the existing IP, and add the new IP. A user cannot change the IP easily and will require technical support and expertise from a partner or from Dell.

There should be an easy way to change the IP from the GUI in Dell PowerStore. In the manageable settings, anything can be changed from the GUI after installation and initialization. The other features are satisfactory and very advanced but easy to manage, with nothing difficult about them.

The IP change issue is important in Dell PowerStore as there are four IPs to consider: a cluster IP, a management IP, and two nodes' IPs. These cannot be changed easily, and the subnet mask is also involved. You need to write everything in a two or three-line command, starting from the IP, removing the existing IP, and adding new IPs one through three, all in sequence separated by a comma. There is a very small tab in the management IP modify section. When clicking on modify, it shows delete, but the delete function is not working as it is not highlighted because it can only be done with the service password.

The service password is not able to log in with the GUI and is only used to log in with the CLI. In the previous Unity, you could log in with both the service account and the GUI, where you could use either the admin or service user. In Dell PowerStore, the service user is only used with the CLI and cannot log into the GUI, which is not a good feature because you cannot perform any maintenance from the GUI.

I have not used Dell PowerStore's built-in integrations for VMware, Kubernetes, containers, or other ecosystems. However, if you are using a different model, not the T model of Dell PowerStore but the S model, which has all VMware products built-in, it would be suitable.

There should be direct connectivity between the nodes in Dell PowerStore. An additional add-on card in Dell PowerStore would allow you to add four nodes in a cluster that can connect directly to each other without utilizing switching in between. We are using two switches as VLT with RedStack, using a direct cable between the switches to become a VLT, making it a single logical switch, though the management is separate. If the nodes in Dell PowerStore could communicate directly with each other through a direct, dedicated media, like a stack cable to form a cluster, that would be a better feature.

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Regarding compression and deduplication, coming from the HP world where I was a systems engineer for nearly four years, Dell has a much stronger and much more powerful compression and deduplication engine than the competition on the market. We are fairly happy with the deduplication ratio and the compression ratio that Dell PowerStore provides.

Dell PowerStore is an enterprise-graded device that is easily scalable and easily integrated into your ecosystem and provides metro cluster as one of the key features I would consider in any storage system. The main advantage is the general support of Dell, which is quite efficient. I would choose Dell over any other brand, and the deduplication and compression ratio is very powerful and very strong, effectively saving space and giving the overhead needed to store data. The cons of Dell PowerStore include that it has not been advertised at least in the Maltese market the way it should be. The advertising campaign that originates from Dell is much weaker than the competition, effectively making people skeptical and sometimes making the product hard to sell even though the product itself is a great one.

In the future, it would be great to have Dell PowerStore that can be a peer on the market for Alletra MP from HP where you have a main Dell PowerStore node that is easily expandable across the network using just a simple LAN switch, for example, the main concept that Alletra MP uses. Additionally, it would be great to have support from Dell for other hypervisors, not just natively on VMware, but also Proxmox and any other open source virtualization hypervisors that need access to a storage system using Fiber Channel protocols because at this point in time, Fiber Channel protocol is not supported on Dell PowerStore, for example, using Proxmox.

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While assessing Dell PowerStore's data resiliency and cybersecurity features, it is important to note that additional tools from the Dell side are still needed to help set up a cyber recovery or cyber resiliency solution. By default, the storage may not have all the features required, and additional software is needed to establish a cyber recovery vault. The solution includes mutable and immutable copy, deduplication, and compression which achieve a good ratio in fully utilizing storage capacity. However, a set of software from Dell that serves as an analyzer is needed to set up all tools and environments. By default, the storage will not fulfill all cyber resiliency requirements without additional tools and isolated environments.

When comparing compression and deduplication technology in Dell PowerStore with Pure Storage, there is room for further improvement. The dedupe and compression ratio is comparatively low, and Pure Storage claims higher efficiency. Additionally, the product life cycle differs, as Dell recommends changing storage processors after every five years, while Pure storage products do not become obsolete for ten years.

Dark data assessment is a functionality that could be introduced, which relates to data not accessed within certain time frames that could be moved to other locations. Such tools would help not only with deduplication and compression but would reclaim unused storage, providing an additional advantage.

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One aspect that could make Dell PowerStore better is adding support for multiple operating systems in Metro Volumes, which would serve as a good use case for some of our customers.

To make it a ten, it would require improvements such as quicker part shipping. Even though most customers have four-hour support, it sometimes takes two days for parts to arrive when I would expect it the next day. We also encountered performance issues with some Dell PowerStores at our customers, which took a long time to diagnose.

The missing element to achieve a score of ten is support for multiple operating systems in Metro, which is rather specific but a recent challenge we encountered.

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As for drawbacks or areas for improvement in Dell PowerStore, I currently do not have any significant concerns.

I cannot name any specific enhancements for Dell PowerStore as I find it perfect for its midrange storage role.

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There are not many differences between Dell PowerStore and Huawei or HP technologies. Usually, Huawei is cheaper and has higher capacity in the same volume. If you want to use RoCE protocol, one of the new networking protocols for storage, it is currently only available in Huawei. It will come with Dell PowerStore in the next month, but it is not available right now as I remember. HPE Alletra is similar to Dell PowerStore—it is not as smooth in using it and handling it, but it is really nearby and not far away.

Dell has to face competition with Huawei when it comes to price. Sometimes there is no option other than to use Huawei when price is the main feature for the client.

Training for clients regarding Dell PowerStore would be nice to help them understand what the system is made of and how to use it. However, you do not need much knowledge, as the handling of the system is really easy.

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Some areas of Dell PowerStore that could be improved include reporting features, such as performance reports, which are lacking compared to VMAX and PowerMax. For instance, with VMAX and PowerMax, you can access detailed reports that show Input/Output (IO) operations, read and write metrics, and response times for specific storage groups. You can monitor IOPS and latency metrics for particular ports, and view heat maps for visualization. Unfortunately, these types of reports don't seem to be available in PowerStore.

Additionally, if a customer reports latency issues, such as the OS team mentions they're experiencing delays from a specific LUN, we lack sufficient options to investigate those reports in Dell PowerStore.On VMAX and PowerMax, we have Unisphere as a tool to check performance metrics. In contrast, PowerStore lacks such a feature, from my perspective.

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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.

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

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We believe there is room for improvement in Dell PowerStore for the file services, but most of it is adequate.

From a cybersecurity perspective, there is not much because immutability does not currently exist. However, for data resiliency, it is fine and is there.

For additional features, immutability features would be nice to see in the future. This is the one thing that needs to be added.

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I cannot provide comment on what could be improved or updated with Dell PowerStore because I do not have that knowledge.

Since I do not own the dashboard of the Dell management and monitoring, I do not know what the capabilities are. I am not the subject matter expert for storage, so I will not be able to provide a full-fledged overview or comment on what is missing.

I cannot optimize any process within Dell PowerStore. The only thing I can suggest is perhaps compression. I do not know if the storage has compression features or how they could help. Compression would be beneficial because we have very heavy files such as AutoCAD drawing files. I do not know if that feature exists or how they could help compress data while transferring it, perhaps during synchronization or when users access those files from the client.

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The primary limitation is that Dell PowerStore typically uses SSD disks, making it more expensive than alternatives. I believe the price should be reduced somewhat.

Regarding lifecycle extension, previously branded as Anytime Upgrade, I would suggest to Dell that support and upgrading inventory should be available in stock at stores in Dubai, England, and Ireland. However, there is currently no stock for this product in Egypt.

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We are not clustering multiple Dell PowerStore appliances currently because we are spread across geographies in different locations.

The support for Dell PowerStore is similar to others; not too extraordinary, but acceptable. It could be better, approximately a six out of ten.

Apart from the upgrading process and technical support, these are the main areas of Dell PowerStore that I would like to see improved or enhanced in the future.

There is nothing particular that comes to mind as a missing feature for Dell PowerStore.

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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.

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From my experience, Dell PowerStore is the best option on the market at the moment, but the worst thing is the price, which is too high compared to IBM or other vendors. I think the price may be double or near to double.

I believe the documentation provided for Dell PowerStore is not adequately fair. I would rate it around seven.

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I believe the solution could be improved through better unification with the NAS file storage component. While the product currently fulfills its role perfectly for the SAN portion, it lacks the necessary versatility to natively handle all protocol types, specifically NFS and SMB or CIFS.

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If I could improve Dell PowerStore in any way, I would enhance the socialization of the good skills this equipment has, improving communication with partners as the good features are inside Dell PowerStore, however, many customers don't know how powerful it is. I suggest increasing communication and giving visibility to these features inside Dell PowerStore.

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I recommend Dell PowerStore to medium-sized companies and not for larger ones as well because I think for the bigger ones, it is missing some features and there is a bit of a lack in terms of performance for big volumetry.

Dell PowerStore lacks some features to cover bigger companies as well; perhaps there is Nutanix, I think, and there are better, bigger storage options from Dell.

Additionally, there is Huawei storage stack which is quite good.

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Regarding Dell PowerStore, one consideration is whether we could support hybrid disks. As you know, Dell PowerStore supports all-flash with either SSD or NVMe. If we consider features that could be added to match some RFPs we have received, some RFPs request hybrid storage. We cannot propose Dell PowerStore because it supports all-flash or NVMe only. In some cases, we could add a tier of SAS or near-line SAS to increase capacity. This is one potential feature, but I already understand that maintaining all-flash for Dell PowerStore is necessary to preserve specific performance characteristics. Generally, Dell PowerStore is an accepted product from our customers.

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I find the design of the products somewhat negative because they are different in terms of expansion level and are somewhat oversized, especially for small and medium-sized customers.

That would be an area where Dell PowerStore can be improved. We have the 500T, the 1200T, and then already the 3000. I think the jumps between the series are simply not explained in a meaningful way to me or to the customers. It is either called small, then really very small, or large, and then it is called large again. It is then not really intended for small or medium-sized German companies.

When we talk about disaggregated infrastructures, the native integration into HCI solutions is currently still not available with Dell PowerStore. When it comes to hyper-converged systems, enhancing them with Dell PowerStore would be desirable. Functions such as transparent failover are also missing, which we still miss at the Fibre Channel level. Because synchronization is currently only available at the iSCSI level, and that also hurts us significantly at the moment.

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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.

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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.

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I would like to see more performance and more dedupe and compression features with Dell PowerStore in the next release.

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I see room for improvement for Dell PowerStore, especially since the market is moving towards AI, cloud, and virtualization; I believe AI can greatly help with troubleshooting, data analysis, performance monitoring, and reporting, and I think Dell will invest a lot to enhance these features.

I assess Dell PowerStore's data resiliency and cybersecurity features as very secure, from my point of view, because it is not like an open system; however, I believe there is still room to improve, as I need to raise requests for vulnerability fixes to Dell on a monthly basis.

While I consider the product to already be complicated, I believe it still has room for simplification, such as enhancing the centralized GUI features and allowing for batch jobs instead of having to click through tasks one by one.

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I don't have any ideas for improvements regarding Dell PowerStore as everything seems good and they continuously implement bug fixes and upcoming patches.

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We had a significant incident two years ago when I was preparing one of the Dell PowerStore systems for an upgrade. While running the health check, it started to corrupt every volume inside the system. We had to recover everything from the DR site because the storage became unusable. The issue was eventually found to be a bug inside the health check package. I think Dell should do better at testing those packages before applying them to the public.

I did not have an opportunity to work with it, but I think it would be beneficial to have the ability to increment a disk one at a time.

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Regarding areas for improvement in Dell PowerStore, I noticed a minor inconvenience. I would have preferred if Dell PowerStore could have a common operating system across all their products, as that would be of great advantage.

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PowerStore is already a strong platform, but I’d like to see improvements mainly in operational maturity and automation, especially for large or mission-critical environments:

CloudIQ / APEX: more actionable insights
Fewer generic alerts and more “what to do next” guidance, better root-cause correlation, smarter prioritization, and clearer remediation steps.

Upgrade experience: stronger guardrails and pre-checks
More robust pre-upgrade validation, clearer impact analysis, and safer/cleaner workflows to increase confidence, particularly in conservative environments (e.g., healthcare).

Proactive lifecycle and certificate management
Better built-in visibility and notifications for certificate/lifecycle items, with clearer guided actions to prevent surprises.

Deeper automation and API-driven operations
More ready-to-use automation examples/integrations (Terraform/Ansible style patterns), and richer API coverage for day-2 operations beyond basic provisioning.

If the next release pushes harder on these areas, it will reduce operational overhead and make the platform even more compelling for critical workloads.

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Dell PowerStore could be improved on the recommendation and dashboard side. I would also mention overall visibility, having a single ecosystem in which we can find all of our hardware, whether it is Dell PowerStore or other Dell equipment, and ideally, third-party integrations to have complete visibility into what is happening on the different sites and to integrate it quickly into a global dashboard and single view for users and administrators. This would allow us to know where we stand in terms of capacity planning and performance. A section on corporate social responsibility and energy consumption with advice on what we could improve compared to new hardware and new disk formats that could reduce our footprint would also be beneficial.

I would rate Dell PowerStore seven or eight out of ten. There are always areas for improvement, which I mentioned earlier. However, it does meet day-to-day needs. What we would like is perhaps more visibility, especially on the corporate social responsibility aspect, which is becoming important as we are being pushed for increasingly detailed annual reports covering power consumption, CO2 emissions during operation, emissions during production, and transport costs. Software-based optimizations that help us gain efficiency on the storage side would also be valuable. These optimizations could tell us how much less we consume compared to traditional equipment and how much more storage we provide per square meter. Those are things that could be interesting.

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One of the big drawbacks on Dell PowerStore that I have run into is the NVRAM cache battery. It does not operate as a traditional active-active storage array, meaning the NVRAM cache on the primary controller is the one that has the NVRAM cache, and if that battery goes dead on that primary controller, it has caused outages.

That is where my biggest issue is with Dell PowerStore. I work a lot of dark sites, and that means they are not internet-connected. Having to call and then give all the information tends to take a lot longer to get to a resolution because they want to follow a script and they want all these things to be given to them. When you work in dark sites, you are not allowed to provide some of that information. I cannot just take the support bundles and ship them off. Dell PowerStore does not have a very good architecture for being able to sanitize the logs so that they could be consumed outside of the dark site. As a result of that, I would say eight out of ten times I usually end up coming up with the solution that fixes the problem with their very agnostic answers.

The big issue with Dell PowerStore is when those NVRAM batteries go bad. The other aspect would be the sizing of what you are putting into the environment. If it is not sized properly for all your hosts and you have put too much in, it does struggle with the read-write cache getting too full. Once that happens, you run into the same problems as if the NVRAM battery has gone bad. It is really about trying to figure out what the sweet spot is. You can have this many ESX clusters attached to it, or you can run this many VMs off of it. Once you do have file enabled, if you are doing it in a unified way, then there become a lot of transactional things that are happening with the NFS or SMB shares. That drives the performance of the overall array down. I have seen where we had NFS for our VDI profiles. That means if you have 10,000 users and they each have their own profile, and you are loading them up at 8:00 in the morning, everybody is logging into their thin client on their VDI. It is going to take a huge performance hit during that timeframe. As a result of that, then you start seeing disk latencies on the actual VMs that are doing their own workloads as well. Going back to my previous statement, once you turn on unified, you are automatically losing 20% of your performance cap off of the physical box itself.

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The features mentioned are already present in the current release of Dell PowerStore. I cannot think of any specific improvement. However, I would say that everything is becoming very expensive nowadays, including memory storage and chips. If Dell could leverage their supply chain advantage and source from quality providers to effectively bring down costs, that would definitely benefit customers and partners. It would make it easier to sell more of the product to customers. The current major challenge with the product is that the whole industry is being impacted by rising costs, not specific to Dell PowerStore. This is a challenge that we all need to handle.

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I have not found any issues currently, and I am unsure what could be better. There is an issue related to the way other operating systems handle compressed volumes, but that is something Dell cannot influence. Scalability is probably not yet a concern in our case.

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There is still some room for improvement when it comes to response time. Dell PowerStore is acceptable; based on how we have configured it, some performance tuning is required, so we are working with Dell in that respect if any augmentation or anything is required. Some performance tuning will definitely help us, but as of now, it is working satisfactorily.

Additional features are definitely required, such as what has been done in other counterparts like IBM, including agentic AI and creating the LUNs and daily tasks through the AI part. AI capabilities are required for the storage box itself.

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The networking of Dell PowerStore needs to be enhanced. Previously, Unity only had storage without any connectivity to network. Dell did not work with switches integrated with storage before, but now they are providing network switches and TCP/IP connectivity.

The iSCSI features of Dell PowerStore need to be enhanced. Perhaps we do not need to rely on SAN switches anymore. We need TCP/IP switches with high utilization and high bandwidth.

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The management interface of Dell PowerStore could be simplified, as it can be challenging to find issues amidst various screens. Introducing AI could help with identifying critical issues or deadlocks faster.

Currently, we foresee no other areas for improvement but acknowledge this might change as deployment progresses.

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There are things I would like to see improved or enhanced in Dell PowerStore, such as they should invest in technology using NVMe. I know that they have the TLC NVMe, so they should use a different type of NVMe, which is much faster, similar to pure storage.

Also, they don't have replication capability; we have to use another appliance to do the replication. I think they should implement replication capability on Dell PowerStore.

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The compression is nice, and we discovered the opportunity to make backups directly to data domain, which is good and something we expected. However, improvements could be made in the replication solutions of Dell PowerStore. Even though replication between Dell PowerStores is possible, high latency connectivity is problematic.

The interconnection between units presents challenges when dealing with latency and doing replication. The algorithm might be stronger in Unity. The delay time allowed between data connection should possibly be higher or not as sensitive as it is currently. In our country, where communications aren't the best, we have two clients with replication sites who experience these problems approximately once a month.

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I would rate Dell's customer service as good; however, the call centers and escalation teams are problematic and slow, with the process being very bureaucratic, which frustrates clients. Despite these problems, the technology is solid and balances these issues.

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The areas for improvement in Dell PowerStore would be to provide trainings and seminars. The philosophy here is to teach how to fish rather than giving a man a fish. Trainings and seminars are of most interest because after trainings, people here would improve their skills. If webinars or trainings are offered in the future, participation would be valued, or if training opportunities are recommended, attendance would be considered. Understanding some technologies better would make it easier to suggest areas of improvement. Currently, information available online from forums is being used, which is straightforward.

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Dell PowerStore can be improved with integration with Dell's Agentic AI platform, which is a feature I want to see in the next release.

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If I could improve Dell PowerStore in any way, the straightforward answer is to add more performance to it by software or try to improve some algorithms to get more deduplication, but that is easier said than done, so I would suggest just continuing to improve the performance.

Regarding pricing and licensing, if it is possible to decrease the prices, that would be great for the customer, but considering the current situation with chip shortages and RAM, it is kind of hard and is going more in the other direction.

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Dell PowerStore is pretty good and can still be improved.

Speed is something I would like to maximize in its features, as there is a need for speed.

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I understand the software-defined storage and other capabilities. That said, I still am a traditional person who considers block and file storage, and I need to double or triple it. What are my pathways for scaling or do I need to rip and replace with another product? So maybe some of the scalability issues are present with Dell PowerStore.

To make it a perfect 10, I would have wished the deployment staff had indicated this is the regular support line, yet offered to connect directly with support personnel to walk through the process. It would have been beneficial to have someone from the support team do a warm handoff to clarify who to contact for future assistance.

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Regarding improvements for Dell PowerStore, there is room for enhancement. While many aspects are good, the dashboard could be improved. This means administration improvements could be made, including monitoring and other points such as hardware monitoring.

Lifecycle management may be modified because Dell PowerStore does not currently have an option on how to modify the lifecycle. This represents an improvement area.

Cloud IQ, also known as AIOps, is not being used because it appears to require a license. Although it is supported, this feature is not currently in use.

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Regarding enhancements for Dell PowerStore, I believe a couple of things can be improved, such as the GUI and CLI connectivity. Another point is the identification of ports; it can be confusing to distinguish between the FC ports, Ethernet ports, and which ports support NVMe, indicating there is scope for improvement.

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As of now, I do not have anything specific that comes to mind regarding room for improvement, but I can say some AI improvements would be welcome.

Otherwise, I think it is good because we continue to get updates and improvements in storage features and efficiency.

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Dell PowerStore could improve in the updating process and lifecycle management, as the upgrades seem to take a long time, along with some of the management features. Additionally, better integration with cloud platforms for offloading storage to hyperscalers could be beneficial. For example, being able to copy backup sets into the cloud.

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My only concern is with the procurement process, which takes longer when we procure Dell products. We always have to work with a partner from Dell, and while Dell connects with us and we have account leadership, the procurement process involves delays due to third parties like Insight or AHEAD, causing us to miss opportunities and experience project delays.

More than the response time, it is the resolution time that needs improvement. The response time is acceptable, but the overall resolution can be improved. We received faulty disks after procurement, which required raising a change for hardware replacements.

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I see room for improvement when it comes to integrations with other ecosystems.

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I believe if Dell PowerStore can have a hybrid mode with burst to cloud capabilities, that would be beneficial. If it can have something an immutable function, that would be great as well. It would be beneficial if Dell PowerStore can integrate with Kubernetes in terms of containerized environment. There is some room for improvement when it comes to built-in integrations with Kubernetes.

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The pricing for Dell PowerStore is quite expensive. I want to have a cluster, but right now we could only have one node. If the pricing were better, I would like to have at least two nodes as a cluster.

I do not use deduplication in Dell PowerStore because I want better performance. While deduplication could help use less space, I have had performance issues with compression and deduplication in the past, so I keep it disabled.

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Dell PowerStore is expandable up to only three expansion modules. If you want to increase the capacity, we cannot go beyond three enclosures. One is a base enclosure and there are three expansion enclosures. I think Dell PowerStore could add some more expansion enclosures, perhaps seven to eight, to get more capacity.

With CloudIQ, I have seen that when we get access to it, we do not see all the products that we have in CloudIQ. We have to struggle a lot to get access to CloudIQ because it is managed by Dell.

We have not tried using Anytime Upgrade (Lifecycle Extension) from Dell as of now. We are doing an upgrade but not using that Anytime Upgrade, as we have a planned one.

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What I do not prefer as a feature of Dell PowerStore, or what should be improved, is more on the storage side, but not the computing. On the storage side, the management of the deduplication and compression ratio should be enhanced. Artificial intelligence has been implemented, but it is not sufficient yet and is not top tier.

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Where Dell in general could be more open is an area where Dell PowerStore could be improved. I have competition in-house where you can only work on the CLI if you really want to do it well, and that is more fun as an admin. However, the nice thing about the simple interface is that you can also hand it to someone who is not deeply involved.

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One thing they need to work on is creating an app sync or the Metro Cluster functionality. Currently, it requires a different hop as we have to add multiple switches to build that functionality for replication from one data center to another. If that could be bundled in a base Dell PowerStore by default, it would be great. That's because most of the time, we are doing the same replications, and if that can be enabled without any additional license or hardware, it would be very beneficial.

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Dell PowerStore has deduplication, but it may need more enhancement because in our case, it was not as efficient as Dell Data Domain. Dell PowerStore's deduplication ratio was 1.5 or two, so perhaps it needs some enhancement in that area. We experienced an issue when we upgraded the firmware of the disks. When Dell released a firmware version and we upgraded it, some disks failed as a result, so we did not upgrade all of the disks. Dell recommended replacing the failed disk afterward and canceled the firmware upgrade from their website because the upgrade had an issue.

From a features perspective regarding Dell PowerStore, the interface is somewhat slow and needs some enhancement. The web interface for Dell PowerStore requires some improvement.

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We are not currently using deduplication or compression technologies with Dell PowerStore, and at this moment, we have no data about the technology from the recovery technology. In the next month, we might have a decision on the technology to be used. We have SAP offering tools for backing up the databases, and we might be using the SAP tools.

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I would like to see additional features or functionalities for the Metro in Dell PowerStore, especially because there are a few workloads still not supported.

The workloads I would like to see supported in Dell PowerStore are mainly for VMware, and other workloads are not officially mentioned, such as Hyper-V and Nutanix. I would also like to see improvements in the replication, which is currently completely network level replication. If everything goes through SAN, that would be much better.

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One suggestion for improvement would be related to volume management by both controllers. Currently, a volume is managed by a single controller, with alternate controllers managing different volumes based on load distribution. For example, if volume one is managed by controller one, volume two will be managed by controller two. In other vendors' solutions, both controllers participate in the I/Os. It would be more efficient if the volumes were controlled by both controllers in an active-active configuration.

The firmware upgrade takes longer than the other boxes. It should be better.

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The new 5.0 release and the new hardware for Dell PowerStore include many of the features we were looking for.

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The things where Dell PowerStore should be improved have now been improved and are being introduced with the new update.

Then it's actually great regarding everything with Dell PowerStore. You can always talk about the price.

For a rating of ten, what's missing is knowing quite reliably that you end up with the right support team for your problem because way too often you have a problem, call support, and then end up with people who repair laptops. They say they have no idea. The last time I had to do a major troubleshooting, you had to somehow go to Dell America, or I think you get routed via Ireland or something. That's sometimes a bit complicated, and if everything were German-speaking, that would of course be even better, but you can't always expect that.

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They could improve the upgrade process. Currently, there are many manual steps required before upgrading the firmware. Making that process more automatic would be beneficial.

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As far as how Dell PowerStore could be improved, anything can be improved. I would say it needs easier or increased compatibility with other storage solutions for easier application, such as Dell's own PowerVault. They don't communicate or talk to each other, and they don't replicate to each other, which makes it harder to mix and match.

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Response time is still an area with room for improvements when it comes to the response time and delivery of a solution.

Improvement is needed not only in physical delivery of a solution, but also in terms of consultancy, how to do something, how to debug something, and changing in firmware.

For Dell PowerStore, I think local consignment stock for spare parts could be beneficial, but for the time being, I think it's not feasible. Maybe in the next two years, if we join the European Union, it will be different.

I think security could be an additional feature they could have in the future besides what I've already mentioned.

Security including AI support, with more flexibility and less user intervention, would be valuable.

Console management could be improved.

Flexible financing options, such as OPEX, which are not available in this region, would be appreciated.

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If I could improve the product, better pricing would help, but it is not the easiest situation at the moment.

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Sometimes they have equipment in stock. Sometimes they don't, so they have to arrange it from somewhere. That's been a challenge, and it's a negative point from a support perspective. Dell is struggling in terms of support SLAs as long as the Pakistan market is concerned since Dell has not been able to give a fixed time commitment from a support perspective, which is a challenge for customers.

We have heard that there are some challenges in terms of availability; if multiple controllers go down, this solution has certain limitations about how many controllers can be down before your environment is affected. This is a feature where Dell PowerStore is not the best product. From a stability perspective, Dell PowerStore rates six out of ten since, while it has good stability, it's not the best. That's why customers often choose to go for bigger and enterprise-level products, leading to a need for those enterprise-class solutions.

Cybersecurity, specifically ransomware protection, is a hot topic, and every vendor is working on this. I'm not fully aware of the extent of security Dell PowerStore provides; for instance, it can offer snapshot protections and immutable snapshots. However, there are certain features that customers are expecting more from cyber resilience. This is a question I'm still seeking from Dell's side. For example, does it scan for viruses from within the storage, specifically ransomware viruses in NAS and SAN? Mostly, ransomware attacks occur on file services, so does it scan those services? What I have heard is that some storage support SAN-level scanning as block-level scanning. Dell needs improvement in this area.

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Compression and deduplication technologies are features that end users will not feel that much unless there's a very big difference. I once had a client who was using Nimble, HP Nimble, and when we moved them to VFlex, which is something that came end of life at Dell, there was small storage usage in Nimble, but when it went to the other side, there was very big usage due to the uncompression. These types of compression do apply in storage, but end users only feel the effect when they migrate from the platform.

Dell PowerStore has better performance considering it first came as an all-flash solution, unlike other products like Unity, which came with HDDs. In Dell PowerStore, most of the models I've worked with have come with NVMe disks, although initially they did have different interfaces that were not NVMe.

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In terms of improving Dell PowerStore, they should have simplified documents available for customers, not just for the support team. We faced issues that were hard to resolve without easy access to information, which could aid in quicker resolutions.

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Dell PowerStore has not yet impacted my organization's performance and operational efficiency.

I have not seen any ROI yet.

I have not been able to consolidate data using Dell PowerStore yet.

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Scalability is one area where Dell PowerStore can be improved. Scalability can be enhanced as it meets our requirements currently, but in the longer run, scalability might be a concern.

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Dell PowerStore could be improved by integration into the Dell automated platform, which would allow us to see it and perform the upgrades right from there.

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Dell PowerStore has minimal areas needing improvement, as it is one of the best products in Dell's portfolio. However, migration services could be included, especially for Oracle migration. Additionally, more documentation specific to Dell PowerStore is needed.

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I cannot think of anything that I wish was different or better about Dell PowerStore at this time.

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The storage for Dell PowerStore has been performing well overall. The only improvement that might be required, though not significantly, relates to the features that allow for support, specifically the call home features.

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I am very eagerly anticipating the next generation of drives, specifically the 30 terabyte drives, but beyond that, it's really been great, and I have no complaints or pain points at all.

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I do not think there are any weak points of Dell PowerStore; however, I believe more AI features are needed, and Dell is already working on it.

In future updates, I do not think any configuration is required for Dell PowerStore, but it might include cross-platform uses or less power usage. There is a high demand for storage and AI workloads, so saving power as much as possible would be beneficial.

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If I could improve Dell PowerStore, I would suggest that integrations into backup platforms be a little more streamlined. We are a VMShop, so just a little more intuitive connections between those systems for advanced functionality such as storage level snapshots versus just the basic VML or VMware level snapshots when doing those backups would be beneficial.

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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.

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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.

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The AI insight feature is fairly new, and I believe that as it collects more data from a larger install base and has more information available for all customers, I could see real value added to those features.

Some customers are very happy with Dell support. However, the VxRail situation does not look favorable for many people because they want to move away from VMware, but if they repurpose the product, Dell will not support it. They are uncertain about what they will do next. There is a buyback option available, but I think they would prefer to reuse the equipment.

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Regarding future improvements or upcoming versions, I cannot provide a definitive answer today. As we do not yet have a full A-to-Z view of the product roadmap or the specific implementation constraints, we are awaiting the next vendor presentation to evaluate how future features will fit our requirements.

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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.

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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.

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I am not satisfied with Dell PowerStore because of stability. Stability and complexity of some features and configurations are issues with Dell PowerStore. There is also a huge dependency on Dell EMC engineers.

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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.

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I do not have any suggestions for improvement regarding Dell PowerStore.

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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.

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If Dell would consider aggressive discounts for critical opportunities, that would be great because most of the time Dell doesn't have a winning probability with the current pricing model. Existing customers often choose Huawei over Dell due to pricing.

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In future updates, I would like to see more AI functionality plus a good integration with OneDrive.

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Dell PowerStore doesn't really have a lot of advantages over other products. It has no special features technically. Other products have better management and analytics features. HP emphasizes much better analytical features.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I would suggest that Dell PowerStore could come with various other features, such as a hybrid model apart from only all-flash, which would really help the customers.

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

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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.

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The enterprise support is brilliant and cannot get any better. As technology and data rates increase, they are also going to increase. More IOPS will increase.

Artificial intelligence will likely be incorporated in later, newer versions.

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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.

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The initial setup was a bit cumbersome. 

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From our region perspective, it would be beneficial to have support with local languages for Dell PowerStore. However, English is acceptable for us as it serves our needs.

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One of the big differences when we were looking at Pure is that they had more of an in-place upgrade option going forward, kind of future-proofing things. We hear Dell is working towards that, but they weren't quite there, especially three years ago.

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If I could improve anything about Dell PowerStore, there are a couple of in-the-weeds features that I would want to see, such as the size of snapshots to know when we can expire some of them.

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The management UI is pretty decent and gets the job done, but the upgrade process is challenging. 

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I am not a fan of the user interface. My background includes working with EMC Clarion and then Dell Compellent. The Compellent user interface is better than any of their other products. PowerStore originated from EMC, while Compellent was a separate company acquisition. Unfortunately, the tools were not merged. The bottom line is the user interface is functional, but not aesthetically pleasing. Sometimes, I find it difficult to get the required information. The performance is good, but the management experience and user interface are lacking. Years ago, I would have rated it extremely high. Now, I would say it deserves a seven. I occasionally encounter individuals who cannot assist me well or quickly and provide some pushback on issues. Generally, it's acceptable, so a seven is fair. I think they could improve integration into virtualization. They have an integration feature with VMware, but it's basic and clunky. They could improve that. Also, I don't think they support other hypervisors. The product is expensive. Initially, you might get a deal, but if you need to add anything later, that's where costs increase. It's possible to buy a PowerStore array at a certain price and then pay as much for additional disks just to expand it.

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I don't see anything I need to change. I am happy with the years of use I've gotten. Nothing more is needed to meet our requirements. We have received the necessary functions, like consistent snapshots for the application. Currently, no function is missing for our needs. As long as they keep up with the quality, I would be happy.

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I don't think there is room for improvement in my opinion. It's already in a good state. I don't recall any issues, at least at this time.

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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.

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The only area of Dell PowerStore that I would see improved is the awareness in the market, as I feel that the Dell team can do better regarding the features and the way use cases and case studies are presented.

I think my customers find several features of Dell PowerStore impactful for their organization, but I do not know what plans you have for the agentic part of it, as I have not heard much about that. Most of the products emerging already have AI for better delivery and insights, but I am not very sure if Dell PowerStore is fully ready for that.

At this moment, I have not utilized Dell AIOps, also known as CloudIQ or Apex AIOps, in Dell PowerStore, and I have seen very limited penetration of that in customer places.

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The previous version of Dell PowerStore we used was easier to use compared to the current one. They have made it more cumbersome to handle, although it still works. It has become more complicated to manage.

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In terms of improvement for Dell PowerStore, I think it would be good to integrate it with IBM workloads.

Regarding Dell AIOps or CloudIQ, there is no problem with that, but it still needs to be more granular.

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One improvement I would suggest relates to the service that pings Dell when there's an issue. I would say it needs to be more transparent. 

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I do not have any suggestions for how Dell PowerStore can be improved. I am very happy with it. It works very well with our tools and it is all super easy.

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I would improve the product to make it better. I had specific troubles with vulnerabilities in Dell PowerStore. There are many vulnerabilities that we cannot mitigate related to the administration interface. It is hard to install certificates from another source.

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

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After upgrades, there were a few bugs in the product, and it can be considered as an area of concern where improvements are required.

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Dell removed support for RecoverPoint for VM on Dell PowerStore, which has been problematic. RecoverPoint is no longer supported on Dell PowerStore, and Dell has also discontinued the RecoverPoint appliance. This creates challenges for customers who still require on-premises deployment and who lack redundancy features.

There is a need for third-party solutions because data resiliency only occurs at the storage level, but nothing is available at the application level. If someone steals data from storage by taking out a hard drive, encryption and other features would be advantageous. However, in scenarios involving ransomware attacks, there is no control available.

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Dell PowerStore is too expensive, and it could be less complicated. It isn't as user-friendly as other options, especially regarding the user interface.

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Monitoring is an area of concern in the product where improvements are required. My company monitors a lot of stuff. My company does monitoring through SNMP traps since Dell PowerStore doesn't allow us to do any monitoring. It is pretty hard for our company to have a central monitoring system on Dell PowerStore since it doesn't have any monitoring capabilities.

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The product can improve by offering AI-based functionalities to users. AI-based functionalities can enhance the tool's performance in moments when the demand is high from the users. The AI-based features can also help users maintain data in a more reachable manner during high demand. Dell PowerStore's throughput limit of the boxes can be improved.

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The replication part needs improvement, particularly the integration of RecoverPoint. The best solution for application is RecoverPoint, but PowerStore does not have direct integration with it currently.

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Sometimes, you have to go back and forth with the technical support team, where they want you to do something you've already done.

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It would be helpful for us to have support for the S3 protocol because our main competitor has the S3 protocol in their system. We lost a few teams because of the requirements of S3, so maybe that could be added to their roadmap.

Dell's data reduction guarantee, initially straightforward for claiming additional storage, has become more complex. Their current analysis digs deeper into data composition, and some customers with encrypted data have been denied additional storage under the guarantee.

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Dell PowerStore should offer more cybersecurity and warehouse data security. 

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I would like a feature parity on the software side. I've been with PowerStore since version one dot zero. I've been through the growing pains of the software. The hardware has always been reliable. The software has been evolving. The biggest area in PowerStore that needs improvement is the overall visibility within the ESX environment. I haven't seen PowerStore Prime yet. I'm hoping that it'll be like it was with Unity. I am assuming it will be but I haven't seen it. That's one area if it's not done. The other area is SNMP deployment so that I can use my own observability platforms to see its performance.

One area of suggestion for the platform engineering team is that when they do introduce new features not turn them on by default, let the customer decide if they want to use those new features. It's been more than once that I have done a software upgrade and started something that's caused a negative impact on my environment.

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The solution's pricing needs to be moderated a bit. As a partner, I'd like to be added to each customer's CloudIQ to take a look.

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Dell PowerStore can improve the integration with VMware.

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We had an issue where we lost both nodes, completely lost all our caching, and had to rebuild that whole appliance from scratch. We need to find a way to ensure the cache data is safe and secure. When we're maintaining it, it takes five to ten extra minutes to confirm it so we don't run the risk of something happening. There needs to be some sort of better feedback between the two nodes.

The one was running online as a master, but somehow, the caching was lost because both the nodes were offline. No one had any references to that cached data, which completely destroyed our data. Something needs to be done with the caching to ensure that if some issue occurs, there needs to be an ability to disable caching during maintenance to make it static, safe, and good.

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There is an issue with Dell PowerStore related to future expansions which are software-related. This caused some issues with my largest customer in Romania. Hopefully, the new model will increase performance making it more efficient. 

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From an improvement perspective, the tool should focus on making it possible for users to configure the tool in a uniform mode with its good features.

The support team should have more people with experience in the solution's installation process, as it is one of the areas where I see certain shortcomings.

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Easy understanding. That is important for the user. When the client has a manual, when the user will take the PowerStore and take the PowerStore, easy installation means. If you click the volume, it will show the order valid. 

It's the network side also and the storage side as upgrading of the versions, like firmware versions.  

Everything is pretty good. Just improve the network side. When adding the address for the host on the Dell side, it is not easy.

When you evaluate deployment after purchasing the Dell storage, you have to add the ESXI host to the Dell server. That time, the IP address is not taken easily.

Please improve that side. When we are on the VM website, the storage side is also not easy when adding storage to the host on the PowerStore side.

The support team doesn't always provide adequate assistance. So, there is room for improvement in the support. 

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I had a session with Dell concerning PowerStoreOS 3.5. The product can provide backup directly to Dell Data Domain, which we use in our environment, which is something nice for the future, but at this point in time, I can't see anything wrong with it.

When you create a case on Dell's support website, you don't always get someone who is experienced in the kind of systems you need help with when you deal with the first line of support offered by Dell PowerStore. Sometimes, you have to explain the issue multiple times to the first line of support, making it an area where Dell's support team needs to make improvements. I understand why the solution's support team is the way it is.

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Dell PowerStore helps to keep the software we rely on in our organization up and running. In our organization, we do firmware updates due to security breaches or vulnerabilities, and as a system administrator, it is important for me to know that the base hardware is in good condition and safe to deal with against hacker attempts while also looking out for any problems within the software itself. To avoid any concerns when it comes to Dell PowerStore, Dell needs to keep working on Dell products.

While using Dell PowerStore's interface in our organization, we sometimes miss out on some information. In our organization, we had to deal with bad firmware last year that generated fast degradation of the disks, and Dell informed us when they would replace the disks, but we couldn't see any notifications about the disks being degraded. I feel that the product's new interface with HTML5 interface is still in the development phase because it lacks the crucial information that system administrators need, like, for example, the degradation of the disk. With the product's current interface, as a system administrator, I just see that the disks are either good or bad, and that's it. As a system administrator, it would be great to use and see through CLI since getting informed at such a level within the interface will be a great improvement since more detailed information is always good.

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Data reduction needs improvement. While the reporting is generally good for general purposes, it may lack sufficient detail for more technical analysis. If you want to delve into where your I/Os are going, the reporting might need more in-depth information to make informed decisions.

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On downtime, it is okay. I would rate it as seven or eight out of 10. There are a few things that Dell has to change, fix, or upgrade. 

The storage could be improved. I would like a feature for how to best secure an appliance and the storage since we are connecting the container to the public cloud. I would like them to develop another level of security, making it more secure than from what they have now. 

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In the past, with Unity, we could run both block storage and configure part of the system as a NAS system. This wasn't ideal, but it provided flexibility. With PowerStore, we have to choose between block storage and NAS functionality. It would be interesting to retain the option to configure PowerStore as a block storage array and try out the NAS features to see how it performs. It was an interesting way to see if we need a certain type of storage. We were able to do that from the same system, and now we have queues when we set up the system, which one it's convenient.

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The solution’s security and technical support could be improved.

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

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

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

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

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Now we are not pushing the PowerStore to its maximum capability, so we are down in respect of the limit of PowerStore we use in our organization. For now, the slackness is ours, not PowerStore's. I'm not able to tell what can be improved since we are not pushing to its maximum speed. Also, we haven't experienced any downtime, and we switched from primary to secondary and so on, and there has been no problem. Initially, we had some problems with the firmware, and it was a serious problem. But, after six months, we upgraded two or three times, after which we didn't experience any problems. So, we never faced any problems or significant failures for two and a half years. We have a double installation, including primary and secondary ones. Also, in the initial six months, even if we had some errors, we never got a stop error. We never stop. Hence, we never stop the protection system. We only have a secondary type of error, which is for one of the parts of the solution but never for the software side.

The only thing is that with PowerStore, we don't have a solution for the file object. Because of this, we have been investigating Zephyr and another solution. We are also thinking of not buying anything in our data center. We are also evaluating a proposal from a provider named Wasabi, which provides an alternative to Amazon S3. Also, we want to follow a totally different approach so that there is no more spending or investments inside our hardware infrastructure, and we depend on just pushing it with the help of an external provider. Vaulting is another approach we may opt for, but we may not do it now since we are using Rubrik for vaulting. A good improvement for PowerStore would be to have an embedded vaulting feature. Currently, two providers of block devices offer vaulting capabilities, allowing for signing within multiple objects or on a partition. In such cases, this feature would be beneficial if you want to freeze a part of your storage or apply differential computing. This strategy involves preparing a disk for a machine and deploying ten machines based on multiple basic installations.

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

You cannot monitor as well with this product.

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

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It was very new when we first deployed it a year ago. Even just the upgrade processes and knowing what to expect, as well as documentation, could be more robust. We had folks that helped us through, however, we did have some bumps and bruises along the way.

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The NAS capabilities have room for improvement. Currently, when you buy the PowerStore T model, you have a choice of using only block—it's block-optimized—or you can buy it as a unified frame. With the latter, you can access the frame using either block—Fibre Channel or iSCSI, and on the other side you can access it using IP protocols, like NFS or CIFS. This is the NAS part and, currently, the NAS part is very poor. It's very basic. Even Dell EMC has said that to us. We are waiting for version 3 of PowerStore for that. This must be improved and it is in the roadmap.

We have other NAS solutions, but if someone wanted to have a unified frame, this is not the right solution, currently. That's why it's not a 10 out of 10. When we will have version 3 of PowerStore's operating system, in less six than months, my rating will probably go up.

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

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

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

The pricing could be lower. It is very expensive.

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The cost always has room for improvement.

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The solution didn't have all of the features we needed. There's a strategic decision to move away from it. 

It lacks in SVM functionality.

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Dell PowerStore needs to continue evolving and incorporating new cutting-edge technology.

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After the smooth launch of the product in our company, only the areas around upgrades are a bit problematic. In our organization, we face difficulties when updating the product. Since Dell PowerStore's system health check runs correctly, there is a need to bypass the health check during the upgrading process. Sometimes, the replication part of the product doesn't work, and because of this, our organization has to contact Dell's support to fix it. In my organization, we have had to go through two weeks with no replication, which is not very handy for our production environment.

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The solution only supports NPE. It doesn't support SSD or Flash. We'd like the option to be more flexible. If a customer finds out SSD is not supported, they will look for another option.

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There is room for improvement in the support. 

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Dell PowerStore is quite expensive.

We would consider this solution if the pricing is competitive with other options, as it offers a very good solution. However, the current price is slightly higher than the competition.

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The cost of technical support is high.

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The support is not very good. 

It could be more scalable. 

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Products that are not native sometimes cause migration issues. 

The solution should include access to Dell Demo Center. Our prior partnership included it and I was able to learn more about products, schedule demos, view functionalities, and run tests in real-time. Without access, I have to wait to get answers to my questions. 

More demonstration and training options are needed. It is important to understand the solution before speaking with customers about its functionality and benefits. 

Documentation and videos are not very rich and should include the whole interface with detailed information that can be shared with customers. 

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The networking was difficult and complicated. It took as long to configure it correctly for the networking, as to roll it out. It would be good if there was a way to simplify the network complexity. 

It's also only supported with a limited amount of switches. If I hadn't bought the Dell switches, I would've had some issues with my legacy switches. That's been our number one issue with customers, when they say, "oh no, I'm going to use this other switch."

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The customer support is slow and has room for improvement.

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

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

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The solution's pricing could be better.

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

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

It needs more mature code. 

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

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Dell PowerStore is a good solution overall, but some models could support hypervisors better by allowing for more customization and flexibility for customer needs.

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

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

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Reporting is an area that could be improved. It's very simplistic sometimes, and some of the very technical guys on my team want to see more of the details and be able to massage the report a little bit better.

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We have an issue with the integration of this box and VMware. I have downloaded so many books from Dell EMC's website. We created the volumes as VVols. The information they gave us said we would directly see the capacity. Unfortunately, that is not true. You only see it after you put data on it. When you create the volume but there is no data, you don't see how the actual capacity grows. This is peculiar regarding this box.

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In the first weeks, we had some problems with the dedupe. According to the warranty, we should have had a dedupe rate of at least two and we had not reached this value. We got an additional hard disk to match the planned capacity of the system and this helped a lot. We got to a dedupe rate of 1.9, and this was very good.

What we are missing is the monitoring. We cannot implement the health check of the system in our monitoring system. We have to open the PowerStore GUI every day.

Also, we have tried to install a separate virtual machine to integrate PowerStore to vCenter. VMware then provides a virtual machine with Photon OS. We have done this integration two times and it has run for some weeks. Then it stops working and I don't know why. We have not used it again. It has nice features and has saved a lot of time and creates a good integration, but it needs to be more stable.

Overall, they need to make the system stable. Again and again, we have problems with upgrades. The upgrades themselves are running fine, but after the upgrade is when we have a problem. With the update to 1.4, we had a head crash. They told us, "This is a known issue. Please upgrade to 2." We upgraded to 2 and, one week later they told us, "Yeah, there are some issues in 2.0.0. You can lose data. Please upgrade to 2.0.1." Overall, they need to make the system stable.

I try to avoid updates for such important, central systems. They require downtime for the whole company, as this is our only storage. It's not good to do so many upgrades. I have used other storage systems and, with them, it was never necessary to do so many upgrades in one year. Last year, I did four upgrades for the PowerStore but I have never done four upgrades over the lifetime of other storage systems. They have run four, five, or six years, sometimes more. I have never patched so often as I have with PowerStore.

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Horizontal scaling has room for improvement.

The price has room for improvement.

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The only area I can highlight for improvement is that the 4:1 data reduction target has not been reached. This may be due to an issue with Dell EMC's initial analysis of data compression. As a result, we have had to add new physical disks to reach our goal of total available disk space. Dell EMC has met us partway on this DRR issue by providing some of the additional disks free of charge, but we have had to purchase the remaining quantity of the disks we need.

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There is no Synchronize replication feature on the storage.

PowerStore should include more NAS functionality.

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Where the system needs to improve is by adding more enterprise features like replication on other sites. We would also like it to be much more aligned with the VMware version. For example, today we have two different versions of VMware ESXi running to keep the PowerStore online. It would be better if the software cycling was faster.

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When it comes to Dell PowerStore, I would like to see more integration and more security features included. It's unfortunate that the solution does not feature Flash trace. 

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PowerStore's management console could be improved. In the next release, PowerStore should add more artificial intelligence features.

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The user interface could be improved.

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We are looking for the Dell PowerStore to become more mature to maximize our use cases.

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I do not like having to use VPLEX for synchronous replication, as opposed to having the store software built-in.

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I would like to see more automation and more analytics in this product.

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I would like to see a Snapshot feature. Currently, it is unable to occupy the capacity. 

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The product could be improved by including a synchronizing feature for the file systems.

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Many customers are looking for a cyber recovery feature included in PowerStore. We would like to see this added in a future release. 

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