Dell PowerVault Reviews

We are a solution provider and Dell EMC PowerVault is one of the products that we implement for our customers. The primary use is high available solutions, such as Hyper-V clusters or VMware clusters.

The most valuable features are stability and response time. Every time I need to use this product, I get a timely response.

I would like to see improvements made to the user interface.

We have been using Dell EMC PowerVault for approximately ten years.

I like Dell as a brand because the products are stable.

I don't usually have the need to contact technical support. I do remember one incident between six and eight years ago where they and Symantec together provided support for a problem. It was a Dell PowerVault TL2000 and Backup Exec from Symantec (now known as Veritas Backup Exec).

When it comes to supporting our customers, they contact us. I like this because the customers are close to me and we can work on the problem ourselves.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We provide this to our customers as a complete solution. We implement the product and then we support them after the implementation is complete.

I think that it's the right price for this type of equipment. It is important to remember that the retail price may seem high, but the final price is usually different.

We are not using the most current version, so I am not fully aware of what the current features are. As such, at the moment, I cannot recommend it one way or another to people. That said, in my experience with the version that I am using, I definitely recommend it.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

On-premises

The primary use case of this solution is for local software, which we use for the production of local ERPs that we use on-premises.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that it is easy to manage and easy to use.

Deduplication and compression is an area that needs development. This is currently not on the device.

In the next release, I would like the deduplication and compression included, as well as the flash technology. It doesn't currently use it.

We have been using this solution since February 2014. It's been more than six years.

We have not had any issues, but I cannot say that it is very secure. We do not use any security protocols, but we have not had any issues with security.

The scalability is not flexible.

We have approximately 150 users, who are using this solution in our organization.

We are satisfied with technical support.

The initial setup was easy and straightforward. 

It's made by the technicians, which made it easy.

The price is reasonable and we are satisfied with it.

I could not recommend this solution to others, because the technology is old. There are other Dell models that I would recommend, but not this one.

I would rate Dell EMC PowerVault an eight out of ten.

On-premises

We are a hospital in Jordan, I'm the IT director and we are end users of this solution. 

We have this solution running almost all the time and it's very reliable and stable.

I'll need to replace Dell soon because it's almost obsolete and considered old technology. If I continued using it, I'd need to increase its capacity. We need higher performance and more reliable storage. It's considered an expensive solution in Jordan, it would be better if the price could be reduced. 

I've been using this solution for nearly eight years. 

This solution is stable and scalable but it's fallen behind our needs.  

We had some performance issues after our initial setup and they managed to resolve all the problems. I haven't needed to contact support since then. 

The initial setup is not that straightforward. It involves SAN switches and some setup procedure that are a little complex.

Licensing fees are expensive - whether that's specifically in Jordan, I'm not sure.

If this solution is within your means as a storage option then I would recommend it.

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

On-premises

Expandability is the most important feature for us.

The MD3260 has given us the ability to have longer term storage for our customers and a reasonable price.

The MD3220i needs to allow for larger drive sizes.

We have owned the MD3220i for about 2 years so far and we are new to the MD3260 only owning it for about 2 months.

The only issue during deployment is that Dell has different ways of installing different SANs. We would like to see more standardization when it comes to the full line of Dell storage products.

Customer Service:

I would rate their customer service as a 10 out of 10.

Technical Support:

I would rate their technical support as a 10 out of 10.

The initial setup of both devices we have was not complex but rather tricky considering they are installed and configured in different ways.

We have implemented all of our SANs in house.

With the 3260i, we use it as disaster recovery storage for our customers. Previously with the powervault, we were paying approximately .81 cents per GB. With the 3260, we are down to .18 per GB in cost. This enables us to lower prices for our customers are still make more money.

Since we are Dell partners, we simply chose Dell as the vendor. The ease of working with them is what is most important and their technical support has been first class.

The PowerVault 3220i is a good unit, but my biggest concern with it is that the unit will only support up to 1TB sized hard drives. This makes the cost of unit higher when using it as added storage. The MD3260 is a great unit, inexpensive, hold tons of drives, its expandable, and the cost is low.

If I had advice to give, it would be based on all the Dell Storage devices. Make sure you evaluate each device thoroughly and understand exactly what you need it to do. Make sure you talk with a product specialist and let them understand your motives. Choosing the correct device for the job is most important.

Extending volume sizes.

It allows on demand without disruption to growing the size of a volume which then in turn allows a system to see more disk capacity previously this required downtime and had to be schedule out of hours.

Better monitoring / event logs and firmware upgrade process.

2 years.

No the San was fairly easy to install and the documentation is good.

Only once when the storage array seem to be very slow and caused VMware Hosts to not see the volumes.

Not yet, as this was for a small virtualisation environment of 20 servers and 100 desktops.

Customer Service:

Very good general Dell Storage support is very responsive.

Technical Support:

Technical knowledge was good.

EMC AX3, due to high hardware and maintenance costs Dell was selected.

Was easy to setup.

Vendor team, Ultima Business Solutions.

1 year.

Setup cost was £30k hard to determine day to day costs.

Dell EqualLogic was reviewed but deemed too expensive for the use case.

Understand that this is a entry level storage array and has limited scalability perhaps below 100 server environments.

My primary uses are virtualization and general-purpose workloads.

The features I've found most valuable are replication and tiered storage.

PowerVault could be improved by increasing its memory cache capacity and adding the ability to export data to the cloud.

I have been using this solution for a year.

PowerVault is stable.

Dell's technical support is excellent.

The initial setup was easy and simple.

PowerVault is an entry-level model for customers needing their first storage solution. I would rate this solution as ten out of ten. 

On-premises

A highly reliable RAID system with durable high speed hard disk drives. The OS can be flashed on to a SD card thereby giving you more space for storage. I've found that the enterprise support from Dell Customer Care is excellent.

No LCD panel for viewing status on-board.

My Company has huge data requirements for which I bought this Dell Powervault NX 3200 with 10 TB storage. It was selected due to very impressive IOPS performance and has proven itself. In my company there are more than 100 users connecting to this server simultaneously and still the I/O operations are very smooth. Dell-IDRAC provides a nice way to manage and monitor its performance.