Dell PowerStore Reviews

Dell PowerStore is used in the BFS industry.

The main feature of Dell PowerStore is its support for NVMe as well as hybrid solutions.

We require the most up-to-date NVMe technology.

We like the performance of Dell PowerStore.

Most of the features are available, including support for NVMe and a mix-and-match of storage devices.

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.

I have been working with Dell PowerStore for five years.

Dell PowerStore is stable. I would rate the stability of Dell PowerStore a ten out of ten.

Dell PowerStore is a scalable solution.

We have more than 50 customers using Dell PowerStore.

We have a team of two or three people who deploy this solution.

We have 25 engineers.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The deployment process only took around thirty minutes.

The deployment process is being handled by my technical team. As the owner of the company, I am not involved in the actual deployment.

Dell PowerStore is a good return on investment.

There are no separate licenses required as all the basic licenses are included in the bundle.

The licenses required may vary based on the customer's specific requirements, such as for decompression, deduplication, disaster recovery data, log shipping, and so on.

I would suggest considering Dell PowerStore for various other applications, such as file storage and video storage, due to its capabilities and features.

I would rate Dell PowerStore a ten out of ten.

It's a good product, especially for companies dealing with virtualization. It's well-suited for a broad range of use cases and stands out when it comes to tasks like personalization. If you require power and flexibility in that regard, it's a reasonably priced, straightforward product that is easy to manage. It delivers on its promises without unnecessary complexity.

A particularly valuable feature is its simplicity. The reporting tools and support are good, and the solution promotes data reduction, often meeting the compression ratio. You can initially invest in less upfront capacity and expand later as needed.

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.

I’ve been using the solution for around three years.

The solution is scalable within regions. It allows you to scale up to four nodes in one tool for extensive storage. You can create as many tools as needed, providing scalability based on the use case. It performs well for midsized use cases, especially those involving up to a hundred servers for virtualization. However, you might consider alternative products for more complex and larger-scale operations.

The technical support is good as they continuously monitor the system remotely through a support agent. This agent provides critical alerts, and the response time is typically within an hour.

The initial setup is straightforward. Firstly, the initial step involves unboxing, followed by configuring connectivity. There are various types of connectivity setups, including straight connectivity, direct connect, and private channel connectivity, offering diverse IT capacity configurations. The setup process encompasses unboxing, provisioning power, and connecting to the necessary switches. However, it's crucial to begin with a well-thought-out plan. One person is required to set up the solution.

The pricing is good. There's no need to pay for a license; it's all-inclusive. The only cost is associated with a support contract based on the level of support you desire.

I recommend this solution, especially if you're not moving everything to the cloud and require reliable local storage. It proves to be an excellent choice.

I rate Dell PowerStore a nine out of ten.
 

We primarily use the solution for storage and data reduction. 

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The architecture is very good.

It's a reliable product. 

The data reduction feature is quite useful. It has a good reduction ratio during migrations.

The solution is stable. 

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.

I implemented the solution around two years ago. I haven't used it for very long. 

It is a reliable, stable product. We haven't had any issues with it. Of course, it is not that old. That said, there are no failures and we have not had controller issues. there are no bugs or glitches. 

It is a scalable product. However, I have not needed to go and upgrade it or add more enclosures, et cetera. It can scale up. However, it can not scale out.

I have three customers that have already implemented the tool. More are coming online soon. Most of them are enterprises. We do expect expansion in the coming years. 

Technical support is more than perfect. We are quite pleased with the level of support on offer. 

I'm also aware of HP, which is a very similar solution. Sometimes the pricing of HP can be better.

The solution is very simple to set up. It is not a complex process. I monitor the process from a design and implementation point of view. 

The deployment takes about 15 minutes if everything is correct and on-hand. Then you move on to the management and you can have the flow up and running. We do the configurations and create the volume and handle the storage of the whole system.

I've implemented the solution three times at different sites. We implement the tool and do the migration. I work with a separate partner and we deploy to the users. 

The pricing is fixed. We have received a good price overall. Users must pay for the licenses. Most of the tools are included in an out-of-the-box delivery. There are no extra fees.

We're partners.

The solution is acceptable for both small and large companies. 

I'd advise new users to be mindful during the implementation process and make sure it is done right. They need to choose the correct solution and implement either block or unified. It's a good idea to look at the documentation before setting everything up.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use the solution for visualization and protection of the environment.

The solution's most valuable features are the quick data compression process and ease of scalability for all types of support contracts.

The solution's pricing could be better.

We have been using the solution for half a year.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. We have more than 300 end users and two administrators using it. We also plan to increase the usage.

The solution's customer service is excellent.

Positive

The solution's initial setup was straightforward. It took one or two days to complete it.

Our in-house team of two executives implemented the solution.

The price of the solution is high compared to IBM. There are additional costs for storage and support apart from the standard license.

We evaluated IBM and Fujitsu storage before. In comparison with Dell, IBM has stable software. But Dell is perfect for technical support and training, helping us make the right decisions. Also, we can choose between different strategies or configurations. It is more intuitive and complex as well.

I advise others to prefer more disks for the solution than standard ones. Also, wait to install updates after release. Overall, it is a great product. I rate it as a ten.

We are in the process of replacing our current SANs, FTP servers, and NAS servers, and have already implemented the new SAN solution.

This solution is highly flexible and offers efficient online compression capabilities. 

The equipment is standardized and can be easily upgraded by replacing the controllers. 

The disk sizes are also quite adequate, and the solution is user-friendly. Additionally, it offers extremely fast performance.

One of the benefits of their continuous improvement approach is that each update comes with additional features, without any extra charges for previously missing functionalities.

The cost of technical support is high.

I have been working with Dell PowerStore for two and a half years.

Dell PowerStore is extremely stable.

I haven't had any issues.

The scalability of the technology is excellent. 

One of the enhancements made since last year is the inclusion of NVMe in each shell. By continually extending NVMe, the drives can now reach up to 15 terabytes, which may differ from previous specifications. 

Although the claimed four-to-one compression ratio may actually be closer to two point eight, or three, it is marketed as four, and it comes with a compact footprint.

Technical Support is pretty good.

We've received an email or a phone call.

The higher the scale, the more expensive it is.

When you buy it, it comes with a three-year service agreement, but it is quite pricey. However, it includes everything for our response and everything.

The initial setup process for Dell PowerStore is straightforward and easy to follow. Even when using a fiber channel, which supports speeds of 10 and 25 gigabits per second, the setup is relatively simple.

Dell PowerStore has been priced aggressively, especially when compared to other NVMe storage options. It is likely one of the most cost-effective options for organizations seeking a pure NVMe play in terms of pricing.

I would rate Dell PowerStore a ten out of ten.

It's an aggressive box. It's a real departure. From everybody else.

We are a partner with Dell.

We use the PowerStore for our development environment. The frame is a repository for all our VMware infrastructure data stores and the applications that live on those data stores are mainly real-time voice applications in call centers.

We use it with Cisco switches and it's pure block only.

Thanks to the duplication and data savings, we have a lot of capacity available to us in the PowerStore. That lets us use and consume logical capacity, which can be done very quickly compared to having to install physical resources inside the PowerStore. The data reduction process is very efficient resulting in very high data reduction if you compare the PowerStore to legacy frames from Dell EMC. This is a very good benefit for us. We were able to very quickly connect new servers and instantly have capacity on the frame because of the data reduction. Moving forward, we can add more disks inside. We plan to have seven drives added in the coming weeks. So we are able to independently add servers, even if we don't have the actual physical capacity on the frame itself.

We have also seen a lot of savings because of the data reduction efficiency, which is currently 4:1 or 5:1.

We will also decommission old frames, and the maintenance contracts on those frames are very expensive. We will save some money as a result and we will also realize some power savings. We also have some environmental-related "green" engagements in Orange, and PowerStore is helping us go in that direction.

There are also space savings because the old frames are using a full rack while the PowerStore is only a 2U unit with almost the same amount of data being stored on it. That is very good. 

So it will save us floor space, energy, and money on maintenance contracts.

Our development team is very happy with us, from an admin perspective. When they query us for more capacity, we are very quick to respond and provide them with resources. If they want to deploy new machines, for example, we can quickly assign new data stores that those VMs will rely on. We have saved a lot of time thanks to the PowerStore.

And because the performance of the PowerStore is very high, we can connect many servers on the same frame, instead of having to multiply frames, side-by-side, to get enough power to serve our IOPS. We are working on real-time applications, so we can't afford a response time of more than 10 milliseconds or 15 milliseconds as a maximum. We can't support a greater lag in a call center. The PowerStore now is less than a millisecond, and that is with more load on it. On one VNX we have two or three VMware clusters with four or five ESXis per cluster. On the PowerStore I have, say, 10 clusters and each has about eight ESXis.

The most valuable feature is that it is easy to use this frame. I am a SAN administrator, but I was able to train my colleague, who had only been a VMware administrator, on the PowerStore in about half a day. Now he's autonomous in assigning volumes and creating data stores, et cetera. I don't have to help him anymore. That is the beauty of this unit and it's due to the effort Dell EMC put into the GUI.

The VMware integration is very good. It integrates all the vSphere interactions when you create your data store, directly from the PowerStore GUI, into your VMware cluster. My colleague who was the VMware administrator is now able, in one shot, to provision his storage and automatically create a data store relying on this storage. That has freed up some of his time.

Another important feature is the power of this frame. It's very powerful. We have almost less than a millisecond of response time, all the time, even during backup windows. That's very good compared with the VNX, of which we have two. We also have a Unity connected on this same SAN for the same kind of application. We did a comparison among the three models of frames, the VNX, which is rather old, the Unity full flash, which is not so old, and the PowerStore. PowerStore is really on top of all of them.

Of course, it enables us to add compute and capacity independently. We add a lot of VMware clusters in our SAN thanks to the PowerStore. We are going to decommission the old VNXs because it's better adding capacity on the PowerStore than keeping the old models.

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.

The PowerStore was introduced in June of last year and I adopted the first one in Europe, in August last year, so we have had it for about seven months.

It is very stable.

The issue we had with PowerStore was due to being a very early adopter. We got a better version of the PowerStore operating system, but the upgrade that came after that, relying on the better version, was not easy to run. We decided to reinstall the PowerStore with a fresh, new, official operating system.

So the stability of the initial PowerStore was good enough for production, but not as good as we would have expected for this kind of frame. The four PowerStores we have that were installed with an official release are very stable. 

We faced issues, but that was normal because the PowerStore was totally new at that time. No one had experience with it. When Dell EMC came onsite to install our first one, it was the very first in Europe.

There are two ways to scale. You can scale up and out. You can easily add shelves to add more physical capacity to your appliance. If that's not enough, you can add an appliance to your federation. It's very easy.

We are on the T model, not the X model. It's pure block and we are external ESXi-connected. We need a lot of servers because we have more than 100 developers working on this frame. They all need their own clusters because there are different applications under development. An X model would not have been enough.

In the future, if the PowerStore 5k is not powerful enough, we could upgrade it to a 7K or a 9k or the new 7200 models that are coming out in a few months. But the magic is that we could do that with the data in place, inside the frame, keeping the drive. That is one of the highlights when it comes to simplifying things.

As a very big company and as a partner, we have a particular kind of access to support. We have a dedicated global account manager. All we have to do is snap our fingers and we have the guy on the phone. The quality of support is okay. I can also access the product manager of the product. I am Dell EMC-certified, so it's very easy for me to access support documentation.

Sometimes, their support doesn't really understand the customer's position. For example, some weeks ago we had an issue on a frame. Dell EMC engineering focused on what was really happening instead of trying to bypass the problem. They didn't succeed in recreating the issue we had in their lab, so they were using our infrastructure as their lab. It was a development environment so it was not harmful for production. But in the end, it was a time-consuming issue for us.

Positive

You don't have to worry about the deployment. It's already done for you when the frame is powered up. That is another aspect of how it simplifies your implementation. Dell EMC comes onsite to do the initial power-up of the frame itself. After that, we do everything by ourselves.

Aside from that—and this is important—because we were early adopters, there were some features that were mandatory at the time, and they complicated the initial deployment a little. The top-of-rack switches that are mandatory when you use a federation are no longer needed if you use a single appliance. That was our case. At the time we deployed our first PowerStore, we had a single appliance, but we needed the top-of-rack switches to be set up for a potential future connection with other appliances, if we wanted to go to a federation.

Now, with version 2 of PowerStore, you don't need to deploy top-of-rack switches if you have a single appliance. That can be done later on, if you go to the federated setup. This is a very good improvement because many customers have a single appliance. It's so powerful that you probably don't initially need a federation. Now, you don't need top-of-rack switches set up but used for nothing.

Because ours was one of the first PowerStores, Dell EMC took a day to deploy it. Afterward, for the other PowerStores we have deployed in the data center, it took less than half a day. With the last one we will deploy, which should happen next week, we will not have top-of-rack switches. There will be no connectivity to set up and no Fibre to run, so it should take two hours.

We had to migrate data out of the legacy frame we previously had to go to the PowerStore, but it was very easy because all was done on our side on our servers, so it was very quick.

We have definitely seen ROI due to our data savings as a result of the data reduction. Instead of buying one-to-one drives, we buy half a drive.

Licensing is very simple. Everything is included in the basic license. There are no concerns about having to pay to add a feature. Everything is there. 

Because we are a big partner, we get good prices from Dell EMC. They know we will resell their technology, so I'm not in a good position to discuss the pricing that applies to non-partners.

We have almost the entire portfolio of Dell EMC products, from VNXs to PowerMax. We also have some other vendors, of course, but they are not as powerful as this one.

My advice would be don't hesitate. It's a good frame. It's doing what it is designed for. It serves IOPS very well. The data savings are very important and the response time is very short. There are always tricky situations that come up, but honestly, since our PowerStore went live, I don't have to worry about the storage for this environment. The VMware guys are independent. They don't need me anymore.

We accepted the risk, due to the fact that it was a relatively new platform, when we went with PowerStore. We were totally aware of that fact. That is why we put the first one into our development area, and not production. Even if we have more than 100 developers working on it, any problems would affect developers, not production. We understood there could be costs because having 100 developers not doing anything during a day costs money. But PowerStore didn't disappoint us. We are very happy with it. We now have four in production.

We are a Dell partner, so we also resell PowerStore to our end-users. When we initially built this frame, we wanted, say, 100 terabytes, but they persuaded us to only buy 40 terabytes of SSD or NVMe drives because of the savings that they said we would see from the data reduction efficiency. The program they gave us was that if we didn't achieve that kind of data efficiency, they would provide us some disks for free.

We primarily use the solution as a POC. We have Extreme IOs that we're looking to replace, and this was brought in as a potential replacement for them.

For our scenario, it doesn't really fit the bill for where we're trying to go. The unit's fine. Unfortunately, it's a relatively greenfield type of product and we're looking for something with a little more robustness that's been in the field more. PowerMax works great, of course, and that's probably what we're going to go to instead. We just decided Power Store was just not going to fit the bill for what we needed. We needed something with a higher tier in the end.

The support is very good. 

For smaller shops, the solution is useful. 

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.

I've using the solution for about a year. 

I'd rate the stability at a three or four out of ten. It could be more stable.  

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the solution at a six for scalability.

We've been quite happy with support. they are very good. 

We're trying out PowerMax, and will likely move in that direction instead of sticking with this product.

We have not witnessed any kind of ROI while using the solution. 

The pricing could be better. I'd rate it four out of ten. 

For new users, I would heavily suggest they evaluate their environment with real-world loads, not synthetic loads, when considering the solution.

I'd rate the product five out of ten. 

In our company, we use Dell PowerStore for IBM SAN Volume Controller. Dell PowerStore is useful for areas like storage, database, and VMware.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the deduplication part, which is very good. The deduplication part of the solution is valuable since, as a user, you get more space for less money.

The product's performance is very good and matches up or exceeds the performance offered by the previous product in our company.

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.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for two years.

I have heard that Dell PowerStore offers scalability options, but I have never used it.

The solution's technical support is good. My company has an on-site engineer to provide us with a line of support whenever needed, especially in a short time, which works perfectly for us.

I rate the technical support an eight or nine out of ten.

Positive

In our company, we have experience with Dell EMC Unity XT, which prompted us to opt for Dell PowerStore. In our company, we also have experience with Hitachi, which is not so great to use for admins.

The product's initial setup phase was very easy.

For Dell PowerStore's installation phase, my company uses the product's GUI and the tools from some other vendors. Sometimes, it's very difficult to set up the system. Dell PowerStore's installation phase is just like Dell EMC Unity XT, which is very simple.

My company's in-house team members took care of Dell PowerStore's installation phase. Dell only puts the storage array in the rack, after which our company takes care of the solution's installation phase.

My company has seen a return on investment from the use of Dell PowerStore since it is a good product that is always up and running. We don't have any issues with it.

The product's pricing model is good, and that is why we have Dell PowerStore in our company. My organization had looked at the products and prices offered by other vendors during our decision-making process. In terms of licensing, my organization has Dell Technologies End User License Agreement (EULA), but I don't know exactly how it works, though it is a big bundle of licenses for Dell Data Domain, Dell EMC Unity XT, Dell PowerStore, Dell ECS, and all such kinds of storage arrays. Dell told us that opting for Dell Technologies End User License Agreement (EULA) can help us improve the entire picture of Dell products and services.

The challenges my company wanted to address through the implementation of the product stemmed from the fact that our previous storage array was full and had reached the end-of-life phase, because of which we needed a tool for lifecycle management purposes, after which we found Dell PowerStore to be a logical choice for us. Previously, my company dealt with a couple of systems from HP, while we also had a lot of Dell systems, so we decided to stick with one vendor, Dell.

My organization uses CloudIQ to manage and analyze Dell PowerStore since we get the option to use standby, so when we get calls after work hours, we don't have to use our laptops since we can just log in via our cell phones and check the status of the storage arrays, which saves a lot of time.

With Dell PowerStore, my company saves a couple of hours a year, though it may not be a lot.

I don't know how I would access Dell PowerStore for its overall energy consumption.

I have seen that the product has an enormous capacity when it comes to significant data consolidation and footprint reduction with the use of Dell PowerStore, especially when compared to our company's old system, which comes up to around 70 percent.

It is tough to assess Dell Technologies for its values around environment, social, and governance. Though the aforementioned values are important for my company and storage admin, even if we don't look at that side of our company, I wouldn't personally mind it.

The product has helped our organization in the area of sustainability. The direct space provided by the product can be considered under the sustainability part of the product since, in our organization, we would need less room and fewer cooling modules, which helps.

For two years in a row, my company has not even seen a failed disk with the use of Dell PowerStore, making it a great product.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.