We performed a comparison between Dell EMC Powermax and Dell EMC PowerStorebased on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, our reviewers consider Dell EMC PowerStore to be a superior solution. The setup is simpler, and although the price is on the higher side, most users consider it to be worthwhile for the high performance.
"The tool is simple and easy to use. It has neat features like protection from device removal. Moreover, you can undo the deletes. The solution is easy to work with and not as complicated as CAC"
"Pure Storage FlashArray's overall speed is its most valuable feature."
"Their REST API is wonderful, well-documented, and easy to use."
"The most valuable feature is its data reduction."
"Technical support is good."
"Cost, racial per terabyte, and speed is why we chose PureStorage. It was no brainer."
"The code upgrades are very smooth."
"At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way."
"It has reduced our footprint in different physical locations."
"It significantly simplifies storage."
"The compression and deduplication are always on. We get more than 4:1 capacity savings using them. The efficiency benefits from compression and deduplication are through a specialized hardware module within the storage itself, and that means there is no overhead to the compression and dedupe."
"The speed and the compatible interface with IBM are the most valuable features of the PowerMax product."
"The tool is a fast-performing asset. It can perform millions of transactions within a second. I like the tool's architecture as well."
"We like the compression, dedupe, and I/O on the PowerMax. They are better than on the XtremIO."
"We are happy with the monitoring that Dell EMC is doing for us. They have helped us to identify many issues during the routine checks, issues which we were not aware of."
"It has dramatically cut down the footprint in our data center and reduced the amount of raw disk capacity that we needed to purchase."
"The PowerStore's compression ratio is even higher than the Unity system."
"It provides a big benefit when upgrading a new VMware environment. For example, in a big environment with 10 to 30 ESXs, you can take everything and put that into PowerStore. So, it is cost-effective, which is very important and has been massive for us. You reduce almost 80% from the hardware and work directly from PowerStore. Building hardware, especially in a big VMware environment, is a big issue for my organization."
"This solution is highly flexible and offers efficient online compression capabilities."
"The way you're able to manage all your PowerStores as one solution is very good for us. PowerStore enables you to federate or cluster multiple appliances with automated load balancing. In terms of management, it's helpful that we can do it from a single interface where we're able to manage multiple PowerStores. When you have multiple PowerStores it works intelligently by running the workloads based on the needs of the infrastructure."
"Dell PowerStore is an easy and fast tool to work through our company's data."
"I like the performance of the PowerStore. When you talk about PowerStore, it's mainly about flash systems and high-end IOPS. The 1000T is a midsize box, in terms of the way the vendor positions it, but it is more than enough for our needs."
"Pricing is very good. It's very competitive against those of all the others that I looked at in the marketplace, such as Hitachi, IBM, HP, and Pure. Dell is right there in the mix as far as providing the best price point as well as meeting the performance requirements that we have."
"When compared to Pure Storage, Dell PowerStore's cost was quite attractive."
"I would like to see them lower the costs."
"I would like to migrate to the cloud in the future and know how that would actually work with this product."
"I would rate this solution an eight. There's always room for improvement, nobody is perfect to get a ten out of ten. They do what they do well. It's not cheap but we it's for uses that we needed."
"We would like more extended historical data to help with some of the capacity planning. This is something that we are asking for all the time. E.g., what was the historical performance of this particular volume? So, we would like more historicals."
"If we suddenly dump large amounts of data onto the storage system, it takes a while to process it."
"I would like to see more cloud integration."
"The credentials on the iSCSI interface are only available to type in with the Chrome browser, and not with the Firefox browser."
"The technical support is okay, but could be improved."
"I would like NVMe to be end-to-end in the next release. Right now, it is not end-to-end."
"The main feature that I personally want to see is the possibility to upgrade to the next generation without changing all the components and just change the engine, relying on the compatibility matrices between two different generations. Meaning that we could just keep the enclosure and upgrade the engine, integrating the enclosure to the existing pool, then adding automation tools for orchestration."
"I would like them to continue improving the management tools and continue moving towards a RESTful API versus CLI."
"Dell needs to offer more midrange storage options with enterprise-class features similar to the PowerMAX."
"We are very interested in NVMe over Fibre Channel, which I understand is on the horizon. We would like to see that come to fruition."
"The installation of equipment needed support's help."
"There is room for improvement in terms of integration with various service providers for public clouds."
"The initial setup was complex, and we had experienced people working on it."
"I do not like having to use VPLEX for synchronous replication, as opposed to having the store software built-in."
"There is no Synchronize replication feature on the storage."
"The only thing is that with PowerStore, we don't have a solution for the file object."
"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."
"It doesn't support SSD or Flash."
"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...making it an area where Dell's support team needs to make improvements."
"It's also only supported with a limited amount of switches."
"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."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage with 46 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while Dell PowerStore is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "Simplified storage provisioning for us, enabling us to assign any volumes in two to three minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell PowerStore writes "It has a very strong NAS that can support a lot of big, heavy environments". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor Dorado, Dell XtremIO and HPE Primera, whereas Dell PowerStore is most compared with Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, NetApp AFF, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and HPE Nimble Storage. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell PowerStore report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors and best NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.
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