We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and Dell XtremIO based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The security operating system is its most valuable feature because it's very simple, easy to use, and operate. You don't have to do very serious training to operate this equipment. It's user-friendly and pretty straightforward."
"Very stable; no worries about how much it can handle."
"The initial setup was really straight forward."
"Pure Storage technology allowed us to automate tasks, reducing something which started as a 12-hour turnaround down to about 15 minutes."
"The support team is available all the time and they seem to know what they are doing."
"The best feature is consistently lower latency, even when IOPS crank up to over 75K. The product maintains submillisecond response time, which is incredible."
"The job of support for the storage engineers dramatically changed. We know more quickly the automation of the provisioning. We can now focus on things that bring more value to the company than just managing storage."
"It's easy to use, and the maintenance upgrades to get free controllers work really well."
"Dell PowerMax NVMe has good scalability and performance."
"The most valuable feature is the performance and compression. The most useful tool is CloudIQ."
"Key features include performance, replication time, and dedup and compression."
"The uptime is the most valuable feature."
"We find the service level option to provision storage very valuable. The ability to define different service levels for storage groups helps us in prioritizing our workload at the infrastructure level."
"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."
"You can use PowerMax for all workloads and consolidation. We have used it to scale thousands of VMs."
"A huge benefit of the PowerMax has been the decreasing of our physical footprint. We recently did a consolidation where we went from 58 tiles down to 5. If we had used just the PowerMax, we could have gone from 58 tiles down to 2 tiles, which is huge space savings. If you have 56 newly available floor tiles on a raised floor data center, which you previously had to cool and provide power to, then now, not only are my costs going down, I now have more revenue opportunities because I have more space to put new customers."
"Deduplication and cloning capability"
"Speed and reliability:"
"The guaranteed sub-millisecond response time for a 4K block."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its high performance."
"It is great for applications like Microsoft Exchange, ERP, SQL and VDI; basically saved the VDI buy-in from users, as now performance was seamless in comparison to a physical PC."
"Dell XtremIO is good for databases and huge workloads."
"It has very good performance for an application which needs lower latency and a better response, for example, in microseconds."
"Initially, we faced numerous issues with our analytical systems. However, we saw performance improvement after the implementation of the solution."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"The initial setup of the product is complex."
"I would like to see more detailed reporting on the data. However, it would be nice to know what are the exact VMs usage after deduplication and/or what that VMs actual latency and bandwidth is, outside of VMware."
"We would like to integrate it more with our backup solutions."
"I would like to see active replication. I know that it's available now but I haven't tried it yet. I hope that it works."
"Most of our upgrades have not been as smooth as they should have been."
"I would like to see the NAS add-on component become more fault-tolerant than just a single virtual machine running inside the array. I'm unwilling to use it for that reason."
"The time-to-market could be better at times, but I think that's true for all vendors of hardware."
"The initial setup was complex. ESRS is a very complex solution to put into our environment, because it requires external access to the Internet. That's a very tough thing for us to do, because we are a PCI and PII company. We store a lot of data for people which is personal. Therefore, going out to the Internet is not our preferred path."
"I would like to see more development in the cloud environment. It would be good if it comes in the cloud kind of setup."
"We had challenges again with the initial setup. I don't know if there was a gap during the requirement-collection phase, but the box was partially delivered to us with missing parts and it delayed the implementation by about 60 days. It was not as smooth as I would have hoped."
"I would like the scalability to improve, as it requires additional footprints."
"I'd like to see the dedup and compression improve. Two to one is not very good. We should be getting something like three, four, or five to one."
"If you go to Pure or you go to NetApp, they deliver in one month. If you go to Dell or HP, they will take up to six months for delivery. This is not a business model for today."
"It's a relatively new product, but for the next release I would like to see higher bandwidth on the front-end adapters. This would allow even greater scalability for critical workloads and consolidation for non-critical workloads. The hosts may not require that level of I/O performance today. However, it allows us to scale physical non-cloud environments without large investment."
"The price could be lower, and we are unhappy with the price."
"Management: At the time, there was no snapshot scheduler, so I had to write XSnapCourier to address it. The sad thing is that even after the newest release, which includes a native scheduler, most customers using XSnapCourier chose to stick with it due to a more feature-rich experience."
"I would like hardware capacity additions to be a little more flexible. The upgrade path for the existing XTremIO units requires you to purchase 2 XBricks at a time and they need to be the same capacity as the existing XBricks."
"The physical architecture could use some higher levels of redundancy."
"The implementation isn't exactly complex, but the solution should have some enhancements in it to make the process more centralized."
"They can improve the product by providing an HTML5-based interface instead of the Java GUI based application."
"It is very expensive to scale. You have to buy an additional system to extend from one disc, for instance. It is scalable, but extremely expensive to do so."
"Native data replication: To replicate data between XtremIO devices, you need to use EMC’s RecoverPoint appliances to move the data."
"Right now, external appliances are needed to replicate XtremIO to XtremIO, or to another EMC system."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 9th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while Dell XtremIO is ranked 25th in All-Flash Storage with 48 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while Dell XtremIO is rated 7.6. 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 XtremIO writes "Suitable for high IOPS and helps get backup in ten minutes ". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and NetApp AFF, whereas Dell XtremIO is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, NetApp AFF, INFINIDAT InfiniBox and VMware vSAN. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell XtremIO report.
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