We are coming from the VMAX environment where the storage provisioning was a bit complex. We had to create volumes manually from the command line. But with the introduction of the PowerMax, it's a piece of cake for us. We can assign whatever volumes we want in two to three minutes. Storage provisioning has become very simple for us and is a real improvement.

During the Request for Proposal (RFP) process with Dell, we know that the throughput of PowerMax will be convenient for us and it will handle our data center workloads.

We already have NVMe in the company, and we're very satisfied with NVMe technology within PowerMax that impacted our IO performance. 

PowerMax improved our storage performance and allowed us to consolidate our old storage into one platform. It's faster than the older EMC equipment we replaced. We had a few different storage arrays, and a couple of them were approaching the end of maintenance, and one was a year away from the end of its maintenance. So it was time to either spend a ton of money on renewing maintenance or replace them. At the same time, PowerMax has made storage provisioning more difficult because it's not as intuitive as other arrays, but it's still a good solution for our mission-critical workloads.

We're using SRDF, but it hasn't affected our storage network bandwidth requirements. We haven't had any issues, so we haven't had to increase the size of any of our connections. Inside the data, there certainly wouldn't be any issues. The only problem would be replicating to the other site, and we haven't had any issues. We have a reasonably large pipe between the sites.

There are so many ways it has helped. It provides efficiencies through compression and it provides high availability through its solid-state drives. We literally turn it on and it does its thing.

When it comes to storage provisioning, a lot of it has been automated. This was true even prior to PowerMax, back with the VMAX. The days of provisioning the mapping and masking, and doing all those things manually, are over. A lot of that is automated through their tools. Overall, that automation is saving us about four hours a week.

As a service provider, we have to deliver the best possible service that is backed by SLAs. The NVMe performance is fantastic for our customers and the features of the PowerMax are fantastic. We have seen improvements in performance, which means less customer support tickets. The ease of management frees up resources for our storage teams so they can focus on other problems with other platforms, etc. This is such a self-sufficient beast of a platform that it has really freed up a lot of time so they can focus on other stuff besides storage.

There is no management overhead involved in optimizing performance. It does it so well on its own. We don't have to manage much at all. It really is like a set it and forget it solution. My storage engineers love the system. It is a lot less work than our previous systems, which weren't bad by any means. There is not nearly as much management as before. So, we are saving dozens of hours per month for our storage team, and that is a real cost in our business.

There are different ways to look at security and availability. We take advantage of array level encryption, but that is a behind-the-scenes thing. We tend to focus on the availability part, because high uptime and performance are important to us. In regards to data security and availability, the data is secure if it is encrypted. The availability means that it is always up.  We have very good opinions of the security features in both single-tenant and multi-tenant deployed to the security. 

There is also the security concept regarding access to data. What we are seeing is that the PowerMax is so consistently dependable that it gives us a very solid comfort level in terms of level of trust. There is data security and protection, keeping your data from the bad guys. On the other hand, there is security knowing that your data is always available. PowerMax provides both of those.

We use the PowerMax SRDF/Metro Smart DR to replicate information on some servers that are important to our company. We use it as a backup from each box and it helps to reduce our storage costs.

The solution has reduced our time-to-market with a single management interface, and it is a very efficient platform. Provides great improvements in operational resilience, aligning us with our direct competitors in global markets. We are ahead in some areas as a result of the deployment of this platform.

The main improvement for us is that we have seen up to 12x performance improvements after moving from earlier, mid-range Dell EMC storage to PowerMax. Some of our reports, which were long-running, are now completed in a few minutes. Something that would take two hours is completed in 15 minutes and that has improved productivity. 

We also used to get timeouts from our storage, but now, after migrating to the PowerMax, there are no timeouts because the latencies are in microseconds, compared to the milliseconds of our old solution.

Our bandwidth requirements have been reduced because of the compression and the dedupe that we are getting with the built-in SRDF. It is bandwidth-optimized. And the best part is the reverse replication. Suppose you activate your DR. When you have to come back to the main array, only the changes are synced. That is unlike many other products. Here, only the changed tracks need to be updated, making the reverse replication very fast.

Also, by enabling the compression and deduplication, we get a very good level of compression and dedupe, of 4:1, which means if you have 40 terabytes, you only need to buy 10 terabytes. There are cost savings there. And by default, thin provisioning is in place, which also gives you at least a 40 percent reduction. And because of the bandwidth optimization, the link required for the DR replication is also reduced, meaning you are saving on the bandwidth costs. We have easily saved 50 percent.

Overall, you are getting very high-performing and reliable storage.

With the SCM memory, it has been set it and forget it. It is being used as a cache drive. There is very little configuration for us to do. We just know that it is working.

PowerMax NVMe's QoS capabilities give us a lot of visibility into taking a look at what could be a potential performance issue. However, because it is so fast, we haven't really noticed any slowdowns from the date of deployment even until today.

It is a very good storage appliance for enterprise-level, mission-critical IT workloads because of its high redundancy, parity drives. It gives us the ability to not worry about our data. Or, if something were to go wrong, e.g., a drive pops, then we have our mission-critical warranty. We get a drive the same day, then get it swapped by the next business day at the latest.

PowerMax NVMe has made it a lot easier to understand how much we are able to provision. It has made it a lot faster to provision new things. 90% of my time for provisioning has been reduced. Also, it has made it very easy to understand and see everything behind it versus the older heritage, where Dell EMC was very convoluted and hard to get working. Things that used to take an hour, probably now take five to 10 minutes.

It has improved storage I/O for our big apps and restores. And the snapshot process and data compression are better.

The solution provides an ease of handling backups and deployments. It provides a smart integration into the customer environment.

We removed the need to observe whether we ran into issues with the performance of disks or number of IOPS. Previously, our Oracle Database would throw us performance errors. Now, with PowerMax, everything runs smoothly.

I would access the solution’s built-in QoS capabilities for providing workload congestion protection at 10 (out of 10), as we are using the highest, platinum-level minimum response time from the system. The NVMe SCM storage tier feature offers crazy speeds. When we were looking for a storage solution, we were looking for the most reliable, high performance, latest solution to delay end-of-life. Our PowerMax setup everywhere enables the diamond-level setting with enabled monitoring. Until this day, we have not experienced any anomalies. We simply don’t experience workload congestion. Our primary requirement was the reliability of PowerMax, then the rest of the features, like NVMe SCM, were a nice add-on

It simplifies things, as we are using higher availability systems. We have always had a 70:30 effective rule between vital critical applications and those systems which are not critical, important, and discretionary. The Symmetrix's line has always been the go-to for our vital, critical application types. 

We are also implementing storage virtualization with VPLEX, where it is giving us the ability to move the storage to the proper platform based on the operating characteristics needed by that platform.

Symmetrix has always been a high-end, high availability system where we have never had one go down. I have never known one to go down. It is just an operational-stable platform that we still have to manage and maintain. However, it's not like some of our lower-end systems, like on the CLARiiON side of it or the Unity systems, where we have to be careful what we put on them and what we do with them because of the loading of the systems. 

This is why we need to virtualize the storage element, so we can move things to the proper platform. We are going to find that we will have more systems going from the mid-range to the higher range, specifically because of the needs of the platform. Wherein before it was driving by someone determining cost for what they wanted to pay for the storage, which overloaded and created problems for the lower-end tiers, because they're pulling too many IOPS out of that tier.

There are a lot of ways that PowerMax is helping our organization function. From a storage admin standpoint, there is no longer a need to rely on the command line interface (CLI) to get data which is needed for performance monitoring and troubleshooting. When you use a CLI, you're actually requesting copies of data and impacting the performance of that production's data. With the REST API, we can do things, just ask for it, and there is the info. We are not impacting production systems.

We use the NVMe SCM storage tier feature, and that's how we're able to do the service level capability (SLA). We have storage class memory as a part of our deployment, and we have about 10% of our storage sizing allocated to storage class memory. With that, we are able to create different service levels for the disk groups or loans provisioned from this storage.

It most definitely helps in improving storage-related performance in our environment. The way our core banking solution works is that we have what we call ODS blocks. So, for leveraging that SLA, we were able to implement some kind of priority for those ODS blocks. Oracle had said that this is something for which their Exadata has a special way of doing, but based on my own assessment, we are able to achieve relatively similar levels of performance by using PowerMax.

Before we deployed this solution, we used to struggle with processing about 100,000 transactions in 10 minutes. We are now able to process about 350,000 or more transactions. These are conservative figures. We did hit much more than that, but conservatively, we are able to see about 300% performance improvement as compared to the SSD storage that we had previously from IBM. We have metrics to show that. The performance is different, and it is better than what we were used to.

We are in our ideal environment in which the storage double acts as our UAT and our test environment. So, we've seen remarkable deduplication in that environment because we are able to expand the footprint much more than what we are able to do in production. The production environment is a bit more controlled, but in our DR UAT environment, we are able to stretch those capabilities. The metrics that we see and the number of environments that we're able to create is quite remarkable.

It provides NVMe scale-out capabilities, which is pretty awesome. We currently have a plan to scale up. We started off with about 100TB. Based on the performance that we've seen, we're consolidating more workloads on the storage. We need to scale up a bit, and we find it very valuable to be able to do that. The ability to scale out and scale up marginally depending on what you want is quite valuable to us.

Our time to response has increased significantly with the new storage tier (SSD).

We have probably replaced eight racks of equipment with one rack of equipment. So, we have seen significant cost savings and performance.

It was easy for teams to pick up the technology with very limited exposure and training, then implement and support it.

We work in healthcare and have to ensure that our data is always available because it can directly affect patient care. This platform is reliable in supporting our data availability. We now have a higher-performing platform and are able to consolidate our workloads into one single platform.

SAP and Oracle Database are on PowerMax. Most of out critical services are on it. We use SRDF, which is a software. You can utilize the storage. It's very good, because you can make a stretch faster between two data centers.

With the NVMe technology, performance in terms of IOPS has improved. Things are generally faster, although there are some bottlenecks with the integration of IBM servers.

The biggest way that PowerMax has improved the way our organization functions is through an increase in performance. The business of pharma is complex and the IOPS demand is huge. In the past, we used VMAX storage, and there was a big issue with the performance. Everybody complained about performance, servers, and storage, saying that they didn't have enough space. We tried many different solutions in an attempt to solve the performance issue.

For example, we tried reducing the data that was stored on disk, and we tried removing unused data. We turned to development and asked that some programs have fewer features. Finally, management made the decision to implement the PowerMax solution, and it solved the issue. As soon as we migrated from VMAX to PowerMax NVMe, the performance increased and everybody felt better.

The security is good. We enabled DSE for our encryption.

CloudIQ has made our lives better. It provides notifications, where you receive an email to let you know about your storage and your SAN. It is a powerful tool, although we have had to upgrade it a few times. Overall, it is a good monitoring tool that gives us a powerful and easy way to monitor our servers.

It is important for our clients that PowerMax provides NVMe scale-out capabilities. They are also getting great performance as compared to the old storage array model. 

Provisioning is faster and immediate. We can do immediate allocation and configuration. As compared to the old storage array model where it used to take half an hour, in PowerMax, we can do it in 5 to 10 minutes. It doesn't take that much time, and there isn't much delay in the PowerMax array.

Our workload is reduced because we are not dealing with any issues. We are not facing many issues on the PowerMax side as compared with the previous one.

As a partner, we don't have PowerMax in-house but for my customers the SRDF replication is an advantage. The ability to have a scalable, all-flash array is pretty impressive. That's important for our customers.

In terms of helping to consolidate islands of storage in a data center, the use case for the particular customer for whom we did the PoC was to move off of an Exadata environment and to move off of an AIX environment and consolidate those down to one storage platform. PowerMax did that.

It is meeting our customer's requirements. They had several large Oracle databases that needed to move over, including from Exadata. Exadata is one of Oracle's fastest systems in terms of Oracle Database workloads. Our customer had to be able to hit certain timelines for jobs that would run. For example, they are running a quote database and they had to be able to hit the same timelines for jobs that were running within that, or better. As a part of the consolidation, the end goal was to limit their licensing on the front end. Being able to consolidate down into that one footprint on the back end helped them save money on the front end.

When it comes to managing and monitoring PowerMax arrays, the interface has really improved compared to the old VMAX. Getting into the interface and finding out if there are any issues with the array is a lot simpler and more streamlined.

Because of the compression ratio, we are able to put more on less hardware.

The PowerMax software and CloudIQ let us get an inside view of our compression and compaction, as well as our usage of the storage.

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 managing and monitoring of PowerMax arrays from a performance, capacity and health checks perspective is really easy. It integrates well with our existing automation  environment and is inline with all Dell EMC's other values and products. As we are moving an application over to it, it has been very fast, efficient, and easy for our teams.

They provide up-to-date, leading-edge products that are constantly improving the technological provision of hardware and software for the customer.

We specifically use it for our PowerHA on IBM i. We were able to move away from a middleware solution for high availability, going right to snapshots and data replication on arrays.

Managing and monitoring PowerMax arrays from a performance, capacity and health checks perspective is easy with Unisphere and CloudIQ. I have CloudIQ on my phone, so I could pull it up and see the state of my arrays right now.

It has simplified our operations when it comes to troubleshooting. We're on-call every time there is an issue and I can show them, 100 percent, that there is no problem on the storage side. I can show them there is no issue here.

The solution has helped to improve our services, in the medical field.

In terms of mission-critical applications, we are running our switch, which is the most critical application that we have in our organization, on the storage box. It is because it is reliable and, in terms of performance, we do not have any issues with PowerMax.

The switch application is very sensitive to IOPs and to the speed of responding and reacting to requests. We went specifically with PowerMax to ensure that we are getting the highest performance, and it has really been exceeding our expectations. We are yet to put it into really demanding tests. We have solutions that we are implementing during the year which will be high-demand in terms of IOPs and performance. We will find out then if PowerMax meets all our requirements.

We use the solution with VMware. It made things easier for us in terms of deployment and implementation.

It is a hyper-converged solution, which has easy deployment. It is easy to manage and upgrade.

We consolidate a lot of various disparate storage arrays into one enterprise solution.

We primarily use Unisphere for managing and monitoring.

We expect it to deliver exceptional performance and capacity utilization metrics. This is one of the reasons we are evaluating PowerMax 2000 and PowerMax 8000 at this point in time.

I have customers who are using this for large Oracle and SQL applications and European SAP types of infrastructures. They are integrating PowerMax with ProtectPoint for additional data protection of their data. They are also automating the backup and recovery of those systems through AppSync, which is another product for keeping everything protected in an automated way.

It's a zero light loss upgrade. So, they're upgrading the system without losing any type of light from the communications of the system. Also, it has zero interruption of upgrades.

A lot of our critical applications are mainframe and open system-based, and they spread between those two. So, we need a platform like PowerMax to be able to recover in a DR scenario.

One of the valuable features is that less work needs to be done on the arrays now, compared with what used to be. I used to spend most of my day managing the array. Now I'm more managing the interconnections and the flows of data, and not worrying about the feeds and speeds anymore.

We've been doing testing before implementing for our Oracle Databases and we're seeing much better performance than we were with the previous generation.

You can use PowerMax for all workloads and consolidation. We have used it to scale thousands of VMs. This is Dell EMC's selling point. 

We have two sites and two data centers. So, we use SRDF to do transfers and fail overs.

It's a new generation and class of storage so it's faster and more resilient. 

We have reached our required performance level with the response time. We have benched the solution with different types of IO. Now we can be sure, with this solution, that the response time is what we need.

The solution has helped to consolidate storage. With lower space, we now have half a rack.

We definitely have situations where we have multiple siloed storage arrays, especially like higher-end VMXs or mid-range storage. So, we have four or five arrays that we can go and take those and put it on one high performing PowerMax, then deliver it to scale and grow.

Helped our organization by improving performance on the I/O side. Before migrating to PowerMax, customers were faced with many performance issues due to high latency from the back-end and front-end side. Our previous storage was VMAX 10K, and with the evolution of business applications, it became more exigent in term of performance, intelligent data placement with FAST VP, resilience, replication, data protection with snapshot, and no more tasks for provisioning servers and applications. E.g., at the end of month, when the financial department ran the script to produce reports for the BI solution, these scripts generated many performance issues and the storage was struggling. With PowerMax, this is very transparent at the end user level.

We are able to provide storage at the right service levels without overmanaging it.

Data is helping us have the performance, so they can do their reporting in the hospitals every day. They are able to maintain with the compression longer.

We're consolidating two to three arrays down to one which means that our data center footprint has decreased by like 90%. So we're saving 90% of our space, and it also is much better on power and everything else in our data center. And on top of that, the performance is much, much better than our older arrays.

The smaller footprint of the device has been really nice. We have gone from eight bays to one bay. Having one floor tile in our data center has been pretty awesome. A lot less power and HVAC cooling is being consumed.

We have all of our large Oracle databases along with a lot of order processing for our warehouses, which ship out clothing, currently on PowerMax.

We have no performance related issues due to hardware.

This solution has helped to consolidate islands-of-storage in our data center due to a reduced footprint. This is because of single pane of glass management.

Applications require zero downtime. The high availability and the configuration of the current Symmetrix provide all of that.

We get amazing IOPS and workload with VMware, SAP, and Oracle.

It does what it's supposed to.

It significantly simplifies storage.

The data in our environment grows very quickly. Other solutions were a little bit slow, but with the PowerMax, there isn't going to be any negative impact.

It has reduced our footprint in different physical locations.