We've been using Dell EMC midrange storage for a few years now.

We're moving from older Dell platforms, previously known as EMC. We're transitioning from VNX, including VNX 7600, 5600, and 5400, to newer storage platforms, primarily Dell EMC PowerMax.

I have also used Dell EMC Data Protection Advisor (DPA).

I have worked with similar products like HP. We made a switch because PowerMax is compatible with IBM's solution. HP, we are using for the other platform.

Before PowerMax, we used internal disks. So it's the first external service for this solution.

I have worked with other solutions like Hitachi, HP 3PAR, and IBM storage. Dell PowerMax NVMe makes it easy for a technical or non-technical person to see the performance. If you need to dig deeply into the performance analysis, you'll have more options in Dell PowerMax NVMe than other vendors.

We were a VMAX customer, so when they changed their service offering from VMAX to PowerMax, that's when we started adopting it. In a sense, PowerMax is the first of its kind for us. But we have been a long-time customer. We started with their DMX almost 20 years ago.

We're dealing with Dell Storage, which we sell to our customers.

We previously used other Dell products, such as the BNXs and XtremIO. 

We switched mainly to gain access to the top-of-the-line model and we had more money to spend.

Here is a nice use case in regards to storage provisioning. In other words, how do we deploy storage for customers? At Rackspace, we are providing a large shared infrastructure environment where we are adding storage or taking it down constantly for customers. We are seeing savings of hundreds of hours of time per a given fiscal quarter (three months). Before NVMe and these versions came out, we had to do a lot of storage work manually to make changes for our customers. We would deal with a storage volume and the subcomponents below that storage volume. So, we create slivers of a volume, then we package those together to make a single volume and present that to the customer's hosts.

By provisioning within the PowerMax systems, we no longer have to go and create individual pieces, and say, "I need all the things needed for 1,000 GB LUN." Now, they can just go there, and say, "I need  1,000 GB. Give it to me." There is no provisioning subwork or extra work needed. It is just there. If I say I'm done with it, I can turn it off. If I want to go from 1,000 to 500. It just happens. A lot of the former busy work that was required for everyday storage support in that location goes away. It literally saves us hundreds of hours per quarter.

Initially, we had Dell EMC VMAX 800 and then VMAX 20K and 40K all-flash. We have recently installed a couple of PowerMax 8000s, and our migration program includes going from VMAX 20K to the PowerMax 2000 and 8000.

We did previously use a different solution.

We switched to take advantage of certain feature sets. Our previous competitor, whilst they did offer deduplication and compression to some degree, could not match the availability nor performance and didn't have the same guaranteed efficiency ratios. They also couldn't perform inline compression without significant performance penalties. This would have to happen at rest and offline. Therefore, we'd need to write the data first, then compress it. The PowerMax solution enabled us to do that inline, without a read or write penalty. Basically, there was no performance impact, and we still saw all the benefits from a reduced physical footprint, such as, cost savings, reduced power requirements, and fewer components to fail (number of drives required being 66 percent lower).

We were using a Dell EMC mid-range storage solution before. 

Because it is NVMe, it is extremely fast. It is a lot faster than our old SAN. It is hard to compare it to others in the market, only because we have never owned other products within the same generation. We switched to PowerMax NVMe because of aging hardware.

Prior, we were using a regular 7200 RPM disk. As a result, it was extremely slow. The upgrade to NVMe has been much appreciated by the company. Things that used to take four to five hours are now taking 15 minutes, if that.

We used XtremIO. We switched because we found many of the features and the functions are better on the PowerMax than they are on the XtremIO. An example would be the snapshot. When we would do snapshots on the XtremIO, we could delete a snapshot, even when we were mapping to the host. But with PowerMax, we cannot delete a snapshot when mapping to the host.

I have worked with NetApp before. Over the last three or four years, we only worked with Dell. Dell is easier to set up and handle. Dell is technically more advanced than NetApp. Dell’s support is better than NetApp's most of the time. The selling process of NetApp was a nightmare.

PowerMax exceeded our expectations. We previously used its predecessor VNX, which reached end-of-life and end-of-sale, i.e., we stopped receiving support for it. We have been using PowerMax for the last three years and have not yet hit the ceiling in its efficiency, performance, and scalability.

Since 2016, we have been buying all-flash components and the price has been trending downwards. What we are seeing in the new products, since we went from the VMAX3 to Power Max, is the price point still drops on the overall cost of the storage. This is what we're trying to do. We're trying to get more value to our internal customers by reducing the cost of usage.

Our performance requirements were response time and what IOPS we needed out of the platform. It's exceeding what we're asking out of it when we looked at the PowerMax which we have already deployed. We are getting typical response times in half a millisecond (or 500 microseconds) lower because the target was supposed to have been the Generation 3 with 300 microseconds. We were supposed to be able to get around 250 microseconds with the PowerMax 3000. I have seen some of that happen on monitoring side. It doesn't happen all the time, but for certain applications, it does achieve going down to the 250 to 300 microsecond range.

As a major service provider, who has been working with Dell EMC for well over a decade, hosting mission-critical applications for important brands and businesses, along with some health institutions, where access to data is literally a life or death, we have to go with a system that we can trust without fail. PowerMax has been giving that to us.

I have experience with IBM products. Dell provides a larger portfolio of products compared to IBM. The ease of deployment and management of products are not areas that are well-matched in IBM products.

We were using SSD storage from IBM. We moved because of multiple things. One reason was the cost. Another reason was the SCM offering advertised by Dell, which was coupled with the AppSync feature of this storage that allowed us to create clones of our databases for UAT, development, and test purposes. So, the features that we desired in the environment were:

• Cost and performance
• The ability to have database clones without necessarily increasing the footprint of the storage required.
• The ability to create service levels for the storage or for disk groups created from the storage. It was critical for us because of the consolidated environments in which we wanted to use the storage.

I am also working with HPE 3PAR. I am just looking for a place to get some 3PAR components. But nobody has it right now.

We are the HP Platinum partner in Romania, and we are now looking for a place to purchase documents from Europe.

Previously, we worked with Cisco, Lenovo, and Pure. The advantage was their delivery.

We don't an advantage. 

The consumer requests something that they do not have with the brand today. 

If it is storage, a server, or power, and we have it, they will purchase it. 

They do not wait for Dell, HP, or Cisco. It is the same for both. If you have Dell on hand, we will purchase it. If it's HP, they'll buy it. It. They don't care about the brand anymore.

Our performance requirements were more about the availability and the performance, since we are running mission-critical applications. We have to have low disk latency to meet the application's performance for our Oracle Databases.

We previously used XtremeIO. We switched just because we felt that the platform was aging and we needed something that was going to be high performing and offer more availability. 

We are migrating from HPE 3PAR, and it's been a very easy transition.

We're actually not going from VMAX arrays to PowerMax. We're going from Hitachi arrays to PowerMax.

Our performance requirements for this solution were response time and very low latency. We were able to cut our response times in half by implementing this solution.

We were using the Hitachi arrays and wanted something easier to manage. After last year's Tech World and hearing all about the brand new PowerMax array, we knew that it was something we had to really look into. We really liked the compression and deduplication.

The switching happens as the vendor, Dell EMC, brings out new products to supersede the old products. It's a natural evolution of things as products get better through significant R&D, and for us to follow that evolution.

We were using generation one of XtremIO, which had some limitations on number of initiators. It didn't have native support for IBM i. There were just a number of limitations with XtremIO that we don't have now with PowerMax. So, we were pretty consolidated on our previous platform XtremIO, then we migrated from XtremIO to PowerMax.

Our corporate ERP systems of databases are all mission critical. We chose to move to this platform from XtremIO because we wanted a smaller footprint with much more capacity with all of the data services that we got out of XtremIO. We also wanted the ability to use PowerMax in our PowerHA environment with its higher availability.

We had XtremIO but we have been a Dell EMC user for a long time. The solution's architecture influenced our buying decision because of the performance and storage growth. With XtremIO we have had storage growth issues.

We had a multitude of storage systems, like Dell EMC Compellent, that we needed to consolidate. A Compellent would take an entire rack space.

We were using the same solution. We just upgraded it.

The solution’s architecture influenced our buying decision with the new features it has, and the smoothness of the migration was also important. The last time we upgraded there was downtime, but this solution gave us the opportunity without bringing down the systems.

We previously used Cisco HyperFlex and Dell EMC VNXe. Both of these solutions are out-of-date.

I have always used Symmetrix and VMAX. Then, it was just a natural progression into the PowerMax solution.

We are slowly moving towards simplifying our current complex environment, but we are not there yet.

In the past, we have been using the various versions and families of VMAX. Now, we are moving more towards PowerMax and newer versions of technology as they get released onto the Dell EMC roadmap. We have been using VMAX based platforms for many years. Suddenly, PowerMax has evolved from the lineage of VMAX. Therefore, we expect Dell EMC to continue to build upon it. 

In terms of the engineering aspects of the performance requirements, we have a variety of applications requiring a certain level of IOPS, response times, and a minimum microsecond latencies. While we understand that PowerMax can deliver to these expectation from a performance standpoint, we will certainly undergo some rigorous proof of concepts (PoCs) with the PowerMax systems to make sure that our current understanding of PowerMax capabilities, from a performance standpoint, meets our expectations.

We looked at this system because we analyzed applications and workloads, then understood our customer's business requirements. It is understanding that there is a need for low latency and zero downtime. We were previously using a combination of VNX and Unity.

When we looked at PowerMax, it was extremely low latency: five submillisecond types of latency. From a general performance perspective, most of these systems that we are designing tend to be more than 100,000 IOPS for input/output operations per second. The other thing is that it handles these types of IOPS with very large block sizes. If you really understand your data, it's very easy to optimize it on PowerMax, and it is exceeding our requirements.

We came off VMAX. Our performance requirements were to just match the VMAX levels. I find the array is doing that for host IO.

Since we were already on VMAX, our decision was related to a data center move and protecting our data. Prior to that, just getting on the VMAX product line and came from IBM. That was a look at all the mainframe products, which was a cost and functionality play. We picked the product that seemed to have the best cost and functionality with longest term company relationship.

We had been using the VMAX line prior, and this was just a case of capacity and performance growth. We refreshed our environment to get the most performance we can out of our applications.

The architecture - using the NVMe on the back end, with the designed use Storage Class Memory, and NVMe end-to-end in the future - really influenced us in not wanting to go backward with our purchase. Rather, we wanted to buy a future-looking device that we can keep growing into, to get our value out of that investment.

PowerMax was deployed as a replacement/tech refresh for our existing VNX.

We were using XtremIO before this. We have all of the features that were available there. Relatively, there is nothing new that we are using.

We had some challenges with our core banking system. There were performance issues, which was the reason we went to XtremIO All-Flash. NVME has really helped us here because anything less than XtremIO would have caused us issues. So, PowerMax is the best replacement or fit right now. In fact, we have seen that it has really improved the performance as well.

We previously used mid-range solutions that just didn't scale.

We used to have a whole bunch of arrays. Now, we have consolidated them onto PowerMax. 

We were looking at All-Flash Arrays that have one submillisecond latency all the time. That is what PowerMax delivers.

The last solution we used was VPLEX. We switched to this new solution because it is more resilient.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution to help our clients respond to all their requirements. We needed to make available other services and other classes of storage. The solution's architecture influenced our buying decision. It was important for us to have NVMe because it is faster.

We haven't done very many migrations from VMAX3-AFA to PowerMax, just because they're close enough in numbers and performance. However, we are seeing a lot of movement from earlier generation VMAX to PowerMax. I even have some customers who are still on the DMX era that were moving over to PowerMax. That is going to be a big difference for them.

Our PowerMax solutions have met all of their requirements that we had when we threw workloads at them.

Yes, we previously used Dell EMC VMAX 10K. We switched just for tech refresh.

Currently, we have a VPLEX with multiple storage arrays behind it. Now, we will be moving to one storage array and getting rid of the rest.

The performance requirements for the Diamond Levels on certain areas, we wanted submillisecond response times. We are still working with our buyer to get this to fruition based on some of our workloads.

We don't have a vast I/O performance database or application suite, so the old arrays were taking care of that part. But we see the milliseconds to microseconds response time in the new variety.

We have purchased some professional services to do NDM migrations. We haven't done any yet, but we will be doing that in the next quarter. From everything I've seen and looked at, and I'm going to take a few more sessions on it. I think it's going to be much easier to migrate data from the old to the new.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution based on a compression standpoint and the overall cost by reducing our footprint and fitting more data into a single file, it just made sense, and it's been working great for us so far. And MVME had a considerable influence on my decision to go with PowerMax as well the ability to encrypt and compress at the same time.

We were previously using VMAX, and it was the end of their lifecycle.

Our performance requirements were that it was an all-flash array multicontroller, and it has been great. We always go for multicontroller architecture. 

We had an opportunity to transform our environment. From experience with previous hardware, we selected this solution.

Our performance requirements were high IOPS, as well as stability. It is meeting those requirements and exceeding our previous infrastructure.

We chose this solution because we wanted to go with the All-Flash array.

We used the PowerVC solution with VNX but that didn't work very well. We're doing a PoC with PowerMax and it's working very well compared to VNX. 

Our performance requirements were that it has to be always stable.