Dell EqualLogic PS series Reviews

This is like a primary storage area for all our machines. We have a virtual environment where we have a number of virtual machines and a number of ESX hosts. We are in basically a VM-ware environment. Therefore, we have ESX hosts there, and those hosts are connected. All the virtual machines and user data and everything is stored on this.

The solution offers very good read capacities.

The size of the box we have is pretty decent.

The speed on offer is very good. 

We've found the initial setup to be fairly straightforward.

Dell's technical support is very good.

The number one is probably the scalability potential of the product. If I need to increase the capacity, I cannot. That's the main problem for us. If I need to have more space or more capacity, I need to replace the product. It would be ideal if we could scale without replacing the box itself.

We've been using the solution for the past six years at this point. I would say that it's been a good amount of time. 

The product is quite stable. We've used it for many years at this point without issue. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't bugs or glitches. It's reliable.

The solution does not scale well at all. It's a box, so we only have so much space to work with. If you need more space, you need to replace it with a bigger box.

Depending on which project we are working on, we have about 150-200 people who use the solution. While it may just be something that's in the background, everyone is using it.

Right now technical support is not under Dell's support as Dell just supports the solution for up to five years. After that, we have to get support from a third party.

While we did have Dell support, it was great. We were extremely satisfied with their level of service. Third party support has its limitations, to be honest. However, we're basically just using them to get hardware replacements and not software support.

We're currently on the hunt for a solution that would offer lower pricing.

The initials setup is not complex at all. It's pretty straightforward. We found it to be easy. We didn't run into difficulties.

Most are very easy setups compared to the technology that was available six years ago. They've really improved a lot of the setup since then.

Deployment is pretty fast. You can have everything up and running within a week or two.

We pay for licensing on a monthly basis.

Over the six years we've had the solution, the pricing has been rather reasonable. That said, we're always looking for solutions that allow us to lower costs.

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with Dell. 

We're working with model PS 4100.

While this is an older model, and technically no longer available, Dell does have other great models that are very useful. I'd definitely recommend this solution is the environment was the right fit.

In general, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is as shared storage for VMware virtual environments.  

The most valuable parts of the solution have been the stability, which it has maintained for eight or nine years, and the scalability, which has met our needs as we grow.  

EqualLogic has room for improvement but it is not likely a lot will happen because Dell is phasing the product out for end-of-life.  

What could be improved is their replication efficiency. I forgot what the minimum block size was, but I think it was maybe 64K blocks for replication. To make the effort to get that down to something smaller — even to the bit level — will allow the replication to be more bandwidth-efficient. When it is more efficient it will not require as much time, and that is critical. Right now, the block size is generally larger than their competitors. Because of that, it takes more bandwidth to do SAN (Storage Area Network) replication than other solutions. That has been an ongoing issue.  

Of course, as data sets grow in size, your backup window — the off-production hours for the environment — stays fixed. You have to push whatever amount of data you need to have backed up to the remote DR (Disaster Recovery) site within that window. We have had some of the replication jobs on EqualLogic run into the daytime production hours and that has caused issues. That they need to concentrate on more efficient replication is a way to summarize that, I guess. It just has to get pushed faster.  

There is also no onboard, inline deduplication capability. That is probably the biggest issue. Inline deduplication is something you have to do that on the fly. The deduplication capability is key to this type of solution now.  

We have been using Dell EqualLogic PS Series since 2011. We have upgraded since we started in 2011 and right now we have gotten to a point where all we have are 6210XS units as our primary storage arrays.  

The stability is very good. I have no complaints there. It has been stable all the time that we have been using it.  

For our use case, it has provided scalability. The product services our entire organization and we are using this solution on a daily basis. That means it is currently serving 330 of us. From the end-user perspective, it is serving up data for the entire court and has been since inception.  

The technical support for EqualLogic has been universally outstanding. They have met our needs, resolved our issues, and answered our questions.  

We are actually moving away from EqualLogic. Nimble Arrays is going to replace all of our EqualLogic arrays. A single Nimble array is going to replace three EqualLogic arrays.  

One of the reasons why we are going with Nimble Arrays to replace all of our EqualLogic arrays is that EqualLogic is not in a good place. It is not really helping our survey from the perspective that they are in their end-of-life cycle and they are getting ready to go away.  

The initial installation and setup in 2011 was straightforward. EqualLogic is pretty simple in that way.  

With the initial deployment, we did use Dell Consulting Services to help. They know their own products.  

We always do the original acquisition with five years of maintenance. That package includes all upgrades and whatnot. There are annual maintenance costs beyond the original licensing period. So beyond year five, if we do keep an array beyond that, it is about $5,000 per array. That would be probably about $15,000 annually for arrays that we plan to keep into year six and year seven.  

The advice that I would you give to others looking into implementing the Dell EqualLogic PS Series is a bit dependent on whether or not I ignore the end-of-life of the product. If it were still a current product line, I would maybe give it C-rating only because of what is currently available and how the current capabilities of other products have surpassed EqualLogic in technological advancement. EqualLogic is really not going to be relevant in the marketplace too much longer.  

Having something with onboard deduplication is extremely valuable and also getting the latency down makes a difference for this kind of solution. Knowing what you need as far as features to take care of your situation is important before making decisions as to what to go with.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate the Dell EqualLogic PS Series as probably a seven-out-of-ten. This would be based on current utility and ignoring that it is being phased out.  

EqualLogic is part of our production database. It is fast and reliable. It is our production SAN (Storage Area Network), so we always use it. It is always on and always running 24/7.  

This product is valuable to our organization because it is so reliable. I think in the past five-plus years, we only had four physical drives fail. We have about 56 drives in that box. We only had four fail over the entire time we have owned them, so they are super reliable. Reporting on them is good too. It includes utilization, graphs, and things like that to help evaluate performance.  

The most valuable features are synchronous replication for data integrity, snapshot capability for multiple reasons such as for recovery and also for cluster upgrades. Snapshots are really a key feature.  

One problem with this solution is that synchronous replication requires lots of duplicated space. I wish Dell would address that issue. It really wastes a lot of space and it does so in a way that the amendment space required is inefficient. Once it is running it does not need as much space, but to start it up you need double the space on both your source and destination chassis.  

Another issue is that I can not mix RAID technologies. On one particular box, I can only set one RAID standard and not create multiple RAID sets. That is a limitation that I could do without.  

One feature that would have been nice on the EqualLogic box is the ability to recover on a file basis. It should not be limited to a volume scale. I do not know that it should be able to recover files being that it is a block-level device for storage. File-level is a completely different animal. But it would be nice to be able to have file recovery even if it is a block-level storage device.  

We have been using Dell EqualLogic for the last five years or six years, or even a little bit longer. 

The stability of the product itself — the software releases and the hardware reliability — is really very stable.  

The scalability is okay. It is very straightforward to implement and it is good.  

There have got to be like 10,000 people in our organization using this. Or that is the number of people within our company and including our outside clients. We have quite a wide range of clients types which is inclusive of retail stores.  

Dell has got very good tech support. I would rate them as a 9-out-of-10. There is not really much room for improvement there. The response time and everything are relatively really good.  

We are a Dell shop and have been historically. The only thing I would have worked with that was comparable would be HP servers versus Dell servers. In any case, we have been a Dell shop and there really was not a previous solution in place.  

The installation and setup are pretty easy. I think it is really straightforward.  

The price became a lot more attractive as the years went by. Initially it seemed like it was a high-priced solution, but as the years went by the price, performance, and just the cost of ownership went down a lot.  

For people considering EqualLogic, the most useful thing I could tell them was that they should implement a demo using a piece of equipment in a proof-of-concept environment and have the vendor help with that. It is the most ideal way to test the product.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate the EqualLogic PS Series overall as definitely a nine-out-of-ten. I would give it that rating because it does what it says it is supposed to do. It has been extremely reliable and very easy to upgrade and expand. In the past when Dell announced they were going to pull the line, all the customers called up and objected. They actually wanted to buy more boxes. Because of the response from the customers, Dell postponed the end-of-life of the product a few times.  

A lot of people use the product and it is a workhorse. Reliability is key, especially in my particular usage for them. The performance is there, and they probably are over-specced. By that I mean the capacity of the product exceeds what we need it to do. As to reliability, having just four drives failing in the span of six or seven years is phenomenal. It is closer to being unheard of. If they were to fix a few of those minor issues that could possibly bring my rating of the product up closer to a 10, but I do not want to give somebody a ten because they just can not possibly do everything right. If you give them that impression they will just stop improving it.  

The Dell EqualLogic PS series is a network-attached storage device.

Dell EqualLogic PS series could improve the performance because in our hybrid configuration the read speed is faster than the write speed.

I have used the Dell EqualLogic PS series within the last 12 months.

Dell EqualLogic PS series is a highly stable solution.

The scalability of the Dell EqualLogic PS series is very good, we had no issues.

The technical support from the Dell EqualLogic PS series is excellent.

The initial setup of the Dell EqualLogic PS series is very simple.

The number of people needed to maintain the solution depends on how many of them you have. If you have 100 Dell EqualLogic PS series devices, then you need more people to administer them. However, it has less to do with maintenance; it is more for administration.

Dell EqualLogic PS series was at its end of life and was replaced by Compellent, and Compellent will be at its end-of-life soon.

I would recommend others to choose Compellent because it is much better than the Dell EqualLogic PS series and is the next step in evolution.

I rate the Dell EqualLogic PS series a ten out of ten.

We primarily use the solution as an array and as a backup. I actually have two.

The solution has been extremely consistent over the years.

We've had absolutely no issues with the product at all. It's lasted a long time without causing any problems.

Technical support, when we had access to it, was very good.

We'd like the solution to have bigger sizing. We need more space and we can't get any. We'd love more memory storage space.

We've been using the solution for the last 10 years. It's been a decade. We've used it for a while.

The stability has always been excellent. the performance is reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's worked. It's worked for a decade.

The scalability isn't really there. You have to have the same size drive in each slot. Therefore, you have to trade out all the slots if you're going to scale up, which makes it kind of difficult to do so.

The solution is at its end-of-life, and therefore we won't increase usage. We are retiring it.

While the solution has reached its end of life many years ago, and we haven't had technical support in years, before, when it was on offer, it was very good. We didn't have any complaints.

I wasn't present for the initial setup. It was a long time ago. I can't speak to how long it took or how easy or difficult it was as a process.

I'm not sure what the exact costs of the solution were originally. I don't have access to that information.

We are customers and end-users of Dell products. We just have an account that we've used and we've done business with them for years.

The solution has been discontinued by Dell for four, five years. Therefore, it's not exactly up-to-date. We couldn't update it if we wanted to. They don't make it anymore. It's not something a company can just buy.

In general, we have been very happy with the product. I would rate it at an eight out of ten.

• We ran a large data housing solution that contained billions of data files. 
• We also used the product for VM storage and file server storage.
  

When initially purchased, it brought enterprise-class features to our systems. Very solid manageability and the product worked well with few technical or hardware issues. The performance was never very good, and its latency was higher than expected.

• Enterprise features for snapshot management and replication benefited us greatly.
• The ability to quickly view and select from snapshots allowed us to restore data very quickly.
• Replication allowed us to move data from one data center to another with ease.
  

• Performance and vision for the product were lacking. 
• DELL was taking on too many storage solutions, and it felt like the EqualLogic series was not aggressively supported.

We use it for virtual machines and data. It performed well but it's end-of-life now. We have to refresh everything. It's still working but it's end of support for the product.

It did what it was supposed to do and it worked well. 

High availability. It has a lot of redundancy and good management software as well as good alerting.

Some of the new features include what they call auto-tiering, where data that needs to be on a faster storage, it would automatically detect that and move it to the faster storage or the most frequently accessed area. Data that doesn't move that much or is not accessed that often would go on a slower storage. It's more efficient, helps a company to maximize what they spend. This kind of storage costs a lot of money; they build that into the newer functionality and into newer SANs.

If you are going to go with all-flash then it's very expensive but it has a lot of performance benefits and a lot of improvement in reliability. Some companies can afford leading edge. My company cannot afford leading edge, so we probably have to go one generation below.

It's very stable. We have had no issues.

You have to determine your size as a company, if you're a small business, medium, or enterprise. The model that we bought was scaling to about a small- to medium-size business, but they give you enterprise functionality. That was the EqualLogic. But if we were bigger or we planned to grow or acquire, we probably would have selected Compellent or some other product line.

You have to make sure you buy the right fit for you to scale because if you're a small company and you don't plan to expand, then this is a solution for you. If you plan to grow, then you need to buy a different model or different solution.

The one that we're buying now is a unified storage solution. It's kind of expensive when you buy the EqualLogic solution because, as you grow, you have to keep buying another controller. It can be more expensive with time.

At the end of the day, you have to remember that every three to five years you have to toss this equipment away and buy a new one. You don't want to overspend.

The support was excellent. When there are alerts, they would get them and they would be on it right away, and they would send a technician to replace. If there was a hard drive that failed or controller that failed, they would send a technician. It was always up, never down. Very good support.

We have alerts. Then the lifecycle refresh time came up, end-of-life. Now, you can continue getting support from a third-party who would support for 10 years after the end-of-life. What triggered us to make a change is the fact that we're running our production data on equipment that is no longer supported by the manufacturer.

When selecting a vendor support is key, support and part-availability. The features, they are important too, but the most important thing to me and to us is the fact that, if there is a problem, the company will support you. Dell does an excellent job of support.

We had HPE before. In my country, the local support vendor of HPE wasn't as diligent as Dell, but that may be different in another jurisdiction. I'm in the Bahamas, so if I was in America maybe I would have a different opinion.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward.

The last five to seven years we went with Dell and they are a good vendor so we continued with them. The only difference is that EMC products have been acquired by Dell. 

It's now end-of-life, end of support, so we're shopping around for a replacement. With all this technology, they only have a lifespan of three to five years and then new features and new functionality come along. New speed. The new ones perform at much faster speed, so you have to change everything often.

I'd give the EqualLogic solution a seven out of 10. It is an entry-level SAN for the enterprise. We're a small business. The price point was good for us and it's scalable; we could buy as many modules as we need, as we grow. They work together. The management of it is good but it can't go higher than a seven because, like I say, it's entry-level. It doesn't have all the functionality and features of some of the more expensive ones. But again, based on the budgets we have to work with, it was the best we could afford.

It is shared storage for VMware.

It was necessary to enable a lot of the advanced functions of VMware.

When we bought it, we were attracted by the flexibility of being able to put in a new shelf whenever we needed to, to expand.

They may already have a product, but I would be interested in either hybrid-flash or possibly an all-flash option.

Three of the four devices have been rock solid, and one of them had a string of issues that we eventually resolved. Overall, pretty good.

Scalability is pretty good.

Technical support has been good to us.

We used NetApp for a while, but we hated the interface. That is why we switched.

When selecting a vendor, at this point I am looking for someone who can talk technical stuff with me, not just throw a storage number at me and then expect me to figure everything out.

It was pretty straightforward. The first time around, we didn't completely understand how much space we were going to need for things like Snapshots and replication. So we didn't buy enough storage the first time.

Licensing is pretty straightforward.

I would give this solution an eight out of 10. It's pretty straightforward most of the time, and tech support is there when it's not straightforward. I'm giving them a knock for having had that string of hardware problems.

The biggest hangup for us was knowing how much disk translates into how much actual space you have, when you're done doing the setup.