Dell PowerFlex Reviews

We are customers of Dell and I'm the general manager of our company. 

The solution saves a lot of space in the data center and that is a key advantage for us. The other advantage is the kind of contingency that it provides within itself, the flexibility of utilizing the resources as and when needed. It basically reduces manual effort and increases efficiency, both in terms of space utilization, as well as resource utilization.

I think the kind of restrictions in terms of VMware licensing is frustrating. I might have some spare licenses which I would like to utilize, but it's not possible so it requires purchasing a different license that's locked with a particular box.

I've been using this solution for one year. 

The solution is scalable. It's a consolidated system and we have around 7,000 users. 

We are generally satisfied with the customer support. 

The manpower required for set up is between one and two people. 

I'd like to see better license management with flexibility in terms of license usage.

We considered Nutanix and another product from HP but that was more from an exploration point of view.

I would suggest looking at VxRail rather than PowerFlex. There are some differences between the two and I think we're going to move to VxRail as a future investment.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

I'm an activity manager and work for a company that deals with electrical installations, assisting customers with strategy and IT investments. My job is to be well-acquainted with the various technologies and assist the customer in making the right choices. Options could include hyper-convergence, mass storage, cloud solutions, or big data solutions, those sorts of choices. It's really about explaining the different technologies and options available rather than using them. I'm not an integrator.

In terms of improvements, I think it would help to have easier access to the cost of installing VxRack infrastructure.

I think including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement. This solution is a black box solution, meaning that you don't really know how it works exactly on the inside. A feature that would include that would be helpful.

VxRack and VxRail are more or less the same solutions. VxRack is a more powerful solution than VxRail. People need to think about which technology will work for them. My opinion is that HP Hyperconvergence is a technology that perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power. If a customer has to juggle these two, the hyper-convergence solutions are okay. It's a good solution.

If the need for computing power is more important, we suggest that they focus more on a Software-Defined Storage solution like VMware vSAN or VMware VSA. Either way, the idea is to be able to increase infrastructure with the best efficiency as companies grow. 

I would rate this product a seven out of 10. 

Dell PowerFlex is our primary private cloud. 

The combination of reliability and scalability is perfect for us. When we need extra storage we have six nodes so we simply purchase new licenses and hard drives. Although it is possible to use the nodes just for storage, we use them for CPU and RAM as well.

Dell PowerFlex improves our latency which allowed us to reduce a lot of our Microsoft Enterprise SQL licenses. If you have a latency in the IOPS, you need more CPUs for the SQL which means more licenses. We provide betting for our customers so even one second of latency can mean a lot of trouble for us.  

I have been using Dell PowerFlex for nine years dating back to when it was ScaleIO before Dell rebranded it.

Dell PowerFlex is scalable.

We have not had any issues in the last nine years but we did have some small storage that filled up quickly so we had a problem with the disk on the standard storage and lost the disk and the data. After 36,000 hours the disk died so we contacted Dell support who changed our SLA to a higher level and they were able to find the disks we needed from multiple countries in Europe to resolve the situation in one day.  

We used an integrator for the deployment. We were simultaneously communicating with Dell who focused on the technical solution and Aricoma who prepared the business and investment. They prepare PowerFlex directly to the data center and provide us with access. 

We used Aricoma as our integrator. They did a seamless job.

PowerFlex has provided a return on investment by helping reduce the number of Microsoft licenses we require for SQL. We needed 40 and now we only use eight.

I have good partners who prepared the price for us. I told them what we needed and everything worked out perfectly. We have a good contact in Dell and he prepared all the information and provided everything to us.

I would rate Dell PowerFlex ten out of ten. PowerFlex is flexible, scalable, and runs without issues.

We used ScaleIO for nine years with no issues and we now have PowerFlex for our private cloud with no issues. It is the best product when we don't remember that we have it.

The tool's most valuable features are its price and flexibility. It has high performance. 

The tool needs to improve its storage. It should also make migration to the cloud easier. 

I have been working with the product for eight years. 

I rate Dell PowerFlex's stability as nine out of ten. 

The solution is flexible. I rate its scalability a nine out of ten. 

I have used Cisco before Dell PowerFlex. I am also working with VMware. 

I rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten. 

Our customers are enterprise businesses. Dell PowerFlex's integration depends on the product and its vendors that are being integrated. I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten. 

Dell PowerFlex is a one-stop-shop solution. Storage, compute, network, application monitoring, and support cases are all combined into one solution. It's very easy to administer compared to when you have a reference architecture where you need to design and build everything yourself. You would also then have to work with multiple vendors.

Dell PowerFlex is easy to sell as well because it is easy to convince the customer that this is the right product rather than the reference architecture.

The support of containers needs to be improved. At present, it is limited to VMware. There needs to be direct communication with the hardware rather than through a hypervisor.

I have been using Dell PowerFlex for one and a half years.

I would rate Dell PowerFlex's stability at nine out of ten.

The scalability is okay, but it could be better. For linear and horizontal scalability, you will have to add nodes rather than just create separate storage.

The initial setup is straightforward. Within 30 minutes, it can be up and running, and you can create your own virtual machines and apply your own top ten templates.

I would recommend Dell PowerFlex.

The solution is a private cloud hyper-converged infrastructure that is scalable, with highly available computer workloads.

The solution has helped reduce our costs and increase our performance.

The integration with AWS is a valuable feature.

Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement.

I am currently using the solution and I was part of the engineering team that developed Dell PowerFlex.

I give the stability a nine out of ten.

We have seen a return on investment.

The solution is expensive and I give the cost a two out of ten.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

At the end of the day, VxFlex is for all applications. We normally do a sizing. Then we usually look at the sizing and design it according to its outcome. It's also about applications. You can see what application requirements are.

We're doing a lot of VMware for IT so this solution is really valuable from a VM point of view. We're trying to assist our customers mainly with management because that's what they want. The most important aspects are ease of management, as well as ease of configuration, allowing them to attach additional nodes and resources for the applications.

I think there might be some room for improvement when it comes to pricing because although I know how to convert customers, at the end of the day, it's quite expensive. Sometimes your feature architecture is still coming out much cheaper than hardware costs for your infrastructure.

The guys normally say it's all about your management. If you do a feature architecture with VMware or Hypervisor with the management, you still get a lot of attitude from that as well.

We've been using this solution for the past six years.

I think it's stable. If it's properly installed, you shouldn't see any issues or bugs.

It is scalable. Scalability depends on our customer. In South Africa, our enterprise may be 2,000 users, whereas small customers would be 400 to 500 users. What might be considered small to you, is a medium sized customer for us.

From a maintenance point of view, we normally recommend customers to get a three-year warranty for maintenance and support. Then we know that they're covered and that they will get all the latest and greatest firmware. I normally sell additional man hours to assist the customers as well. That is just to assist by doing health checks on a regular basis for them. I normally sell about eight hours. It all depends on the customer's knowledge of the products. It's between eight and sixteen hours a month, where I normally send an engineer on site to do health checks to see if everything's still fine.

I have not interacted with support myself, but our technical engineers have. I have heard from them that the technical support team is good and always helpful.

Our engineers sometimes complain that it's quite complex and incongruent. You need to make sure of a lot of things. There's a lot of pre-planning that you need to do correctly. if you don't have the correct information, then you can have performance issues on your environment.

With one that we installed, the guys found out that some of the networking was not correct. It took us two weeks just to sort that one out from a networking point of view. Normally as soon as you deliver the stuff onto the customer's site and you have all the information, it can be between two to three weeks to deploy. You will get the customer up and running and he can start using it. However, you need to make sure that you have all the information.

I have a team that provides implementation services.

Make sure that you have all the required information and that you actually do a full assessment before you design or implement a solution. You need to make sure of this so you will get the best possible performance out of the solution. If you don't have the correct information, it's going to take you a bit longer than normal to make sure it's installed correctly and performs in the ultimate areas.

I would rate this as eight out of ten.

It has reduced downtime. Before on our previous solution, we used to have downtime on some of the servers because of the sort of convention. Currently, I've not experienced any downtime on any of the servers, and there is no more resource congestion.

All of the features are useful. We just started three months ago but we found that the issue we were having in our previous environment, which has high latency on the storage, we are not experiencing it anymore. The high ups on the storage are very good for us.

For now, we just started using it, so we've not really identified the area where we see anything lacking. Maybe after we use it for around six months we'll be able to know some areas. Moreover, we're still doing the migration. We've re-migrated from our old environment, we have migrated from VM to the new environment. So far so good. We do not really have a lot of challenges right now.

I think an area where maybe we'll need some improvement is that we have been, in our old environment, running VMware Virtual machines. We're also running Hyper-V virtual machines. But we recently discovered that migration of the Hyper-V virtual machines is a bit challenging. Maybe if Dell EMC can come out with a tool that will make it very easy for us to migrate the Microsoft Hyper-V machine, that may be an improvement.

The solution is very stable, and so far, so good. We don't have any issue with the security, and the environment is stable.

We've not added additional resources, but we believe that it's highly scalable. We believe that at any time we need to add resources we can easily add those resources to it. We don't have plans to increase usage, and we're using it extensively.

We've not reached any technical support since we started using it. Since we deployed this we have no cause to reach certain support.

Previously, we used to use Cisco before VxFlex. We switched because of the environment. We had high latency in the storage. Also, the underlying servers were obsolete. They were end-of-life.

The setup has been straightforward. We don't have many problems with the migration and so far it has been straightforward. 

The OEM, Dell EMC, did the installation. Ten consultants did the installation for us.

I would recommend others use VxFlex.

I would rate the solution eight out of 10. I would rate it a 10 if they provided better integration with the other applications and offered a migration tool to easily migrate from Hyper-V.