Dell PowerMax Reviews

I have been with the company for 16 years, and my use case involves Dell PowerMax, which we already had before I started working there. I don't actually know for how long it has been there, but it has been many years. We were one of the first, or maybe the first, customers in the Netherlands for EMC. I think it was attached to the mainframe back then, which is really ancient history.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerMax is its reliability. There are more traits that are really important to us, such as requiring very little management time. It is really 'set it and forget it' because it is really easy to manage, at least now it is. In the past, it used to be more difficult, but now it is really easy. It is always there; it is just 'set it and forget it'.

If we could improve Dell PowerMax, I would suggest improving its flexibility. With other products, we don't have this issue, but with Dell PowerMax, engineering always has to be involved if you want to expand the system with a couple of disks or anything. It is quite a tedious process.

I have been with the company for 16 years, and my use case involves Dell PowerMax, which we already had before I started working there.

We have seen some performance issues in the past with Dell PowerMax, but that was with previous models. For the past five years, we haven't seen any performance problems.

It is easy to scale Dell PowerMax, but it takes more time than with other products because we need consultation from Dell, and they have to calculate and see what has to be done to support the extra amount of drives.

My experience with customer service regarding Dell PowerMax is very good. They are very professional and responsive. With Dell PowerMax, it is one of the best among all the products we have. The service is really on time and professional, so there are no complaints about that.

My advice would be to stick with the plan regarding additional advice about pricing, licensing, or anything else. When you sell a product, you sell it for a number of years, and you are not supposed to change the rules within those five years.

If we could improve Dell PowerMax, I would suggest improving its flexibility. With other products, we don't have this issue, but with Dell PowerMax, engineering always has to be involved if you want to expand the system with a couple of disks or anything. It is quite a tedious process.

I would rate Dell PowerMax as a whole a nine.

My company's use case for Dell PowerMax is that it's a partner of mine and it's for a WMS, warehouse management system platform that hosts all the manufacturing distribution sites.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerMax, in my opinion, is its uptime. The benefit to my partner's organization using Dell PowerMax is mainly reliability; we have it deployed in an active-active configuration using SRDF, with VMware as the hypervisor, designed to handle component failure, site failure, and it works as advertised.

I am a big fan of the command line interface (CLI), and I'm not a fan of the UI that they've deployed over the recent years; I feel that you can do more with the command line platform than you can with the actual UI. What would be better about the command line for Dell PowerMax is that you can do way more with it, as you have more control of the platform and way more executables; the UI is limited relative to the command line.

I have been using Dell PowerMax for 15 years.

There has been no downtime with Dell PowerMax; it's been extremely reliable, easy to manage, easy to upgrade, and trustworthy as we've upgraded over the years from one version to another.

In terms of customer support for Dell PowerMax, I come from the old EMC world, and you can't get better support than Dell Technologies. I would rate Dell PowerMax support as a ten, as I have never had an issue with Dell support as it relates to this product.

Positive

Before Dell PowerMax, we were on Clariions, which shows how far back this goes.

I install Dell PowerMax, I support it, and I manage it every day.

My client has seen significant ROI since the install, and when you don't go down, that's an ROI in and of itself.

I think the pricing of Dell PowerMax is definitely expensive, but you get what you pay for; the way you want to measure a platform is its uptime and availability, and if it never goes down, it's easy to upgrade and extremely reliable.

I evaluated competing products years ago, but not in the last two refreshes; we won't consider anything else.

If I could improve Dell PowerMax, I would say that after using the Symmetrix platform for the better part of 30 years, which is probably the most reliable technology in the marketplace, I would recommend not changing it, as I am somewhat of a bigot and I love it. 

My partner's organization is about 5,000 employees.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Dell PowerMax overall as a ten.

We host mission-critical applications, SAP applications, and disaster recovery applications on this storage itself because of its resiliency, absence of a single point of failure, and optimal performance. We host SAP data, which is the most critical data of any organization, for ourselves and our customers on Dell PowerMax NVMe. 

With Dell PowerMax NVMe technology, we can achieve significant automation. The system allows seamless integration of more compute power and system resources into the storage. We can host different applications on the fly. The best part is it works on Service Level Objectives (SLOs). For instance, SAP is a critical application accessed by all internal users of an organization, so it requires minimal response time. Dell PowerMax NVMe allows us to define specific response times for particular applications integrated with storage. We can prioritize SAP data access while assigning different response times to less critical applications. This feature greatly improves user experience by providing seamless access with minimal response time.

The implementation of end-to-end NVMe has improved performance by more than 20%, particularly beneficial for I/O intensive applications such as SAP hosted on the Oracle database. We can also fine-tune the applications with the least response time so that the user experience is great. Overall, the performance has improved by more than 20% because of NVMe. It is a niche technology. It is being used by all the storage vendors nowadays.

It is a fantastic Dell EMC product ever competing with all the vendors. It stands out in terms of performance. You can ask for mission-critical application workloads. 

The Dell PowerMax family is evolving with new NVMe technology. Data is written through the cache before being written to the disks. NVMe provides additional fast cache, similar to random access memory (RAM), which improves overall system performance and read/write experience for users. 

The system features dense DAEs (Disk Array Enclosures), allowing for multiple petabytes in one storage unit. It accommodates bigger capacity drives within a single storage system, providing a smaller footprint with larger capacity. 

Dell PowerMax or Symmetrix is a block-level storage and unified storage, supporting both NAS and SAN. One area for improvement would be integration with public cloud services. Many users are inclined towards hybrid cloud solutions, but it remains primarily an on-premises solution. Compared to competitors such as NetApp, which integrates with public cloud hyperscalers (GCP, Azure, AWS), Dell PowerMax lacks in this aspect. Integration with a public cloud would provide an added advantage and give it an edge over other vendors.

Dell PowerMax NVMe is a recent product in the Symmetrix family by Dell. The product evolved from DMX (with variants DMX3, DMX4) to VMAX (with variants VMAX3, different families 10k, 100k, 200k), and finally to Dell PowerMax. It has been more than a decade since I have been working with it.

The solution is highly stable. Dell proactively releases patches when new bugs are discovered. These patches can be applied on the fly without requiring software upgrades or system downtime. The engineering code is stable, and the solution rates an eight out of ten for stability.

It features dense DAEs and allows for on-the-fly scalability. Volumes can be defined to grow to any level without impacting overall performance. With substantial CPU power and cache memory, integrating new applications doesn't affect existing users accessing the storage. It provides a highly scalable, redundant, and reliable solution.

It is being used in a global organization with about 10,000 users. Our clients are medium to large organizations.

Dell support for Dell PowerMax is exceptional, rating a perfect 10 out of 10. The support team is highly capable and provides excellent service. They are amazing.

Positive

Compared to previous DMX solutions in the Symmetrix family, Dell PowerMax offers significant improvements. While DMX had smaller disk array enclosures limited to 15 disks, Dell PowerMax features dense DAEs accommodating more than 15 drives. Additionally, DMX used Direct Matrix where each controller had dedicated compute power and cache memory. In contrast, Dell PowerMax distributes compute power, CPU, and cache across the storage, allowing any controller to utilize available resources.

I did not deploy it myself. Dell PowerMax deployment involves certain restrictions as it operates with a bin file configured based on specific requirements. The deployment process requires vendor involvement, though users can participate in learning and integrating devices. Other Dell storage solutions allow more user configuration, but Dell PowerMax maintains a limitation requiring vendor liaison for deployment.

In terms of maintenance, it is fully redundant. Maintenance is not really needed. Even the upgrades are nondisruptive, but to be on the safer side, we do plan the maintenance.

The solution has demonstrated significant time savings. During a DCDR setup and migration from VMAX to Dell PowerMax, what was planned as a two-day downtime was completed in just three to four hours.

Dell offers various pricing models, including a pay-as-you-go option where storage is provided without upfront charges, billing only for used capacity. As a 360° partner, significant discounts are available. The higher cost compared to other vendors is justified by additional features, vendor-managed upgrades, and superior support services.

Go for it if you are looking for good support. However, you have to see its cost. It is the best solution in the market. If cost is not a constraint, Dell is your go-to vendor.

Dell has a lot of disaster recovery solutions. In addition to hosting mission-critical applications, you can have quite nice DR solutions.

Overall, I would rate it a ten out of ten.

I use Dell PowerMax NVMe for data storage and management within my organization.

A valuable feature of PowerMax is its ability to encapsulate storage, such as storage virtualization. This capability is particularly useful when it is necessary to migrate data from one storage to another without downtime. 

Additionally, the NVMe technology improves input/output performance. This makes it a valuable asset for our organization's storage solutions.

Dell PowerMax needs more connectivity options for projects that require separate web access. Usually, users propose PowerMax, however, this could be better addressed. 

Additionally, features related to AI technology could be improved by learning more from Pure Storage.

The system of the storage is well-designed with NVMe disks, allowing direct communication between the disk and the CPU memory, making it stable for future use.

PowerMax offers a range of features for big projects, making it a suitable choice for scalability.

The technical support by Dell PowerMax is satisfactory, however, there is room for improvement. Dell could be more proactive in their approach, similar to Pure Storage.

Neutral

Previously, I worked with Pure Storage and Infinidat among others before using Dell PowerMax NVMe.

The setup of PowerMax NVMe is complex and involved. The integration with backup options and software requires careful attention.

The price of Dell PowerMax depends on the project size. It is the best choice for large projects in terms of price and features compared to midrange solutions.

I evaluated Pure Storage solutions before settling on Dell PowerMax.

Dell PowerMax NVMe is recommended for its advanced capabilities in data storage and management, and I would rate the solution eight out of ten. 

The additional features I would like in the future include more proactive data collection and analytics similar to Pure Storage.

We are one of the largest telco companies in Pakistan. We use Dell PowerMax NVMe for telecom IT, which includes different workloads hosted on different systems. We use systems like UNIX, VMware, Windows, and Linux to map Dell PowerMax NVMe.

The solution's most valuable feature is the data reduction ratio. You can store a 5:1 ratio of your data in Dell PowerMax NVMe. For example, if you have 200 terabytes of usable capacity, you can save up to five times of data on that capacity. That means you can save one petabyte of data on just 200 terabytes of usable capacity.

The solution's end-to-end NVMe capabilities have improved our operations. Everything is fast, and you don't have to map your storage to old hybrid storage technologies. Our organization has experienced positive change, and the solution has improved our uptime, availability, performance, and capacity.

The solution should integrate better with OpenShift and Kubernetes architecture. We also use OpenShift in our environment, and I had some problems integrating Dell PowerMax NVMe with the OpenShift Kubernetes environment. The solution's integrations and usability could be better.

I have been using Dell PowerMax NVMe since June 2021.

Dell PowerMax NVMe provides high stability and availability if it's designed and deployed properly. We didn't have even a single outage in the four years we used the tool.

The solution's data reduction is so good that we didn't feel the need to scale it. Dell PowerMax NVMe falls into the enterprise domain. It is recommended for enterprise customers and customers who want their mission-critical workloads hosted on enterprise storage.

Mid-tier storage is available only for mid-tier customers. For all enterprise customers, PowerMax fits very well in terms of availability, capacity, and performance.

Dell has very flexible technical support. You can open SRs ranging from one to five severity levels, and even their live chat is available for Dell PowerMax NVMe. We often open it if there is a very severe issue. I think the solution's technical support is phenomenal.

One of Dell PowerMax NVMe's top competitors in the Pakistan market is the Huawei Dorado 8000, which people have deployed in large numbers. As a telco, we have also deployed Huawei Dorado 8000, but Dell PowerMax NVMe stands out in terms of performance.

We are a customer, and the initial setup was done by the Dell customer engineers. We were not involved in the solution's deployment. We were just involved in the migration process.

The tool has improved our performance KPIs, response time, throughput, and solution IOPS. We don't have to worry about the performance of our workloads when they are hosted on Dell PowerMax NVMe because it automatically adjusts performance profiles according to our desired SLAs.

Since Dell PowerMax NVMe is an enterprise storage, its price is premium.

I would recommend the solution only to enterprise users who have the budget.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I use it as a production storage solution.

The upgradability and extendibility for the size of the storage unit are noteworthy. When discussing PowerStore or PowerMax, the primary point I mention is that they use all-flash storage. This means that with more concurrent sessions on my device, we need to discuss input and output per second, which I use. PowerStore is the best solution for me in these terms.

The disadvantage of PowerMax is its cost. It is expensive, mainly due to pricing. The issue is only with pricing, as I can find the PowerVault ME cheaper than PowerMax.

I have been using the solution since 2004.

The solution is very stable.

I can't believe Dell, in the back area, is not offering better upgradability for PowerStore or PowerMax compared to HPE.

I would rate customer service as nine out of ten.

Positive

The price is starting from $500,000. It's expensive.

Dell is an end-to-end solution. Dell is the best vendor worldwide, with an end-to-end solution starting from a mouse to Telza Hyperfix or HyperConverged devices. 

If I talk about HyperFlex or storage, it's a very good solution compared to all competitor vendors. However, I found a problem in upgradability. It was surprising when searching yesterday that Huawei offers storage upgradability with fifteen device options and superior controllers. 

Dell and HPE only offer three upgradable devices. I can add three enclosures. Dell and HPE have the lowest credibility for PowerStore, as they talk about three expandable devices in a single system, while HPE offers customers the option to add eight devices, and Huawei claims they support up to twenty-four devices. You can see the difference among Dell, HPE, and Huawei in this aspect.

Overall, I rate the product eight out of ten.

I use the solution in my company, specifically the SAN storage in the core banking applications for our banks running in Bahrain and Egypt. Most of the projects were the same for billing applications and core banking.

The most valuable features of the solution are its compression ratio, performance, desk support, seamless configuration, the software's native migration, the NDM, and open replicators, which are very good advantages of the tool I experienced during the projects I implemented.

There are so many configurations in the tool that cannot be done by anyone who is not a Dell personnel. Not everything can be done by a partner in the tool. Handling file changes and modifying some configurations regarding mainframe integration with Dell PowerMax cannot be managed by Dell and not the partners.

Dell has to allow partners or give authorization for the partners to do some configuration for Dell PowerMax. If you need to do something in a BIN file, you need to get approval from Dell, but I feel you should be able to do it by yourself as a partner. I don't understand why one needs to engage Dell in every single detail regarding any integrations with mainframe work, integrations with third-party storage, or BIN file changes when you can do it yourself. I also don't understand why a partner should need to engage with Dell and pay a professional service to Dell for everything. Dell can be more friendly, like in the case of PowerStore or PowerScale. There are many storages Dell has been releasing, and even PowerProtect can do everything. Only Dell PowerMax has a lot of problems.

There are some limitations to the tool when you want to migrate data from third-party storage. Not all third-party storages are supported to be connected to Dell PowerMax NVMe. There are so many old operating systems that are no longer supported by Dell PowerMax, like Oracle Solaris 10, Windows 2000, and Windows 8.

I have been using Dell PowerMax NVMe from 2018 or 2019. My company serves as an implementer and a partner of Dell.

It is a very stable solution. The tool is 100 percent stable. The tool is stabler than any other storage in the market.

The tool's scalability is very good because Dell PowerMax supports scaling up configurations, like attaching enclosures to the processors using some links, so it is also quite easy.

I like the solution's technical support. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have used Hitachi's storage, specifically the high-end ones, along with Pure Storage and IBM. SAN storage is still at the top of the pyramid. The difference between Dell and other storage revolves around performance and scalability. Dell PowerMax NVMe offers the best performance compared to other vendors.

The product's initial setup phase is easy. Only a script running in the management module control station is required to deploy the tool, so it is very quite easy.

For racking and stacking, it might need two or more people, especially if the hardware is more and if there are many expansions of multiple engines. It might need two or three people to stack it because it is quite heavy. I think one person is enough if it is only one controller and one expansion.

From an enterprise storage perspective, I think it is an expensive tool, but it is the best product. I think it is expensive and the cost one must pay for the best solution.

I have never gone too deep to figure out the need to use the end to end NVMe technology in PowerMax but I was suffering for the past three or four years. Many customers share Dell PowerMax because they think it is an NVMe, but the switches and servers connected to PowerMax weren't supporting NVMe. We weren't taking advantage of the feature itself in PowerMax because the servers and switches weren't NVMe- supported appliances.

I have not used the tool's real-time machine-learning capability.

Most of the maintenance involves replacing ports, which can be replaceable. When it comes to engines and modules and something big like the processor or something, we need a customer engineer from Dell or an authorized partner to help us.

The tool can support AI because it offers the maximum performance that you can get from a SAN or enterprise storage. If the customer wants to use some AI applications, I think Dell PowerMax NVME is sufficient for all the computing.

I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

We are using the solution's application and snapshot feature.

The solution should include more AI features to make it smarter.

I have been using Dell PowerMax NVMe for a couple of years.

Dell PowerMax NVMe is a very stable solution.

The solution has limited scalability. Around three users use Dell PowerMax NVMe in our organization.

I rate the solution’s scalability a seven out of ten.

The solution’s technical support is good.

Positive

Operation-wise, the deployment takes 20 minutes. Our process may take longer for approval. It may take a couple of days.

IBM and Hitachi are Dell PowerMax NVMe's competitors. I would recommend the solution to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.