Dell PowerMax Reviews

My main use cases for Dell PowerMax comprise all of our tier-one storage, including all block storage, VMware primarily, and LUNs to our AX infrastructure, which is our primary banking system.

The features of Dell PowerMax that I appreciate most are SRDF and the snapshots.

These features have benefited my organization by providing protection, replication, and disaster recovery capabilities.

Dell PowerMax could be improved with additional features such as a one-click upgrade capability that would allow us to perform upgrades ourselves without scheduling support, and long-term support capability so that we do not have to continually upgrade multiple times a year, as we prefer to minimize disruptions to the system.

I have been using Dell PowerMax for twenty years.

The return on investment with Dell PowerMax is that it is rock solid; we have never experienced a problem with it. There is no downtime, and my team saves time because they do not have to maintain it.

Prior to adopting Dell PowerMax, I was always using PowerMax or the variant VMAX Symmetrix as tier-one storage in all the companies I have worked with. The company that I am currently at had purchased a PowerMax, or a VMAX at the time, right before I came on board, so I have always had it and I would have pressed for that if they had anything else.

For the setup, we had an excellent partner who helped us set it up and replicated it from our old VMAX to Dell PowerMax, and it was seamless.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing is that it is what it is; essentially, you pay for solid enterprise storage.

The positives and negatives of comparing these options show that when looking at other options such as Hitachi, there is not a lot of tier-one storage at that level that I consider. Because Dell PowerMax has been so solid throughout my career, I have always pressed for that as our tier-one storage. Comparing other options, we have done comparisons to others, but nothing ever competes with it.

Dell PowerMax does not play a role in my organization's AI initiatives at this time.

The performance metrics and benchmarks I use to measure success with Dell PowerMax indicate that we have achieved stability rather than improvement. We are a bank, so we have to be operational all the time. All of our core banking systems and our member-facing systems all run on Dell PowerMax, and they are always available, which demonstrates that it is rock solid. I would rate this review ten out of ten.

We use Dell PowerMax for very IO-intensive databases. These are OLTP databases with a lot of real-time transactions and real-time IOPS. It's primarily for databases for a healthcare organization.

Our infrastructure is spread across the private as well as a public cloud. Our requirement was that the IOPS latency should not be more than one millisecond. If anything goes beyond one millisecond, it's a problem for us. We wanted a system that could handle the transactions and meet our latency requirements.

There are performance benefits for sure. The amount of deduplication and compression offered by Dell PowerMax is quite good, especially with databases. Dell PowerMax delivers optimum performance and reliable support, integral for handling failures and ensuring operational continuity. The performance capacity optimization and support we receive from Dell are also valuable.

The most important feature or function in Dell PowerMax is the capacity to deliver the required IOPS. Before moving to Dell PowerMax, we did a lot of testing. It was great in terms of delivering the required IOPS. At this moment, the systems are in production, and they're delivering the IOPS we wanted them to without sweating too much. We are getting optimum performance.

There are quite a few design areas where I have been trying to understand why it has been designed in certain ways. This includes redundancy at the engine level, the virtual engines, or the directors that are installed. It is also related to how the cache destaging happens, or how it's designed, and how read and write caches are designed. These are design areas where I think they can do better.

It has been three years now with Dell PowerMax. Before that, I have been working with VMAX as when it was EMC. Later, Dell acquired EMC, and then everything got renamed. Now they call it Dell PowerMax. In total experience with EMC products, I have more than 12 years of experience.

It's stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

It's scalable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.

Dell PowerMax is good for enterprises, and it also depends on how much workload you're going to bring in on Dell PowerMax in terms of performance and how many users are going to use the database you're hosting. Dell PowerMax 2000 may be good for midrange, but Dell PowerMax 8000 or 8500 is good for enterprises.

The support that we get from Dell is really important because everything works fine when it's working fine, but support is very important when the systems are down. Dell is doing quite a fair job there, so that's something we value at this moment.

Positive

I've worked with Pure Storage, NetApp, HPE, and IBM. 

Pure Storage is doing quite a fair job. In fact, they're doing better in some areas than Dell PowerMax. Pure Storage and its flash arrays are definitely something that can easily replace Dell PowerMax.

Dell offers several advantages. First is the kind of support they offer. Second is scalability, as well as supporting a small footprint with hardware. Supporting 500 terabytes or 2 petabytes of storage in 8U or 12U is also credible. Pure Storage is doing a very good job in terms of green initiatives.

Pure Storage's performance is definitely better than Dell's. I could not find any gap or challenge in design and performance, and there were no unexplained issues as well. There were no bugs. I'm very happy with Pure Storage. In my list of the products I've worked with, Pure Storage is definitely at the top.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Dell PowerMax is our enterprise storage for all of our hosts and servers, which facilitate all of our compute platforms from AIX through to x86. 

I manage the team who are the subject matter experts who work for daily BAU and for uptime for enterprise storage within the organization that utilizes Dell PowerMax.

The features of Dell PowerMax that I find most useful include reliability, support, uptime as well as flexibility and expandability. 

The key benefits of using Dell PowerMax, quantified in terms of saved hours and saved costs, is having one single platform that provides functionality to all of our internal customers, which is not only easier to manage and cheaper to manage but also is easier to explain to management when they have to keep an eye on one ball at a time; the scalability and expandability offered on one platform is a lot easier to express and plan for. 

In terms of uptime, Dell PowerMax is pretty much 100%.

As it stands, I don't have any functionality requirements that Dell PowerMax doesn't give me at my level. The teams and SMEs on my teams may have user interface and other configuration requests. For example, there might be things that engineers do at the command line that GUIs don't do. However, that's the same for a lot of enterprise platforms nowadays. For the most part, it delivers what we need.

I've been working in the environment with Dell PowerMax for almost two years.

I evaluate Dell's support for PowerMax as very good, especially regarding their response time as well as their willingness to get ahead of issues. If I would rate Dell's support on a scale of one to ten, I would give it a nine.

Positive

The transition to Dell PowerMax was a natural progression from our other Dell platforms. It was first, and any investigations that were done with storage, it was logical that the expertise was in-house.

My experience with deploying Dell PowerMax is seamless, thanks to a lot of in-house expertise. It might have been complicated as we're migrating from an older platform to Dell PowerMax. However, we're up and running with very minimal interruptions to service, as it's architected well.

Our engineers in-house knew what to do, and they had the backup from Dell to do it. It was a success story.

We have spent less than we'd budgeted with Dell PowerMax, if we had purchased all the storage outright. 

The performance metrics or benchmarks I use to measure success with Dell PowerMax include uptime as well as our response times on our platforms, both of which are exactly where we want them to be, which is five nines and as fast as possible.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Dell PowerMax is simple; we're under the Apex model.

At this point, Dell PowerMax does not play a role in my organization's AI initiatives. We are thousands in employee size; we are owned by a much larger entity. 

Dell PowerMax meets all of our needs. The expertise that we have enables us to work with it and do what I want, allowing me to sleep at night, which is probably one of the best things about it. I recommend doing what fits best. 

I rate Dell PowerMax nine out of ten, as I never give tens.

We use the solution for medium to large enterprises. 

My specific use case for using Dell PowerMax NVMe is that it serves all our critical system storage functionalities. It's central storage where we provide LANs to our critical systems that require storage facilities and performance from the disk, which is a common requirement. 

We also undertake disaster recovery activities using this storage for compliance requirements, as it allows us to move from one site to another efficiently.

Dell PowerMax NVMe supports growth and operational success for our organization, as it significantly aids in our operational support.

The most useful feature of Dell PowerMax NVMe for me right now is its ease of management with the API functionality, which allows for automatic provisioning from anywhere, even without using the storage itself.

It can be API integrated to any system. 

Its performance offers the highest capability. They have very, very, very good performance.

Application users can also take snapshots for provisioning, and it can be integrated with any system. Another important aspect is its performance and IOPS capability, which is very good concerning reads, writes, and IOPS. 

Dell PowerMax NVMe is very supportive of our operational growth since we require daily performance from our core banking systems and need to facilitate data movement efficiently.

I have not faced significant problems or challenges with Dell PowerMax NVMe during this time, although one area for improvement is its user-friendliness, as it's a bit engineer-oriented. Specific knowledge and expertise are required to manage it properly, which some users might find a bit challenging, yet it's not a big deal for me. 

With user experience in mind, an improvement for Dell PowerMax NVMe could be clearer total capacity measurements from snapshots and clones, which should be more visible for better planning. 

Additionally, a template script from PowerMax could assist customers in easily integrating their API-interconnected systems without needing extensive knowledge. To improve regarding scripts, I recommend that if a customer wants to automate snapshots from other systems, Dell can assist by providing plug-and-play integrated templates that allow customers to drag, drop, modify, and connect with any target system for generating snapshots without logging into the storage directly.

I have been working with Dell PowerMax NVMe and VME for nearly two years.

Regarding stability, I have not faced any issues with downtime or crashes with Dell PowerMax NVMe. I would rate it nine out of ten since there are no required downtimes, even during firmware upgrades.

Dell PowerMax NVMe scales with our growing needs, as we anticipate potential capacity issues and make arrangements to order and plug in resources without interrupting any services. If I would rate scalability on a scale from one to ten, I'd consider it more than eight. It is not a vertically scalable product. In terms of scalability, Dell PowerMax NVMe is scalable enough for our organization's long-term plans, as long as Dell continues to support us.

Technical support for Dell PowerMax NVMe is good, and I am satisfied with the assistance provided.

Before working with Dell PowerMax NVMe and VME, we were using another solution for the same needs. We worked with IBM storage solutions previously, as well as Dell ExtremIO.

We decided to go with Dell PowerMax NVMe since we required greater performance than before, needed to maintain our replications and snapshots, and aimed to increase our snapshot-taking capabilities. Additionally, we found its recommendation for great performance supported numerous IOPS, and it delivers additional capabilities such as snapshots, cloning, and replication.

The deployment was very smooth. During the implementation, everything went well. Considering only the PowerMax case, the host integration is a different thing. There were some challenges, like, some volumes are not getting in some specific corporate from some specific operating systems; the size wass creating a problem. owever, it's not entirely a PowerMax issue. If you consider PowerMax as a single entity for considering deployment, it it was very smooth. 

The implementation involved a dedicated engineering team from Dell and a project management team from Thailand, along with our local partner from Bangladesh.

In terms of return on investment with Dell PowerMax NVMe, while we do not meticulously calculate ROI, we should measure if it's a good investment. If achieved, then the cost is not a matter.

Regarding the cost of Dell PowerMax NVMe and VME, it's a bit expensive and should be cheaper than it is. I would prefer the cost to be decreased by around 10%, not more than that.

Whether Dell PowerMax NVMe has features that cater to the needs of small and medium organizations depends on their performance requirements and the customer volume, as small and medium organizations may also require performance-hungry applications. 

Dell PowerMax NVMe is more suitable for larger organizations.

My advice for those planning to use Dell PowerMax NVMe is to first assess their requirements carefully and to have experienced storage experts involved before deciding to purchase. 

I rate this solution nine out of ten.

We are using Dell EMC PowerScale for the data and Dell PowerMax NVMe for the production database and production guardian database.

Dell PowerMax NVMe provides enterprise solutions for banks and other companies that have to implement their online database and data transactional database, particularly financial institutions.

I am working with Dell infrastructure, next generation infrastructure, which is the latest infrastructure of the solutions, and the EMC features of Dell storage.

Dell PowerMax NVMe is high-end, mission-critical storage, so there is complete responsibility for the storage availability as they are running critical business applications.

Performance and management aspects are satisfactory, however, there is room to enhance data protection and future proofing to enable remote visualization and control capabilities when compared with other vendors.

It can improve its hybrid model.

Improvements can be made in support services, remote support, and remote visualization. This depends on in-situ support, remote support, and other factors, however, enhancement is needed in our territories to improve remote support and parts availability. While Dell PowerMax NVMe is very reliable storage and cannot experience downtime, we sometimes face challenges in our territories regarding the availability of critical parts. Our local support people occasionally encounter situations where faulty parts are not currently available.

I have been using Dell PowerMax NVMe for the last three years.

The solution is stable. I would rate it ten out of ten.

For scalability of the on-premises version, the rating would be seven out of ten.

Technical support deserves a rating of seven out of ten, as there are some gaps and areas for improvement. Remote support, in particular, needs improvement, specifically in our country. We don't have local support.

Neutral

The main competitors for Dell PowerMax NVMe in the market are HP Alletra and IBM.

Dell offers storage in comparison to HP as a bundled package with no additional licensing and other components, while HP and IBM provide model-based licensing.

Dell PowerMax NVMe is very simple to implement and install. After implementing, support can be improved.

When comparing Dell PowerMax NVMe with other vendors, such as IBM enterprise solutions, the price is relatively higher.

I am working with AI aspects. 

It's a good solution for enterprises. 

Overall, I would give Dell PowerMax NVMe a final mark of eight out of ten.

Our use case for Dell PowerMax is with the Mainframe, and we use it together with the Mainframe. Many applications utilize Dell PowerMax through the policy, especially older applications. We will deactivate the Mainframe in the next month or two.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerMax is the resource FICON. We can connect the Mainframe in this storage. The benefits of Dell PowerMax are that we can use the older environment. 

We are satisfied with the product. It can be better, however, I don't know what could be improved. There is nothing that could make it better at this time.

I have been using Dell PowerMax for 15 years, as we implemented this PowerMax, and PowerScale is new.

Dell PowerMax is very stable with no problems. We didn't have any issues such as crashes. I remember an episode where we had a performance issue based on one disk or more, which caused a performance drop for all equipment. At that time, we didn't have support service, however, we contracted it now. The engineer executed a command in 30 minutes and solved the problem.

Dell PowerMax is scalable. We purchased one piece of equipment and needed to expand, and we got a purchase case for another piece of equipment and expanded our environment.

We have worked with customer success support, and the service is very good. I would rate Dell support a ten on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the best and one being the worst.

Positive

I don't remember what we were using before Dell PowerMax. I didn't work at the company at that time.

It is very easy to implement; we don't have a problem.

I don't know the pricing details. That said, my understanding is that Dell PowerMax is very expensive.

I haven't evaluated any other similar solutions to Dell PowerMax.

I am not using Dell PowerMax for AI at all. 

I would rate the overall Dell PowerMax product a ten out of ten.

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.

Positive

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.

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 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.

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.