Dell PowerMax Reviews

I am the solution administrator for Telcel. I use it to analyze the host and for data availability. It is a useful tool for me. I use it a lot every day. It is used for mission-critical operations.

We use the PowerMax SRDF/Metro Smart DR to replicate information on some servers that are important to our company. We use it as a backup from each box and it helps to reduce our storage costs.

It is important that the product provides NVMe scale-out capabilities. We support many things with the product and we need to know what the architecture is. It makes things very simple for us.

The data security and availability are pretty good. We have many clients connecting to the box, which means security is very important. This is true when it comes to remote support. The compliance is very good.

The performance is very good on our servers. It's superior. And the QoS capabilities for providing work congestion protection are also important because about 99 percent of our servers are production servers.

I have been using Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe for about four years.

It's very stable. 

We have had some trouble with the VMAX-to-PowerMax migration, but the VMAX box will be powered down after the migration. The PowerMax boxes are working fine and we don't have any issues with them.

We plan to increase our usage of the product.

Dell EMC's technical support is pretty good.

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.

The setup was pretty easy. We are a team of three people who handle storage and the deployment was not complex. We had no problem with it. It took us about eight hours.

We received help from EPS Consulting.

We use the PowerMax SRDF/Metro Smart DR, and the bandwidth is excellent but the equipment is in the same location.

Overall, I don't see much that they need to do to improve the product. It's very good.

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.

Dell PowerMax NVMe is an enterprise array that gives you maximum throughput. It's not a mid-range or small array. Dell PowerMax NVMe can handle a minimum of one petabyte.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerMax NVMe is its replication feature. The replication was configured directly on the array, and we didn't need any separate replication switch.

Dell PowerMax NVMe will have one administration login for DBA. So if you log in, the DBA can see the performance of the database in the storage area level. I have not seen this feature in any other storage vendors.

Dell PowerMax NVMe is costly compared to other solutions.

I have been working with Dell PowerMax NVMe for three years.

We didn't experience any downtime or shutdown with Dell PowerMax NVMe. I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe a nine out of ten for stability.

Dell PowerMax NVMe is a scalable solution. I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe ten out of ten for scalability.

The solution's technical support is really good. Dell PowerMax NVMe's technical support is our benchmark with all other support vendors.

Positive

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.

The solution's initial setup was easy because an implementation engineer helped us with everything.

It took two to three hours to deploy Dell PowerMax NVMe.

I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe a five out of ten for pricing.

You need proper technical knowledge to use Dell PowerMax NVMe. A classroom session will help users acquire more technical knowledge to explore and use the array. So it's not easy to dive deep in without technical knowledge. An instructor-led session would be helpful for users before using the array for the first time.

Overall, I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe a nine out of ten.

Our database and client records are stored in EMC. 

I am impressed with the tool's reliability since we see a few hardware failures with it. Also, the solution's replication configuration is good. 

The tool needs to improve its performance. Today's applications are demanding a response rate of one millisecond or below. The product should also look into AI integration. 

I have been using the product for four years. 

I would rate the product's stability a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the product's scalability a seven-point five out of ten. We have encountered controller failures while scaling the solution up. Controller failures occur when we expand to 85-90 percent since they are unable to handle the load. My company has around 40,000-50,000 users for the product. We manage about 260 petabytes of storage with a team of 25 people managing it. 

We have platinum support from Dell. We didn't face many issues with the support team. They take some time to go back to the engineering and R&D and come up with a solution. That's the only delay I have seen with them. 

The product's setup is simple since EMC is in the industry for many years. The vendor is always with us during the setup process. They do the major activities of setting it up. Our engineering folks take care of the rest of the parts. 

Dell is expensive compared to other products and I would rate its pricing a four out of ten. 

I would rate the solution a seven out of ten after considering factors like cost, stability and performance. 

We mainly use it for databases.

The speed and the compatible interface with IBM are the most valuable features of the PowerMax product.

Dell should work on their marketing strategies to make the product more visible on the market. They should promote the product's compatibility with IBM, as not everyone knows it.

I have been using this solution for four years.

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten.

It is a scalable product. There are over 1000 users in my company.

The customer service was okay. We contact customer support in case of firmware updates; they do that for us. So we contact them. It's okay now. For PowerMax, the support was good because it is enterprise technology. But for other Dell products, the support is worse.

Positive

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.

The initial setup is easy. We are using PowerMax 2000 with fiber channel connectivity, and it was easy to set up.

The internal team deployed it. It took around a day to deploy the solution completely. We installed it in the physical location, but Dell support has to initialize the storage.

The price was good, that's why we chose PowerMax. We got a five-year pricing model, and therefore, we have five years of support. After five years, of course, if we want to use the support, we have to order support for the next years.

People should test it before buying. I tested this solution and found it suitable for us. However, the solution depends on the specific application and configuration. So, testing before buying is essential.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten.

Our clients are using PowerMax for scaling, for example, for cases with banking details and public records. They're already using it on the enterprise level. Moreover, the clients need to use strong and more expensive batteries to meet all the different tool groups and applications that are running on it. This solution provides flexibility to handle huge amounts of data, even with different sites and branches. 

Some features could be better. I think if we can integrate PowerMax with the public cloud, it would be safer as we can have the service without any data on-premises or in the public or hybrid cloud.

And we can remove all the data from on-premises and the public cloud. This would make migration and data recovery quicker.

There is room for improvement in terms of integration with various service providers for public clouds. It would be beneficial to integrate with AWS, Azure, Microsoft, Oracle Cloud, and other service providers. 

This integration would enable a more comprehensive and open solution, catering to multiple vendors and applications, particularly in Azure cloud. This would enhance the overall customer experience and provide more flexibility.

We are working with the PowerMax 2000 and PowerMax 8000. We have been stable with multiple customers for several years, ranging from two years to more.

It is a very stable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten. 

In terms of percentage, we can give it a nine for its performance. Nine out of ten. Our clients are different businesses with varying infrastructures and different project sizes. 

They fall into the medium budget category and have multiple choices. Some projects are huge, covering different branches or partnerships, including public projects. So we can definitely showcase this product in an enterprise environment.

The customer service and support team is very good. Whenever I open a case with Dell, they are available to assist us at any time. I'm very satisfied with the support team.

Positive

The initial setup is easy. The deployment depends on the infrastructure sizing, the number of clusters, and the amount of data. For example, you need to consider if it is greenfield infrastructure or if there is a migration from the existing infrastructure to the new solution. This calculation is regarding the solution and the infrastructure savings.

The solution has already been decided with the technical team from our side. But there are other infrastructure elements we need to migrate, providing value. It may require some downtime, so it might take multiple days.

This product's solution is already flexible, and we can implement it in a few hours. It's already adaptable for implementation. And already, some of our customers have mentioned the product and its capability to use it.

An implementation engineer, as a technical engineer, will assist with the technical configuration. There are multiple choices. We might need one engineer for each product, depending on the integration. And for the cluster, it's usually multiple engineers. It's a team effort.

Moreover, when it comes to maintenance, if we are already using it, we can raise any new issues and open cases with the vendor's billing team to double-check. For example, if there is any issue with one or two ports, we can utilize this feature.

The pricing depends on the integration and the solution required. It can be handled with the configurator, and it always ensures minimal specifications at the minimum cost to meet customer needs. It's already cost-effective compared to other vendors. So, the price is okay.

I would recommend using the solution. We have implemented it in a price-sensitive environment, especially for small businesses. I recommend this product for its specific use case, which is related to our SQL data, and banking accounting. This product handles this case well. 

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

We used it for Oracle Databases. The customer for which we did the PoC of PowerMax is planning on deploying mission-critical applications on this solution: Oracle workloads such as their quoting system and their data warehouse.

As a partner, we don't have PowerMax in-house but for my customers the SRDF replication is an advantage. The ability to have a scalable, all-flash array is pretty impressive. That's important for our customers.

In terms of helping to consolidate islands of storage in a data center, the use case for the particular customer for whom we did the PoC was to move off of an Exadata environment and to move off of an AIX environment and consolidate those down to one storage platform. PowerMax did that.

It is meeting our customer's requirements. They had several large Oracle databases that needed to move over, including from Exadata. Exadata is one of Oracle's fastest systems in terms of Oracle Database workloads. Our customer had to be able to hit certain timelines for jobs that would run. For example, they are running a quote database and they had to be able to hit the same timelines for jobs that were running within that, or better. As a part of the consolidation, the end goal was to limit their licensing on the front end. Being able to consolidate down into that one footprint on the back end helped them save money on the front end.

When it comes to managing and monitoring PowerMax arrays, the interface has really improved compared to the old VMAX. Getting into the interface and finding out if there are any issues with the array is a lot simpler and more streamlined.

The SRDF replication piece is probably the best feature. It's useful for maintaining recoverability in the event of a disaster.

I would like to see more cache because we are limited to two terabytes of cache now. More cache would potentially help drive better improvements in performance.

Also, when it comes to Oracle and database workloads, data reduction could be a little bit better. Some of the competition, like Pure, have post-processes which do additional deduplication and compression on the backside; everything is in-line and then they do a secondary process. It would be a good option if you could start getting 5:1 or 6:1 data reduction on database workloads. That would be beneficial.

Since our use of PowerMax was just a PoC, we didn't really have any issues with the with stability. We didn't run it for a long time, it was a 30-day PoC. There wasn't a lot of time to really explore that area. During the PoC it was fine, it was perfect, we didn't have any issues.

The ability to add additional engines, additional SSDs, is really a benefit to the customer. You can grow it as you need to.

The PowerMax architecture influenced the buying decision. The ability to grow, to scale from single-engine to multi-engine, was probably the biggest factor in that.

Tech support for PowerMax was pretty good. They came out and set it up and did the install. That took a day. We did have a problem with one of the compression modules and they had it out there and fixed the next day. It was during the install that they uncovered that. We weren't using the array yet anyway, so it was just a byproduct of the installation process.

The improvements to the interface have really been great. It's very simple to set up and configure the storage volumes, whether it's a Fibre Channel volume or an iSCSI volume.

The initial setup was straightforward. I did the setup of the iSCSI volumes to the host and it was it took me less than an hour to do that.

We were initially doing a PoC and comparing PowerMax against other arrays: NetApp, XtremIO X2, and Pure. We were doing a performance benchmark and it came in second compared to XtremIO X2, so it did a good job.

I would give PowerMax a nine out of ten, only because we had that single issue with the compression module failing. Otherwise, it did exactly what we wanted it to. It wasn't as fast as the XtremIO, but we didn't think it was going to be as fast as that in the first place. The XtremIO was somewhat oversized. So from a performance standpoint, we were very happy with it.

We are a medical organization. We use PowerMax with medical ERP. We have some government projects that utilize PowerMax because we have 99.99% reliability and uptime requirements.

We are not using cloud-connected storage. However, we are using PowerMax to virtualize our local/on-premise infrastructure.

We do not have a big installation. In Russia, our company was among the first companies who purchased PowerMax appliances. Our environment is around 250 terabytes.

We removed the need to observe whether we ran into issues with the performance of disks or number of IOPS. Previously, our Oracle Database would throw us performance errors. Now, with PowerMax, everything runs smoothly.

I would access the solution’s built-in QoS capabilities for providing workload congestion protection at 10 (out of 10), as we are using the highest, platinum-level minimum response time from the system. The NVMe SCM storage tier feature offers crazy speeds. When we were looking for a storage solution, we were looking for the most reliable, high performance, latest solution to delay end-of-life. Our PowerMax setup everywhere enables the diamond-level setting with enabled monitoring. Until this day, we have not experienced any anomalies. We simply don’t experience workload congestion. Our primary requirement was the reliability of PowerMax, then the rest of the features, like NVMe SCM, were a nice add-on

We value maximum system uptime because our projects are associated with a government customer. We have medical ERP, which is used throughout Russia, covering 8 time zones. If it fails, then we have big problems. Therefore, the stability of the system is important for us.We are using PowerMax and VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols).

We use Power Pass, which is an additional software from Dell EMC, alongside multi-passing in our SAN network. This allows us to balance uploads and optical links of our SAN network.

I would like a more informative CloudIQ for iOS. What you can see via the web UI significantly differs from what you can see via the web application.

We have been using PowerMax in a production environment since August 2019.

My colleague and I are responsible for the infrastructure, network, and PowerMax storage.

In terms of storage users, we have about 1,000 people.

We are happy with everything, especially their technical support. We had a situation where there was an outage in the data center associated with our electricity supplier. Later, when we launched the infrastructure, the support perfectly helped us with this issue.

Positive

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.

The deployment took about two days. We moved in segments, checking that everything was working properly, before moving forward with the migration.

The initial setup and integration of PowerMax were carried out by Dell EMC. We then migrated it via vSphere from our previous solution EMC VNX 5700 to PowerMax.

We don’t calculate ROI on PowerMax.

The PowerMax appliance pricing was reasonable. Dell EMC quoted us a substantial discount.

Support pricing is very high. Our support contract is about to expire and Dell EMC provided us with an extremely high renewal quote. It was four times more than the support contract for our previous EMC VNX solution.

I would suggest initially purchasing PowerMax with a longer support contract to reduce your support costs.With our previous EMC VNX solution, we were able to lock in the support costs, but we failed to do so with PowerMax. Therefore, it is more cost effective for us to purchase a new appliance with a support contract than to support PowerMax at these support cost amounts. For example, if the purchasing price was a million dollars, then the support costs a third of the total appliance cost per year.

We briefly looked at and evaluated Hitachi. However, in 2019, PowerMax didn’t have any direct competitors. There might have been a similar Huawei solution, but it was not really the same as PowerMax.

The primary reason that we went with PowerMax is because we have always preferred Dell EMC solutions. Our previous solution was a Dell EMC product and we were very satisfied with its reliability and performance until its end-of-life.

The NVMe has great speed with an Oracle Database, but that is not that important for us.

I often use the mobile CloudIQ client, which I find very useful.

I would rate the solution as 10 out of 10. It works perfectly apart from the support costs.