Dell PowerMax Reviews

I use the solution in my company for mission-critical core banking applications.

If you ask me, technically, the tool is the same as most of the vendors have the same thing. If you ask me about Huawei, I can tell you about the tool's many features.

Dell PowerMax NVMe's advantage is just the support.

The tool's disadvantages are its cost and lack of ease of use. According to the latest market trends, certain technologies are lacking.

The main challenge with the product was to have control over the simultaneous failures of controllers. For recovery, manual intervention is required.

The tool's cost, active controller part, installation, maintenance, scalability, and recovery parts can be considered for improvement.

I have been using Google Cloud for five years. I have a Dell PowerMax NVMe 8000 and a Dell PowerMax NVMe 8500. I was a partner integrator with Dell. I have twenty-four years of storage experience.

It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

It is not a very scalable solution. Other vendors offer much more scalability options than Dell PowerMax NVMe.

There is something called transfer of ownership known as LUN tagging, but other boxes don't offer such a feature.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

The solution's technical support was good, and it is one of the tool's main advantages. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I am also a solution architect for Huawei.

We are talking with one of our vendors and customers, who were keen to get involved with OPSWAT. With most vendors, whenever there is an NFS and compliant storage, all the products offer support. I just wanted to understand why only a few products are listed in Google's support portal.

I have been using Huawei for almost seven and a half years now. Prior to that, I was a business partner of HP and Oracle. I was Dell's partner for almost ten years. Before that, I was IBM's partner for five and a half years.

The product's initial setup phase is okay. If you compare Dell's setup phase, Huawei is convenient and easy to install.

For Dell's installation phase, around two people are required. For Huawei's installation phase, one person is required. Huawei's installation can be managed remotely. I am a solution architect, so I don't do the deployments now.

There is no ROI. I have seen the tool used, and pretty much all the vendors are the same.

The tool is very expensive. I rate the tool's price as a one out of ten.

We are talking with one of our vendors and customers, who were keen to get involved with OPSWAT. With most vendors, whenever there is an NFS and compliant storage, all the products offer support. I just wanted to understand why only a few products are listed in Google's support portal.

The tool has a fully symmetric architecture, so it offers an active controller there. Controller failure is not something that we can withstand, especially if there are two simultaneous controller failures. With the other vendors right now, considering what we are working for, tools can support up to seven controller failures, which is so for any banking operations.

I don't know how the tool's real-time machine-learning capability has impacted our company.

The maintenance of Dell PowerMax NVMe requires companies to have resources along with extensive technology experience. It is the same for any vendor.

I have not really seen any AI features in the tool.

For the technical specifications, I can rate the tool as a seven out of ten.

I rate the overall tool as a seven out of ten.

My role involves being a system integrator, providing optimal solutions to various sectors like public, airlines, banking, and commercial financial, all within Dell's technology portfolio.

Investing in Dell PowerMax has impacted our operational costs positively, although the actual savings depend on factors like the experience of the engineers implementing the product and the support level chosen.

Dell PowerMax NVMe has been a significant enhancement for data handling in my industry. Its improved security features and data calculation capabilities make it a valuable solution for our customers. The most critical feature of Dell PowerMax NVMe for performance enhancement is its strong network support and integration with other vendors, along with its efficient use of hardware components like CPU and memory. Data reduction technologies in PowerMax have been highly beneficial for our company, allowing us to optimize storage and reduce costs by consolidating files

The one area for improvement in Dell PowerMax NVMe would be to align the features of the on-premises version with those available in the cloud, as this would provide added value and flexibility.

I have been using Dell PowerMax NVMe for the past eight years.

I would rate the stability nine out of ten.

I would rate the scalability ten out of ten.

The support has been great.

Positive

The decisive factor in choosing Dell PowerMax over other storage solutions was its ease of use and suitability for enterprise-level data management. It aligns well with the needs of big organizations and offers robust features for AI-driven projects and machine learning initiatives.

Setting up and configuring Dell PowerMax NVMe typically takes about three days. However, if there's migration involved from existing systems to the new PowerMax, that process can extend to around one to two weeks, depending on the complexity and scale of the migration project.

Deploying PowerMax has been straightforward and flexible, especially in integrating with other technologies and vendors.

The pricing might be a bit high for small organizations, so it's more suitable for larger enterprises.

I highly recommend Dell PowerMax NVMe for enterprise-level data management.  My experience with Dell PowerMax NVMe has been excellent, especially compared to other vendors I've worked with in the past, such as VMware, Cisco, and Oracle.

Overall, I rate the product a ten out of ten. 

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.

We have two PowerMax arrays. One is at our primary data center. The other is in the secondary data center, and they replicate back and forth to each other. We use them to store a lot of databases and files, but we don't have as much on them as we used to because our CIO is outsourcing a lot. We have taken a lot out of the data center recently, so there isn't as much on them as we intended when we bought them but I think it's mostly databases, file shares, and some one-off applications. It's all virtualized on VMware as well.

PowerMax improved our storage performance and allowed us to consolidate our old storage into one platform. It's faster than the older EMC equipment we replaced. We had a few different storage arrays, and a couple of them were approaching the end of maintenance, and one was a year away from the end of its maintenance. So it was time to either spend a ton of money on renewing maintenance or replace them. At the same time, PowerMax has made storage provisioning more difficult because it's not as intuitive as other arrays, but it's still a good solution for our mission-critical workloads.

We're using SRDF, but it hasn't affected our storage network bandwidth requirements. We haven't had any issues, so we haven't had to increase the size of any of our connections. Inside the data, there certainly wouldn't be any issues. The only problem would be replicating to the other site, and we haven't had any issues. We have a reasonably large pipe between the sites.

They're basically tanks. You could take a baseball bat to it, and it's still going to keep running and doing what it's supposed to do. We've had a couple of part failures, and you can pretty much replace any part on that thing at any time during the day in the middle of production without worrying about anything happening. Nobody notices. We even had to replace a memory card, so we had to take out a controller. There were two, so no one even realized what was going on. 

The availability is excellent. You can do anything to it, and it still runs. The uptime is a great feature, and the replication has been pretty solid. That's another important feature for us.

The dedupe and compression features have been the biggest disappointment. It's not as efficient as we were expecting or had hoped. It's not terrible, but not as good as we were led to believe it was going to be. They need to improve their reduplication algorithm or the compression algorithms. It comes with a guarantee that you'll get 3-to-1 dedupe and compression, meaning that if you have 3 terabytes of data, it should only take 1 terabyte of space because we reduce its size. We're only getting 2-to-1. It's not a big deal because we have more storage than we'll need, but it's disappointing.

There's also a qualifier in that I'm told that if we filled the array up more, some deeper algorithms would kick in and help that reduction number go up a little. Also, if you have deeper algorithms that you're going to use, only if I put more data on it, is that going to slow things down? Why not just use them now? That also left a lot to be desired. I attempted to use that and was having some performance issues, and the fix was, "Don't use that." So it was a little lacking.

I think management is where PowerMax is weakest. We're still managing it like we managed EMC arrays in the early 2000s. There's a slicker, fancier GUI that does more, but at the end of the day, you still have to dig into the command line and issue a lot of the same commands that we still were using almost 20 years ago. So the ease of use factor is low. One of the reasons I wanted Pure Storage was because I felt like I could teach a coworker how to fill in for me if I ever went on vacation for a couple of weeks. If anything bad happens and I'm out of the office, they're going to have to bother me. This is not intuitive. There are a lot of CLI commands that you still have to use. It's just not as user-friendly as it should be.

We got PowerMax just short of three years ago.

The performance has been good. I wouldn't say great, but it's good. It's more than what we need.

PowerMax's scalability is good. We have the lower model, so it doesn't scale as much as the larger model. You know that going in, so you buy the model you need. We realized we would probably never have to expand it when we bought it.

I'd rate Dell EMC support eight out of 10. It's pretty good. They actively monitor the array, and it dials home to let them know if there's anything they should look at. Sometimes, when I come in the next morning and check the logs, I'll notice that somebody from support had connected in and looked at something. Then, I can look on the support website and try to figure out what they were doing, which could be an easier process, but it's good that they keep an eye on the arrays. If a part fails, the arrays generally dial home to notify them that it needs to be replaced, and they contact me to arrange it. 

Positive

Setting up PowerMax is definitely complex. The initial configuration of the array itself is pretty simple, but once you start trying to connect hosts and set up replication, then it becomes a lot more work than it probably should be. It took a couple of days for the initial setup, but after that, there has been some ongoing work as we put more and more on there. 

We looked at three other vendors, including NetApp, but we were looking for block storage. I've always felt NetApp is great for file storage, but I look elsewhere if I want block storage. And while their presentations were impressive, there wasn't a compelling reason to choose them. They weren't any cheaper. There wasn't anything that stood out about them that made us want to take a closer look.

We also looked at Kaminario, but we had questions about whether they'd still be around in five years to provide support. There were many positives I liked about it, and the price was low. It was like an off-brand version of a Pure array in a lot of ways. Just by playing with it, you could tell it was a year or two behind what Pure Storage was selling.

We also looked at Pure Storage, and I thought Pure Storage had the best mix of cost and ease of use for an organization our size. I felt like it was probably the best choice, but the corporate leadership overruled my recommendation based on the "No one ever gets fired for buying IBM" theory. My CIO was feeling like, "He's a software developer, so he's not very hardware or vendor savvy." He didn't know much about Pure Storage and felt more comfortable sticking with EMC.

I'd give PowerMax seven out of 10. There are also a few things PowerMax does that nobody else offers. For example, some of our other vendors don't have its replication or mainframe connectivity features. If you need that, you have to have a PowerMax or some kind of Dell solution. If you're planning on implementing it, you definitely need someone who knows PowerMax or a VMAX to take care of it for you. You can't just buy one and think that you're going to give it to someone who's never done it before. You need somebody with some experience on staff. 

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 are using the PowerMax for our core banking solution, ERP, and our payment systems, as well as middleware, ATM, and the most critical banking systems.

The main improvement for us is that we have seen up to 12x performance improvements after moving from earlier, mid-range Dell EMC storage to PowerMax. Some of our reports, which were long-running, are now completed in a few minutes. Something that would take two hours is completed in 15 minutes and that has improved productivity. 

We also used to get timeouts from our storage, but now, after migrating to the PowerMax, there are no timeouts because the latencies are in microseconds, compared to the milliseconds of our old solution.

Our bandwidth requirements have been reduced because of the compression and the dedupe that we are getting with the built-in SRDF. It is bandwidth-optimized. And the best part is the reverse replication. Suppose you activate your DR. When you have to come back to the main array, only the changes are synced. That is unlike many other products. Here, only the changed tracks need to be updated, making the reverse replication very fast.

Also, by enabling the compression and deduplication, we get a very good level of compression and dedupe, of 4:1, which means if you have 40 terabytes, you only need to buy 10 terabytes. There are cost savings there. And by default, thin provisioning is in place, which also gives you at least a 40 percent reduction. And because of the bandwidth optimization, the link required for the DR replication is also reduced, meaning you are saving on the bandwidth costs. We have easily saved 50 percent.

Overall, you are getting very high-performing and reliable storage.

The most important feature is the performance, because we have four directors, all of them Active-Active. (PowerMax directors support multiple functions including front-end I/O modules).

It is highly available because it has multiple controllers. All of them are unlike some of the traditional storage arrays, where you assign certain LUNs to certain controllers. Here, everything is Active-Active. You don't assign a particular disk or LUN to a particular controller. All the controllers are servicing all of the LUNs. So from an availability point of view, we don't even know if a particular controller or director has failed. And all the spare part replacement, including controllers, can be done online while systems are working. We don't need to do it during off-peak hours. We can do so during normal working hours because the performance you get from the service, due to the other controllers, is enough to take care of any failed components.

There is also a Call Home facility configured, so the system can send out alerts to the Dell EMC support team. They can dispatch spare parts based on these alerts, so it is a fully integrated system.

Another valuable feature is the DR replication technology, which is based on the Dell EMC SRDF solution. It provides a very good level of near-real-time replication. It supports synchronous as well as asynchronous. When it comes to activating the DR, it is very easy.

Then there are the compression and deduplication which are always on. We get more than 4:1 capacity savings using them. The efficiency benefits from compression and deduplication are through a specialized hardware module within the storage itself, and that means there is no overhead to the compression and dedupe.

In addition, the solution supports IBM Power Systems, Solaris, VMware—almost everything is supported. That's important to us because we are using multiple hardware flavors including IBM Power Systems, SPARC machines, and HPE Onyx. All of these are different classes of machines, and we have different operating systems. We have Linux and Windows on physical and we have it running on VMware. Oracle virtualization is also supported. It supports a wide combination of specialized technologies and hardware.

And the built-in QoS capabilities enable you to drill down to any particular QoS levels and define the type of performance you'll have: diamond, platinum, or gold. The result is that different performance levels can be set for individual disks. Using the QoS functionality, we can vary the performance or prioritize it based on the criticality of the performance needs.

Another nice feature is the CloudIQ app. You can even monitor things using the app on your mobile. Every five minutes, the performance statistics and the system diagnosis data are sent to the cloud and you can access them sitting anywhere. You get these statistics at your fingertips.

Although they call it unified storage where you have SAN and NAS, with a NAS implementation on top of a SAN, the NAS implementation is a little complicated and clumsy. As SAN, as block storage, it is very powerful. However, even though NAS is provided as a feature, I don't think many customers will be using a PowerMax as a NAS because NAS is normally meant for file servers or some kind of archival storage. If they could provide a very good NAS implementation, it would be better, so that customers don't have to look for other simple solutions for NAS.

I have been using Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe for one and a half years.

We don't have any issues with the stability. It is rock-solid.

It is scalable. We recently did an upgrade. You can keep on adding disks within a shelf or even attach additional shelves.

Also, the NVMe scale-out capabilities are very important. Although we are using SSD, all-flash drives, the backend is NVMe. It is quite fast. The IOPS requirements will never reach the max. It is also future-looking storage because it supports storage class memory (SCM). That is where you can utilize the full benefits of the storage solution. Currently, we are not using SCM because it is quite expensive. At the moment, we don't need it, but the storage backend is already NVMe and the controllers are connected using InfiniBand for very high bandwidth.

It's also very easy to add or expand disks in very few steps. Everything can be done online, even the firmware updates, meaning that you don't need any downtime. It's all seamless.

Dell EMC's technical support is excellent. The backend support is very strong, just like the implementation team. They have a dedicated team for PowerMax, like they used to have for VMAX or Symmetrix.

Positive

We were using a Dell EMC mid-range storage solution before. 

It is a complex system, but the engineers and architects behind the implementation are well-versed. They're very technically competent. They're on top of the prerequisites, and there are a lot of those. For a first-timer customer the setup will be difficult, but they will help you. The implementation team is very strong. They're very clear on what needs to be done and how to do it. For us, it was a very clean implementation. We didn't have any hiccups.

It is not a one-day job. It is not a very easy installation. It requires the experts. But Dell EMC makes sure that you get a certified, real expert to do the implementation. It doesn't get done through a partner. Dell EMC themselves send their engineers for the installation.

It is high-end storage and it is a bit expensive, but it is doing what it is meant for: running business-critical applications or latency-sensitive applications like ATM payments, and those kinds of core banking systems.

There may be customers who don't utilize all the compression features of competing products, thinking they may slow the system down. I know certain customers who have bought competing products, but they keep the compression and deduplication disabled by default, or even the encryption, because they create additional overhead. That means that with those solutions, you need to have more capacity than what you need with PowerMax. The guarantee with PowerMax is that there is no compromise on performance, even if you enable compression, deduplication, and encryption.

This particular model of storage is considered Tier 0 storage for the most mission-critical applications, the applications that require a very high level of reliability and low latency. It's also for the types of applications that require real-time replication across different sites. The solution is suitable for mission-critical applications and not for archiving, because it is not cheap.

We currently use it to power our Oracle databases, especially for our core banking solution. We also use it for storage. We provisioned the storage from PowerMax for various VMs that we created for the applications in that environment.

We use the NVMe SCM storage tier feature, and that's how we're able to do the service level capability (SLA). We have storage class memory as a part of our deployment, and we have about 10% of our storage sizing allocated to storage class memory. With that, we are able to create different service levels for the disk groups or loans provisioned from this storage.

It most definitely helps in improving storage-related performance in our environment. The way our core banking solution works is that we have what we call ODS blocks. So, for leveraging that SLA, we were able to implement some kind of priority for those ODS blocks. Oracle had said that this is something for which their Exadata has a special way of doing, but based on my own assessment, we are able to achieve relatively similar levels of performance by using PowerMax.

Before we deployed this solution, we used to struggle with processing about 100,000 transactions in 10 minutes. We are now able to process about 350,000 or more transactions. These are conservative figures. We did hit much more than that, but conservatively, we are able to see about 300% performance improvement as compared to the SSD storage that we had previously from IBM. We have metrics to show that. The performance is different, and it is better than what we were used to.

We are in our ideal environment in which the storage double acts as our UAT and our test environment. So, we've seen remarkable deduplication in that environment because we are able to expand the footprint much more than what we are able to do in production. The production environment is a bit more controlled, but in our DR UAT environment, we are able to stretch those capabilities. The metrics that we see and the number of environments that we're able to create is quite remarkable.

It provides NVMe scale-out capabilities, which is pretty awesome. We currently have a plan to scale up. We started off with about 100TB. Based on the performance that we've seen, we're consolidating more workloads on the storage. We need to scale up a bit, and we find it very valuable to be able to do that. The ability to scale out and scale up marginally depending on what you want is quite valuable to us.

We find the service level option to provision storage very valuable. The ability to define different service levels for storage groups helps us in prioritizing our workload at the infrastructure level.

We also find the compression technology of PowerMax very valuable. In some instances, depending on the kind of data that we have, we can attest to compression ratios of about 9:1, which is very valuable.

The NFS feature is also quite useful for us in our environment. We're able to deploy the NFS capabilities to resolve some of the use cases that we identify.

Its efficiency and performance have been remarkable. It could be because we've not been able to break the limits of what we have. The PowerMax 2000 that we have can do about a million IOPS or so if my memory serves me well. Our use case at the moment isn't stretching as much as that. So, for us, performance has been remarkable in terms of meeting expectations. It has been much better as compared to what we used to have. We see responses to application requests, especially database request queries, in microseconds, as advertised, and even that in some ways gave us a bit of a challenge because the applications couldn't cope with the speed of the response of the storage. So, it was new learning for the providers of the application. The performance has been remarkable. We've seen data within microseconds as advertised. In terms of the IOPS, we've not been able to fully exact the limits, but so far, so good. We are pretty comfortable with that. As we grow organically, we will see more performance and we will be able to drive, but in terms of compression and deduplication, we have received remarkable value.

In the last one year, we haven't had any issues with the availability of the platform, the storage, and the extension of our data. The encryption or data address feature is also there. Even though we've not fully utilized that, it's comforting to know that capability is available for us to explore. We've not had any storage level outage in terms of the data not being accessible within the agreed service. So far, so good.

They can make the GUI better, especially for the ones that come out of the box. We did encounter a bit of difficulty in setting up the storage. We had to deploy Solutions Enabler on a Linux machine to be able to fully interact with the storage. They need to upgrade the web interface for the management of the storage that comes out of the box. The management interface for NFS is also a bit old and not very intuitive.

We deployed PowerMax for our core banking solution in October last year.

It is pretty stable. We've not had any incidents around this storage in the last one year. I can't recall any major incidents. The storage supports our core banking solution, which is always in use. We have 24/7 banking services, and the solution has been pretty stable.

We are able to scale. There are plans to procure more capacity so that we can consolidate other workloads to this storage.

It was top-notch, and it still is top-notch. They're quite responsive. They have a team of knowledgeable people, and they were quite supportive all through the implementation. They still keep in touch to see how we're faring. I would rate them a nine out of 10.

We were using SSD storage from IBM. We moved because of multiple things. One reason was the cost. Another reason was the SCM offering advertised by Dell, which was coupled with the AppSync feature of this storage that allowed us to create clones of our databases for UAT, development, and test purposes. So, the features that we desired in the environment were:

• Cost and performance
• The ability to have database clones without necessarily increasing the footprint of the storage required.
• The ability to create service levels for the storage or for disk groups created from the storage. It was critical for us because of the consolidated environments in which we wanted to use the storage.

With professional services from them, it was straightforward. The only issue was that some of the management and out-of-the-box capabilities needed a bit of work to make it as easy as possible for system admins to provision clones from the storage. Aside from that, the setup was pretty easy and straightforward.

We did the most part in about two weeks or less. Some of the delays must have been from our end because of a few requirements. We had the production site and the DR site, and it took about two weeks. After the arrival of the infrastructure, we did the entire project in about six weeks. The setup of the storage took about two weeks.

For its maintenance, we have a team of three system administrators who also act as storage admins.

I believe we have seen an ROI. It took us about eight months to see a return on investment. The way I gauge it is that the ROI started coming in when the storage gave us what our previous capability couldn't in terms of:

• The ability to do more transactions
• The ability to see the effects of things like compression and duplication
• The ability to create and extensively use the storage to create multiple environments as desired

All of these pretty much started coming in when our data footprint increased and our transaction volume also increased.

Its price is competitive, but they need to have a different price for West Africa. 

They can do better with the price point to allow us to scale even more. We wanted to migrate our entire storage infrastructure to PowerMax, which would require us to buy more capacity, and from the price point, it didn't attract us.

We reviewed a few other solutions. NetApp was one of them. What made us go with Dell was a combination of the offering that we saw and the price point at which that was being offered to us by Dell. So, the combination of the offering in terms of the storage features and the fact that Dell offered us competitive pricing at that point were the main reasons.

At the time we were choosing this product, they and a few others were the only ones boasting of having a true NVMe experience. At that point, they had also introduced the SCM into the mix that lowered the platinum latency to about less than 0.04 milliseconds. Those were the things that really attracted us to this storage solution.

I would advise others to go for it. It is highly recommended for storage for enterprise-level and mission-critical IT workloads. It has fully met the expectations based on what is available in the market and from its competitors. They can do better with the price point to allow us to scale even more, but in general, the solution meets our expectations because one of our goals was to achieve a fine balance between the performance and the cost, and it seems we've been able to get that with PowerMax.

It has not enabled us to consolidate open systems, mainframe, IBM i, block and file, or virtualized data with cloud-connected storage because we've not had use cases for these. Our use case has mainly been traditional in terms of:

• Having data or raw disk groups allocated to all core databases.
• Using the disk for virtualizing VMs for creating virtual machines. We are allocating storage to a physical host that we virtualize with VMware to be able to create a virtual context. 

In terms of the built-in QoS capabilities for providing workload congestion protection, I would give it a 4.5 out of a five. The 0.5 point is because sometimes we see, even from the dashboard, that the defined SLAs are violated. It is only for brief moments, and it could be because of any reason, but for the most part, the QoS service works. 

We have not used its CloudIQ features. That was one of the things that actually attracted us to it, but we didn't get to deploy it. If we review the notes again and find that we aren't exhausting what's at our disposal, we'll take it up again. Because of remote work and the sheer fact that the platform has been pretty stable without any issues, the administrators are comfortable with what they can get periodically, so they're not really bothered with checking on the mobile or checking the storage so often.

We deployed SRDF but didn't utilize it fully. We use it for some of the use cases that have better tolerance for any latency issues. We also did the setup for MetroDR but didn't utilize it fully. It is because there is a bit of doubt around the infrastructure that we have in our country. So, MetroDR has not affected our storage and network bandwidth requirements because it has not been aggressively used.

I would rate Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe a nine out of 10.