Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users
Jan Cipra - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a retailer with 11-50 employees
Real User
Sep 4, 2023
An enterprise storage designed for bigger customers that require resilient and powerful storage solutions
Pros and Cons
  • "I have been highly satisfied with the resiliency and scalability of the solution."
  • "I believe it would be of great benefit to work on the customization of the pricing structure for different enterprises and their specific needs."

What is our primary use case?

Dell PowerMax NVMe is an enterprise storage designed for bigger customers that require resilient and powerful storage solutions. It ensures seamless management of large database workloads that need high performance and low latency in data handling and responsiveness.

What is most valuable?

I have been highly satisfied with the resiliency and scalability of the solution.

What needs improvement?

It is more expensive compared to midrange storage options.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with Dell PowerMax NVMe for the last four years. 

Buyer's Guide
Dell PowerMax
January 2026
Learn what your peers think about Dell PowerMax. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I am highly satisfied with the stability of the solution. I would rate it ten out of ten.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It allows great flexibility regarding scaling options to adapt to evolving storage needs, ensuring organizations can meet their growing data demands without major disruptions. I would rate it ten out of ten. 

How are customer service and support?

We are overall satisfied with the customer service provided by their support team. I would rate it eight out of ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup can be somewhat complex as it requires specialized knowledge. I would rate it seven out of ten. 

What about the implementation team?

The basic deployment can be done in one day, as it easily integrates with existing Dell EMC storage platforms and software. Usually, it will require following certain steps regarding the configuration and installment in the data center of the customer, connecting the storage to the infrastructure, and initializing it.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The cost of the solution is quite noticeable, but it provides a good fit regarding the price of the hardware and all of the required licenses. We are fairly satisfied with it as we didn't have any need for additional subscriptions and licenses.

What other advice do I have?

I would suggest thoroughly evaluating all of the benefits of Dell PowerMax NVMe and checking if it provides good value for the money because it might not be feasible for organizations with budget constraints. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Integrator
PeerSpot user
GehadSaid - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Presales Solutions Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
May 23, 2023
Small Business suitability and offers a price-sensitive environment
Pros and Cons
  • "It is a very stable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten."
  • "There is room for improvement in terms of integration with various service providers for public clouds."

What is our primary use case?

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. 

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

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.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and support?

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.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Dell PowerMax
January 2026
Learn what your peers think about Dell PowerMax. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Director - Products & Solutions at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 20
Jan 31, 2023
Good operability and easy scalability but unfortunately quite expensive
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution has good operability and easy scalability."
  • "The solution is quite expensive."

What is our primary use case?

We are using this solution as our main storage. We use it with VMware, as well as our databases. We are customers of Dell and I'm a team lead for network and infrastructure. 

What is most valuable?

I like the operability and easy scalability of this product. It's also easy to integrate with all of our systems. It has high speed and a good name in the market. The accounting is good, easy, be accessible. 

What needs improvement?

The solution is quite expensive and I believe Dell should examine their prices because they are currently very, very high.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for two years. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's very easy to scale this product. 

How are customer service and support?

The technical support is good, whenever there's an issue they figured out the problem and repaired the faulty part.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is easy; our deployment took a few days. Dell carried out the deployment for us. We have around 2,000 users in the company. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The cost depends on the capacity that you're using so every use case will have a different price. 

What other advice do I have?

It's important to think about your workloads and define them. All right. I'd also recommend comparing prices, both within and outside Dell. 

Feature-wise the solution is perfect but because of the price, I rate this solution seven out of 10.  

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
it_user1256415 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Private Cloud Solutions at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Jan 3, 2022
Simplified storage provisioning for us, enabling us to assign any volumes in two to three minutes
Pros and Cons
  • "The SRDF site-to-site replication for the volumes is the most important feature for us. That enables us to do site recovery and replication for our VMware infrastructure."
  • "There is also room for improvement in the PowerMax architecture and hardware itself. They should design the PowerMax on the basis of PCIe 4.0. I would like to see the possibility of an NVMe drive that operates on PCIe 4.0 and not PCIe 3.0."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use case for PowerMax is hosting our VMware environment with VMware SRM hosted on and connected to both. The PowerMax does the SRDF replication for VMware SRM, and some of the workload on it is for the physical environment that consists of Unix, AIX, and Sun Solaris. In addition to that, we have physical Windows and Linux servers as well. We have 1,200-plus virtual machines hosted on PowerMax.

We have two PowerMax 8000s, each deployed at a different site. The capacity of the PowerMax at the primary site is 500 terabytes, and approximately 200 terabytes at the DR site.

How has it helped my organization?

We are coming from the VMAX environment where the storage provisioning was a bit complex. We had to create volumes manually from the command line. But with the introduction of the PowerMax, it's a piece of cake for us. We can assign whatever volumes we want in two to three minutes. Storage provisioning has become very simple for us and is a real improvement.

What is most valuable?

The SRDF site-to-site replication for the volumes is the most important feature for us. That enables us to do site recovery and replication for our VMware infrastructure.

Along with that, the NVMe response time is very good. We used to have a VMAX 20K but we have just upgraded, and moved two or three generations ahead to PowerMax, and the response time is great. Because we are coming from a hybrid storage scenario, the performance of NVMe is a huge upgrade for us. The 0.4 millisecond response time means our application works great and we are seeing huge performance improvements in our VMware and physical environments.

Regarding data security, EMC has introduced CloudIQ solution with the PowerMax environment, and that enables live monitoring of the telemetry and security data array of the PowerMax. CloudIQ also has a feature called Cybersecurity. That monitors for security vulnerabilities or security events that are occurring on the array itself. That feature is very helpful. We have been able to do some vulnerability assessment tests on the array, which have helped us to resolve issues regarding data security and security vulnerabilities. We are not using the encryption feature of the PowerMax, because we didn't order the PowerMax configuration for it.

CloudIQ helps the environment and lets us manage the respective connected environments. A good feature in CloudIQ is the health score of each connected infrastructure. It gives you timely alerts and informs you when a health issue is occurring on the arrays and needs to be fixed. Those reports and health notices are also sent to Dell EMC support, which proactively monitors all the infrastructure and they will open service requests themselves.

In terms of efficiency, the compression we are currently receiving is 4.2x, which is very good efficiency. We are storing 435 terabytes of data in just 90 TB. In addition to what I mentioned about the NVMe performance, which is very good, we were achieving 150k IOPS on the VMAX, but on the PowerMax the same workload is hitting 300k-plus IOPS. That is sufficient for the workload and means the application is performing as required, according to the SLAs as defined on the PowerMax.

When it comes to workload congestion protection, we have not faced any congestion yet in our environment. We have some spikes on Friday evenings, but they are being handled by PowerMax dutifully. It can beautifully handle up to 400k IOPS, even though it is only designed for 300k IOPS. That is another illustration of its good performance.

What needs improvement?

The CloudIQ features still need to be improved because CloudIQdoes not support PowerProtect DD capacity, although it is working well overall.

Their mobile app also still needs improvement. 

In addition, the web GUI is good and shows all the related reports, but I would like to see more granularity in the reports, and reporting on CloudIQ should be done in the web GUI interface.

There is also room for improvement in the PowerMax architecture and hardware itself. They should design the PowerMax on the basis of PCIe 4.0. I would like to see the possibility of an NVMe drive that operates on PCIe 4.0 and not PCIe 3.0. The design could be very much better if they did some R&D and introduced a version based on PCIe 4.0.

For how long have I used the solution?

I manage the IT infrastructure of a telco company in Pakistan. I look after the servers and storage infrastructure and I've been with the company for the last eight years. Recently, we have deployed PowerMax, PowerProtect DD and PowerScale Isilon, with the help of Dell EMC and their partners.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

In terms of availability, Dell EMC claims PowerMax will give you six nines. We have not faced a single issue in the last six months with PowerMax. The storage has been very stable for us and it's performing well. It's giving us the right amount of uptime and availability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The NVMe scale-out capabilities were a factor we had in mind when we were evaluating the PowerMax against competitors, including IBM and Huawei. The scale-out capabilities are very important. We have 4 TB of cache with four directors right now, and we can add capacity in the future. If that capacity is met and we need to add more engines for our workload, we can do that very easily.

We are not currently using the NVMe SCM storage tier feature, but that is in the pipeline. If there is a high-demand workload in the future, we will consider the SCM storage.

How are customer service and support?

Dell EMC's support for PowerMax has worked great for us. If we have to open a severity-one, we call their support line. Other than that, the support portal works great. If we have to open a severity-two, or they open a service request with the proper severity, the infrastructure and storage support are very good. They will escalate an issue to the next level when required, as well.

There is some margin for improvement in that they should develop an application for support where you could see support tickets and escalate them if you want.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

I was involved from the initial design to the product evaluation from different vendors, and I was involved in the whole migration project through to its conclusion.

Dell EMC dedicated project managers and members of its professional services team to handle all of our migration from VMAX to the PowerMax without any hassle. And all of our data was successfully migrated within 1.5 months. It was a very good experience for us. There was no downtime and it was a totally non-disruptive migration for VMware, AIX, Windows, and Linux. Only some of the Solaris environment experienced a disruption because we had to reboot the servers. The rest of the migration was non-disruptive and the deployment was very good for us.

For maintenance and admin of the solution, two people report to me. They manage the PowerMax series along with me as the team lead. On the user side, there are different stakeholders. We provision storage to them and then they map the storage to various OSs for VMware, Linux, Solaris, AIX, and Windows. That team is a bit larger and has separate departments, with approximately 25 to 30 people.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated PowerMax against IBM FlashSystem 9200R and against the Huawei Dorado V6. At that time, Huawei did not have the VMware certification due to US policies and enforcement, but Dorado now has VMware certification. That's why we rated the PowerMax highest.

What other advice do I have?

The solution is very stable and performs well. If you are doing research, look at the architecture of all the available vendors. Evaluate every storage solution with respect to architecture, the NVMe version they are using, and the hardware which they are using.

Out of 10, I would give PowerMax a nine. It has worked very well for us.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Senior Solution Architect at a media company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Jun 9, 2021
CloudIQ ensures that all our arrays are properly communicating so we can see performance and storage capacities
Pros and Cons
  • "There is no management overhead involved in optimizing performance. It does it so well on its own. We don't have to manage much at all. It really is like a set it and forget it solution. My storage engineers love the system. It is a lot less work than our previous systems, which weren't bad by any means. There is not nearly as much management as before. So, we are saving dozens of hours per month for our storage team, and that is a real cost in our business."
  • "Support of the product can be slow and an administrative challenge: planning, scheduling, and overseeing data center access for a Dell EMC rep. One improvement could be to enable a self-maintenance option. The requirements that we go through to get Dell EMC onsite to replace failed drives, power supplies, and other small redundant parts can be unnecessarily complex. If simplified, they could send us the parts, then we could replace them much faster, more easily, and truly within the SLA parameters."

What is our primary use case?

We are a very large customer of Dell EMC. We have several different deployments or installations. The biggest use case is probably a multi-tenant or shared environment where we provide many petabytes of storage for multiple customers who utilize that same infrastructure. We are a managed services provider in the cloud sector so we have to deliver high performance storage for thousands of customers who have to be up all the time.

There are a lot of different use cases, in general: Having large quantities of storage available that is always available, because of this uptime is important as is performance. As a service provider, we deliver storage on demand for our customers. This is important because we can adjust storage needs on a per customer basis. Whether it be increases or decreases in storage, this platform allows us to do that very easily.

We are using the latest release.

How has it helped my organization?

As a service provider, we have to deliver the best possible service that is backed by SLAs. The NVMe performance is fantastic for our customers and the features of the PowerMax are fantastic. We have seen improvements in performance, which means less customer support tickets. The ease of management frees up resources for our storage teams so they can focus on other problems with other platforms, etc. This is such a self-sufficient beast of a platform that it has really freed up a lot of time so they can focus on other stuff besides storage.

There is no management overhead involved in optimizing performance. It does it so well on its own. We don't have to manage much at all. It really is like a set it and forget it solution. My storage engineers love the system. It is a lot less work than our previous systems, which weren't bad by any means. There is not nearly as much management as before. So, we are saving dozens of hours per month for our storage team, and that is a real cost in our business.

There are different ways to look at security and availability. We take advantage of array level encryption, but that is a behind-the-scenes thing. We tend to focus on the availability part, because high uptime and performance are important to us. In regards to data security and availability, the data is secure if it is encrypted. The availability means that it is always up.  We have very good opinions of the security features in both single-tenant and multi-tenant deployed to the security. 

There is also the security concept regarding access to data. What we are seeing is that the PowerMax is so consistently dependable that it gives us a very solid comfort level in terms of level of trust. There is data security and protection, keeping your data from the bad guys. On the other hand, there is security knowing that your data is always available. PowerMax provides both of those.

What is most valuable?

We use the solution's CloudIQ features for what we call fleet management. We manage hundreds of devices. We use this to make sure that all our arrays are properly communicating so we can see performance, storage capacities, etc. We can also generate reports on usage and performance. Our customers with dedicated solutions rely on CloudIQ for reports, but we also have a lot of homegrown internal tools which give us the same features so we don't use it as much as our customers, but we use it occasionally.

CloudIQ is definitely helpful for our customers who use it, but our teams are using internal tools that we've trusted for years. CloudIQ is very helpful for helping to manage storage for customers who need the tools but don't have their own.

In regards to efficiency and performance, we don't have escalations to the vendor at all because it works so well. These devices are a beast. Historically, before the PowerMax came out, we would sometimes experience storage performance bottlenecks because there were a lot of customers in the shared or multi-tenant environment. So, we have a lot of customers requesting a lot of data. We do things at an enterprise-level at scale. Therefore, we would see performance bottlenecks. The efficiency of the system has now just proven that it works phenomenally. It can allocate resources to different storage tiers, like a Gold, Silver, or Bronze tier. If Gold is busy, it can go and request resources from the Silver or Bronze layer as we have defined them. We no longer see performance issues because the system just runs really well and handles a lot of scaling in both directions. 

There is an underlying QoS-type functionality behind-the-scenes where we are providing storage with an SLA based on tiers (Gold, Silver, or Bronze tiers). For example, if the Gold tier does not hit its minimum required performance, the system will kick into a lesser quality of service. It will reach out to the other storage tiers and consume more bandwidth, if needed. However, in our experience, the system works so well that we don't actually have to use that feature. On the very rare occasions that we need to, we just go click a button in the background. The system works so well that we don't actually have to use the QoS capabilities.

It works great. We don't ever have to escalate to the vendor. PowerMax is really a game changer for us. Historically, we would have bottlenecks on older, spinning disk gear, but this NVMe technology is really solid. Now, it works phenomenally. Therefore, storage is not a problem for us. The performance that we are experiencing changes the customer's conversation from talking about I/O to response times or latency. We used to have to worry about disk and how quickly could your data go in and out. Now, things are so dang fast that we just want to know how quickly we can connect to it, so the latency is pretty cool. We don't have any issues with performance efficiency at all.

What needs improvement?

The improvements made to the product line over the generations has made PowerMax a gem. Nothing being perfect, the improvements that come to mind would not be specific to the physical product, but instead on the support and management side.

Support of the product can be slow and an administrative challenge: planning, scheduling, and overseeing data center access for a Dell EMC rep. One improvement could be to enable a self-maintenance option. The requirements that we go through to get Dell EMC onsite to replace failed drives, power supplies, and other small redundant parts can be unnecessarily complex. If simplified, they could send us the parts, then we could replace them much faster, more easily, and truly within the SLA parameters.

We have had performance/availability issues in the past with the management server/application, Unisphere. Upgrades to the platform could also be difficult and even fail. However, the most recent version released last month had been the first in a long time that was successful. Therefore, we are hopeful those past software issues have been addressed.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using the solution since it rolled out, along with the previous hardware iterations prior to NVMe.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

PowerMax is an absolute must have - 100%. At Rackspace, we have had PowerMax since its initial launch. Prior to PowerMax, we had the VMAX3. We also had VMAX2s. We even started with the original VMAX (VMAX1). All told, we have been working with the entire Dell EMC product line for 10 to 11 years now. In that time, we have literally had just six minutes of downtime over 11 years. 

There was one single outage across that entire 10- to 11-year window. While no one likes outages, the nice thing about this one was that when it was down, there was zero data loss and zero data corruption. This single six minute outage was caused because of a legitimate bug in the system. The system kind of invoked a safety mechanism to protect data, but itself glitched. It immediately recovered, restored, booted back up, and picked up right where it left off. This happened in the middle of the day. Very few customers even noticed. This has been it for more than 10 years of service across hundreds of devices supporting double-digit quantities of petabytes of storage, which is pretty impressive. Based on our experience, Dell EMC could very easily offer a 100% uptime guarantee on an annual basis. It is that good of a system.

Based on the feedback from our engineers, the system could not be more stable than it is. It is incredibly stable and very dependable. This is Dell EMC’s flagship product line. It has been a very stable product for many years and easily achieves the five nines of uptime that they guarantee. Outside of the normal hardware failure here and there, we have only encountered a couple bugs that had effects on attached hosts which were very rapidly resolved by Dell EMC’s engineering teams with software or firmware patches. The only significant (downtime) event we have ever encountered was on a previous generation unit, where Dell EMC’s engineering team responded and resolved the issue very swiftly by identifying the bug and immediately writing a patch to prevent future occurrences.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The system scales as far as you want to take it.

In a large shared infrastructure environment where we are regularly adding storage or taking storage down as our customers need change, this is hundreds of hours of time every quarter. Now, with this new technology, it is faster and more efficient. It gets the work done quickly, which is less time that my storage engineers have to worry about working. This applies for adding new storage as well as expanding an existing storage for our customers. Now, the customer says, "I need 1,000 GB." We say, "PowerMax, give me a 1,000 GB." Then, it is done. If the customer says, "Wait, I need 2,000." We can scale that up without any of the busy work on the back-end that we had to do with previous systems. The PowerMax system is getting our storage team out of the business of having to manage these micro-interactions while letting the team focus on storage maintenance and management. 

We have dozens of storage engineers on our team and thousands of customers who use the solution as part of our service. Because we are a service company, we deliver the best technology home for applications and data. Our customers are eCommerce (banks, medical, and retailers). We service businesses of all sizes and every vertical who are using the storage service that we deliver for them. We have a very competent, modest-sized team managing tens of petabytes for thousands of customers very easily.

We hope to increase usage in the future. When we get more customers, they buy more storage.

How are customer service and technical support?

Our support teams work with the actual Dell EMC support team. We are not engaging Dell EMC tech support a whole lot, unless we are escalating a serious bug issue.

We regularly meet with the Dell EMC product teams. They are getting our feedback constantly. They are asking us questions or being proactive on things that we have noticed, whether it's feature requests or bugs that we find. We have a clear communication path with Dell EMC.

Our storage team is very familiar with the trend analysis tool system, monitoring management tools, etc. In fact, our storage team regularly meets with the CloudIQ developer team every quarter or two to go over feature sets and give them feedback on our use cases. The CloudIQ team actually relies on Rackspace to provide them some input on the product, and as far as fleet management goes, to see what we have done. We have done some beta testing for them and had some sneak peaks on new features. We have a really tight relationship with Dell EMC, which we have had for a couple of decades now. So, we are definitely influencing the CloudIQ feature set and helping the team out the best we can.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Here is a nice use case in regards to storage provisioning. In other words, how do we deploy storage for customers? At Rackspace, we are providing a large shared infrastructure environment where we are adding storage or taking it down constantly for customers. We are seeing savings of hundreds of hours of time per a given fiscal quarter (three months). Before NVMe and these versions came out, we had to do a lot of storage work manually to make changes for our customers. We would deal with a storage volume and the subcomponents below that storage volume. So, we create slivers of a volume, then we package those together to make a single volume and present that to the customer's hosts.

By provisioning within the PowerMax systems, we no longer have to go and create individual pieces, and say, "I need all the things needed for 1,000 GB LUN." Now, they can just go there, and say, "I need  1,000 GB. Give it to me." There is no provisioning subwork or extra work needed. It is just there. If I say I'm done with it, I can turn it off. If I want to go from 1,000 to 500. It just happens. A lot of the former busy work that was required for everyday storage support in that location goes away. It literally saves us hundreds of hours per quarter.

How was the initial setup?

Our team knows Dell EMC really well. I don't think they had any issues with the initial setup.

Follow the manufacturer's instructions once you get it deployed. In many ways, it is a set it and forget it technology.

What about the implementation team?

We work hand in hand with Dell EMC. The implementation strategy is just providing the best possible quality of storage equipment with the features that our customers need. The features that they need constantly change so we need the ability to adapt. Our implementation strategy is to work with a platform that is dependable and flexible, and we have been successful with Dell EMC.

What was our ROI?

You can save provisioning time and focus on mission-critical issues as well as problem solving. It is really helpful for businesses of all sizes.

The labor savings and support have been significant. If we're talking 100 hours of labor every three months, that is 100 hours of a database engineer costs. There are performance latency numbers as well as costs associated with recovering data that gets lost, and this system doesn't lose data. You can look at numbers that go around the cost of downtime, if data is not available. This system doesn't go down. Everyone's ROI is going to be unique, but the dependability and performance of the system combined with its ease of operation will definitely save businesses of all sizes money.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We have been with Dell EMC since the beginning of business. We adopted them from a server perspective, then we adopted their storage lines. 

What other advice do I have?

The solution keeps getting better. When you go with trusted vendors and time tested technology, things are going to go well for you.

I would rate this solution as 10 out of 10.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
Joerg Utesch - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Director at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
Reseller
Oct 25, 2023
Offers performance, serviceability and high availability
Pros and Cons
  • "I would rate my experience with the initial setup a nine out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy."
  • "Dell needs to offer more midrange storage options with enterprise-class features similar to the PowerMAX."

What is our primary use case?

It's mainly when it's driven to performance and high availability, that's the main two use cases that we actually address with the systems. 

What is most valuable?

The main feature that we are looking into for some storage is the DDoS features as well as transparent failover and failback in terms of high availability. That's the main topic that we're dealing with with these systems, but at our customer sites.

Besides reliability and so on and serviceability also in different countries.

What needs improvement?

The new versions, like the Power Store, which is coming up, are mainly in the midrange perspective. Because we have a lot of customers from the KMA, which means that we have, like, they typically buy Enterprise-class features with midrange storage, basically, and we don't have typical sizes like the PowerMAX from the solutions, we have either Pure for the higher customers or we have different systems like VNX and Unity and so on from the Dell EMC side.

Dell needs to offer more midrange storage options with enterprise-class features similar to the PowerMAX.

Additionally, the NVMe benchmark could include more features, such as built-in transparent failover.

For how long have I used the solution?

We are a Dell partner, and we are a pure professional partner, an elite partner as well. 

So, we have been working with this solution for more than 12 years.

We sell the systems and we have been selling them for 10 years now. It depends on whether we sell new systems to our customers or upgrade them. We're basically looking into past solutions that still are ongoing and running, but mainly when we go to new solutions, then it's the latest version that the customers actually can have.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. It is suitable for medium and enterprise-level businesses. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We're dealing with Dell Storage, which we sell to our customers.

How was the initial setup?

I would rate my experience with the initial setup a nine out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy. 

The deployment time depends on whether you have to do the migration as well, but it's hours to days max.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.

It is quite expensive. 

What other advice do I have?

When it comes to Dell, we prefer to go for Pure Storage, which is more, in our terms, more reliable and simple to use for our customers. 

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Reseller
PeerSpot user
Senior Manager - SBR Technical Services at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
Aug 25, 2023
Has good customer support but needs to increase storage and improve scalability
Pros and Cons
  • "Dell PowerMax NVMe's tech support is good."
  • "Dell PowerMax NVMe needs to increase storage and improve scalability."

What needs improvement?

Dell PowerMax NVMe needs to increase storage and improve scalability. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the product for a couple of months. 

How are customer service and support?

Dell PowerMax NVMe's tech support is good. 

How was the initial setup?

We can complete Dell PowerMax NVMe's deployment in a week. 

What other advice do I have?

I rate the product an eight out of ten. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Implementer
PeerSpot user
Rami Jadallah - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Center Solution Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Top 10Leaderboard
Aug 9, 2023
Offers outstanding high availability and stability for telecom company's critical system
Pros and Cons
  • "The high availability that other systems don't have. In other systems, there is an owner in the storage processes. But for PowerMAX, there is no owner. All the process storage is passed to all nodes without ownership. So, there is no response feature in the storage in PowerMax. In the other systems, there is a response, which is a very nice feature. No systems have such a feature."
  • "The initial setup could be easier."

What is our primary use case?

Our customers are using it for telecom.

What is most valuable?

The high availability that other systems don't have. In other systems, there is an owner in the storage processes. But for PowerMAX, there is no owner. All the process storage is passed to all nodes without ownership. So, there is no response feature in the storage in PowerMax. In the other systems, there is a response, which is a very nice feature. No systems have such a feature.

What needs improvement?

The initial setup could be easier.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with the solution since the last year. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The PowerMax solution has been very stable, in my experience. I have been using it for four to ten years and have only had two issues related to internal storage processes. One was a planned maintenance issue, and the other was a CBU failure. Both issues were quickly resolved with no data loss. Once again, it's a very nice feature. You can go with the upgrade without storage records. So it will not affect the production servers.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The product is scalable. 

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is not difficult. But it's not easy to have access to this material. I'm having a problem right now in this implementation in order to find the procedure generator in order to initialize the system. It's not updated on the website. So, sometimes you suffer from getting the material of the software. You need to have a discussion with the support and the way the account team is in order to provide you with such material.

The deployment thing is different from customer to customer. It depends upon the requirements. But it's fairly easy to deploy. The deployment, once initiated, is easy. There is no problem related to that.

I would rate the deployment process of this solution a five out of ten.


What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing is competitive. I would rate the pricing of the solution a six out of ten.

What other advice do I have?

For the customers, I advise them to test it and check the features because it has very nice features. It has some features that don’t exist in other solutions, such as the migration for the new PowerMax 2500 and 8500. There will be no more data migration except for licensing the nodes and the old nodes and installing the new nodes. It's a very nice feature, and in the future, there will be no technical attachments and no better migration. It will be very easy for them to implement the new solutions in addition to the other solutions. As for the partners, they have to make sure that they have their knowledge and enrich their knowledge in PowerMax because PowerMax is not an easy solution. They have to understand it to implement it easily.

I would rate PowerMax NVMe a nine out of ten. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Implementor
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Dell PowerMax Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: January 2026
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Dell PowerMax Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.