Dell PowerMax Reviews

We are most interested in cloud utilization.

We would like to improve the delivery model. They don't have the delivery terms today. If they improve this area, everybody would be happy.

For the Romanian and Eastern European markets, we have long delivery times, and even if we have a solution, we don't have the products, and we don't know what to install. For the time being, manufacturers must enhance the delivery of all items while they have them.

If you go to Pure or you go to NetApp, they deliver in one month. If you go to Dell or HP, they will take up to six months for delivery. This is not a business model for today.

I have been working with Dell PowerMax NVMe for 10 years.

Dell PowerMax NVMe is a stable solution. The performance is good.

Dell PowerMax NVMe is a scalable solution.

It is suitable for enterprise customers.

They are now experiencing problems with Dell's specifications. They have a typical reporting period of five days and nine hours each day till Friday. 

Right now, on the enterprise side, they want 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It is not available in Romania, which is why you need to retain inventories or have some replacement components on hand to accomplish this type of integration with other vendors.

I am also working with HPE 3PAR. I am just looking for a place to get some 3PAR components. But nobody has it right now.

We are the HP Platinum partner in Romania, and we are now looking for a place to purchase documents from Europe.

Previously, we worked with Cisco, Lenovo, and Pure. The advantage was their delivery.

We don't an advantage. 

The consumer requests something that they do not have with the brand today. 

If it is storage, a server, or power, and we have it, they will purchase it. 

They do not wait for Dell, HP, or Cisco. It is the same for both. If you have Dell on hand, we will purchase it. If it's HP, they'll buy it. It. They don't care about the brand anymore.

The installation of Dell PowerMax NVMe was easy.

Deployment time depends on the customer's request since if you have a solution with a cluster or include VMware or a solution or disaster recovery, we can provide it in two days. But, in any case, it depends on the project and your relationship with the customer.

The price is on the market. It's not inexpensive, but it's available on the market.

The cost is determined by the solution. It's not the greatest option.

You built the solution and rely on the customer's requirements, on the budget since they know the price of the product, they know the service to the client and it's the same if it's HP, Dell, or Cisco. It is how the solution is created and implemented. 

Today, the client is asking for SLA and uptime for the critical months rather than the important months themselves. This is the most crucial. They don't care if it's from Dell, HP, or Cisco; they just care about this one.

I don't have any requirements. I am now really unhappy with the delivery, therefore I don't have any arguments or recommendations to make. 

If we receive the goods, everything will be okay. When we are working, we have something. We are now dissatisfied with our needs. Simply provide the delivery. It is more important now.

We are partners with Dell.

I would rate Dell PowerMax NVMe an eight out of ten.

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 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.

We are using it for core banking systems and virtualized enrollment. So, everything for this bank is on PowerMax, including its core banking system, which is running on Solaris, and all the relevant applications running on VMware.

You can use PowerMax for all workloads and consolidation. We have used it to scale thousands of VMs. This is Dell EMC's selling point. 

It is a good, resilient product.  

The good thing that we have found is the enhanced data savings. For example, in an XtremIO, we were seeing the space savings was 1:4 or 1:3. With PowerMax, I have seen 10:1 and 12:1. This is something that has really come out as a distinctive feature and is helping us a lot.

The Unisphere GUI has been enhanced. A lot of options have been added to the GUI. Though, if somebody is planning to buy PowerMax, they should also have some associated training with that.

We brought up this question to the implementation engineer. We were comparing use cases where a customer is using RecoverPoint, then goes to PowerMax. In our previous setup with XtremIO, we were using RecpverPoint and keeping snapshots for 30 days, every few seconds. With PowerMax, I requested this for every 15 minutes, keeping it for a week. The engineer's answer was, "There will be too many snapshots. It might slow down the system." This is specifically for the use cases where there is RecoverPoint. While PowerMax works with RecoverPoint, and you can use it, there should be some way where you can have even more snapshots and not to worry about performance and system cache.

We have been using PowerMax for less than a year. We just installed it recently.

From my experience, it is stable enough. For our current setup, it is too early to assess stability.

They support scalability. We can add more capacity when it is needed.

I always tell my customers that Dell EMC support is good. Specifically with enterprise storage, like PowerMax and VMAX, it is really good.

Positive

PowerMax was deployed as a replacement/tech refresh for our existing VNX.

We were using XtremIO before this. We have all of the features that were available there. Relatively, there is nothing new that we are using.

We had some challenges with our core banking system. There were performance issues, which was the reason we went to XtremIO All-Flash. NVME has really helped us here because anything less than XtremIO would have caused us issues. So, PowerMax is the best replacement or fit right now. In fact, we have seen that it has really improved the performance as well.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We are still in the implementation phase. 

The ease of administration is okay for me. However, for other team members and specifically our customers, who are not very familiar with it. It has increased provision time. Though, it is just a one-time activity. During implementation, we did the split properly. Therefore, there will not be challenges going forward. 

Initially, it took a lot of time to do the initial provisioning, specifically for the Dell EMC engineer who provisioned a couple of hosts. After that, we did all the provisioning, SRDF replication, snapshots, scripting, etc., and that took awhile. 

I am hoping that this is just one time. Going ahead, it should be simple to add volumes and not have to go through the cycle.

Implementation was mainly done by a local resource, because we are not a deployment partner. The resource connected to somebody remotely from a site in Egypt. We managed to deploy it in half a day for each site. The first time that we did the provisioning, it took time, but it was a relatively straightforward process.

We had some requirements, like SRM integration, where we needed some guidance. Dell EMC has suggested that we use CloudIQ, so we want to explore that option. However, we are not using it right now.

We have used VMAX in other places. It has helped because it has various options for data protection. I have worked on DMX3, DMX4, and VMAX 10K. I am a fan of VMAX because it is really good. There are various command line options that allow you to do a lot of things.

Most of the products are the same and have similar features. There could even be some which might be better. However, one thing that I always liked about Dell EMC is the support, which is really good. If there is an issue and you can get somebody to resolve it, that is the most important thing. Many products have the same features, e.g., snapshot, replication, and data compression, but the support from Dell EMC is one of the best.

It is a good enterprise-scale storage. I would rate it nine out of 10.

Generally, storage doesn't expose your data unless you have certain protocols. With PowerMax, it is too early to remark on data security because we just deployed it and migrated the data. We have not even done a proper drill or failover for data availability and data security. 

It is also too early to remark on workload congestion. Though, since we have been migrating the data, which is live data, I have seen the utilization and that is performing relatively better than our previous Dell EMC platform.

From a technical perspective, you should have some technical training associated with the deployment. That is the one aspect that is complicated. Apart from that, everything is simple. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I would like to see more security features and improvements in the platform's ease of management. Sometimes, it isn't straightforward to understand, especially for new users.For example, if there are power issues and the system needs to be shut down, we need to connect with the support team and go through several steps. There are complications to powering down the system.

The backup features need enhancement. 

I have been using Dell PowerMax NVMe for three years.

The product is stable. I rate the stability as nine.

In our organization, three admin executives use the product. Regarding customers, there are many users since we provide municipal services. 

We haven't had much experience with technical support, but we did have some upgrades to the core system and firmware. The support team was very cooperative and responsive. We had some issues with timing, but the team was adaptable and worked to schedule maintenance events to suit our time zone.

We didn't face many challenges during setup, but the implementation team resolved some initial issues. We received some knowledge transfer, basic training, and orientation regarding the technology. Overall, the solution was successfully implemented.

Dell's team implemented the system; some products were configured and installed in our environment. We also received knowledge transfers from them. 

We used to use an HP storage solution. After we switched to PowerMax, performance significantly improved across the whole environment. About 95% of our services run on virtualized servers with Dell containers. With SAN storage, like PowerScan or Microsoft products, we saw multiple performance upgrades on the virtual machine side.

The lead application is the most valuable feature. The reduction of consumed space was significantly higher than with the previous solution.

NVMe technology gave the database servers a huge performance boost compared to the previous environment. Database admins were very happy with the improvement.

I rate it an eight. 

We use the solution of building systems and data warehouse management systems. 

Dell PowerMax NVMe has good scalability and performance. 

The solution does not use new versions of OS and patches. Its installation is also difficult. The solution is not as fast as other storage in the market. 

We have never had issues with data loss and vulnerabilities. 

You need three people to handle the deployment. 

Dell PowerMax NVMe's price is expensive. 

I rate the product a nine out of ten. 

We use the PowerMax 2000 and 8000 models as storage appliances for high-end mission-critical applications. 

PowerMax is a compact high-performance appliance. It is one of the best devices in terms of performance specs. It includes an NVMe All-Flash Array. 

PowerMax's software is highly stable, but we faced two hardware issues in one year. We had a failure of the storage director module, and the physical disk failed on another occasion. Dell EMC should improve its hardware quality.

I'm unsure if PowerMax is scalable because I haven't done any scalable activity with PowerMax so far. I haven't added any components. 

I rate Dell PowerMax support five out of 10. They didn't provide an adequate explanation and resolution when we had issues. 

Neutral

Setting up PowerMax is straightforward. It only takes about three or four hours if you have everything ready on site, like the local network, power supply, and connections. 

I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe nine out of 10. If you have large applications with a high volume of transactions, Dell PowerMax is the number one solution.

We currently use PowerMax NVMe for our file server and all our VMs. It is a SAN, so all of our storage or data sits on it. It is just a great storage appliance.

With the SCM memory, it has been set it and forget it. It is being used as a cache drive. There is very little configuration for us to do. We just know that it is working.

PowerMax NVMe's QoS capabilities give us a lot of visibility into taking a look at what could be a potential performance issue. However, because it is so fast, we haven't really noticed any slowdowns from the date of deployment even until today.

It is a very good storage appliance for enterprise-level, mission-critical IT workloads because of its high redundancy, parity drives. It gives us the ability to not worry about our data. Or, if something were to go wrong, e.g., a drive pops, then we have our mission-critical warranty. We get a drive the same day, then get it swapped by the next business day at the latest.

PowerMax NVMe has made it a lot easier to understand how much we are able to provision. It has made it a lot faster to provision new things. 90% of my time for provisioning has been reduced. Also, it has made it very easy to understand and see everything behind it versus the older heritage, where Dell EMC was very convoluted and hard to get working. Things that used to take an hour, probably now take five to 10 minutes.

• The cost of the entire solution
• Their dedupe rates
• Ease of use
• Simplicity

Data availability is very high. Data security is also very good. There are a lot of encryption methods available.

We use the solution’s NVMe SCM storage tier feature. There is almost no overhead or management time involved. It was kind of set it and forget it.

The visibility within the storage resource tools or understanding the utilization of the SCM memory have been pain points. We know they are being used, but it is hard to actually see them within the actual GUI.

Firmware updates are a bit painful because you have to involve their support, as opposed to having the ability to do it yourself. This is probably for the best because you don't want something to go sideways while being the only person working on this and not having external support for it.

We have been using the physical appliance for 2.5 years.

It is a very robust, stable machine. We have had no worries whatsoever.

At this time, scalability is not applicable. I understand it is very easy to scale up. You just add on the drive shelf, then connect it in. That is really it. Now, you have all these drives available to you.

It is being used every single minute of every single day. The IOPs, the throughput data, is about 525 megabytes per second. So, it is actively being used at all times of day.

As time goes on, the usage of it will increase. That is just the nature of it being our primary storage array.

The technical support was very good. There have been no real issues. Any questions we have had, they were able to answer and assist with. There have been no problems whatsoever.

Because it is NVMe, it is extremely fast. It is a lot faster than our old SAN. It is hard to compare it to others in the market, only because we have never owned other products within the same generation. We switched to PowerMax NVMe because of aging hardware.

Prior, we were using a regular 7200 RPM disk. As a result, it was extremely slow. The upgrade to NVMe has been much appreciated by the company. Things that used to take four to five hours are now taking 15 minutes, if that.

It was a pretty complex process in the beginning: migrating data, verifying everything is good to go, standing up our volumes, and things of that nature. Once everything got going, it was a lot easier to understand and manage.

Deployment took about two weeks’ time, not including transfer times. With transfer times, it was closer to a month.

We set up our PowerMax, attached the source to VMware, and then migrated all of our VMs off of our old storage array into the new one. Once we verified everything was good, we turned off the old storage array and went from there.

We did it through Dell EMC ProDeploy, which is their professional services for this type of work. Our experience with them was very good. There were a couple of hiccups here and there, but it was more related to what was shipped to us, opposed to an actual hiccup with the implementation process.

We have seen an ROI based on time saved by being able to use a faster storage array versus our really slow, old one.

In terms of price-performance, it beat out other competitors when we were taking a look and comparing it to the market. That was one of the biggest driving points for us.

We did look at HPE Nimble Storage as well as Pure Storage. Pure Storage was probably the biggest competitor. At the time, we just wanted something that was a little bit more tried and true versus a new player in the storage array game.

Pure Storage did offer a couple of very niche tools related to SAP. PowerMax NVMe just came in very aggressively with their pricing, and that ultimately won them the business. 

PowerMax NVMe is very energy intensive, in terms of electricity. You need to spec that out properly. Just because it can fit in the rack doesn't mean it will work by sitting in the rack. You will probably need additional power, specifically just for PowerMax NVMe.

It isn't important at this very specific moment that the solution provides NVMe scale out capabilities. However, it will be once we decide to add more drives into this and expand our storage.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10). There are definitely areas of improvement, but everything comes down to time and cost.