Dell PowerMax Reviews

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.

Our customers use the product for virtualization. They also use it for SAP deployments and bigger databases like PostgreSQL.

The solution provides an ease of handling backups and deployments. It provides a smart integration into the customer environment.

The product is very fast and reliable. It's certified for several scenarios. It is easy to handle. The UI is good.

The initial setup process is difficult.

I have been working with the product for five years.

It is the most stable system we know.

The tool is scalable until a certain point. There are only two versions available. Each has a limit, but the limit usually is never reached by our clients. Generally, the scalability is limited, but we have no problems with it.

The technical support is brilliant.

I have worked with NetApp before. Over the last three or four years, we only worked with Dell. Dell is easier to set up and handle. Dell is technically more advanced than NetApp. Dell’s support is better than NetApp's most of the time. The selling process of NetApp was a nightmare.

I rate the ease of setup a four out of ten. We have to prepare for the deployment and plan with the customer. We set up the hardware. We need Dell’s help with the software setup because we do not have access to all the tools that are needed for it.

The initial deployment and software work is done together. Afterward, we do the detailed configuration of the machine. We need one person from our organization and one from Dell for the deployment. The deployment can be done in one day. The maintenance is mostly easy. It’s done with the Copilot system. Dell checks the machine in advance and tells us whether the software version is available.

We get a return on our investment. The solution is not cheap, but it is worth buying. All our customers who bought the solution were satisfied and said they would buy it again.

The price is really high. It could be better. It is a high-end product.

We sell the solution, implement it, and support our customers. I recommend the solution to others. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

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. 

Our customers are using it for telecom.

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.

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

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.

The product is scalable. 

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.

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

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. 

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.

I work in data storage as a senior administrator.

I use multiple Dell EMC protection and storage tools like VMAX and PowerMax network for data domains. This product is an onsite data center and we have two PowerMax boxes. One of them is for our main site and the other is for our disaster recovery (DR) site.

We use PowerMax SRDF as our main application.

With the NVMe technology, performance in terms of IOPS has improved. Things are generally faster, although there are some bottlenecks with the integration of IBM servers.

The biggest way that PowerMax has improved the way our organization functions is through an increase in performance. The business of pharma is complex and the IOPS demand is huge. In the past, we used VMAX storage, and there was a big issue with the performance. Everybody complained about performance, servers, and storage, saying that they didn't have enough space. We tried many different solutions in an attempt to solve the performance issue.

For example, we tried reducing the data that was stored on disk, and we tried removing unused data. We turned to development and asked that some programs have fewer features. Finally, management made the decision to implement the PowerMax solution, and it solved the issue. As soon as we migrated from VMAX to PowerMax NVMe, the performance increased and everybody felt better.

The security is good. We enabled DSE for our encryption.

CloudIQ has made our lives better. It provides notifications, where you receive an email to let you know about your storage and your SAN. It is a powerful tool, although we have had to upgrade it a few times. Overall, it is a good monitoring tool that gives us a powerful and easy way to monitor our servers.

This product provides NVMe scale-out capabilities, which is important to us because our performance and IOPS have improved. The administrators have felt better about our environment since we implemented PowerMax. The storage is much better, overall.

We use the NVMe CSM and it's a very powerful feature that makes our business stronger. The performance is improved, making everything faster.

The reporting functionality is very good.

The UI is very easy to use. We can add volumes and manage them easily.

We have faced problems integrating IBM servers and adding volumes. The capacity on the IBM servers was not the same and we needed to perform a reclamation process on the DR site to fill the same capacity on the storage site.

The SRDF software has an issue when it's used in conjunction with VMware. In the past, we were using SRDF for VMware but in swapping from VM to DR site, VMs take a very long time. In some cases, where the data on the main size was many terabytes in size, it took a very long time to replicate to the DR site. Some VMs power on automatically, without entering any schedule. We had to migrate to RecoverPoint, which is another solution from Dell, but we still use SRDF for things that are not stored on VMware disks. When we enabled hardware compression, things improved.

PowerMax Storage needs improvement in the area of monitoring tools. It should have more functions and more complicated analysis options inside the monitoring tools. For example, if I need the tool to analyze monitoring logs from one month ago, it can't be done because it retains data only for the past two weeks.

I have been working with Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe for more than five years.

This solution is very stable.

This is a very scalable product. We have approximately 170 VMs running on the servers.

Between administrative users, including server administration and monitoring, we have approximately 20 users.

The support is very good.

They respond very quickly when we have issues and the responses are good. However, the first-level engineers take more time to investigate some problems. The first level of support could use some improvement. Specifically, they should be faster at solving problems. If there are critical issues then we need them to be solved quickly, and the first level simply takes too long to investigate.

Our management is satisfied with PowerMax. There had been a discussion with IBM about obtaining a storage solution from them but when we saw the power that PowerMax had, we opted for the next version of it instead.

PowerMax SRDF is a very powerful tool that will replicate data to a DR site. It is very fast and has many powerful features including data compression. 

This is a powerful solution for us and our performance is 100% better since we implemented it. Overall, for enterprise-level mission-critical workloads, the solution is very powerful.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.