Dell PowerMax Reviews

The best feature is the protection - PowerMax NVMe is volume-based and replicates data, so it's very comfortable for us to use.

The GUI interface is very complicated and could be improved by streamlining the number of steps in the process, as the new storage UIs have done.

I've been using this solution for eight months.

PowerMax NVMe is stable.

This is a scalable solution.

I'm happy with Dell's technical support - we have a private support contact that ensures we get good support.

Positive

I would rate PowerMax NVMe six out of ten.

We have PowerMax 2000. It is for our clients. We have two PowerMax in our environment. One is in production, and another one is on the DR site. We have to replicate the data from production to that one.

It is important for our clients that PowerMax provides NVMe scale-out capabilities. They are also getting great performance as compared to the old storage array model. 

Provisioning is faster and immediate. We can do immediate allocation and configuration. As compared to the old storage array model where it used to take half an hour, in PowerMax, we can do it in 5 to 10 minutes. It doesn't take that much time, and there isn't much delay in the PowerMax array.

Our workload is reduced because we are not dealing with any issues. We are not facing many issues on the PowerMax side as compared with the previous one.

Based on our experience with VMAX, there isn't any hardware failure or something like that in PowerMax. Performance-wise also, everything is fine. We haven't faced any performance issues or any hardware failure. Its performance is great as compared to VMAX. Its I/O per second rate is higher than the old model.

We can use it block-wise, and we can also use it at the file level. It is good for any environment.

I would like to see more development in the cloud environment. It would be good if it comes in the cloud kind of setup. 

I have been using this solution for two and a half years.

It is very stable. It has very few failures. In the last two and a half years, there is only one failure that I have faced in PowerMax. That was because one of the ports went down. The port was replaced within two days or something like that by an EMC engineer. Hardware failure is very rare in PowerMax. Previously, in VMAX, multiple drives used to fail within a day itself. 

In our setup, we are just using less than one petabyte. In the PowerMax itself, we are using 130 or 150 TB. For scalability, it is the best option. We can directly connect the PowerMax array with the other storage array devices, such as a USB, without any performance issues.

We don't have much involvement in it. Whenever the customers need any help, they ask for some help from our side, and accordingly, we provide the help. They usually involve us only when they have any doubt. The entire configuration is done by EMC itself, so we are not a part of the implementation.

We don't have any involvement in the pricing. We are just from the backend support team for the PowerMax array. If any expansion is required, we will just inform the customer, and the customer directly contacts the EMC person. They discuss and finalize the dealings, and we are not involved in those dealings.

It is a good solution for any environment. You won't face any issues in terms of performance and stability. 

SRDF has helped to reduce storage costs, but I can't provide the numbers. We don't handle that aspect. We are from the support team, and for capacity, there is a separate team in our environment. That capacity team takes care of the capacity and does the daily basis and monthly basis kind of calculation. We are just supporting the existing environment, and we have to maintain its availability.

We have not been able to consolidate open systems, mainframe, IBM block, and file or virtualized data with cloud-connected storage using PowerMax. That's because currently in our environment, there isn't a separate cloud, and the cloud is not connected with this PowerMax.There is also no mainframe server. We have a separate storage array for IBM in our environment. Similarly, EMC is also separate.

We have not used PowerMax's NVMe SCM storage tier feature and PowerMax's built-in QoS capabilities for providing workload congestion protection. We have also not used PowerMax's Metro Smart DR, also known as MetroDR.

PowerMax would be useful for enterprise-level storage or mission-critical IT workloads, but in our environment, we only have the basic model, which is PowerMax 2000. As per my understanding, it will be good and useful for mission-critical applications.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. I am not giving it a 10 because day by day, technology is improving, and there might be another solution that is better than this. Even EMC might find another solution and introduce it.

We use it for our core banking data.

It has improved storage I/O for our big apps and restores. And the snapshot process and data compression are better.

We like the compression, dedupe, and I/O on the PowerMax. They are better than on the XtremIO.

Snapshots make it easy to deploy production, pre-production, and UAT environments. It is easy to snapshot and reverse snapshot to other environments, compared to other storage vendors.

In addition, we have a lot of users in our core system and the PowerMax performance is very good. The I/O performance is running fine; it's not an issue.

We would like more documentation, a guide to the features of the PowerMax. We needed to use the option to reclaim storage and we had to chat with the Dell EMC team.

We have been using Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe for around one year.

It is stable.

Because we have just started using it, we haven't scaled up yet.

We have opened cases with the Dell EMC team and we have chatted with them. They have provided good, fast support for us. But in some cases they did not explain the solution well.

Positive

We used XtremIO. We switched because we found many of the features and the functions are better on the PowerMax than they are on the XtremIO. An example would be the snapshot. When we would do snapshots on the XtremIO, we could delete a snapshot, even when we were mapping to the host. But with PowerMax, we cannot delete a snapshot when mapping to the host.

The setup was difficult because PowerMax has more functionality, but some of that functionality is still not clear to us.

Four people work with it on my team; all system admins.

PowerMax is a good storage solution for the banking sector. Choose it for your core banking system, because of the dedupe and compression, the I/O, and the high availability for your data.

We primarily use the solution for putting together solutions for our customers.

They provide up-to-date, leading-edge products that are constantly improving the technological provision of hardware and software for the customer.

The deduplication of the solution is excellent and the compression is quite helpful. These are the most useful aspects of the solution for us.

The initial setup is quite straightforward.

Technical support has been excellent.

The product would be better served if there was a slight reduction in price at the moment due to the marketplace. People haven't got as much money. If they could offer more of a discount, it would help their customer base out quite a bit. Even if it was just in the short term, it would make a big difference.

If the solution had more power-saving capabilities, it would be quite nice.

The solution could benefit from even more speed and increased redundancy and flexibility.

I've been using the solution for about one year. It hasn't been that long.

We do hope to increase usage in the future. All we just need to do is get more opportunities and as the marketplace opens up from COVID, we will be increasing our prospecting efforts.

Technical support is fantastic. they are quite knowledgeable and responsive. We've extremely happy with the level of support they provide.

The switching happens as the vendor, Dell EMC, brings out new products to supersede the old products. It's a natural evolution of things as products get better through significant R&D, and for us to follow that evolution.

For us, the initial setup is not overly complex. We've got very highly trained engineers and therefore it's no problem.

Demployment is still fairly standard. It hasn't really altered too much, so it's not gotten shorter or longer. In terms of the strategy, we have a standard scope of work document that we always employ when implementing new solutions.

The licensing costs are reasonable.

We're resellers.

We actually use the PowerStore 3000 and 1000 products.

I would definitely recommend this solution to other organizations. We've been very happy with it.

I would advise people to make sure that you introduce the features and benefits of NVMe and the power and speed and articulate that well to management or the customer.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. It's not perfect. It's evolving. However, it's almost perfect.

The primary use case is the database and high transactional use for block storage.

It simplifies things, as we are using higher availability systems. We have always had a 70:30 effective rule between vital critical applications and those systems which are not critical, important, and discretionary. The Symmetrix's line has always been the go-to for our vital, critical application types. 

We are also implementing storage virtualization with VPLEX, where it is giving us the ability to move the storage to the proper platform based on the operating characteristics needed by that platform.

Symmetrix has always been a high-end, high availability system where we have never had one go down. I have never known one to go down. It is just an operational-stable platform that we still have to manage and maintain. However, it's not like some of our lower-end systems, like on the CLARiiON side of it or the Unity systems, where we have to be careful what we put on them and what we do with them because of the loading of the systems. 

This is why we need to virtualize the storage element, so we can move things to the proper platform. We are going to find that we will have more systems going from the mid-range to the higher range, specifically because of the needs of the platform. Wherein before it was driving by someone determining cost for what they wanted to pay for the storage, which overloaded and created problems for the lower-end tiers, because they're pulling too many IOPS out of that tier.

The compression and deduplication are the most valuable features because of the cost savings.

There are glitches in the system at this point in time. I don't get the information that we've traditionally gotten, things like the power report that used to be standard for all EMC components across the board. Now, you can't get them. You get a little bit here in that report and a little bit in another report, but you never get the total amount in one report which gives you the equipment, its power utilization, maximum recharge, the interfaces for the power, and what are the requirements for the interfaces on the other end, so you can know exactly what has to be connected at that point.

So far, the scalability has been good. Normally, what we end up doing is putting in a base platform, then adding capacity. However, the capacity adds appears to vary 30 to 45 days on us being able from a time of request to a time we are able to implement, because we were using Cloud Flex. We had been on a utility model for almost six years with Dell EMC, who was one of the early adopters of that type of technology, and in the first three to four years, it saved us over $5 million in expense.

It's the whole thing of having to go out and buy a multibillion dollar array. It takes us so long to ramp up and be able to get on it, due to the lifecycle components and because of the storage virtualization side of it. It is just incredible how we can just roll in a new platform, transfer the workloads, and have it up and running in days, instead of months.

We live with technical support. We employed a platform called ViPR SRM, which I think they are redoing. It allows us to take a single pane of glass for an entire storage infrastructure. This gives us a window into what's going on and problem spots that we need to work on. However, there are always times when something is breaking and we have to work with tech support to get it up and running. There have been a few cases where tech support didn't work out well and other cases where they met the margin. 

Since the merging of EMC and Dell into Dell Technologies, there has been a hurdle that they've had to overcome, and they're not over it yet. It takes two to three times longer for things to get fixed than it did when they were separate companies. That is something that has to be fixed.

Since 2016, we have been buying all-flash components and the price has been trending downwards. What we are seeing in the new products, since we went from the VMAX3 to Power Max, is the price point still drops on the overall cost of the storage. This is what we're trying to do. We're trying to get more value to our internal customers by reducing the cost of usage.

Our performance requirements were response time and what IOPS we needed out of the platform. It's exceeding what we're asking out of it when we looked at the PowerMax which we have already deployed. We are getting typical response times in half a millisecond (or 500 microseconds) lower because the target was supposed to have been the Generation 3 with 300 microseconds. We were supposed to be able to get around 250 microseconds with the PowerMax 3000. I have seen some of that happen on monitoring side. It doesn't happen all the time, but for certain applications, it does achieve going down to the 250 to 300 microsecond range.

The migration from the VMAX arrays to PowerMax was done using our storage virtualization via VPLEX. It was just a matter of submitting the mobility jobs and keeping the queue full as long as it took to get that done. For the storage that was virtualized, that was done in a matter of days in transitioning from the old Generation 2 and Generation 3 to PowerMax.

On the Symmetrix's line, we are moving away from the VMAX2 and VMAX3 that we have and moving to the PowerMaxs 8000, as quickly as possible, because of the financial incentives. Also, the cost per gigabyte is reduced by at least a third, if not by a half overall, mostly because of the duplication.

Right now, we're doing a PoC with HPE 3PAR storage.

We currently have almost 100 percent Dell EMC storage technologies in play. We are looking at it as other vendors to see if they have comparable products, what we can use, and if there are very similar things to what we have.

I've even been to other classes for other vendors, like IBM. I have looked at IBM storage for various applications and come back to say that we are doing the best of class, so far, because what IBM recommended for the solutions does not exceed the current platforms that we current use for those storage solutions.

Our primary use case for Power Max is customer data. We host hundreds, if not thousands of applications, large and small, for hundreds of thousands of customers. It's the storage platform for our customers' online presence.

What's not on PowerMax? Because we have hundreds of thousands of customers running thousands and thousands of applications. From the small mom and pop shops running their mission-critical eCommerce site to the major Fortune 500 companies running every major database: Oracle, SQL, MySQL, Postgres, etc. We're running the big database engines, and the database is the holy grail for all online businesses. Therefore, major database applications are very important. Big eCommerce applications for very large brands are running on top of it, as well. We are running everything on it.

The role that data plays in Rackspace is two-fold because we are both a customer and a partner. As a service provider, we are monitoring millions of data points every hour for our customers. We are monitoring the health of their systems: the traditional IT monitoring, CPU, networking, storage, uptime, security, etc. We are gathering all that data and need systems where we can dump that data, then analyze it without fail, knowing that it will be there. PowerMax gives us the latency and capacity that we need at any scale for all the data that we can throw at it.

On the customer side, they are using us and our underlying PowerMax infrastructure for their mission-critical applications to do things with big data, dedupe, and other applications. Our customers are using us for the foundation of their big analytics applications.

There are a lot of ways that PowerMax is helping our organization function. From a storage admin standpoint, there is no longer a need to rely on the command line interface (CLI) to get data which is needed for performance monitoring and troubleshooting. When you use a CLI, you're actually requesting copies of data and impacting the performance of that production's data. With the REST API, we can do things, just ask for it, and there is the info. We are not impacting production systems.

PowerMax specifically is giving us incredible improvements in performance. Significantly decreased the latency, which is different than IOPS. I've been told by the team, "Don't focus on IOPS anymore, it's the latency. Not how fast is the data, but how quick is the data." So, we've seen great performance: Single millisecond type performance, which has been fantastic. 

Another huge benefit of the PowerMax has been the decreasing of our physical footprint. We recently did a consolidation where we went from 58 tiles down to 5. If we had used just the PowerMax, we could have gone from 58 tiles down to 2 tiles, which is huge space savings. If you have 56 newly available floor tiles on a raised floor data center, which you previously had to cool and provide power to, then now, not only are my costs going down, I now have more revenue opportunities because I have more space to put new customers.

My storage engineers are very happy with PowerMax. They are very pleased with the performance, decreased latency, and dependability. From the team, the RESTful API makes management so much easier for them versus the command line interface.

I would like them to continue improving the management tools and continue moving towards a RESTful API versus CLI. 

They should work with the storage engineers to better tweak the management tools to give them improved visibility into their data.

Stability has been fantastic on PowerMax.

Right now, we have zero concerns about scalability. It's running everything we throw at it, and we can't wait to get more.

Our relationship with Dell EMC is fantastic. We have very smart storage engineers, and they in turn work with Dell EMC's very smart storage engineers. We have zero complaints. We don't ever have a question that doesn't get answered.

As a major service provider, who has been working with Dell EMC for well over a decade, hosting mission-critical applications for important brands and businesses, along with some health institutions, where access to data is literally a life or death, we have to go with a system that we can trust without fail. PowerMax has been giving that to us.

One of the things that we learned right away about PowerMax during the setup is that regardless of your awareness of data type, structure, or compression, we starting seeing benefits immediately.

Rackspace is running a 1G, 2G, and 3G Dell EMC storage systems, then we added PowerMax into our array farm. So, we are migrating some data into the new PowerMaxs, and it has been smooth as silk.

I'm going to give PowerMax a ten out of ten just for the savings that I've heard about. From reclaiming data center space which is so tightly constrained these days, it will pay for itself in a short amount of time, which is fantastic. Anything we can do to get more out of our current physical data center space helps us a ton, and PowerMax has helped enable that.

PowerMax is giving us significant improvements in Oracle and VMware. We are seeing between four to eight times improvements in latency, which is serious numbers. 

Look at Dell EMC storage solutions. They have been around for a long time and are time-tested. The R&D department is constantly improving its offerings with better features, better performance, great return on investment for your purchases, and amazing support. Dell EMC bends over backwards to help its partners and customers get what they need out of this stuff. It's time-tested and trusted.

PowerMax gives our storage engineers everything they need to do their jobs successfully.

We use the solution for managing workloads like SQL, online streaming, and middleware. 

The tool is a fast-performing asset. It can perform millions of transactions within a second. I like the tool's architecture as well. 

The tool is costly compared to other similar products. The product's pricing needs to be improved. I would like the product to include the replication feature in its future releases. 

I have been working with the tool for two to three years. 

The product is one of the most stable solution that we have ever worked on. 

The tool is scalable up to eight engines. 

The tool's support is good but they can do better. 

The product's setup is managed by Dell. The implementation process is a quick one and takes about a week to complete. The product is also easy to maintain since there are alerts and templates. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. If you are looking to use the product, go for it. It will be beneficial for you in terms of daily operations and pricing. 

We use this solution to consolidate high-performing workloads. The solution houses all of our VM workloads, as well as our EMR, which supports over 20,000 users. We also have PowerMax deployed on a different site for disaster recovery.

We work in healthcare and have to ensure that our data is always available because it can directly affect patient care. This platform is reliable in supporting our data availability. We now have a higher-performing platform and are able to consolidate our workloads into one single platform.

Overall, the platform is easy to use. The performance has kept up with our workloads.

I have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The customer service for this solution is excellent. We received assistance with a four-hour response time. I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

Positive

We previously used XtremeIO. We switched just because we felt that the platform was aging and we needed something that was going to be high performing and offer more availability. 

The initial setup was straightforward. We received great support on the ground from Dell. They are familiar with our data center and they were able to prepare the site to install the equipment without any delays so everything ran on schedule. Deployment took one day. 

We worked with a project manager both internally and from Dell, and we ensured that we had all the necessary power, networking, and other connectivity ready for deployment to take place on schedule.

The deployment involved myself and another engineer, as well as Dell engineers. It took several days to get the configuration right from a layout perspective, but overall, it was straightforward.

The return on investment is the consolidation of our platforms. We've reduced our footprint in the data center, which has required less power, less heat, and less floor space.

The pricing for this solution is good compared to other products on the market. 

I would advise others to do their homework and assess their environment to understand their workloads. It's important to do testing and model your workloads against your expectations to push the boundaries.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.