Dell PowerMax Reviews

We are primarily using the solution to drive components of an e-trading (electronic trading) platform.

The solution has reduced our time-to-market with a single management interface, and it is a very efficient platform. Provides great improvements in operational resilience, aligning us with our direct competitors in global markets. We are ahead in some areas as a result of the deployment of this platform.

Uptime and availability are first and foremost. The deduplication and compression capabilities are also excellent, allowing us to be very efficient with the physical hardware that we need to deploy on-prem in order to fulfill our requirements. It has given us excellent value for money without compromising performance.

The solution's snapshot capabilities and replication are very good features. Snapshots are allowing us to quickly build analytical models directly from production data. This gives us amazing insights into market trends and allows us to build more effective trading algorithms. Replication offers us unparalleled levels of resilience.

The management overall is excellent. Dell EMC continues to build on very solid foundations, which have been evolving for over two decades. 

The REST APIs are great.

The solution exposes excellent automation opportunities.

We have found the performance to be very good so far.

It's a relatively new product, but for the next release I would like to see higher bandwidth on the front-end adapters. This would allow even greater scalability for critical workloads and consolidation for non-critical workloads. The hosts may not require that level of I/O performance today. However, it allows us to scale physical non-cloud environments without large investment. 

We are about eight months into our deployment. It's still a rather new solution for us, although we have had some time to get to know it.

With six nines, we have reduced our maximum annual downtime to around 32 seconds (previously around 48 minutes). From a stability point of view, I have absolutely no issues or complaints there at all.

It's an e-trading platform. Therefore, there are no end users involved. It's about half a petabyte in size.

In terms of scalability potential, it is first class. With the level of performance it gives you and the response time that we get from the arrays, the scalability is groundbreaking.

I was very impressed with the support overall. They understand customer service. They have never made me wait for anything. Things do go bump. Challenges and unpredictable circumstances do arise. I rate the Dell EMC team based on their prompt and decisive action during these circumstances.

We did previously use a different solution.

We switched to take advantage of certain feature sets. Our previous competitor, whilst they did offer deduplication and compression to some degree, could not match the availability nor performance and didn't have the same guaranteed efficiency ratios. They also couldn't perform inline compression without significant performance penalties. This would have to happen at rest and offline. Therefore, we'd need to write the data first, then compress it. The PowerMax solution enabled us to do that inline, without a read or write penalty. Basically, there was no performance impact, and we still saw all the benefits from a reduced physical footprint, such as, cost savings, reduced power requirements, and fewer components to fail (number of drives required being 66 percent lower).

The deployment process is a standard procedure for deploying SAN, and that's with any vendor. I'd say that the process wasn't any different from deploying another solution. We've got our architecture and our blueprints. We worked with a solutions architect and that design drives the configuration, and then we go ahead and deploy that configuration.

Deployment took around three months. Some of this was due to internal processes, timing, and pandemic conditions. Over December, we were hampered with end-of-year change control freezes in place so some of the activity couldn't get done. All in all, I'd say we probably could have been done in about six to eight weeks.

I had three people working on this internally (not counting the non storage resources) as we deployed to two geographies in different time zones. 

Maintenance is just ongoing service and that'd be the same as any technological asset. It has a mean time before failure. We monitor it on a daily basis. Alerts are actioned with the vendor. However, the platform does have five-nines of availability  and multiple layers of redundancy.

We did not use an integrator, consultant, or implementor during deployment. We worked with a solutions architect to build the configuration. We then worked with our project office to coordinate and complete that deployment.

Six months in, we have ROI. Some key metrics are: 

• Increased uptime and availability, 
• Reduced man-hours for support and provisioning (approximately 30 percent reduction in overall management hours required).

Pricing will very much depend on an organization's terms and conditions with the vendor. Therefore, I couldn't really give any concrete pricing to quote. I'd just advise CTO/Technology leaders to negotiate hard and consider the commercial advantages/benefits to Dell EMC for onboarding their product. 

Be very thorough about your criteria (functional and non-functional requirements) and what you're looking to achieve. Test, test, test! Do the due diligence and test comparable solutions head-to-head. In our use case, PowerMax was the best solution. However, that doesn't necessarily mean it would be the best solution for every scenario. You really do have to do the work, the engineering and architecture, then test the products head-to-head to see if this solution really does solve your business requirement.

The licensing again depends on the agreements they've got in place with your organization. For example, we know we've got a large and global agreement with Dell, and therefore, our pricing and discounting structure might be different from a small to medium business or another enterprise.

We did look at other options. We tested it head-to-head with two other vendors in a lab with identical conditions. We basically looked at the top five storage vendors on the market and shortlisted three.

The cons were the fact that it was really an internal process. Qualifying a new platform, through engineering and getting that through governance and architecture is a detailed and time consuming process. Those were the cons. In terms of pros, the technological features available, including the compression ratios, were excellent. The performance itself, the out-and-out, the horsepower of the platform, is where PowerMax did significantly outperform the other solutions we put it up against. However, most importantly, it was that uptime and availability which pushed it ahead. The inline deduplication and compression capabilities also significantly outperformed its competitors.

We are customers of Dell EMC.

We are using the PowerMax 2000.

My advice to other organizations considering the solution is to fully understand your use case, and test it. Make sure your functional and non-functional requirements are complete, understood, and documented with input and agreement from your internal stakeholders

Definitely support your teams with education and training, even internal workshops. This will help make any transitioning smooth - a great tech solution can evaporate very quickly if your teams are not onboard and up to speed on day one.

You need to have a good people strategy and processes before you start running away with the technology!

Overall, I would rate the solution as an eight out of 10.

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. 

The primary use case is data storage consolidation for mission-critical applications, like billing, the charging system, mobile payment, and intelligent network. Virtualization and cloud infrastructure are where the customer is using many solutions for virtualization, like Hyper-V, Oracle Virtual Machine, OpenStack, VMware, Solaris, Linux, Kubernetes, and Docker. Disaster recovery was also the main focus of the customer to guarantee RPO and RTO. The last use case was a NAS solution through the eNAS provided by PowerMax. The previous eNAS hosted by VMAX 10K has its limits in term of size limit for a file system.

Helped our organization by improving performance on the I/O side. Before migrating to PowerMax, customers were faced with many performance issues due to high latency from the back-end and front-end side. Our previous storage was VMAX 10K, and with the evolution of business applications, it became more exigent in term of performance, intelligent data placement with FAST VP, resilience, replication, data protection with snapshot, and no more tasks for provisioning servers and applications. E.g., at the end of month, when the financial department ran the script to produce reports for the BI solution, these scripts generated many performance issues and the storage was struggling. With PowerMax, this is very transparent at the end user level.

1. The optimization of the cache memory of each engine and the use of persistent memory. 
2. I/O density with predictable performance when we grab the I/O to host, as the storage level supported by the PowerMax is too far to be reached regardless of workload and storage capacity utilization. 
   

The main feature that I personally want to see is the possibility to upgrade to the next generation without changing all the components and just change the engine, relying on the compatibility matrices between two different generations. Meaning that we could just keep the enclosure and upgrade the engine, integrating the enclosure to the existing pool, then adding automation tools for orchestration. When you move from VMAX 200K to PowerMax you swap Array. Or DELL EMC must give to the customer the ability to reuse component to the new Array. For example with IBM Storage like Storwize you can reuse enclosure from Gen2,2+ on Gen 3

One year.

Good.

Good.

Proactive.

Yes, we previously used Dell EMC VMAX 10K. We switched just for tech refresh.

Straightforward.

Very good expertise.

No access yet.

We hope that with the combination of both NVMe and SCM the next PowerMax will be much cheaper that the one which we acquired.

Grab performance I/O, and analyze it for better sizing and costing. 

Yes, Huawei. 

We use it for tying in high-end analytics services. PowerMax has some tiers which a make difference between the use of the data for our customers. All Dell technologies Solutions have tiers with faster hard disks. This one has special tiers to grant another level of data. That's why we use PowerMax and NVMe technology.

It is best for block storage.

SAP and Oracle Database are on PowerMax. Most of out critical services are on it. We use SRDF, which is a software. You can utilize the storage. It's very good, because you can make a stretch faster between two data centers.

The analytics and transactional data are its most valuable features.

With PowerMax, you don't have to buy new storage, like with the older VMAXs.

It is efficient and very simple for our administrators to use.

I would like NVMe to be end-to-end in the next release. Right now, it is not end-to-end.

It is a high-end storage. It is never down. This high-end technology is designed for mission-critical operations, where systems can't go down or it will affect a business' reputation and/or revenue.

With these type of high-end technologies and their uptime, there is no need to contact support.

Compared to VMAX, the initial setup is very easy. Setting up VMAX was a pain versus PowerMax, which was simple and efficient.

To migrate the data from VMAX to PowerMax, we used SRDF. It was fast. In some cases, we used VPLEX.

We used both an integrator and reseller to assist with the deployment.

The cost is expensive. While VMAX now has good pricing, PowerMax is a little expensive.

Our solution is focused using Dell technologies.