Dell PowerMax Reviews

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 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 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.

Our mission-critical environment is on the PowerMax.

It does what it's supposed to.

• The All-Flash array
• Performance
• Reliability

Our operations team would say that the GUI needs improvement.

You taking an island-of-storage and just creating another.

The scalability is acceptable and what we expected.

The technical support has been A plus.

We chose this solution because we wanted to go with the All-Flash array.

The initial setup was complex, and we had experienced people working on it.

For the migration process from the older VMAX arrays to PowerMax, we VMotioned everything. It was easy.

We considered Dell EMC and NetApp.

There is nothing that is not there.

We use it for virtualization and consolidation of our data lakes.

We are using PowerMax for SAP and Exchange to run the company. 

We have two sites and two data centers. So, we use SRDF to do transfers and fail overs.

The data services, especially SRDF, are its most valuable features.

We are using Unisphere for monitoring. REST API is great for configuring the storage system.

Accessibility to new users needs improvement.

The stability is great. It is five nines.

It scales far beyond what we need, so I am good with that.

The technical support is great. It is a high-end system, so the support should be high-end as well.

We previously used mid-range solutions that just didn't scale.

We used to have a whole bunch of arrays. Now, we have consolidated them onto PowerMax. 

We were looking at All-Flash Arrays that have one submillisecond latency all the time. That is what PowerMax delivers.

The initial setup was complex, as it is a complex system and you have to learn a lot.

We worked directly with Dell EMC for the deployment.

We have seen ROI.

We looked at Dell EMC and Pure Storage.

Look at it. Don't be afraid of its complexity. It has great performance.

Data is core to our business. Have an array with our data on it is very important to the business.

It has reduced our footprint in different physical locations.

The health checks and problem solving are its most valuable features.

The stability is good. We never have any issues.

The scalability is great.

The technical is very good. It is easy to contact someone. They have a great team that helps us.

Our performance requirements were that it has to be always stable.

Setting up PowerMax with VMAX is always complex. The support from Dell EMC helped made a difference.

Dell EMC helped us with the deployment.

It is a really good product. We never max out on the performance.

The number one most valuable feature is reliability. I want to go home at the end of the day and come in the next day knowing it works, especially since we have storage offshore.

I would like to see the rack change. They have defaulted to the standard rack, so our fiber cables are crowded when we shut our back door.

It is reliable at the end of the day.

It is not complex for us because we have done so many of them. We have a lot of people with experience now.

We also considered Pure Storage.

It is a product that people take for granted.