Dell PowerMax Reviews

Mainframe and open system storage that replicates consistently.

We are a financial services organization, so we are data and investments. It is what our company uses to run. However, I don't know that PowerMax, or VMAX, is anything special compared to other products that we have our data on.

A lot of our critical applications are mainframe and open system-based, and they spread between those two. So, we need a platform like PowerMax to be able to recover in a DR scenario.

We can consistently replicate mainframe and open system and have a single recovery point.

I started using CloudIQ two days ago, and all it's been doing is filling up my phone with alerts that aren't worthwhile. There is something going on there that the array is flagging things as inappropriate that aren't really impactful.

I would like to have Snapchat scheduling and the ability to modify that instead of erase a schedule, then recreate it. There are way better ways to do that. 

Support for SRDF consistency groups within the GUI, instead of making that the command line. 

Remove the need for physical or hardwired virtual servers to run consistency groups, instead make the expensive array controllers handle that.

The management interface needs improvement. It shouldn't be as hard to do some of the functions as it is. Also, it shouldn't need Windows Servers to run a million dollar array.

From a host IO standpoint, the stability has been very good. 

From a replication standpoint, we're actually a company who turned up a bug in the brand new PowerMax. That makes me a little jaded.

It scales enormously, but it's expensive to do so.

The technical support has been good. When we did run into an issue, once I told them what the problem was, they were able to come up with a solution to fix the problem moderately quickly.

We came off VMAX. Our performance requirements were to just match the VMAX levels. I find the array is doing that for host IO.

Since we were already on VMAX, our decision was related to a data center move and protecting our data. Prior to that, just getting on the VMAX product line and came from IBM. That was a look at all the mainframe products, which was a cost and functionality play. We picked the product that seemed to have the best cost and functionality with longest term company relationship.

The initial setup was complex. I found out you can't make the new arrays talk to other arrays on a customer level. You have to reach out to Dell EMC support to do that. It's the only array in my environment where I can't, as a customer, make those changes. That's one of the things that slowed down our install.

The migration from VMAX to PowerMax wasn't much of a migration because it was a DR target. We just changed our SRDF.

We used a reseller to purchase it, but I believe it was Dell EMC badged people who did the install.

The experience wasn't great. The install, in my mind, meant a usable box. The install that I got was a plugged in box. Then, it's like, "Oh, but we still have to do these five steps." I was under a time crunch, so that was a surprise.

When it's mainframe there are only three: IBM, Hitachi, and Dell EMC. The arrays at this level are all fairly competitive.

IBM doesn't support VMware the way that we needed it to. 

Hitachi and EMC were neck and neck. What won it out was Dell EMC's relationship with our sales team.

It's effective at doing what you need it to do. It's fairly high-powered, but the management interface has a long way to go to be made simple and easy to use.

If you have mainframe, you have few choices, and this is a good choice. If you don't have mainframe, there are a lot of products on the market which are much easier to use. It depends on your requirements. 

SRDF/A is quite good, but even other cheaper arrays have synchronous and asynchronous replication. I don't know that I would look at a product line for this unless your needs are either enormous that you need a box this big or mainframe centric.

The Unisphere has gotten a lot better. It is fairly easy to dig into and find things. It has been a long time coming, but it's there.

From a storage point of view, our primary uses are as our primary storage which provides all of the capacity for our databases, applications, and most of our mission-critical work at the moment.

We're planning on moving our most critical databases onto the PowerMax to take advantage of all the new features and functions, as well as the ability for it to grow into the future to continue to provide that top level of performance.

Data plays a very important role in our business. It allows us to make good decisions and react to our customers' needs. The PowerMax is going to be where we put the most critical data so we can get the fastest results from that investment.

One of the valuable features is that less work needs to be done on the arrays now, compared with what used to be. I used to spend most of my day managing the array. Now I'm more managing the interconnections and the flows of data, and not worrying about the feeds and speeds anymore.

We've been doing testing before implementing for our Oracle Databases and we're seeing much better performance than we were with the previous generation.

We're using a combination of Unisphere and CloudIQ. CloudIQ has become an optimal tool for us to get the full picture of all the different arrays, from mid-tier all the way up. It gives us that single view and the ability to launch the Unisphere. That is really is powerful in being able to manage the array.

With it being part of the Symmetrix family over the years, we don't have a worry at all about it being stable and serviceable. It's been many years since we've had a hardware issue with any VMAX array, and I don't see the PowerMax being any different.

For us, it has enormous scale in the way it can grow with our needs. Starting out as small as we are, with just a small PowerMax 2000, it is amazing how much capacity we can get in such a tiny footprint.

Support from Dell EMC has been phenomenal. Getting the box up and running was very simple, and any time we have a problem we get the right engineers working on it.

We had been using the VMAX line prior, and this was just a case of capacity and performance growth. We refreshed our environment to get the most performance we can out of our applications.

The architecture - using the NVMe on the back end, with the designed use Storage Class Memory, and NVMe end-to-end in the future - really influenced us in not wanting to go backward with our purchase. Rather, we wanted to buy a future-looking device that we can keep growing into, to get our value out of that investment.

The installation of the PowerMax was very straightforward; probably the easiest implementation of an array that we've done so far.

We did it ourselves.

PowerMax was the shortlist.

This should be on your shortlist. You should really take look at PowerMax. They're reliable. They do everything you could possibly want and much more. They have a lot of features that other arrays just don't.

We'd rate it as a ten. It has done everything that we've asked it to do and much more.

We use PowerMax to provide storage for our clients. The service level is important for the different service classes we propose to our clients.

It's a new generation and class of storage so it's faster and more resilient. 

We have reached our required performance level with the response time. We have benched the solution with different types of IO. Now we can be sure, with this solution, that the response time is what we need.

The solution has helped to consolidate storage. With lower space, we now have half a rack.

There is room for improvement in the replication. It's an important requirement for us.

The stability has been good.

The scalability has also been good. We have just bought PowerMax so it's difficult to say much more for now.

Technical support has been good.

The last solution we used was VPLEX. We switched to this new solution because it is more resilient.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution to help our clients respond to all their requirements. We needed to make available other services and other classes of storage. The solution's architecture influenced our buying decision. It was important for us to have NVMe because it is faster.

The initial setup was a little complex because it was our first time with a high-level storage class from Dell EMC.

In terms of migrating from older VMAX arrays, they are still running. We are working with Dell EMC to do that. We are migrating from the OS side, so it's not from the storage side. It's a little longer process.

We worked with Dell to integrate the solution. Our experience with them was good.

The other vendor on our shortlist was HPE and we went with Dell EMC because, with all the tests, it seemed to be the best array.

My advice is to buy this array.

We use CloudIQ and we use Unisphere, but for day-to-day management, we prefer to automate all tasks with REST API.

For now, I would rate this product at nine out of ten. We have tested it and it seems to be resilient and as fast as we need. But we have to do more tests, such as on the replication. That's important for us.

We used it for Oracle Databases. The customer for which we did the PoC of PowerMax is planning on deploying mission-critical applications on this solution: Oracle workloads such as their quoting system and their data warehouse.

As a partner, we don't have PowerMax in-house but for my customers the SRDF replication is an advantage. The ability to have a scalable, all-flash array is pretty impressive. That's important for our customers.

In terms of helping to consolidate islands of storage in a data center, the use case for the particular customer for whom we did the PoC was to move off of an Exadata environment and to move off of an AIX environment and consolidate those down to one storage platform. PowerMax did that.

It is meeting our customer's requirements. They had several large Oracle databases that needed to move over, including from Exadata. Exadata is one of Oracle's fastest systems in terms of Oracle Database workloads. Our customer had to be able to hit certain timelines for jobs that would run. For example, they are running a quote database and they had to be able to hit the same timelines for jobs that were running within that, or better. As a part of the consolidation, the end goal was to limit their licensing on the front end. Being able to consolidate down into that one footprint on the back end helped them save money on the front end.

When it comes to managing and monitoring PowerMax arrays, the interface has really improved compared to the old VMAX. Getting into the interface and finding out if there are any issues with the array is a lot simpler and more streamlined.

The SRDF replication piece is probably the best feature. It's useful for maintaining recoverability in the event of a disaster.

I would like to see more cache because we are limited to two terabytes of cache now. More cache would potentially help drive better improvements in performance.

Also, when it comes to Oracle and database workloads, data reduction could be a little bit better. Some of the competition, like Pure, have post-processes which do additional deduplication and compression on the backside; everything is in-line and then they do a secondary process. It would be a good option if you could start getting 5:1 or 6:1 data reduction on database workloads. That would be beneficial.

Since our use of PowerMax was just a PoC, we didn't really have any issues with the with stability. We didn't run it for a long time, it was a 30-day PoC. There wasn't a lot of time to really explore that area. During the PoC it was fine, it was perfect, we didn't have any issues.

The ability to add additional engines, additional SSDs, is really a benefit to the customer. You can grow it as you need to.

The PowerMax architecture influenced the buying decision. The ability to grow, to scale from single-engine to multi-engine, was probably the biggest factor in that.

Tech support for PowerMax was pretty good. They came out and set it up and did the install. That took a day. We did have a problem with one of the compression modules and they had it out there and fixed the next day. It was during the install that they uncovered that. We weren't using the array yet anyway, so it was just a byproduct of the installation process.

The improvements to the interface have really been great. It's very simple to set up and configure the storage volumes, whether it's a Fibre Channel volume or an iSCSI volume.

The initial setup was straightforward. I did the setup of the iSCSI volumes to the host and it was it took me less than an hour to do that.

We were initially doing a PoC and comparing PowerMax against other arrays: NetApp, XtremIO X2, and Pure. We were doing a performance benchmark and it came in second compared to XtremIO X2, so it did a good job.

I would give PowerMax a nine out of ten, only because we had that single issue with the compression module failing. Otherwise, it did exactly what we wanted it to. It wasn't as fast as the XtremIO, but we didn't think it was going to be as fast as that in the first place. The XtremIO was somewhat oversized. So from a performance standpoint, we were very happy with it.

The primary use case is for Tier 0 applications.

We have no performance related issues due to hardware.

This solution has helped to consolidate islands-of-storage in our data center due to a reduced footprint. This is because of single pane of glass management.

Applications require zero downtime. The high availability and the configuration of the current Symmetrix provide all of that.

We get amazing IOPS and workload with VMware, SAP, and Oracle.

The stability is the most valuable feature.

It has a simple GUI, but still has a CLI-like interface for managing and monitoring.

I find Unisphere and REST API valuable.

We would like easier DR setup. We require DR operations, and we wish it was a lot easier to do that configuration.

It could use additional features and easier integration.

The stability is amazing. Zero downtime reported over the last years.

I would like the scalability to improve, as it requires additional footprints.

It's been always stable, so we haven't really required much support.

We had an opportunity to transform our environment. From experience with previous hardware, we selected this solution.

Our performance requirements were high IOPS, as well as stability. It is meeting those requirements and exceeding our previous infrastructure.

The initial setup was complex. The initial implementation team was not familiar with the Symmetrix architecture.

This was all new implementations for us.

We used a reseller for the deployment, who we are no longer working with.

Our costs are on a yearly basis.

IBM was the competitor. Ultimately, it came down to price.

The product is good. Test it yourself. Assess it against other solutions, and you'll be impressed.

Data plays a role in digital transformation, automation, and database decision-making.

I am looking into CloudIQ.

We're not at the NVMe architecture mode yet.

We use it for our testing and development environments.

It is a hyper-converged solution, which has easy deployment. It is easy to manage and upgrade.

It doesn't need shared storage.

There are some stability issues that we just recently experienced. We hope the next release will solve these problems.

We probably needed more time to test the solution.

Stability is okay for now. However, but if you are using over 80 percent of the storage, that will become a problem.

Scalability is very good. We just added another node with computing too, so it is pretty good.

The technical support is good.

We previously used Cisco HyperFlex and Dell EMC VNXe. Both of these solutions are out-of-date.

The initial setup was not straightforward, though it was pretty easy. We did have Dell EMC come onsite and help us, which was good.

We worked with Dell EMC directly for the deployment. Our experience with them was pretty good.

We did some research and talked to Dell EMC. We asked what solution they recommended, since we are a Dell EMC shop.

I would recommend this product to other customers. It is a very good solution for a remote office, a test environment, and maybe, production. It is not that big.

We have a lot of other Dell EMC solutions: Unity, Isilon, and VxRail.

We are a partner installer.

It significantly simplifies storage.

• The ease of install
• The ease of maintenance
• Expandability

There is some room to grow, especially with some of the installation quirks.

As an installer, I've seen a lot of different things. It's mostly stable. It's had its fair share of quirks, but support has always been there to help us get around those quirks.

The scalability is incredible. It's great.

I use technical support frequently. Support has been relatively great across the board. There have been some language barrier issues in the early morning hours. They transfer calls to China, and there are some translation issues, but they know their stuff. You just have to let them go and type because you don't understand what they are saying.

The build process is relatively straightforward.

Talk to other people who have the people. It has been a great experience for most of my customers.

It's pretty much where it needs to be. For the most part, it is solid.

We run a Medicaid data warehouse on a massive enterprise Oracle shop. Therefore, we have a lot of Oracle on PowerMax. We run a big analytics for the New York State Department of Health using Oracle Big Data.

Because of the Big Data analytics, we require immense IOPS, which the PowerMax handles quite well. Our sole purpose in life is to provide endpoint analytics.

We consolidate a lot of various disparate storage arrays into one enterprise solution.

We primarily use Unisphere for managing and monitoring.

Enterprise Cloud Storage is the most valuable feature, along with the data services which come with it, plus the deduplication and compression.

We are very interested in NVMe over Fibre Channel, which I understand is on the horizon. We would like to see that come to fruition in its ability to traverse the Fibre Channel SAN.

The solution is rock solid.

It is a solid platform.

The technical support is very good. We have the ESRS call-home function, and it's been rock solid since day one.

I have always used Symmetrix and VMAX. Then, it was just a natural progression into the PowerMax solution.

The initial setup is very straightforward. We had a team come in and get everything setup. It was handled very professionally. We had a project manager assigned to the account. It was very smooth.

We used the PowerPath solution for the migration, which allowed us to seamlessly migrate from one storage array to another.

We have impeccable uptime in our data center with very strict SLAs. We have had zero downtime.

We run a big Oracle shop, as well as VMware, which is very high performing. It exceeds our needs.

Our costs for the product are three million.

We looked at Hitachi and NetApp, but it really boiled down to our relationship with Dell EMC and the portfolio of the product.

This solution’s architecture influenced our buying decision because of all the data services incorporated, especially the LAN technology. This allows us to replicate from one site to another.

Our SLAs are extremely tight, and we've had zero issues. I would highly advise going with the PowerMax.

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.

Typically, when we are doing PowerMax, it is for applications that we need maximum performance, but also maximum reliability. So, Dell EMC has a lot of other products that can do very high performance, but there are not a lot of other products in the market that can reach the reliability and the availability that PowerMax can.

The use case goes back to when you need that ultimate uptime, where you can't ever have an application go down. We see this a lot in healthcare applications. We also see a lot of miscellaneous other database applications that need to be up all the time for running web services and service providers.

We definitely have situations where we have multiple siloed storage arrays, especially like higher-end VMXs or mid-range storage. So, we have four or five arrays that we can go and take those and put it on one high performing PowerMax, then deliver it to scale and grow.

Uptime by far is the most important thing, and also the replication ability (SRDF). Most of the customers who need this type of availability also want the protection of multiple data centers, and it is able to easily switchover workloads to their other data centers.

I am looking for ease in usability going forward. PowerMax is super powerful, but because it's been around for so long, there is some complexity in configuration and getting the right SLAs set up that you want. I feel like this could be simplified. I would like to see some improvements from there to avoid having to hunt and peck through an interface to do something that I feel should be relatively simple.

I hear from people on my team that they would like improved reporting. While there are some decent tools for doing reporting, they would like to see a lot more built-in functionality. This way when they are logged into the interface everyday doing basic management tasks, they could also see some statistics on what is their storage pool usage and will be their projected usage with their current data growth. They want to be able to see more detailed stats on how they are using the system and have forecasting.

The great thing about PowerMax is from a reliability standpoint, everything is redundant. Uptime is six or seven nines.

PowerMax can grow quite a bit. The design with how storage controllers and engines scale out in regards to storage lets you scale your performance pretty linearly, though not as high as some things, like some of the hyper-converged solutions, but it's pretty nice.

The tech support has been great. One of the good things with PowerMax, as much as the new branding and everything has come about since Dell and EMC merged, but the actual product history goes back really far. So, there is a ton of expertise from a support perspective within the organization. 

There is a lot of knowledge out in the community as well, without having to directly engage Dell EMC support. A lot of times you can find community assistance for common problems and configuration needs.

We haven't done very many migrations from VMAX3-AFA to PowerMax, just because they're close enough in numbers and performance. However, we are seeing a lot of movement from earlier generation VMAX to PowerMax. I even have some customers who are still on the DMX era that were moving over to PowerMax. That is going to be a big difference for them.

Our PowerMax solutions have met all of their requirements that we had when we threw workloads at them.

There are very few other products on the market which I've run into that can give performance at this level of availability.

We do a lot of managed services. Where we get a lot of use from the data is we gather a ton of statistical data about our customers: How they're growing and using their own data. Therefore, we have a lot of metadata about our own customers that we have to sort through. From a consolidation standpoint, it's nice to have all of that in one place. It comes back to performance. We have to be able to pull from a lot of different customers, and do it simultaneously.

I find that PowerMax is improving performance for workloads, like VMware, SAP, Oracle, and SQL Databases.