Dell PowerMax Reviews

We use it for all entitled storage on back-end hospital systems, VMware, and Citrix.

We will be putting the hospital HR system on it, because we need it to be fast, efficient, and always up. PowerMax will provide this solution for us.

We are able to provide storage at the right service levels without overmanaging it.

Data is helping us have the performance, so they can do their reporting in the hospitals every day. They are able to maintain with the compression longer.

• Its uptime
• Dedupe
• Compression
• Reliability

It would be nice if there was a training course offered by Dell EMC. It would help us use the product.

It is very stable. We have no concerns.

The brick scalability solution is very nice. It allows us to add smaller quantities and still get quality performance.

The technical support is lacking. We are working with Dell EMC to get some better understanding of this.

Currently, we have a VPLEX with multiple storage arrays behind it. Now, we will be moving to one storage array and getting rid of the rest.

The performance requirements for the Diamond Levels on certain areas, we wanted submillisecond response times. We are still working with our buyer to get this to fruition based on some of our workloads.

The initial setup is very straightforward because it is All-Flash. We are now looking at maximizing the performance features.

We are still working with our integrator on the deployment since the VMAX is relatively new in the industry that I am working in. We are still working on improving our experience, as they lacked experience in the PowerMax.

The migration process of the VMAX to PowerMax is ongoing. Because we have a VPLEX, it is causing more complexity than if it had been just VMAX to VMAX.

Ensure whomever you work with knows the solution and you get feedback from other customers.

It has good performance and speed, but it is still lacking in training and knowledge.

We are only using Unisphere of the performance management and monitoring tools, as we are not that familiar with the other ones available.

This would be for leveraging the purchase of PowerMax storage system through a service provider, who would deliver the capacity of PowerMax on a service catalog basis. The storage capacity would be offered as a block service and the utilization of the PowerMax would be delivered on a revised written basis.

This will certainly be leveraged to deploy non-critical and mission-critical applications in our environment, in which we have plenty of both at this point in time.

We expect it to deliver exceptional performance and capacity utilization metrics. This is one of the reasons we are evaluating PowerMax 2000 and PowerMax 8000 at this point in time.

The most valuable features are compression, deduplication, and NVMe-based back-ends for flash technologies. 

I would like it to support NVMe over Fabrics, because that is the next item for consideration on the NVMe roadmap. PowerMax supports NVMe on the back-end, but when it starts supporting NVMe over Fibre Channel, suddenly various hosts can directly communicate with PowerMax, and with NVMe-oF, as well. Suddenly, Gen 6 and Gen 7 switchers will be able to help facilitate that particular communication channel.

It is very stable. We expect superior performance and reliability from this particular storage system.

We expect it to scale.

We are slowly moving towards simplifying our current complex environment, but we are not there yet.

In the past, we have been using the various versions and families of VMAX. Now, we are moving more towards PowerMax and newer versions of technology as they get released onto the Dell EMC roadmap. We have been using VMAX based platforms for many years. Suddenly, PowerMax has evolved from the lineage of VMAX. Therefore, we expect Dell EMC to continue to build upon it. 

In terms of the engineering aspects of the performance requirements, we have a variety of applications requiring a certain level of IOPS, response times, and a minimum microsecond latencies. While we understand that PowerMax can deliver to these expectation from a performance standpoint, we will certainly undergo some rigorous proof of concepts (PoCs) with the PowerMax systems to make sure that our current understanding of PowerMax capabilities, from a performance standpoint, meets our expectations.

We are not yet done any setup of PowerMax systems. We are still working on the integration plans.

We have always used Dell EMC. We have evaluated the technologies from some of the other vendors. We have done numerous proof of concepts, and we have done some real hard proof of concepts. Either in the architectural design stage, or in the engineering stage, some of those particular products do not meet the rigorous testing that we do in these types of scenarios and environments.

Use PowerMax.

• Performance
• Replication time
• It's become easier to use
• Dedup and compression

I'd like to see the dedup and compression improve. Two to one is not very good. We should be getting something like three, four, or five to one.

The setup was pretty straightforward. It wasn't that hard.

We bought it from a reseller and we used some services from Dell EMC. Our experience with them was pretty good. They showed us the basics and got us started.

The primary use case is block storage.

We are planning on deploying mission-critical applications on this solution for redundancy and performance.

Our time to response has increased significantly with the new storage tier (SSD).

We have probably replaced eight racks of equipment with one rack of equipment. So, we have seen significant cost savings and performance.

It was easy for teams to pick up the technology with very limited exposure and training, then implement and support it.

As per performance, being able to consolidate down some of our older DMZ technologies into one platform.

My team has found the Unisphere to be a valuable tool.

We haven't had any issues with the solution in the six months that it has been live. So, the stability has been very good.

We are getting ready to add to it already, so it is very scalable.

The technical support has been very supportive when we have had to call and ask for their assistance, especially during the installation of the equipment.

Our performance requirements were more about the availability and the performance, since we are running mission-critical applications. We have to have low disk latency to meet the application's performance for our Oracle Databases.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was easy to implement. They implemented it through their normal processes in a very timely manner.

The migration process from the older VMAX arrays to PowerMax was fairly seamless. When the team came in, they migrated data from one to the other. The process was simple.

A reseller, Advisex, worked with us on the deployment. We have a close partnership with them and had a good experience.

We are happy with what we have.

We are using it for VMware, virtual infrastructures, and our physical host. All of our virtual infrastructure is pretty much mission-critical, and we have all of our virtual infrastructure migrating into the PowerMax family.

Because of the compression ratio, we are able to put more on less hardware.

The PowerMax software and CloudIQ let us get an inside view of our compression and compaction, as well as our usage of the storage.

• Compression
• Compaction
• A lot of storage in a small box.

The PowerMax software has some room for improvement. We have run into a couple bugs with it so far.

It scales well. We currently buy ours fully maxed out, so we don't really worry a whole lot about the scaling from a new infrastructure standpoint.

So far, technical support has been really good.

We are migrating from HPE 3PAR, and it's been a very easy transition.

The initial setup was complex. ESRS is a very complex solution to put into our environment, because it requires external access to the Internet. That's a very tough thing for us to do, because we are a PCI and PII company. We store a lot of data for people which is personal. Therefore, going out to the Internet is not our preferred path.

We used Dell EMC directly for the deployment. The experience has been good, so far.

We generally do a PoC. In this case, we went directly to the PowerMax because we felt it was a good solution. Our upper management chose it.

Study the integration very carefully, as far as how you're going to integrate it into your environment, such as how you're going to use ESRS and the other solutions which Dell EMC offers.

As far as provisioning, storage, and use of the array, it's been very simple to use.

For the PowerMax 8000, a million IOs is our minimum requirement. We have yet to be able to test that, but that is our minimum base requirement for a PowerMax 8000.

We have used it for a long time and we have recently been upgrading it. Last month we acquired a PowerMax 2000 and we have just finished the migration. We hope it will help us with performance and through the additional features which are part of the software.

In terms of mission-critical applications, we are running our switch, which is the most critical application that we have in our organization, on the storage box. It is because it is reliable and, in terms of performance, we do not have any issues with PowerMax.

The switch application is very sensitive to IOPs and to the speed of responding and reacting to requests. We went specifically with PowerMax to ensure that we are getting the highest performance, and it has really been exceeding our expectations. We are yet to put it into really demanding tests. We have solutions that we are implementing during the year which will be high-demand in terms of IOPs and performance. We will find out then if PowerMax meets all our requirements.

We use the solution with VMware. It made things easier for us in terms of deployment and implementation.

• Availability
• Reliability

We are also happy with the monitoring that Dell EMC is doing for us. They have helped us to identify many issues during the routine checks, issues which we were not aware of.

We are facing challenges with the SRDF replication which we got with the latest, new box. Overall, it has been working for us so well for the past few years. We hope that whatever bugs there are right now in the PowerMax are going to be sorted out quickly.

There is room for improvement with the enclosures. We were happier with the old VMAX enclosures which looked nicer in our data centers. The new one is dull.

The stability is superb.

We have yet to find out what the scalability is like. We recently added this new box and towards the end of the year, or next year, we are going to look at expanding it. So we don't know how easy it is to scale it.

Our experience with technical support was different before we got the most recent box. We are facing challenges. We were told that this is the first PowerMax box implemented in our country, so maybe these are teething issues, and hopefully, they will be sorted out quickly. But we are constantly in touch with support, and I have actually been trying to get ahold of one guy here at the Dell Technologies World conference so I can see if he can help us sort out the bugs quickly.

We were using the same solution. We just upgraded it.

The solution’s architecture influenced our buying decision with the new features it has, and the smoothness of the migration was also important. The last time we upgraded there was downtime, but this solution gave us the opportunity without bringing down the systems.

We had challenges again with the initial setup. I don't know if there was a gap during the requirement-collection phase, but the box was partially delivered to us with missing parts and it delayed the implementation by about 60 days. It was not as smooth as I would have hoped.

We used a local Dell EMC partner and they were pretty good.

We have already recommended this product to two institutions who called. Our view of the product is positive. Our experience has been positive. As head of IT, my worry was about the migration. We believe in the technology, but how could we achieve a smooth migration? What I have seen was amazing beyond expectation. Things have been so positive, overall.

The migration process from older VMAX arrays to PowerMax is very good. The data dependency is tremendous and the results we got from the migration were amazing. They were beyond our anticipation. Things went smoothly, mostly, with the SRDF technology, and the critical systems were not taken down, so we had 24-hour continuous operation.

We have attended a couple of technical sessions which talked about how to do some analysis on the box, from the box, using the Dell EMC tools. We are exploring those tools to see how we can take advantage of them and improve productivity.

We have faith in the solution and would rate it an eight out of ten. The rating will depend on fixing the issues we are facing.

The primary use case is for Tier 0 applications. It is meant for applications which are absolutely mission-critical, when you can't compromise your system performance. We have customers who use it across the board for just mission-critical applications, high availability, and guaranteed performance.

I have customers who are using this for large Oracle and SQL applications and European SAP types of infrastructures. They are integrating PowerMax with ProtectPoint for additional data protection of their data. They are also automating the backup and recovery of those systems through AppSync, which is another product for keeping everything protected in an automated way.

It's a zero light loss upgrade. So, they're upgrading the system without losing any type of light from the communications of the system. Also, it has zero interruption of upgrades.

The most valuable feature is its global cache, which allows for uncompromised performance. 

It offers a high level of availability, so pretty much near zero downtime.

It is the best platform for just seeing and getting visibility into performance and capacity utilization. It has very positive management. Through CloudIQ and others integrations that Dell EMC provides, visibility has excellent predictive health metrics that we can look at.

I would like to see continued visibility and analytics in the platform.

There is nothing more stable in the market today.

It is very scalable. Depending on what platform you go with, it has both a scale up and scale out architecture. You can scale without compromising performance by adding additional compute nodes to the front-end which allows it pretty much uncompromised capacity expansion and scale-out.

The technical support is excellent. It's a very immediate, high level of support. The Mission Critical ProSupport response team that Dell EMC has is the highest level of support.

We looked at this system because we analyzed applications and workloads, then understood our customer's business requirements. It is understanding that there is a need for low latency and zero downtime. We were previously using a combination of VNX and Unity.

When we looked at PowerMax, it was extremely low latency: five submillisecond types of latency. From a general performance perspective, most of these systems that we are designing tend to be more than 100,000 IOPS for input/output operations per second. The other thing is that it handles these types of IOPS with very large block sizes. If you really understand your data, it's very easy to optimize it on PowerMax, and it is exceeding our requirements.

The initial setup is straightforward with Dell EMC Services. An organization with this type of investment would want to install it themselves. Therefore, with Dell EMC services, it's very easy to get going.

The migration from older VMAXs to PowerMax is extremely straightforward, as it's a zero downtime migration. You can move systems from one VMAX platform to a PowerMax platform with zero downtime and 100 percent of the data migration compatibility. We typically do that coupled with Dell EMC services, as well. They have a very dialed in process for taking that data over to a brand new platform.

We used resellers for the deployment, as we are resellers. We always use resellers, because that is the best option that customers have.

We are implementing PowerMax at a much lower ROI than maintaining maintenance on legacy systems. We have actually seen return on investment in as low as two years from an ROI perspective by leveraging PowerMax for consolidation of workloads, as well as consolidation of maintenance contracts, where they might have across multiple legacy platforms.

From a general capital investment, it's one of the higher price points in the market. It depends on the size and software features that you would include in a system. So, the cost varies dramatically.

The cost has room for improvement.

Alternatives in the Dell EMC portfolio are primarily XtremIO and Unity. However, PowerMax is the only product which can meet the uptime and latency requirements.

Engage a reseller to analyze the workloads and do the data-driven architecture behind it. Use the data to drive the solution and make sure it meets your requirements.

There is so much innovation in it. They have been very relevant in terms of the Tier 0 workforce. It really differentiates itself in the market.

It meets the needs of what we're trying to do from a file level perspective for performance and capacity.

If you live and breathe by your data, there are a lot of features in PowerMax which allow you to protect yourself from ransomware and other types of relevant threats today. It is not just about a platform for running mission-critical apps. It's also protecting mission-critical apps through features that prevent ransomware infection. If you get infected, it allows for recovery of that data without having to pay the ransom fee or other alternatives.

The primary use case is for SQL database, as it's our primary data tier. We are deploying the main SQL databases for our cloud application on the solution.

It has dramatically cut down the footprint in our data center and reduced the amount of raw disk capacity that we needed to purchase.

The managing and monitoring of PowerMax arrays from a performance, capacity and health checks perspective is really easy. It integrates well with our existing automation  environment and is inline with all Dell EMC's other values and products. As we are moving an application over to it, it has been very fast, efficient, and easy for our teams.

• Compression 
• Deduplication

The REST API needs improvement. We are a very big automation company, and this would be big for us.

It has been very stable, so far. We have been a VMAX customer for a little awhile, and it is continuing on with the same reputation.

The product is still very new for us, but given what we have heard about it and everything we've seen, it should scale very well and not disrupt us.

The technical support is excellent. We have always had great support.

We're actually not going from VMAX arrays to PowerMax. We're going from Hitachi arrays to PowerMax.

Our performance requirements for this solution were response time and very low latency. We were able to cut our response times in half by implementing this solution.

We were using the Hitachi arrays and wanted something easier to manage. After last year's Tech World and hearing all about the brand new PowerMax array, we knew that it was something we had to really look into. We really liked the compression and deduplication.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We were up and running in no time and immediately serving production applications with it.

We partnered with Data Strategy, who is now Trace3, for our PowerMax implementations. We had a very good experience.

We also considered Hitachi since they were our current vendor.

It's a very strong platform for compression, deduplication, and performance, which makes it tough to compete with.

We use PowerMax as a dedicated Tier 0 for our product.