Dell PowerStore Reviews

That kind of integration was very specific because it's a type of security for secret services, and we haven't been involved in all the phases of implementation.

Stability is a key feature.

I am satisfied with Dell PowerStore when it comes to functionality.

I usually recommend Dell PowerStore for the government sector, public sector, and government agencies.

Improvement is needed not only in physical delivery of a solution, but also in terms of consultancy, how to do something, how to debug something, and changing in firmware.

For Dell PowerStore, I think local consignment stock for spare parts could be beneficial, but for the time being, I think it's not feasible. Maybe in the next two years, if we join the European Union, it will be different.

I think security could be an additional feature they could have in the future besides what I've already mentioned.

Security including AI support, with more flexibility and less user intervention, would be valuable.

Console management could be improved.

Flexible financing options, such as OPEX, which are not available in this region, would be appreciated.

There isn't anything else I would like to add or improve.

We are mostly proposing Dell PowerStore.

We use the 500T model.

We don't use Dell AI Ops or CloudIQ in Dell PowerStore for the time being because it's a closed system for security services.

My overall rating for this review is 7.5.

The primary use case that my clients need for Dell PowerStore is block storage for VMware and Hyper-V.

The most valuable features of Dell PowerStore are, in Germany, especially the Metro Volume, which allows for synchronous replication. Metro Volume is the most commonly used case in Dell PowerStore.

Having Dell PowerStore installed benefits these organizations because they have a fast solution. Dell PowerStore makes it fast; I believe it is the combination of the products from Unity and SC Series, the old Dell storage. It is a good combination and it has good software code. Everything is on NVMe, which is excellent.

It impacts their organization in terms of performance and operational efficiency by making it faster and more resilient.

If I could improve the product, better pricing would help, but it is not the easiest situation at the moment.

I have been using Dell PowerStore or working with clients using Dell PowerStore for six years.

Dell PowerStore is a stable product with no downtime.

My clients choose standalone because one system is enough.

I would rate the customer support a nine on a scale of one to ten, with one being worst and ten being best.

The problem with pricing is the competition; sometimes the price is too high.

My customers consider other solutions besides Dell PowerStore when they are looking at products. From the competition, they consider HP or IBM.

People mostly configure it as standalone.

My clients do not use Dell AIOps.

They go with Dell mostly because of the combination of PowerEdge and the complete portfolio, along with the support. I would rate this review a nine on a scale of one to ten.

Dell PowerStore has many use cases, such as in banking and virtualization, especially database projects. 

Regarding use cases, since it's flash storage, it's NVMe class flash storage, so it covers most of the cases in the industry. You can use it in mid to enterprise-class banking sectors; some customers are even using it in core banking, virtualization, and these kinds of workloads. Some other use cases are also being implemented since this is very common storage.

Many people really appreciate Dell PowerStore, and they choose it since, especially from a brand perspective, it's very strong. Dell has been in Gartner for the last 10 years or so, and it contributes majorly to the market. 

In Pakistan, Dell has a physical presence along with Huawei and IBM, so we can say Dell has a very reasonable presence in Pakistan. Many customers are using it, which is one of the reasons why customers still believe in Dell PowerStore products. 

The good thing about this storage is that it is NVMe storage and provides very good compression and data reduction ratios. If you purchase storage with 300 terabytes, you can easily achieve one petabyte of effective capacity. That's the value Dell creates; you invest less, and you get a better ROI.

It's unified storage, so it can cover file, SAN, and block both. It's good storage; it gives good IOPS and less latency. 

Sometimes they have equipment in stock. Sometimes they don't, so they have to arrange it from somewhere. That's been a challenge, and it's a negative point from a support perspective. Dell is struggling in terms of support SLAs as long as the Pakistan market is concerned since Dell has not been able to give a fixed time commitment from a support perspective, which is a challenge for customers.

We have heard that there are some challenges in terms of availability; if multiple controllers go down, this solution has certain limitations about how many controllers can be down before your environment is affected. This is a feature where Dell PowerStore is not the best product. From a stability perspective, Dell PowerStore rates six out of ten since, while it has good stability, it's not the best. That's why customers often choose to go for bigger and enterprise-level products, leading to a need for those enterprise-class solutions.

Cybersecurity, specifically ransomware protection, is a hot topic, and every vendor is working on this. I'm not fully aware of the extent of security Dell PowerStore provides; for instance, it can offer snapshot protections and immutable snapshots. However, there are certain features that customers are expecting more from cyber resilience. This is a question I'm still seeking from Dell's side. For example, does it scan for viruses from within the storage, specifically ransomware viruses in NAS and SAN? Mostly, ransomware attacks occur on file services, so does it scan those services? What I have heard is that some storage support SAN-level scanning as block-level scanning. Dell needs improvement in this area.

From a stability perspective, Dell PowerStore rates six out of ten. While it has good stability, it's not the best. That's why customers often choose to go for bigger and enterprise-level products, leading to a need for those enterprise-class solutions.

Although Dell PowerStore storage has a capacity of offering eight controllers or four arrays, what I've seen is that customers are normally using a single box that comes with two controllers. This is a normal practice since the market is not ready to go with scale-out architectures. 

What I've seen is that customers prefer to initially buy a better controller box for better processing, memory, and IOPS. Normally, I see that single clusters have one controller box only. I would rate the scalability and ability to expand of Dell PowerStore as eight out of ten.

As far as support is concerned, they are good. Still, when we talk about support in terms of part replacement, I would give them six marks out of ten. However, if it's a consolidated question related to warranty part replacement, for just support, you could give them eight marks out of ten.

Positive

I have an understanding of other solutions, however, I'm still with Huawei and still connected with Huawei.

Many people really appreciate Dell PowerStore, and they choose it due to the fact that, especially from a brand perspective, it's very strong. 

Dell has been in Gartner for the last ten years or so, and it contributes majorly to the market. In Pakistan, Dell has a physical presence along with Huawei and IBM, so we can say Dell has a very reasonable presence in Pakistan. 

Many customers are using it, which is one of the reasons why customers still believe in Dell PowerStore products. The good thing about this storage is that it is NVMe storage and provides very good compression and data reduction ratios. 

If you purchase storage with 300 terabytes, you can easily achieve one petabyte of effective capacity. That's the value Dell creates; you invest less, and you get a better ROI.

Dell is struggling in terms of support SLAs as long as the Pakistan market is concerned. Dell has not been able to give a fixed time commitment from a support perspective, which is a challenge for customers. Sometimes they have equipment in stock, sometimes they don't, so they have to arrange it from somewhere. That's been a challenge, and it's a negative point from a support perspective.

Dell PowerStore has better sales. PowerMax is a niche product, so mostly when we sell, we are selling Dell PowerStore. When we talk about PowerMax, unfortunately, its price is too high compared with Huawei. That's why when we talk about enterprise-class storage, we see a big challenge from the Huawei side.

In the public cloud, Dell PowerStore is a niche product. It's normally high in price, so people are not using Dell storage in their public cloud. Customers usually look for cheaper storage, which is certain; it's not a good storage option commercially. However, customers are using it in their private cloud, not a true private cloud, however, you can say the virtualization that we discussed, they are using for virtualization on-prem storage.

They need to reconsider their pricing strategies, especially in the Pakistan market, where they face strong competition from Huawei and often say they cannot compete with Huawei. The second challenge lies in their support structure; they cannot provide committed services including part replacements. For enterprise customers, having a committed service is very important. This is a significant challenge, though this may not be the case in other markets, the US. As long as the customer has the budget, I will recommend it as it is slightly expensive. 

Overall, I rate Dell PowerStore eight out of ten.

I use Dell PowerStore primarily for the main site, storing database data, and I also use it for data replication between two different sites. Additionally, there are sites where I have it as an independent storage box directly attached to the respective site. For other sites, I use it as shared storage between two different hosts in the data center or servers, employing it as block storage.

I have not clustered any of them; they are always independent per site.

Most of our clients are onboarded with Apex AI Ops, also known as Cloud IQ, to monitor most issues arising in the storage box. This simplifies the lives of these clients because initially we had an on-premise virtual machine that sometimes could go offline, but now it is cloud-based and monitored via AI. It provides different alerts, so I can easily know when a client's storage is getting full or if there's a faulty battery before the client even reports the issue to the support desk. I would say it's a helpful feature.

Dell PowerStore is more of a simplified Dell Unity. For now, I could say it is workable, where it is very easy for me, who supports different clients having these storage boxes, to operate on. I don't see much improvement, though if you look at Unity, we used to have the ability to upgrade the storage even with slight degradation, but looking at Dell PowerStore, it has improved with more detailed health checks than Unity. However, it refuses to carry out upgrades unless it's bypassed by the Dell support team.

Dell PowerStore is more simplified compared to Unity, and the first training I did was under Dell PowerStore. If I haven't forgotten, here in Uganda, I was among the first team to deploy Dell PowerStore, which is why I did the first version of Dell PowerStore certification.

I like the thin clones of Dell PowerStore because what happens with the clones in Unity is that they come much more as snapshots at the VMware level, whereas with Dell PowerStore, I can easily make it an independent volume from the base volume.

Compression and deduplication technologies are features that end users will not feel that much unless there's a very big difference. I once had a client who was using Nimble, HP Nimble, and when we moved them to VFlex, which is something that came end of life at Dell, there was small storage usage in Nimble, but when it went to the other side, there was very big usage due to the uncompression. These types of compression do apply in storage, but end users only feel the effect when they migrate from the platform.

Dell PowerStore has better performance considering it first came as an all-flash solution, unlike other products like Unity, which came with HDDs. In Dell PowerStore, most of the models I've worked with have come with NVMe disks, although initially they did have different interfaces that were not NVMe.

I work for a service provider company where I do support, and I have been supporting Dell PowerStore for almost four years, covering two different sites like between primary and secondary sites and also for some independent sites.

In terms of stability, I haven't seen any lagging or crashing. Dell PowerStore products are stable and I have not experienced crashing with these kinds of products.

I would say scaling up is still as easy as these other Dell storage boxes. I have not scaled out.

Technical support under Dell PowerStore, apart from the back-end Dell PowerStore node troubleshooting for partition being full, is just normal, easy tasks. I don't need to contact support unless a disk fails. I have some orders for failed batteries which I am still waiting on because I was told they are shipped via water.

Negative

I have used Dell Unity, Dell PowerStore, and Dell ME. I have experience with Enterprise Storage.

My initial deployment of Dell PowerStore was not difficult at all because I had prior knowledge of Unity, specifically Unity 380 if I haven't forgotten, so it was a very easy deployment. That client had only two servers connected directly to Dell PowerStore, making it very easy for me.

The last time I deployed Dell PowerStore was for a company called Ithuba from South Africa, and it took us about two days because we first rack-mounted on the first day on site. On the third day, I had to go back to do an upgrade on Dell PowerStore.

Regarding maintenance, we do blow out the dust from the front of the disks and also perform firmware upgrades in Uganda. Sometimes Dell calls us as service providers to inform us that a particular client has very old code that needs upgrading.

Dell PowerStore has a more simplified, user-friendly interface compared to the different storage products I have from Dell.

I am not familiar with Lifecycle Extension, formerly branded as Anytime Upgrade.

I rate it a ten out of ten due to its simplified interface, where even a new beginner can easily navigate. I simply click to access compute storage and volumes. My overall review rating for this product is ten out of ten.

My role in managing and using Dell PowerStore is that we have not yet adopted it, but I am exploring the possibility. I have not been using it at all.

I am not currently using Dell PowerStore models and am still in the evaluation phase, but we want to implement it and I have been exploring the systems.

I can provide examples of how this can benefit our company, especially for our unstructured AR data sources. Regarding how much I think it will affect our operations, we are really early in our AI factory steps, so I am not certain yet. However, we know where our bottlenecks are occurring, so I estimate Dell PowerStore could potentially improve performance by 30 to 40 percent in the future.

The feature I value most is the additional speed.

I would describe my experience so far with Dell PowerStore's data resiliency and availability as positive based on what I have observed. It looks good and represents an improvement over other solutions. The benefits my organization has realized from the life cycle extension program are positive, and I have used it to upgrade to the next generation version.

Dell PowerStore has not yet impacted my organization's performance and operational efficiency.

I have not seen any ROI yet.

I have not been able to consolidate data using Dell PowerStore yet.

I have been in my field for 15 years.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate customer service and technical support as a 10.

Prior to considering Dell PowerStore, we were using a mixture of NetApp and Cohesity to address similar needs.

I am not yet certain about pricing, setup costs, and licensing as I am not aware of those details.

The other solutions I considered before selecting Dell PowerStore included a mixture of various products. During the evaluation process, what stood out to me were the positives, which are the additional speed and the storage space. I have not seen any downfalls yet.

Dell PowerStore is used for storage purposes. Storage for SAP is provided by Dell PowerStore. Dell PowerStore supports our SAP environment for backups.

Dell PowerStore offers features that are easy to deploy and work very well. Dell PowerStore has positively impacted my organization by working effectively and saving a lot of time and money.

Scalability is one area where Dell PowerStore can be improved. Scalability can be enhanced as it meets our requirements currently, but in the longer run, scalability might be a concern.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for five years.

Dell PowerStore is stable.

Scalability can be improved as it meets our requirements currently, but in the longer run, scalability might be a concern.

The customer support for Dell PowerStore is excellent.

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution.

I had a good experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing.

The implementation definitely needs fewer employees.

I do not have specific numbers or examples that come to mind regarding the time and money saved.

I had a good experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing Dell PowerStore.

If others are evaluating Dell PowerStore, I would definitely advise them to consider it and highly recommend the solution. I rated this review a 9.

My main use case for Dell PowerStore is for the storage of the Dell automated platform to let us navigate away from the hyperconverged infrastructure. I use it for our regular workloads and VMs and for large language model storage.

A specific example of how I'm using Dell PowerStore with my workloads and VMs is that we used it for the VSAN on the Dell automated platform, the vSphere, and we have also used it for a couple of large language models allowing them to connect to a larger storage array from a remote location.

The best features Dell PowerStore offers include scalability, redundancy, and a single pane of glass for updates.

The single pane of glass for updates makes my work easier as it allows us to find an easy way to maintain updates. It is not a large process and it requires a lot less work on my IT team.

Dell PowerStore has positively impacted my organization as it has allowed us to more clearly define the storage needs of each individual process or VM. Where before we had a hyperconverged infrastructure, now we are able to control the storage and data needs more effectively.

We have significantly fewer issues with unknown data space usage where now we can define individual use spaces for our VMs and for different scaled projects, which illustrates how that control has benefited our team.

Dell PowerStore could be improved by integration into the Dell automated platform, which would allow us to see it and perform the upgrades right from there.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for about six months.

Dell PowerStore is stable.

The scalability of Dell PowerStore is very easy to scale and very easy to add redundancy.

Customer support through ProSupport Plus is an easy resource to call when needed.

Positive

I previously used VXRAIL as a hyperconverged infrastructure and switched to Dell PowerStore.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been positive as it is a very easy model to follow and allows us to expand the nodes as needed.

I have seen a return on investment as we have been able to define storage areas, which allows us to prevent large language models and different workloads from taking up too much space and affecting the larger hyperconverged infrastructure. Now it is limited to only that area affecting a single area.

My advice to others looking into using Dell PowerStore is that it is a simple product that gives you a large return on feature sets. I give this product a rating of 10.

Dell PowerStore is mainly used as a core storage platform for scale-out and file storage with NVMe storage. 

Clustering multiple Dell PowerStore appliances is straightforward from a presales perspective, with everything managed from a single dashboard. 

The data resiliency features include single or double drive resiliency for quick recovery from drive failures. The NVMe SSD drives enable fast data rebuilding, replacing traditional RAID systems.

It provides efficiency. The solution uses NVMe platforms and NVMe drives, making it very fast when writing data. While NVMe can be costly, Dell enables always-on data reduction, which means data will be deduplicated with thin provisioning and compression to ensure efficient use of the platform.

With deduplication and compression always on, it offers data efficiency and saves space, which can lead to fewer rack requirements. It can be easily consolidated into half of the space, in turn reducing the power and cooling needs. It reduces the overall footprint by reducing the amount of data that we are managing.

Regarding security, Dell PowerStore includes integrated features such as encryption and anomaly detection to reduce attack surfaces. 

The performance has been good. I haven't had any complaints from customers.

The solution offers tight integration with VMware, Kubernetes, and containers through numerous APIs and tools. Tasks can be performed from vCenter or PowerStore Manager.

The beauty is the simplicity - customers can manage multiple workloads from a single dashboard with scale-out architecture. The new binaries for Dell PowerStore are built on microservices, so updates can be easily deployed on the appliance without hardware changes. In summary, it offers scalability, simplicity, and performance as its magic triangles.

The solution has a very efficient data reduction guarantee of 5:1 based on the workload, which is supported by Dell. The Dell support and services make it easy to sell and easy for customers to use.

It is also very easy to use. The solution is easy to maintain and scale.

Dell PowerStore has minimal areas needing improvement, as it is one of the best products in Dell's portfolio. However, migration services could be included, especially for Oracle migration. Additionally, more documentation specific to Dell PowerStore is needed.

My experience with Dell PowerStore spans five years, starting from its launch.

The solution's scalability is a ten out of ten. When needed, the appliance head can be changed for higher implementation. For example, when starting with 1200 and requiring more IOPS, the head can be upgraded through an in-place upgrade. The scale-out architecture and scale-up architecture give customers options to easily scale performance or capacity. Scale out adds additional appliances to increase performance for more workloads, while scale up adds drives to increase performance for certain workloads.

We have clients from small, medium, and enterprise segments. We have all kinds of clients. The models that we are selling depend on the segments. For example, SMBs mainly go with PowerStore 500T, which is a single appliance. Government or higher sectors take multiple appliances. They have recently launched a new appliance, 200Q, which is very popular because it has a QLC drive. For higher capacities, it is more convenient for the customer, with almost the same performance as well.

We have about five people working with this solution in our organization.

Technical support rates at a seven out of ten, primarily due to response time rather than knowledge. Issues arise when customers try to reduce costs by not purchasing the appropriate support contract or SLAs. This leads to customer satisfaction problems when they expect immediate fixes, but their contract specifies next business day resolution.

Neutral

Comparing Dell PowerStore with other vendors such as Pure, IBM Storage, and Unity, Dell PowerStore stands out for its performance and simplicity. Partners report that customers feel the difference with Dell PowerStore, experiencing higher performance and fewer administration tasks.

It's easy to deploy. The deployment process is straightforward and takes approximately half a day if pre-configured. The process is automatic and requires minimal cabling.

The pricing rates at seven out of ten as it is considered overpriced. Entry-level models are reasonably priced, starting around $30,000 for a base model with 6 drives. However, upgrades become costly - adding 6 additional drives can cost another $30,000.

While Apex AIOps is promoted for health insights and recommendations, I have not personally used this feature.

Overall, I would rate Dell PowerStore a nine out of ten, leaving room for further development.

My main use case for Dell PowerStore is block storage for VMware and virtual desktop infrastructure.

I use Dell PowerStore for my entire environment: production, QA, development, and virtual desktop. I also use it for disaster recovery.

My main uses for Dell PowerStore involve using it across my entire environment, and the data reduction is a useful function.

The best features Dell PowerStore offers are ease of management, setup and configuration, and also the monitoring with AIOps integration, which stand out to me the most.

The ease of management for Dell PowerStore makes setup and configuration straightforward because it has been one of the easiest storage systems I have ever had to set up and configure. It was very quick to get configured with a lot of it being automated.

AIOps has helped me when I have had to look for any performance issues across the stack from application to storage. It has helped me to efficiently get in and look at storage and rule that out as a bottleneck or a performance issue.

Dell PowerStore has positively impacted my organization because in four years of use now, I have had zero outages on my PowerStores, and that is the only system I have had that has had zero outages in a four-year period.

The reliability of Dell PowerStore has greatly reduced any downtime costs for my team, and the replication has increased my disaster recovery functionality as well.

I cannot think of anything that I wish was different or better about Dell PowerStore at this time.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for four years.

Dell PowerStore is stable.

Dell PowerStore's scalability has scaled very well for me so far. I have not had to increase very much; I have added a few drives, but that has been it, and it is as easy as adding a single drive.

Customer support has been fantastic so far.

I previously used the Dell SC series, and I switched because the SC series was end-of-sale.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was all a good experience.

I believe I have seen a good return on investment with Dell PowerStore, but I do not have any metrics to share.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was all a good experience.

Before selecting Dell PowerStore, I evaluated Pure Storage and NetApp. Performance and cost-wise, Dell PowerStore ended up being the leader.

My advice to others looking into using Dell PowerStore is that if you are looking for a great block-level storage solution, this would definitely be one to consider. I give this product a rating of ten out of ten.

For customers who are looking for a unified solution where they want a mixture of block and file systems, Dell PowerStore would be the right fit. Customers can have an array based on flash and also on spinning disk, depending on what kind of workloads they want to run. For example, if they want to do video surveillance systems, we can propose the Dell PowerStore that has only spinning disk, which they can capitalize on capacity because of the video images and related content.

One of our customers is a bank that has Dell PowerStore. Initially, before implementing Dell PowerStore, their transactions were slow, and they received many complaints from their customers regarding data access speed and backup initiation times. 

After implementing Dell PowerStore storage, the performance became exceptional, and customers started to notice improvements in system access. The internal team was very satisfied with the storage performance, and customers are providing positive feedback about Dell PowerStore storage.

The storage for Dell PowerStore has been performing well overall. The only improvement that might be required, though not significantly, relates to the features that allow for support, specifically the call home features.

I have been working with Dell PowerStore for over five years, while also dealing with IBM, Lenovo, Dell, and NetApp systems.

The technical support from Dell PowerStore has been very good. I would rate them eight out of ten.

Positive

We are a partner for Dell, IBM, Lenovo, and Huawei. Dell PowerStore is a good storage solution that I can place in the top five. It has excellent features, and given the opportunity, I would position Dell PowerStore first in a customer environment.

Unless customers specify otherwise, I prefer to position Dell PowerStore over other storage solutions because of its simplicity in deployment, management, and support. It has been very easy to expand in terms of scaling up and scaling out. The process is seamless as you don't need to take the whole storage down to add additional storage space. It's simply a matter of bringing in expansion, connecting it, and then adding space into the existing storage.

Dell PowerStore is highly recommendable due to its anti-ransomware features, which many customers appreciate. When creating snapshots of data that can be immutable, it prevents unauthorized access to the content. These security features make Dell PowerStore a preferred choice for many customers.

On a scale of 1-10, this solution rates 8.5.