Dell PowerStore Reviews

Dell PowerStore is used primarily for conducting demos for customers, proof of concepts, and projects such as migration projects.

Dell PowerStore has become much easier to manage because of my background with EMC storage dating back to Symmetrix and CLARiiON. The ability to quickly engage with the interface means customers can become proficient after just an hour walk-through and are ready to proceed immediately.

I actively use Dell AIOps, and it has proven beneficial in our operations.

I have been able to consolidate data using Dell PowerStore with the data reduction it offers.

The new 5.0 release and the new hardware for Dell PowerStore include many of the features we were looking for.

With approximately 25 years of experience working in my current field, I bring extensive expertise to the table.

I would rate the technical support for Dell PowerStore as an eight out of ten. The responsiveness could be faster, but once you reach the higher tier engineering for major problems, they are very good.

Prior to adopting Dell PowerStore, I used Unity, the SC, and PowerMax.

Regarding ROI, for us, it really does not impact much because as a partner, we pick it up inexpensively. However, for our customers, we have transitioned many from using vSANs and VX Rails with vSANs to using VX Rails with the dynamic node and Dell PowerStore. They manage to downsize their new clusters by having the storage disaggregated, resulting in savings by having basically less compute.

Before selecting Dell PowerMax, we considered Dell PowerStore as it was the central product for everything we sold, fitting perfectly in the sweet spot. We also looked at PowerVault for specific use cases such as backups, but in general, Dell PowerStore is our work engine.

We are not enrolled in a Lifecycle Extension, formerly the Anytime Upgrade Program, but we have customers that are. Those customers who participate in the program benefit primarily from preventing obsolescence, which is the main driver for them.

My advice to other organizations considering Dell PowerStore is to look at the reliability and the history of the company and its heritage. That is the most important factor to me. The performance is great, and the features are all impressive, but the solid foundation is critical.

I would rate this review an eight out of ten.

On-premises

I don't use Dell PowerStore myself, but we sell it, set it up for customers, and we are also the best certified, Europe-wide, I think, also for the PowerStore area with Bechtle.

You need block storage whenever you want to give your virtual machines storage where the hard drives are essentially located. For that you rather need block storage, or for databases.

The challenge with Dell PowerStore was MetroCluster, so recently it's been feature-wise MetroCluster over Fibre Channel. I think with the new update, Dell PowerStore has that now as well, and there was a discussion going on for years where people said Fibre Channel is a very German topic and people prefer to use Ethernet. The Americans recently realized they would develop this, and they even introduced the feature for Bechtle as well.

I consider the active-active MetroCluster the most valuable function on Dell PowerStore.

To growth and business success, Dell PowerStore contributes definitely because the appliances have these expansion enclosures and scale-up and scale-out work pretty well with Dell PowerStore, up to a certain degree. Ultimately the machines themselves are also very powerful. I think especially in growth phases, small and medium-sized businesses benefit from the fact that because it has a dual-controller architecture, both controllers run simultaneously and also work accordingly. They get an extremely good package for the money they invest.

The things where Dell PowerStore should be improved have now been improved and are being introduced with the new update.

Then it's actually great regarding everything with Dell PowerStore. You can always talk about the price.

For a rating of ten, what's missing is knowing quite reliably that you end up with the right support team for your problem because way too often you have a problem, call support, and then end up with people who repair laptops. They say they have no idea. The last time I had to do a major troubleshooting, you had to somehow go to Dell America, or I think you get routed via Ireland or something. That's sometimes a bit complicated, and if everything were German-speaking, that would of course be even better, but you can't always expect that.

I have been working in my field for three years.

I wouldn't know what could keep up with Dell PowerStore regarding stability and reliability.

On a scale from one to ten regarding stability and reliability, I would rate it a ten.

I find Dell's support great. I can't imagine a time when they said no idea, go look somewhere else.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it a nine.

Positive

From other manufacturers, I consider Dell PowerStore alongside something similar to NetApp FAS and Pure Storage, which is also in the block storage area. Every manufacturer has something going for them, but Dell definitely offers the best overall package.

Quality has its price regarding Dell PowerStore. The feature set of Dell PowerStore is so competitive that it can easily put the market admirers in its pocket and simply represents a better product.

I actually haven't really dealt with licensing that much yet.

The network is always a big thing with implementations of Dell PowerStore because especially Dell PowerStore with the network—you want jumbo frames, and on Dell networks they're set a bit differently on the switches.

Regarding AI initiatives, I'd say quite good, because not everyone has a manual in their head on how to use Dell PowerStore. If you can use AI to do certain things for you and to troubleshoot, I think that's quite good.

I would rate this review a nine overall.

On-premises

Other

The main use cases for Dell PowerStore in my case involve using it as primary storage for a mid-range of applications hosted on VMware, as well as in disaster recovery.

We are working with multiple industries. We provide services to a variety of companies, including several security firms and financial institutions such as banks. Additionally, we operate our own site as well.

One of my customers has the 500 series. They have multiple clusters in their primary data center. If I recall correctly, they operate with four or five nodes. From what I understand, it's fine for moving and optimizing workloads within the cluster. Previously, there was a different kind of storage, such as Unity and VNX, from which they migrated. There were numerous quality of service and performance issues back then. However, since migrating to PowerStore, I believe everything is quite optimized. We haven't observed any issues in the two years since the migration.

My experience with the deployment of Dell PowerStore was good. It was easy and straightforward. The migration was quite quick compared to other storage solutions, and provisioning was smooth as well.

The best features of Dell PowerStore that I most appreciate are its performance and the quality of service it provides. The snapshot and replication features are much improved compared to previous mid-range storages. 

In terms of improving Dell PowerStore, they should have simplified documents available for customers, not just for the support team. We faced issues that were hard to resolve without easy access to information, which could aid in quicker resolutions.

I have almost three and a half years of experience with Dell PowerStore, and overall with storage and backup, I have over 10 years of experience.

I find Dell PowerStore stable.

We haven't expanded Dell PowerStore yet, but according to the documentation, it is quite easy to extend. It does take some time to distribute the data among nodes, but we haven't experienced scaling issues as we are currently at 65% capacity.

I would rate Dell's customer service or technical support highly because I was part of Dell EMC in Johannesburg from 2015 to 2018. I know how they work, and their timely responses and resolutions have been quite good. I would rate it an eight.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward, with the help of the Dell team. After hard installation and upgrades, we were up and network-ready in about six hours, including rack and stack, management, and hosting, and then we began migration the next day.

For that client, the deployment model we uses was on-premises, not private cloud or anything else.

Based on my experience, I would rate Dell PowerStore an eight out of ten.

On-premises

It's connected to our VMware environment. We have two appliances. We are using 1200T. We are clustering between two sides in the same building.

Dell PowerStore is very stable. After we completed the installation, we haven't made many changes except for a few updates. The Dell support is very good to work with. 

Dell PowerStore has a nice user interface and works as it should. It's fast and stable to work with, and it seems to be good for our purpose. 

The cybersecurity and data resiliency features are also good. Management capabilities are also good.

They could improve the upgrade process. Currently, there are many manual steps required before upgrading the firmware. Making that process more automatic would be beneficial.

We have been using the solution for about two years.

The workload performance is very good, but we have a rather small installation of Dell PowerStore. It's connected to our vCenter and VMware. We just use it as block storage for VMs.

In our case, we haven't needed to scale yet, as we have half the capacity not being used. If we want to expand the volume of disk storage, we only need to install more disks, making it easy to scale.

I would rate their support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have only worked with EMC and Dell.

The initial setup was very easy. I have also updated it a few times. The system requires updates approximately once every year, and Dell support is very good.

We worked with a Dell consultant. Our experience was excellent.

The solution helps us save money and provides good returns.

It might not be the cheapest product on the market. The purchase was made two years ago, and I'm not certain if the price has increased or decreased since then.

I would rate Dell PowerStore a ten out of ten. 

Dell PowerStore is utilized as one of our built-in integrations with VMware.

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.

Scalability is very important, including reinvestment protection.

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.

Response time is still an area with room for improvements when it comes to the response time and delivery of a solution.

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.

I have been dealing with Dell PowerStore for more than ten years, since the beginning of its introduction to the market.

I would rate their technical support as an eight out of ten.

We were dealing with HP also, but approximately five years ago, we got a better and more flexible relationship with Dell than with HP. We received better prices, better delivery terms, and better support.

I'm not the right person to answer which features I find most valuable because the technical department could answer that question more accurately.

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.

On-premises

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.

Other

Dell PowerStore simplifies management in my organization. The main use cases for Dell PowerStore are performance improvement and workload consolidation.

Dell PowerStore has helped me simplify management in my company by providing storage for the VMware virtualization environment, which means that everything that has VMware is located in a single place.

I consider the best features offered by Dell PowerStore to be low latency, high availability, and consistent performance.

Regarding low latency and high availability, these advantages have impacted my team's day-to-day work by reducing database response times and speeding up the execution of critical processes.

Dell PowerStore has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to optimize storage usage and simplify backup and recovery tasks.

I have optimized storage usage with Dell PowerStore, and I have noticed improvement in database query response times, which has enhanced the experience for both internal users and customers.

I do not think Dell PowerStore could improve at the moment, and I have no suggestions for changes.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for around a year.

I consider Dell PowerStore a stable and reliable solution.

The scalability of Dell PowerStore has been sufficient for my organization's needs as it works properly.

I would rate Dell PowerStore's customer support as nine out of ten.

Before Dell PowerStore, no solution was used.

We have seen a return on investment with Dell PowerStore, observing tangible benefits in the first two years of operation, such as the consolidation of multiple workloads onto a single platform and a reduction in the time spent on administration.

My experience with Dell PowerStore's pricing, implementation cost, and licenses is that it was within the assigned budget, so it wasn't an issue. I give Dell PowerStore a nine and not a ten because of the cost.

Before selecting Dell PowerStore, we evaluated IBM FlashSystem. The decision to choose Dell PowerStore over IBM FlashSystem was influenced by technical support.

Dell PowerStore is deployed on-premises as part of a private cloud in my organization.

We use Microsoft as the private cloud provider for Dell PowerStore.

We are currently using the Q model of Dell PowerStore in a cluster, which was a recommendation from the supplier.

We use VMware as a native integration with Dell PowerStore, and it is very important since virtualization is based on it.

At the moment, we are not using Dell AIOps like CloudIQ or Apex AIOps in Dell PowerStore.

I would recommend Dell PowerStore to organizations that are looking to modernize their storage infrastructure. I give this review an overall rating of nine out of ten.

Private Cloud

Microsoft Azure

Dell PowerStore provides measurable benefits in performance because it uses all-flash disks while our old storage relied on mechanical hard disks. We noticed significant performance improvements between mechanical storage and flash storage, and I believe this represents a major impact.

Dell PowerStore has deduplication, but it may need more enhancement because in our case, it was not as efficient as Dell Data Domain. Dell PowerStore's deduplication ratio was 1.5 or two, so perhaps it needs some enhancement in that area. We experienced an issue when we upgraded the firmware of the disks. When Dell released a firmware version and we upgraded it, some disks failed as a result, so we did not upgrade all of the disks. Dell recommended replacing the failed disk afterward and canceled the firmware upgrade from their website because the upgrade had an issue.

From a features perspective regarding Dell PowerStore, the interface is somewhat slow and needs some enhancement. The web interface for Dell PowerStore requires some improvement.

I have been working here since 2010, which is 15 years now.

In terms of operation, Dell PowerStore has supported us and we have not faced any issues with it. In terms of speed and performance, it performs very well.

The technical support I received from Dell for Dell PowerStore was satisfactory. When we faced the firmware upgrade issue, we called them and they solved the problem. It did not take much time, but it was eventually resolved and they replaced the defective parts.

Negative

We faced a challenge while deploying Dell PowerStore with the partner in implementing NVMe because it was a new offering from Dell and the partner did not have sufficient knowledge to implement it.

During implementation of Dell PowerStore, we upgraded our virtual infrastructure from VMware 7 to VMware 8, and Dell PowerStore offered a new feature for implementing NVMe over Fibre Channel. This had a significant impact on performance and speed, but at that time, it was a new feature and the partner lacked sufficient knowledge to implement it. After conducting research and trials, we eventually implemented it successfully.

To be honest, the pricing of Dell PowerStore is somewhat high, but in terms of features and performance, it is suitable. My advice to other organizations considering Dell PowerStore is to select the suitable model because there is no one model that fits all organizations. Selecting the suitable model for each company and each specific need will be beneficial. I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.

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.