Dell PowerStore Reviews

We have used Dell PowerStore for service and storage needs, emphasizing products like VxRail, PowerStore, and our series rack mount servers.

Dell PowerStore offers good value for money and some feature scalability that is better than other products.

Dell PowerStore has good value for money and some scalability features that are better than other products.

Dell PowerStore doesn't really have a lot of advantages over other products. It has no special features technically. Other products have better management and analytics features. HP emphasizes much better analytical features.

I have used Dell PowerStore for a couple of years, probably about five years.

Dell PowerStore is reasonably priced and scales reasonably well. You don't really need to do much maintenance work on it, and it's not different from any other array.

Dell PowerStore's scalability features are better than those of other products. However, there are other products that are better overall.

HP is superior in analytics, while Dell is superior in scalability. It depends on which model of array you're talking about.

Dell PowerStore is pretty set and forget. It takes a while to install, but it's not overly complex.

Dell PowerStore offers good value for money.

Dell PowerStore is reasonably good value for money. There's nothing special about it technically compared to other products.

HP emphasizes much better analytical features compared to Dell.

I'd rate the solution five out of ten.

We mostly use Dell PowerStore to replace people's outdated technology. Most of the time, if it is Compellent, we use it for that. It easily outpaces Nimble, even though HPE changed its name.

We are using PowerStore 500T and PowerStore 1200T. We have multiple appliances. We have clients that have five and six now, but they are not clustering them.

We recommended Dell PowerStore to one of our clients. They have since standardized on Dell PowerStore. They are setting up a data center and chose Dell PowerStore 5200T to meet their needs. Their deployed ones were all 1200s or 1000s, and now, they are going with much bigger ones for the data center. They like having one interface and one vendor. It has been extremely good.

Overall, it is fairly straightforward. They have standardized the platform for many of their solutions because it makes it much easier to sell and support since PowerFlex and PowerStore have the same footprint. They just put a different OS on them. The standardization makes it very handy. They can hopefully drive the prices lower, but we do not see them having any competition right now.

The management is easy. Intelligence is built into it. Most of the people just set it and forget it. It takes care of itself. It adjusts itself. I am not saying that you should set it and forget it. You should be checking it once in a while, but most of our clients do not. They just set it, and if something goes drastic, such as running out of disk space, they call us, but it warns you early enough. They get a warning, and then it is just trying to get dry fast enough depending on what they are doing.

Compression has improved, which is one of the enhancements that came with an update, which is great. Dell now claims 5:1, which I do not believe, but it used to be 4:1. The compression is really good and extremely important because you do not have to buy too much, and you can grow it when you need to. Compression is probably the key feature that allows us to slay the competition. I am not aware of the competition having as aggressive compression.

PowerStore improves operational efficiency. Having the NVMe drives is much faster than having SSD drives. We are in a new world there, and the compression is inline, which is awesome. It is just a sweet ride.

We utilize PowerStore’s built-in integrations for VMware and Kubernetes or Containers. VMware integration is very important.

Updates come with enhancements. Each time we do an update, there is an enhancement, like new features, which is extraordinary. Other companies would try to charge for all that, but the enhancements just come with it. 

The maintenance is a bit expensive. The service and support are there for three years, but after the third year, it is pretty pricey for renewal. I hope Dell addresses that. Everything is pricey these days anyway. It is not like the old days of Compellent.

We used to be able to see the metrics for our customers. On Compellent, we could look up that customer and see all the metrics. That is not allowed for us now. We cannot do that anymore. I have to be explicitly allowed by the customer to do that, and some companies' security does not allow that.

I have used the solution for at least four, or maybe five, years.

The stability has been excellent. We have not had any issues with that. I have had a client that had a fire. It was a pretty bad smoke fire, and PowerStore came through it like a champ. It is still going. However, it needs to be replaced. It is on one processor until the insurance comes through. It is a 500T.

The scalability has been extremely good.

The customer service has been excellent. I would rate them a solid nine out of ten.

Positive

We have used different solutions. We moved to Dell PowerStore because it is easy.

If you look at the pricing in the field right now, are you going to buy a storage product from HPE that pretty much has a different engineer every week? Also, HPE makes their products in China, which Dell is not doing anymore. They got rid of making products in China. I believe the Dell PowerStore and PowerFlex are produced in the Northeast, so it is a US-based product. The components do not come from China. That is a very strong aspect. With the advent of AI, you need the IO that a PowerStore can give you because things are not getting any less complicated. They require more and more data every day.

The deployment is easy. With the tools that come with PowerStore, you can pretty much migrate from anything.

We are deployment-certified, and we can have everything done within two days. However, we are not Dell. We got ourselves deployment-certified because we wanted to save money on the deal, and we did not want to get sucked into the vortex of the deployment process because there is so much minutiae there.

We are a partner with Dell, and we advise our clients. We are technical advisors for our clients, and the good thing about us deploying is that we can migrate their setup over several weeks. They do not have to do it all at once like with Dell. 

The rate is always too high. Nobody likes paying for it. I have not seen a client yet who says that the price should be higher.

Initially, people look at it, but when they see what the benefits are, it is a no-brainer. We can give them good pricing at the outset.

I would rate Dell PowerStore a nine out of ten.

It is our primary storage. We have two appliances.

It's very easy to use. It's very easy to manage. We did not find any difficulties in terms of management. Its benefits were visible from the start.

It's good storage. The hardware is decent. It's doing its job.

It's easy to use and manage. It's compatible with our infrastructure. We don't have an issue in terms of compatibility, usage, and support.

We find NAS to be the most impactful feature of Dell PowerStore. The compression and deduplication technology is very important and essential, and this was one of the reasons that we decided to go with Dell PowerStore. 

In future updates, I would like to see more AI functionality plus a good integration with OneDrive.

We have been using Dell PowerMax in our organization for approximately seven years. Dell PowerStore has been in use for approximately two to three years.

It is stable. We have no issues with it.

I would evaluate Dell Technologies' service and technical support as very good and very responsive.

Positive

We have been using Dell PowerMax. We had a requirement for additional storage and decided not to expand Dell PowerMax because of the pricing. We decided to have new storage with Dell PowerStore.

It was very easy to deploy, and there was no challenge. It took two to three days to deploy.

Three people took part in the deployment process.

Dell PowerStore has helped to reduce our organization's capital expenditures.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I can't think of anything to improve Dell PowerStore because when it comes to storage, I don't want to have to troubleshoot it or deal with it unless I'm deploying a new volume or deploying something. That's one of the reasons why I love PowerProtect - if I didn't save the password in a password manager, I would forget what the admin login is, because I never have to log into it and troubleshoot it at all. It just works. It is very resilient, and that's my favorite thing about it. 

I evaluate storage reliability performance by noting that I'm the one who would have to troubleshoot or fix something, and with Dell PowerStore, I never have to log into it, which is awesome. 

I've never had to contact support, which is one of the reasons why I love it. I don't want to constantly have issues with something, so I can dedicate my time to something else that's not just fixing what we have.

One improvement I would suggest relates to the service that pings Dell when there's an issue. I would say it needs to be more transparent. 

Dell has always been good to us, even though we're not a massive company. While we are a global company, in terms of employees, we're not that huge. Dell has always been good to us, and we never felt they looked down on us because we're under a thousand employees.

Positive

That's one of the big reasons why we're here, so we can find how we can start utilizing AI for our business, that's not just asking ChatGPT to make a report for us or something. Dell PowerStore is my baby.

My use case for Dell PowerStore is to have a faster storage platform.

The most valuable feature about Dell PowerStore is speed and reliability. Speed and reliability are valuable because we reach a better response time in the applications. 

We use the storage principally for the database, and their response of the database was better after that. Dell PowerStore helps my organization overall by providing a better experience for the clients from the front end.

I would improve the product to make it better. I had specific troubles with vulnerabilities in Dell PowerStore. There are many vulnerabilities that we cannot mitigate related to the administration interface. It is hard to install certificates from another source.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for five years.

I have found that Dell PowerStore scales with my organization.

I have not used customer service or support.

Positive

I did use another solution before Dell PowerStore; we were using EMC before, and EMC was a part of Dell. The switch was for obsolescence; we were really happy with EMC, and this is the next generation of the same platform.

I was not part of the group that deployed Dell PowerStore. We worked with another team for the deployment.

I did evaluate other companies before. Companies such as IBM and ThreePAR for HP were among those I evaluated.

I ended up choosing Dell PowerStore for many reasons; the principal reason is due to the fact that I had experience with it before. I had a nice provider with a close relation, and this product complied with our requirements.

The advice I would give to somebody who's looking at purchasing Dell PowerStore is that it was easy to deploy; the migration was easy, too, and I always had good customer service and replacement parts. It works fine and is pretty simple.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the product a nine.

I have implemented Dell PowerStore primarily for use cases involving straight-up service in virtualization, which includes fewer VDIs and more generic services.

The solution's most valuable feature is that the full NVMe offers great latency, which is the most effective way to give our customers the benefits of all-flash storage, especially since they won't really notice the bandwidth more than the latency.

The challenges my company was trying to address with the implementation of Dell PowerStore revolve around floor space saving. In Germany, one mostly has to deal with a conservative customer base. If there is a storage that is seven years old and now if one wants to change it, then there are these big machines, with which one can get a lot of terabytes out of it, and that is definitely a big point. When it comes to the area of data reduction, Germany is very conservative, and it may not be possible to reach 4:1 data reduction, but it is still good as the tool's usability is very simple compared to other systems.

Dell PowerStore's ability in the area of overall energy consumption is very good compared to the other systems, which have spinning disks. All-flash storage solutions are a lot more effective, but it is a big concern as energy prices are high. In terms of whether my company could reduce the power consumption with Dell PowerStore, I would say that my company had a use case with a customer around three weeks ago where their old Dell EMC VNX Storage System used to draw about 2500 watts compared to Dell PowerStore which drew about 800 watts, which is a really a big saving looking at the twenty-four hours and seven days of usage of the system.

My organization uses Dell CloudIQ to manage and analyze Dell storage around 50 percent of the time. It makes a lot more sense when one has a lot more Dell hardware because it provides one with a single pane of glass management and an overview of the systems.

After assessing Dell PowerStore's Cyber-resilient data approach to security, I would say that its secure and immutable snapshots are a big feature in Europe. The tool was lacking for quite a time in the area of cyber-resilient data approach to security, but now it has become very good. I think Dell PowerStore is a state-of-the-art system.

I have been able to reduce our organizational footprint and data consolidation using Dell PowerStore, considering that the tool has helped with data reduction by around a 2.5:1 ratio. If I compare the footprint of Dell PowerStore with our company's previously used solution, I would say that the products used in the past did not help with any kind of reduction of data. As a company that has partnerships with different vendors, we have Pure Storage in our portfolio. Pure Storage is better than Dell PowerStore, specifically in the case of data reduction. The algorithm behind Pure Storage performs a bit better, but looking at the price difference, Dell PowerStore is available at a better deal.

The tool is deployed mostly on an on-premises model. The deployment is split into an 80 percent and 20 percent model. Around three to seventeen customers use the tool with VMware, while a few customers use OpenStack.

After upgrades, there were a few bugs in the product, and it can be considered as an area of concern where improvements are required.

I have been using Dell PowerStore since 2021. I was still a customer back in 2021 who bought a Dell PowerStore and then switched to the partner side at the beginning of 2022. Since 2022, I have dealt with 30 to 35 product implementations.

There were a few bugs in the product after the upgrades. My company had to face a few bugs in the latest upgrades of the tool owing to which we had to reboot the solution, and it is a big no-no for us considering that the product is a part of the virtualization stack, but if you are not really counting that and stay at the target code, which the tool recommends actually, then it is good.

In my company, we have a few appliances which we scaled out. The problem is mostly that single drive additions are really expensive. For most customers, it is actually more efficient to buy a whole Dell PowerStore, which is kind of hard to explain to most customers.

My company mostly contacts Dell's support team for mission critical services. Dell's support team's response has always been completely positive. The quick response from the tool's dedicated German support team for storage ensures that our company gets new leads and connects you to the right set of people from Dell. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

Considering the other solutions my company has used, I would say that Dell PowerStore, with all its features from previous releases, offers good functionalities. The big pro associated with Dell PowerStore stems from its price point since one gets a lot more compared to other products in the market.

The product's initial deployment phase has been straightforward. You can't get anything wrong with the deployment process associated with the product. I had two or three systems on which the validation was successful, but the actual deployment failed. It is not a big problem since you can just re-initialize it and start over.

Though I don't get real hard data about the savings part attached to the product, customer feedback has been extremely positive. There are no issues with the product's performance since Dell PowerStore is an NVMe product.

I rate the tool an eight and a half out of ten.

The main use case for Dell PowerStore is that it hosts our production base and the virtualization infrastructure.

The best features of Dell PowerStore are the cluster and the synchronization, which is far better than the technology we were using. It was VPLEX, and it was quite complex with a bunch of more equipment, SAN switches, and the link between the sites, the bandwidth, and the time to converge both systems to the same state whenever we had a network problem. It used to take 6 to 10 hours to synchronize the storage. Now it's much more reliable and faster.

Dell PowerStore has positively impacted our organization by improving the user experience. We were having issues with the hybrid storage we had in the past, so we decided to go to an all-flash solution, and it made it possible to give a better experience because we were having heavy delays on the applications. We had to make some tuning on SQL Server as well, but we got into a limit that it was necessary to move to another technology or to a faster technology.

I have two years of experience with Dell PowerStore.

We are clustering multiple Dell PowerStore appliances with two active-active clusters.

I would rate Dell's technical support or customer service a 10.

Moving and optimizing workloads within the cluster became easier with Dell PowerStore. It became easier because we had a VNX, and it was quite tricky to set up. It's much easier now.

The initial setup of Dell PowerStore is complex, but it's not as complex as the previous version.

I think the pricing or setup cost or licensing of Dell is fair.

We have two storages; we have an object storage that stores all the objects such as PDFs and other kinds of documents, which is a Dell storage, a DCS. All other storage is supported by Dell PowerStore, approximately 70-80%.

Dell PowerStore definitely meets our company's needs. We are a public company, a state company, so we are very regulated in privacy and other requirements. It helps significantly.

I have been able to consolidate our data using Dell PowerStore. As far as non-technical improvements, there's a niche market in Brazil for Dell PowerStore, so more players would be nice. They are good because of the response time, the knowledge, the attention, and the supply chain.

I don't have any issues with storage, so if it doesn't give me any problems to resolve and doesn't bring me issues to solve, it's excellent. I assess the management capabilities of Dell PowerStore as pretty easy. The initial setup with SAN storage is always complex, requiring setting up ISL and all the back-end equipment, but once you've done that, the setup to provide storage and manage everyday activities is pretty easy.

Regarding the insights offered by APEX AIOps, CloudIQ, I've been receiving some reports. Every week I have a report in my email, so it's good.

Overall, I would rate Dell PowerStore a 10.

I use it in the financial sector for banking, specifically for core banking applications, to serve our applications. We served different types of customers, ranging from oil and gas to the financial sector, education, and healthcare. We deployed Dell PowerStore in different industry segments, such as manufacturing and retail, for example.

The most impactful benefit is the data reduction and the deduplication.

Replication is easy to implement, and you don't need higher bandwidth to do replication across sites. It's quite useful.

The most impactful feature is the data reduction. Data reduction significantly saves costs. If I purchase, for example, twenty terabytes of storage, the effective capacity gives me somewhere around eighty terabytes. I pay for ten terabytes but gain eighty terabytes or fifty terabytes, for example. It depends on the type of data I am storing on Dell PowerStore, but usually, the reduction ratio is very good. It's a fantastic feature.

I have read about the new ability to cluster multiple PowerStore appliances and it sounds like a very good feature.

Its management capabilities are very strong. It is easy to implement and very easy to manage. The interface is very user-friendly.

Dell AIOPS is quite useful. It sends helpful notifications. It tells you what bottleneck is in your storage environment. It gives you detailed orientation of why you are getting a bottleneck and where the problem is. 

We have been able to consolidate data using PowerStore.

PowerStore's compression and duplication technologies are very important and useful. It's a good feature.

The data resiliency and cybersecurity are good. It covers all the aspects that modern storage should have. 

The PowerStore cybersecurity and resiliency features meet our organizational needs.

PowerStore's built-in integrations for VMware are beneficial. It has all the features that need to be integrated into the environment. It's well aligned and tightly integrated.

One challenge in clustering is that when I create a cluster, the overall pool doesn't increase. Separate pools must be created for each controller node in the cluster. For instance, if I am creating a four-node or four-controller node cluster, I will have four different pools. If I want to enhance a pool beyond the maximum capacity of one controller node, I cannot increase it and must create a separate pool. This is a drawback in Dell PowerStore clustering. 

Synchronous replication covers the entire replication process, but there are scenarios where implementing synchronous replication is necessary, and that feature is missing. Pricing must also be considered, as Dell PowerStore is quite expensive compared to competitors in the market like HPE Alletra, Huawei Dorado, or Hitachi storage, for example. It is quite expensive price-wise.

Feature-set wise, PowerStore is very rich. I think all of the necessary features are there. Price-wise, PowerStore is quite expensive compared to the competition in the market like HP Alletra, Huawei, or Hitachi storage. Dell is more expensive. 

Competitors come in with better pricing and a similar feature set. Customers who already have PowerStore are very satisfied but when it comes to new storage requirements or a tech refresh, customers consider other options as well because of the price.

I have used the solution for roughly five to seven years.

It's very stable.

Scaling up is quite easy, whereas scaling out my storage requires deployment in a clustered manner from day one. If it's not deployed in a clustered manner and I want to scale out, I cannot do so. Careful planning is required at the start of implementation to determine if scaling out will be needed in the future. If this is not addressed in time, I will have to start from scratch, which is a daunting task. There are challenges with scaling out if the environment is not prepared at the initial deployment. Otherwise, it is straightforward. It is very useful, as I can add drive storage incrementally instead of a large batch of disks each time. It is both very useful and cost-effective.

Dell technical support is very good. They reach out to me promptly, deliver replacement parts quickly, and have local depots in three different cities across the country. Overall support is good.

Positive

There are two major aspects when it comes to the setup. One is the migration from existing storage, and the other is how fast I can complete the initial setup of Dell PowerStore. From a migration perspective, Dell PowerStore has the capability to migrate data from existing storage, even from other brands. The second phase is the initial setup, which is very straightforward. In a few steps, I am ready to set it up. Then, in the third phase, configuring replication, it is very straightforward and can be done in a few clicks. In all three phases—from migration to initial setup and to replication of the DR side, or the secondary side, or a third site—Dell PowerStore is easy to install and implement.

When I plan a tech refresh, other competitors offer better pricing with similar feature sets. This is a challenge for customers who are already satisfied with Dell PowerStore. However, when it comes to new storage requirements or a tech refresh, I consider other options as well.

Normally, Dell PowerStore is an NVMe storage, but it does not offer all NVMe protocol support like NVMe over RoCE, NVMe over fiber channel, and NVMe over TCP while other competitors do offer various connectivity options that Dell PowerStore lacks. For example, it lacks F5 and NVMe over RoCE and NVMe over fiber channel. Although it's NVMe-ready storage, it is not end-to-end NVMe ready from a technical angle.

My advice to anybody considering PowerStore is that if you need a scale-out feature in the future, you should consider it from day one. If Dell PowerStore is set up as a single appliance, scaling out will not be possible. This is the main point that needs consideration. 

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten.