Dell PowerStore Reviews

I use Dell PowerStore for an application. In my last work at B3, we bought Dell PowerStore for a specific corporate back-end, back-office solution for one application to solve problems with the service desk. We created some LUNs for a SQL Server and presented them to some Microsoft Windows Clusters using Dell PowerStore, but we don't use remote replication for Dell PowerStore; it's in a single, specific solution for an application attending a SQL Server.

The solution is implemented in finance. B3 is the Brazilian stock exchange, and all the solutions I worked on there for the last 15 years were in finance.

It reduces the time and complexity of the deployment process. It’s quite simple and can be done quickly. I believe it has significantly reduced the time required to deploy. Overall, the deployment process is very straightforward.

I really appreciate the management and the management console of Dell PowerStore along with features such as deduplication. It's good and sufficient.

Additionally, it's very easy and simple to use Dell PowerStore for moving and optimizing workloads within the cluster. It's just to provision the LUNs for the cluster. If we have a virtual environment like VMware, we can easily perform storage migration from a source disk to a target disk. This process allows us to transfer data seamlessly. In my previous jobs, we typically utilized tools such as Open Replicator, which is provided by Dell EMC, to move data between Dell EMC storage systems.

Furthermore, Dell's post-sales support is strong and very good.

If Dell PowerStore had more controllers, making it more reliable and resilient, it would be better. The most important thing for the customer is resilience and business continuity. When we have a failure in one controller and only two controllers, that's not good enough. If we could scale Dell PowerStore to four controllers, it would be better than what we have today.

I have worked with Dell EMC for more than 15 years, and also HPE, including 3PAR.

Dell's post-sales support is very strong and good. I trust in Dell's post-sales support. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

I have experience with NetApp storage solutions, hybrid NetApp, all-flash storage systems, and Hitachi models such as USPV and VSP, but my strong knowledge is with Dell EMC, PowerMax solutions, PowerFlex, VXRail, and hyper-converged infrastructure solutions.

I have deployed Dell PowerStore just once, but I have deployed many other products such as PowerMax 200, PowerMax 8000, and others. I have deployed a lot of high-end storage platforms from EMC and Dell EMC including DMX series.

I deployed it on-premises; the model is 500T. It was very simple and easy to do. I particularly really appreciate using the Apex AIOps or the CloudIQ solution from Dell EMC as it allows me to observe all the metrics and telemetrics from the performance through the SAS portal, which I think is very good for knowing about the workloads and how the equipment is working.

When it comes to Dell solutions, I find PowerMax to be the most comprehensive option. It offers a range of features such as remote replication, security snapshots, immutable security snapshots, and SRDF capabilities—both synchronous and asynchronous. It also includes features like chip copy disk mode, deduplication, peak provisioning, and effective data reduction. There are some similarities between the two, but PowerMax has several advantages. It comes with more controllers and greater resiliency, making it better suited for critical mission environments.

I would rate Dell PowerStore an eight out of ten.

We store all our critical business databases and applications on Dell PowerStore, and we use it as the storage for our virtualization environment, so pretty much all our workloads from virtualization to database, it's the main primary storage for everything.

Dell PowerStore has supported the growth and operational success of our organization by reducing the footprint, rack space, power consumption, and the resources needed to run the backend storage, which has been consolidated into just 2U, thereby enhancing efficiency. We now know everything is there, as there's one GUI, and that's where it is.

The features of Dell PowerStore that I like the most include the simplified web GUI, and setting up replication to protection groups on the other site was pretty straightforward. I have presented straight-up Linux NFS shares off it as well to certain systems, which we weren't able to do on our old storage, so that was very useful.

Nothing comes to mind at the moment on how Dell PowerStore can be improved or any additional features I would like to see included in the next releases. I do not have any current pain points that I would like them to fix, although we did have one issue when an update stopped the phone-home solution, however they fixed that via support.

We've had Dell PowerStore for the last two years.

I assess the stability and reliability of Dell PowerStore as very reliable, as we've only had one alert that had an issue with it in the last two and a half years of our full operational load.

As we require additional storage, or once we hit the capacity limit, Dell PowerStore is easy to expand and add extra capacity, so it will be there for years to come.

I evaluate Dell's customer support as good, as we've always been able to upload the logs and get the parts within the four-hour deadline on the one occasion that we needed them. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Dell support a nine. What would make it a ten is that sometimes we go through an initial triage that repeats a lot of the initial triage steps that would have been done by my own engineers, so sometimes it would be nice to skip the starting point.

Positive

We transitioned from an HPE Nimble Storage and an HPE 3PAR, which are no longer supported or offered, to Pure Storage. We had also previously considered an EMC solution.

There was a general ease of deployment, as it was a fairly intuitive web GUI that was self-explanatory once it was racked.

I evaluated the market and the competition, and we settled on Dell PowerStore as our preferred NVMe flash storage solution, so my initial role was to set it up, get it configured, and get it active in the environment, and then plan the migrations to it.

I have seen some return on my investment with Dell PowerStore. You're getting rid of equipment, with the first 3PAR being a full rack, the other 3PAR being half a rack, and the Nimble being more 8U, so we've basically gone down from two rack spaces to a 2U server space. 

I have realized some money and time savings with Dell PowerStore. We're not spinning up that amount of power, and in terms of time saving, I'm sure it's performing some workloads quicker than the previous disks had to, but operational stability and 24/7, 365 operation is more what we need in our environment.

The advice I would give to other organizations considering Dell PowerStore based on my experience with it is that it has to be highly considered, as the price point was not really any better than the competitors; it was close, and it has worked out well, so stick with your account manager and they will do their best to get you a good deal.

Examples of how features benefited our organization include: previously, for the NFS, for the SIEM cybersecurity solution, we had to have a separate Linux server, where we were able to just do it straight from the Dell PowerStore GUI, so we got rid of three layers of complication and resources that weren't needed. 

I rate Dell PowerStore a perfect ten out of ten.

We were end-of-life on our current Unity 480S all-flash arrays and needed to upgrade to a newer array, and we didn't want to have to pay the extortionate costs for renewing our support for Unity.

Dell PowerStore outperforms Unity by approximately ten to one. 

In terms of performance, it performs very well. Implementation went well. The console GUI is very similar to all the other Dell flagship products, such as Dell PowerProtect Data Manager or Dell Data Domain. All of the front-end console GUIs have been brought together to provide one seamless pane of glass ecosystem, which makes it really easy to move around in the environment. When I'm managing all these systems, that helps me quickly get familiar with where things are going to be placed, which then helps me speed up and do my job a little bit more efficiently.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is Metro Volumes. It allowed us to remove our current Recovery Point/Broadcom VMware SRM licenses, which cost a fortune, resulting in significant cost savings.

The product stands on its own merit. It does exactly what it's meant to do. It's very scalable, very efficient power-wise and performance-wise.

Cost is one aspect that needs improvement, as selling the drives after purchasing the solution makes them incredibly expensive. The reason we buy it as a whole complete system is because we get such a discount on the drives upfront. When we go to buy or populate more drives in the storage array, they're so expensive. If they could lower the cost for components, we would definitely expand them more and be more inclined to buy more storage units, but it's currently a price crunch for us. Price is a deterrent to scalability.

We have been using Dell PowerStore since implementing it two months ago.

We've actually crashed the system on purpose and watched Metro do what it was supposed to do. The product does exactly what it claims. We saw that on keynotes at Dell Technologies World 2024, and to see it actually work in our data center was impressive. When I removed all the cables, it failed over within five minutes. It's remarkable to see that actually happen in practice. You hear a lot of talk, but to see the talk go into action is another thing in itself.

We have 700 to 800 people. Dell PowerStore has models such as the 500T that we have in one of our smaller data centers. This solution is more suitable for mid to large-sized businesses. As a Dell company, it's definitely growing with our needs in every aspect, from data protection to storage capacity to the workstation level.

The deduplication feature set built into Dell PowerStore helps us with current scaling for storage because it provides significant data reduction. However, when we need to grow, the price point of buying external storage and filling up new LUNs and racks becomes expensive. We try to budget our storage for Dell PowerStore ahead of time to avoid populating it with more drives later, knowing that adding another rack will be costly. If they can help offset that cost, it would be beneficial.

They provide the same great support that I always receive with all Dell products. Their support is one of the best. That's why we're with Dell.

It was incredibly easy to deploy Dell PowerStore. The deployment time from start to end was a week, which included cabling, configuration, migration of data, and everything coming together.

We've received a return on investment in the coming renewal of our Broadcom VMware licensing. In terms of licensing, we're paying less due to the implementation of the new PowerStore system into our infrastructure.

After attending Dell Technologies World 2024 and seeing the new iterations and feature sets coming out in version five, we were further convinced to go with Dell PowerStore.

There are plans for an AI implementation, a kiosk-type system, that will utilize this storage, but it has been tabled for now. It will likely be picked up at the end of our quarter or beginning of next quarter.

I would rate Dell PowerStore an eight out of ten.

I was with Dell myself for 22 years before starting this company. I used to manage storage for South of India. So, I am pretty familiar with the product.

There are many valuable features. The dedup engine allows you to not have to have the hot spare concept. Dynamic sparing is another great feature. I could go on and on about the capabilities.

There is not a drawback from Dell PowerStore perspective as such. The concern is an issue with the overall portfolio.

It was very easy.

Not directly myself, but my team has handled this.

We are partners for Dell.

It was very easy.

My entire team is ex-Dell. They were with Dell for 19-odd years. They are very familiar with deployment of Dell PowerStore.

I would rate this as 10.

I would also rate this as 10.

We can be, and they can be as well.

We have deployed Dell PowerStore T, we will deploy Dell PowerStore X, and we have deployed VMs on Dell PowerStore directly. We have had Dell PowerStore 500T. We have done Dell PowerStore 1200T cluster. We have had four clusters in DC replicating to DR to four more clusters. We have done everything on Dell PowerStore. Overall, I would rate this review as 10.

My use case for Dell PowerStore is virtualization and primary data storage.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is the ease of deployment and general use. The ease of use of Dell PowerStore means that we don't have to have as many storage admins, and general people can now use it as opposed to just having specialized teams for that. 

Dell PowerStore has freed up staff to do other things, and they don't have to focus as much on the care and feeding of things on a day-to-day basis. We save approximately 40 man-hours a month, which is significant.

Some of the issues I have with Dell PowerStore are more gripes than actual issues. I wish there were more options to fine-tune things. Some of the information requires deeper investigation to get data efficiency per data store. 

I would rather see this as one holistic view, instead of having to dive down to each one to find where a data store is not performing as well as desired.

I have been using Dell PowerStore since 2020.

Dell PowerStore has been very reliable.

I think Dell PowerStore can grow, especially because we've done in-place upgrades. We've gone from a 1000T to a 3200 live, so we were able to increase the generation from Generation 1 to Generation 2, and then also increase the performance envelope by changing out the controller.

I have used customer services for Dell PowerStore. It has been very favorable. Most of the customer service we've dealt with has been out of Oklahoma for the mid-range tier products, and I've had really good interactions with them over the years.

Positive

Before Dell PowerStore, we were still Dell customers, using Compellent and Unity. We migrated over to Dell PowerStore as an option.

Dell PowerStore is mature now, though we were very early adopters and dealt with different teething pains. It's a mature product now and the ease of use and incremental scalability makes it very attractive for mid-enterprise teams. It fits a wide envelope of use cases, from basic standpoint to high-performance workload that can run without any issues.

I am familiar with the pricing and licensing of Dell PowerStore. The pricing is currently difficult due to global circumstances. The initial attraction was ease of expansion, one thing at a time, but with tariffs there's a lot of fluctuation. The pricing itself is fine, and the fact that we can expand one drive at a time makes it easier to manage capital expenses versus investing in an entire big array.

My overall rating for Dell PowerStore is eight out of ten.

We use Dell PowerStore for all of our file storage and our local storage in general. We have all of our VMs running on it, data backups, and file storage is a big thing for us, with everything else in the cloud.

The features of Dell PowerStore that I appreciate the most are that it just works; it's tried and true and amazing, and we never have to worry about it. 

A lot of the interface is very clean and easy to use, making it very easy to get done what we need to get done.

One of the benefits I have seen from using Dell PowerStore is ease of use. While it is one of the biggest things, another huge benefit is that we have implemented other solutions and had issues with them—hardware, software, whatever it may be—and we don't have those issues using Dell PowerStore; it just works and is very reliable.

How Dell PowerStore could be better or improved is still to be determined with AI. Currently, it suits many of our needs, and there isn't much to want out of it because they are very good and innovative with their solutions.The first thing that comes to mind for improvement would be education. While I know that some educational resources exist, knowing about them would be beneficial, and if I dealt more with our representative to get more education on some aspects, that would be helpful.

I have used Dell PowerStore off and on for 15 years, and recently, for the last two years, we have gone back with Dell PowerStore.

If I would give a rating to Dell support on a scale of one to 10, it would be close to a 10. Ten is hard because that's perfect and nobody's perfect, but I would say it's up there, around eight or nine for sure, as they are always very helpful and responsive.

What would make it a 10 is hard to say since that's a perfect score, but it ticks many of our boxes and we really enjoy working with Dell. I don't have anything negative to say.

Positive

Before we decided to go with Dell PowerStore, we did consider other solutions and used to have a different solution. Then it caused problems, so we ended up going back with Dell and implementing Dell PowerStore.

I have seen a return on my investment in Dell PowerStore. One of the biggest ways is through time savings; we don't have to mess with Dell PowerStore as it just works, and that in itself is a huge ROI.

Comparing Dell PowerStore to our previous solution, we have significantly decreased our time spent on management. 

Annually, we used to spend considerable time configuring, reconfiguring, troubleshooting, and contacting support because things weren't working. It's night and day using Dell PowerStore—we don't do any of that, which is great.

Whether Dell PowerStore supports our AI initiatives is to be determined, as we have been figuring out how we are going to implement these technologies. What we are planning to do with AI in the context of Dell PowerStore is still undecided since it's a new technology, but we are exploring options. Dell PowerStore does not have features that specifically cater to the needs of our company or industry that are outstanding among others, but reliability is crucial, and ease of management is also important. 

I see Dell products growing with our future needs. I feel very comfortable with the scalability of the Dell PowerStore solution for our long-term plans. I can expand and keep using, and scale what we need to do. We don't have any performance metrics or benchmarks in place to measure success with Dell PowerStore; uptime is significant, and it has been great.

For the size of our company, Dell PowerStore has supported our growth and operational success very well. Dell as a whole has been awesome, always there to support us. We are working on a PC refresh right now, and our representative has been very helpful, always a phone call away.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Dell PowerStore a 9.

We have a large Citrix environment and a large VMware environment, virtualized server infrastructure, and we use Dell PowerStore for our medical organization, so our imaging for x-rays and all those are stored on there, along with some backups. 

We're just exploring AI use cases for Dell PowerStore currently, as we're in the early stages of it. We definitely can see the potential of helping our medical staff come to conclusions quicker, also our financial team, which can get very complex with insurance and billing, and we're looking for opportunities there. We're also looking at opportunities in my field in IT to support staff more quickly, so there's a lot of potential across the board with supply chain issues and all that kind of infrastructure.

I don't have many features to highlight for Dell PowerStore. I do appreciate the warranty support side of it. When we've had issues, it's been easy to get them rectified. 

I have realized nothing exemplary from using Dell PowerStore, except hat the user interface is clunky, and we've had issues with that. 

The interface of Dell PowerStore reminds me of the Cisco mentality where it's just boxes moving around as you're clicking; it's not easy to understand what you're trying to do, and you have to have solid documentation to navigate the system and make changes to ensure you're not jeopardizing your system as you present and remove storage and expand LUNs. 

Some other vendors in that space are innovating in that area, making lives easier for engineers, however, it seems the Dell PowerStore solution doesn't cater to that need, and I'm seeing more and more that my colleagues in other organizations are experiencing the same problem and turning to other more user-friendly solutions.

The organization has been using Dell PowerStore for 15-plus years, maybe longer.

They're very stable; our infrastructure stays up, and we very rarely have any outage, occurring approximately once every three years.

Dell PowerStore grows with our needs and scales effectively. In the past, we've expanded our usage of Dell PowerStore substantially; in healthcare, we have to keep our data indefinitely, so we're always increasing our storage.

The support for Dell PowerStore is exceptional; I would rate it at probably an eight or nine out of ten.

Positive

Dell PowerStore is slightly more expensive than some other competitors when it comes to pricing, setup costs, and licensing.

In some cases, we haven't decided to purchase Dell PowerStore; we've been going with other competitors as in some cases it's easier and slightly cheaper. 

I'm not aware of other competitors at this level, so when asked about other competitors and their AI use cases, it's early in this world for many organizations, but Dell is leading it currently. If they're going to be using AI, this changes everything regarding Dell PowerStore. If it has built-in AI at the storage layer, at least the compute for it, that's only going to enhance that situation, and if your data's on-premises, that's a game changer.

We covered the cons of Dell PowerStore; as for the pros, we have a strong relationship with Dell and that partnership, and some of the innovations we're talking about today sound interesting to me. There's a good reputation there, and we've had great success with support.

I would rate Dell PowerStore as a solution overall at a seven out of ten.

I'm currently working with a Dell partner in Saudi Arabia and collaborating on EMC solutions. I'm working with Dell PowerStore, PowerScale, and Unity, especially the SAN storage and NAS storage. Dell PowerStore is used for their server environment, for ESXi, environment, for VMware environment, for database, Oracle database. 

We have Dell PowerStore 3000T; we are currently using Dell PowerStore 3000T. For some customers, they have clustering of multiple Dell PowerStore appliances. I utilize the built-in integrations for VMware and Oracle ecosystems, but I found that most of the customers are not using them, even though they know that it works, especially with VMware vCenter. They prefer individual administration, meaning they go directly to Dell PowerStore rather than using vCenter to manage Dell PowerStore.

The best features in Dell PowerStore are that it's easy to manage. For the customer user interface, customers can start learning and provision everything, and manage the system easily. From the operational efficiency perspective, Dell PowerStore has helped improve operational efficiency for most customers here, as they will arrange their EMC residency to manage their product on-site. It's easy to expand Dell PowerStore in terms of scaling up.

There are things I would like to see improved or enhanced in Dell PowerStore, such as they should invest in technology using NVMe. I know that they have the TLC NVMe, so they should use a different type of NVMe, which is much faster, similar to pure storage.

Also, they don't have replication capability; we have to use another appliance to do the replication. I think they should implement replication capability on Dell PowerStore.

I have been working with Dell PowerStore since they started selling it. I worked for EMC from 2000 until 2022.

Clustering Dell PowerStore appliances is easy. You manage from one graphical user interface.

My experience with the technical support and customer support for Dell PowerStore is good. However, when it was during EMC, it was much better. Now, during Dell's time, it's not as good as it used to be. They're getting worse. I don't know whether Dell is really invested in customer support. 

Depending on the product, for Dell PowerScale or for Dell PowerStore, I would rate it eight. It depends on which support center you are engaged with, because I have experience with some support centers where their support made a wrong decision.

Positive

In terms of deployment and initial setup, the question is unfair because I've worked with a SAN environment for more than 22 years. It's easy for me to set up.

The benefits that Dell PowerStore brings to customers include trust in EMC storage, which is why they keep buying. It's easy for migration and future migration.

I can share advice and recommendations with users who are looking into implementing Dell PowerStore for their companies or organizations from an implementation perspective. I would assess Dell PowerStore's data resiliency and cybersecurity features as good because Dell is continuously updating about any issues with any loopholes in their products. They keep giving the advice, so we just follow, do upgrades on the firmware. Dell PowerStore's cybersecurity and resiliency features meet customers' needs in this aspect because so far they haven't complained about anything.

I utilize the add capacity abilities of Dell PowerStore, which is good because, compared to the previous Unity and the storage pool where you had to buy multiple drives to add, with Dell PowerStore, you can buy one drive and plug it in to increase capacity. I know about the compression and the deduplication technologies in Dell PowerStore. It's important. I believe other vendors also do deduplication, compression, and if they don't do it, then they might be left out by other competitors.

I find Dell PowerStore stable. Regarding the workload performance of Dell PowerStore, I don't do performance testing, but Dell PowerStore is good, so customers do not complain about any performance issues. They just do the clustering based on the application. Overall, I rate Dell PowerStore an 8 out of 10.

The use case for companies to buy Dell PowerStore is that it's an all-flash storage, which is needed to save their data or applications that demand faster responses. They brought it because the read and write operations of Dell PowerStore are extremely high, and the IOPS are very good compared to the other Hitachi level storage.

Dell PowerStore helps the organizations that I sell to by allowing them to buy less storage and store more capacity, which helps them save costs. Additionally, it's very durable and priced appropriately, which helps the organization to save money.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is the data compression, which is extremely good, having a data compression ratio of 5:1 that rarely other storages have in the market. This feature is very good compared to others.

What makes the data compression feature of Dell PowerStore so good is that if you need to store, for example, 100 TB of storage, you just have to buy 1/5 of it, the capacity, and then you can store that data. The compression features in the storage make it very special compared to others, apart from the day-to-day, normal data retrieving capabilities such as data deduplication, which this has something more that no other storages offer.

I would suggest that Dell PowerStore could come with various other features, such as a hybrid model apart from only all-flash, which would really help the customers.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for the past four years.

Dell PowerStore has rarely had any downtime; I have never come across it having any downtime, and the technical support is extremely good, which makes it a good product.

Dell PowerStore does not meet the needs of a small organization; Dell has Unity which meets the entry-level or SMB segment. Dell PowerStore is for mid and high enterprise segments, catering to bigger customers. Dell PowerStore can grow with a small company or if the company has less than 2,000 employees; it can grow to meet their needs.

Customer service and support for Dell PowerStore are very good, so once customers buy Dell PowerStore, they always choose to buy it again since the performance is extremely nice.

Positive

Besides Dell PowerStore, we offer other solutions such as HP solutions, Lenovo solutions, and NetApp solutions. Someone might pick Dell PowerStore versus HP or NetApp because PowerStore has the unique compression feature that other products lack, allowing them to buy less storage and save more capacity.

All Dell products are quite easy to deploy and maintain.

The success metrics that companies use to determine their ROI for Dell PowerStore are based on the kind of performance they get or the returns they see once Dell PowerStore is deployed, which are quite substantial since they always look at expanding it in the near future. They don't only buy it for a specific application; once they see the performance, they try to utilize it for all other applications as well.

The pricing of Dell PowerStore is a bit high, as it is not an entry-level storage, so it is priced higher than it should be.

The companies I sell Dell PowerStore to are extremely happy, as they keep expanding it and keep buying more shelves to expand the storage. 

A con for Dell PowerStore would be if somebody has standardized on certain products, such as only buying Dell or HP products, which might lead them to choose HP instead. HP is losing a lot of market share because of Dell PowerStore, as they do not have a product that can match it. 

I rate Dell PowerStore nine out of ten.

My main use case for Dell PowerStore is LUN storage for ESX environment. Storage for ESX is my primary focus. My main use cases for Dell PowerStore include simplifying management and data reduction.

The best features Dell PowerStore offers include storage, good reporting, immutability, and encryption. Dell PowerStore provides good storage solutions. The feature of Dell PowerStore that I have found most impactful for my organization is storage.

Dell PowerStore can be improved, but I have nothing specific to add at the moment. There are no improvements needed for Dell PowerStore that I haven't mentioned yet.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for seven years.

While the performance is good, I haven't seen any specific outcomes or measurable benefits. I don't use Dell PowerStore's AI capabilities regarding governance and security. I don't use Dell PowerStore's AI output, so I have no thoughts on its accuracy and reliability. I am not using a specific PowerStore model like T or Q, and it is not set up as standalone or clustered. I do not use Dell AIOps, also known as CloudIQ or Apex AIOps, in PowerStore. I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.