Dell PowerStore Reviews

I use Dell PowerStore in my company primarily for virtualization through ESXi. Dell PowerStore serves as a primary system for all the storage needs within our organization.

The product's current functionalities that have improved my organization's functioning stem from the SSD caching and SSD capabilities of the product. The product's speed is also crucial for us, especially within our new modern infrastructure, which has a strong networking backbone. My company has a good experience with the product overall.

The most valuable feature of the solution for me is the deduplication part, especially since most of the servers in our organization are Windows-based servers. Due to the deduplication technology in the product, my organization needs just a little storage for many servers, meaning the new technology within Dell PowerStore is a big advantage for us.

Dell PowerStore helps to keep the software we rely on in our organization up and running. In our organization, we do firmware updates due to security breaches or vulnerabilities, and as a system administrator, it is important for me to know that the base hardware is in good condition and safe to deal with against hacker attempts while also looking out for any problems within the software itself. To avoid any concerns when it comes to Dell PowerStore, Dell needs to keep working on Dell products.

While using Dell PowerStore's interface in our organization, we sometimes miss out on some information. In our organization, we had to deal with bad firmware last year that generated fast degradation of the disks, and Dell informed us when they would replace the disks, but we couldn't see any notifications about the disks being degraded. I feel that the product's new interface with HTML5 interface is still in the development phase because it lacks the crucial information that system administrators need, like, for example, the degradation of the disk. With the product's current interface, as a system administrator, I just see that the disks are either good or bad, and that's it. As a system administrator, it would be great to use and see through CLI since getting informed at such a level within the interface will be a great improvement since more detailed information is always good.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for two to three years. Considering that the one we use in our company is for SSD caching, I believe it is Dell PowerStore 1000T.

From a stability perspective, my company has faced some problems only with the firmware part of the product, but that didn't really impact the product's performance. There were some problems with the degradation of hard disks, because of which there were more chances of failure of the solution. Dell handled issues related to the degradation of hard disks.

From a scalability perspective, my company doesn't have any problems since we get what we need and what we expect for about five years. In our organization, we are still good with the limits offered by the product, so we don't really talk about scalability. We can reduce our ESXi service, but my company does not plan to scale up.

The solution's technical support is great. In our organization, we have had several incidents related to firmware in the last couple of years. Dell's support team is good to reach out when, in our organization, we upgrade the product outside of office hours since they provide you with good information and good tech personnel to resolve an issue or a problem anywhere in the world. In my organization, we have had incidents and seen how the support personnel from Egypt, India, and China are always well aware of the cases or problems, and they always give good information to help us with our problems, making it a good experience for us.

I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

I have experience with HPE products that have the same capabilities as Dell PowerStore. I would say that Dell is on the same level as HPE.

My company has a good relationship and history with Dell, so things are good for us in the department concerning supplies from Dell.

The product's initial setup phase was quite smooth. The product's setup phase was done parallel to the old storage in our organization, so we had to make the correct connections and migrate everything to run it on a new storage. There is a need to dismantle the old system and reconfigure the network part.

The solution can be deployed in under a month.

In my organization, we were involved with the implementation phase of the product and during the upgrade from the old storage to the new storage with a specialist from one of our suppliers of Dell products.

I am not aware of any return on investment my company has experienced from the use of the product.

In the pricing and licensing department, the product is always too expensive.

My organization does not use CloudIQ to manage and analyze Dell PowerStore.

My organization does not get involved in any power management or monitoring to assess Dell PowerStore's overall energy consumption.

I have seen a significant data consolidation and footprint reduction with the use of Dell PowerStore since we need to use way less storage in our organization, which is around a 50 to 60 percent reduction if we consider it from a TB perspective due to its deduplication technology.

Within our organization, the area revolving around the assessment of Dell Technologies for its values around environment, social, and governance is a hot topic. Our organization has used Dell for a lot of years, and it is great to see that Dell has become innovative in terms of recyclability and reduction of carbon footprint, because of which we don't need to change to another supplier or vendor to help us attain our green goals.

Dell PowerStore is a good product since we don't face any more problems with it in our company. Dell's support team's contracts with our company are very good. I hope the product fulfills its duty in a couple of years, after which our organization can replace it with another next-gen product.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

It's a good product, especially for companies dealing with virtualization. It's well-suited for a broad range of use cases and stands out when it comes to tasks like personalization. If you require power and flexibility in that regard, it's a reasonably priced, straightforward product that is easy to manage. It delivers on its promises without unnecessary complexity.

A particularly valuable feature is its simplicity. The reporting tools and support are good, and the solution promotes data reduction, often meeting the compression ratio. You can initially invest in less upfront capacity and expand later as needed.

Data reduction needs improvement. While the reporting is generally good for general purposes, it may lack sufficient detail for more technical analysis. If you want to delve into where your I/Os are going, the reporting might need more in-depth information to make informed decisions.

I’ve been using the solution for around three years.

The solution is scalable within regions. It allows you to scale up to four nodes in one tool for extensive storage. You can create as many tools as needed, providing scalability based on the use case. It performs well for midsized use cases, especially those involving up to a hundred servers for virtualization. However, you might consider alternative products for more complex and larger-scale operations.

The technical support is good as they continuously monitor the system remotely through a support agent. This agent provides critical alerts, and the response time is typically within an hour.

The initial setup is straightforward. Firstly, the initial step involves unboxing, followed by configuring connectivity. There are various types of connectivity setups, including straight connectivity, direct connect, and private channel connectivity, offering diverse IT capacity configurations. The setup process encompasses unboxing, provisioning power, and connecting to the necessary switches. However, it's crucial to begin with a well-thought-out plan. One person is required to set up the solution.

The pricing is good. There's no need to pay for a license; it's all-inclusive. The only cost is associated with a support contract based on the level of support you desire.

I recommend this solution, especially if you're not moving everything to the cloud and require reliable local storage. It proves to be an excellent choice.

I rate Dell PowerStore a nine out of ten.
 

I use it to solve a problem for a customer when he has a big VMware ESX environment with virtualization. You can solve a big problem with money or a lot of hardware since you can take the virtualization from PowerStore. Inside PowerStore, on the operating system level, you can use virtualization with VMware ESX or something like it. So, you don't need any hardware.

My company does backups and security. We use a lot of OEMs. We use Dell because they have the strongest product, especially in Israel.

Hybrid environments are very important for our disaster recovery issues. By default, we have 50% to the public cloud, with either Azure or AWS, and 50% on-prem. If it is on-prem, then it is a PowerStore. In Israel, 90% is deployed on-premises.

PowerStore is used in Israeli universities since they have big environments with a lot of vendors. They take all the versions from the 500 to the 3000. It is also used in IT companies with 1,000 or 2,000 employees that have a lot of traffic with heavy loads. There are a lot of people in Israel who love to work with Dell.

It provides a big benefit when upgrading a new VMware environment. For example, in a big environment with 10 to 30 ESXs, you can take everything and put that into PowerStore. So, it is cost-effective, which is very important and has been massive for us. You reduce almost 80% from the hardware and work directly from PowerStore. Building hardware, especially in a big VMware environment, is a big issue for my organization.

It brings us a lot of security, creating security between the containers. Then, we can separate an environment for security. You have IDS, IPS, the firewall, etc., but if you take the environment that you built on the containers then it creates a different security.

I use the security between the rack server and PowerStore. Or, we use a connection with the fiber channel. It also separates the network from the SAN storage. This is the most important security when you are connecting storage to PowerStore for any environment.

1. The level of virtualization is a big feature. This is the most important thing in PowerStore. 
2. PowerStore has a very good replication tool. 
3. It has a good NAS environment. It has a very strong NAS that can support a lot of big, heavy environments. 
4. The container and its ability to connect directly to the cloud. We can use a lot of workloads and get all the workloads that we need. For example, we can get VMware directly from PowerStore and move it to the Cloud or any other containers. This is an added value of PowerStore. If you want to solve a workload problem, this is the best way.

Once you build an environment based on a container, it is a big benefit because you can take the workloads from the cloud directly to on-premises and vice versa. It is a big benefit, especially in an environment based on VMware, a virtualization environment, and heavy storage.

OpenManage Console is the best tool that Dell has. It is a great thing. We use it to configure the networking. It helps you realize what you need to discover. It is a little bit heavy. However, after that, it is a very user-friendly tool. It can connect to any vendor, switch, storage, etc. I would rate OpenManage Console as nine out of 10.

On downtime, it is okay. I would rate it as seven or eight out of 10. There are a few things that Dell has to change, fix, or upgrade. 

The storage could be improved. I would like a feature for how to best secure an appliance and the storage since we are connecting the container to the public cloud. I would like them to develop another level of security, making it more secure than from what they have now. 

I have been using it for a year to a year and a half.

I would rate stability as 10 out of 10.

It is very scalable.

When you are trying to scale in or out with a system, you can see the return on investment.

In general, Dell technical support is very professional. They have a good SLA. We have had a few cases that I personally use them to support, and they are great, especially the on-call. They are very professional and have very fast reactions. I would rate them as eight or nine out of 10.

Positive

We previously used Unity and VNX, and Unity especially belongs in the past.

The initial deployment was very straightforward.

If you need to install the system and upgrade the existing environment, that can take around half a day. If you don't need to install it, then it can take around an hour or two.

Be very professional when designing the system and ensure your environment fits with the PowerStore.

Two people can do the entire deployment project in Israel. You take the storage, place it on the rack, and start to install it to make the volumes, view, and networking. In the most bigger, complicated cases, it takes around two or three people.

If you use PowerStore as a virtualization environment and don't buy a rack server, then the solution is very cheap since you no longer need to buy the hardware or server for the ESX.

The big pricing issue is with capacity:

• If we use the 500 or 1000, the licensing and pricing are reasonable. PowerStore can compete with any vendor and the price isn't that expensive. 
• It is very expensive though when you get to this point of using the 3000 with a client. They will start to think about using another vendor. There are a lot of solutions similar to PowerStore in regards to networking capacity and their prices are very cheap compared to PowerStore. 

Dell has very good rack servers that are all on PowerStore, e.g., R640 and R740. These are the best servers that we have with our virtualization environment. This is the best hardware that you can use today. When it comes to servers and storage, there are a lot of vendors. NetApp is also a very good vendor in the world of storage, but there are some added values with PowerStore that I can't see on other vendors, such as the virtualization where you can take all your ESXs and put them inside PowerStore. I don't see this with other vendors.

It is a very good tool for networking, storage, and working with the rack server. I would recommend this solution to other people. They should just take it.

I would rate it as an eight out of 10.

We typically use Dell PowerStore 500T and 1000T models.

We sell and integrate Dell PowerStores to our customers who use it for block storage.

Dell PowerStore has helped our customers manage their systems.

CloudIQ helps our customers mainly if they have a lack of storage space, it alerts them of the failures on the server.

PowerStore does not consume much power.

We have integrated PowerStore with PowerProtect and VMware to benefit our customers.

Our customers sign a data reduction guarantee with every order. 

The most valuable feature is the three-to-one data reduction. The improved reliability is also valuable.

The customer support is slow and has room for improvement.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for four years.

PowerStore scales well. We have sold ten systems and have not required any scaling.

The technical support can be slow at times.

Positive

I would rate Dell PowerStore ten out of ten.

We're using the solution for a specific application called Boomi for data analytics.

The application was running on an Isilon, and we needed an NFS mount. Since the solution was performing very poorly, we chose Dell PowerStore with the NVMe disk, which solved our performance issue.

The overall energy consumption seems comparable to other products in the same class.

Performance was the biggest challenge we were looking to address by implementing Dell PowerStore. We were running our application on an Isilon, and it just couldn't perform because it was a very chatty application with high transactions.

Dell PowerStore is very simple to implement, and its user interface is very simple.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for four months.

Dell PowerStore is a stable solution.

Dell PowerStore is a scalable solution.

The solution’s technical support is pretty decent.

Positive

We implemented the solution through a reseller, CDW. Our experience with them for the implementation of Dell PowerStore was fine.

The solution's price was comparable to other products for the use case, size, and setup. We did go with the NVMe disc and looked to do a capacity upgrade at one point.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use Dell PowerStore as a storage layer behind the virtualization layer. We have IBM SCC and we have the PowerStore behind that to serve the discs to the SCC and the SCC then presents it to the hosts in the network.

The high deduplication ratio means that we need less physical storage space. As a result, we have more virtual storage space available to assign to our servers. We have not encountered any problems with the system so far. Therefore, the system is better in terms of both performance and storage efficiency.

The compression ratio is way better with PowerStore. We were getting a ratio of 1:3 and now it is around 1:6. The compression ratio has doubled.

Dell's values around ESG are high and they have been working on those areas throughout the years.

We noticed that the PowerStore has a really high compression ratio for data. It's really good for data deduplication and also compressing the data on the drives. The PowerStore's compression ratio is even higher than the Unity system. Also, the way the PowerStore is built with special CPUs for moving data around. The systems also have lower CPU utilization compared to Unity systems.

In the past, with Unity, we could run both block storage and configure part of the system as a NAS system. This wasn't ideal, but it provided flexibility. With PowerStore, we have to choose between block storage and NAS functionality. It would be interesting to retain the option to configure PowerStore as a block storage array and try out the NAS features to see how it performs. It was an interesting way to see if we need a certain type of storage. We were able to do that from the same system, and now we have queues when we set up the system, which one it's convenient.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for one and a half years.

I would rate the stability of Dell PowerStore as ten out of ten.

Dell PowerStore is scalable but we are not using the scalability of the system.

The technical support is always quick to respond. They are always willing to help us and if necessary, they will search for a specialist within their Dell network who we can approach with our questions.

Positive

We replaced Dell VNX with Dell PowerStore.

The deployment is really easy. If we have a PowerStore and we buy another and arrange all the necessary factors that need to be available in the data center, including cabling, power, and configuration details such as IP addresses and DNS names, it's simple to roll out, and it doesn't take much effort to place it in our data center and have it up and running. It takes a few hours of work if we have done all the prep work to get it up and running.

I would rate Dell PowerStore ten out of ten.

Prior to my joining the organization, they used Hitachi and transitioned to Dell due to cost considerations.

We haven't implemented the latest code yet, but we attended a session at the beginning of the day where they mentioned that backups can now be moved directly to the data domain from the power store. This is an interesting development, as it opens up new possibilities for backup management. For instance, we could now consider placing backup clients on a machine that is specifically designed for this purpose.

Dell PowerStore is doing what it's supposed to do, and it's even doing it better than we were expecting.

Dell PowerStore is used in the BFS industry.

The main feature of Dell PowerStore is its support for NVMe as well as hybrid solutions.

We require the most up-to-date NVMe technology.

We like the performance of Dell PowerStore.

Most of the features are available, including support for NVMe and a mix-and-match of storage devices.

Dell PowerStore is quite expensive.

We would consider this solution if the pricing is competitive with other options, as it offers a very good solution. However, the current price is slightly higher than the competition.

I have been working with Dell PowerStore for five years.

Dell PowerStore is stable. I would rate the stability of Dell PowerStore a ten out of ten.

Dell PowerStore is a scalable solution.

We have more than 50 customers using Dell PowerStore.

We have a team of two or three people who deploy this solution.

We have 25 engineers.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The deployment process only took around thirty minutes.

The deployment process is being handled by my technical team. As the owner of the company, I am not involved in the actual deployment.

Dell PowerStore is a good return on investment.

There are no separate licenses required as all the basic licenses are included in the bundle.

The licenses required may vary based on the customer's specific requirements, such as for decompression, deduplication, disaster recovery data, log shipping, and so on.

I would suggest considering Dell PowerStore for various other applications, such as file storage and video storage, due to its capabilities and features.

I would rate Dell PowerStore a ten out of ten.

We use the very first one we added for a very pinpointed solution for a high-performance Oracle database. We've added four more, and they're going to be used primarily to migrate away from HP systems.

Our environment is 80% to 90% virtualized VMware. We have some pretty heavy workloads, whether it be SQL databases or Oracle databases working on the PowerStores right now. It's about three petabytes in size.

The systems I currently have in place are old, and their support is running out. They're at the end of their life cycle. One of the key improvements that PowerStore is going to bring is that it will enable me to shrink the physical footprint. I'll be going from 5 physical HP arrays, which are about 12 racks in size, down to 4 PowerStores, which can fit on one rack.

As a result, I'll be able to shrink the footprint, save power, cooling, etc. I will also be able to improve the existing performance and longevity of the platform.

When we put the PowerStore in for the Oracle database, it was previously on NetApp. The staff wanted to do snapshots but also clone, and then be able to clone from a clone to add it to another system. PowerStore enabled them to do just that.

They not only got their performance back to where it needed to be from previously being on the NetApp array but also got some of the feature functions that they require for the application.

The simplicity and ease of use have been very valuable features. I have a very small team, and only half of the team is well versed in the HP product. Whereas if I bring PowerStore in, everyone can learn it because it will be new on the floor.

Also, the simplicity of the administration, snapshot capabilities, and its replication are other features of PowerStore that I've found to be valuable.

Reporting is an area that could be improved. It's very simplistic sometimes, and some of the very technical guys on my team want to see more of the details and be able to massage the report a little bit better.

We originally added our first PowerStore about a year ago.

I haven't thought about the stability of the product, which means that it's working. That says it all. As a manager of the environment, if I'm not thinking about it on a daily basis, then that means it's doing what it's supposed to be doing.

I haven't really had to scale PowerStore as of yet, but it does have the scalability features that I need. I'll be able to scale up when we do grow.

Dell's support staff is very proactive. They were with us every step of the way to make sure that we were plugging everything in properly and making sure that everything is fully redundant during deployment.

With regard to post-deployment support, if we have any needs and call them, they respond within minutes. So, I would rate them ten on a scale from one to ten.

Positive

We replaced HP and NetApp with PowerStore because we wanted to reduce the physical footprint.

Deployment is very simple. I think we were up and running in less than a day.

Dell helped us with our deployments. They use ProDeploy, and we used it for one of ours that's overseas.

Normally, my data center team does all of the rack and stack and cabling. I share all those requirements with Dell to make sure that they understand that we're following best practices. We can plug it in, and do it all online.

The rack space I'm saving alone is an ROI because I'm able to then use those racks for more servers.

Power and cooling are big factors for us because we're trying to shrink the footprint as we move things over to the cloud.

Performance-wise, if I can have jobs that used to run for ten or eleven hours cut down to three or four hours, then that allows everyone to be more productive.

Pricing is very good. It's very competitive against all the others that I looked at in the marketplace, such as Hitachi, IBM, HP, and Pure. Dell is right there in the mix as far as providing the best price point, as well as meeting the performance requirements that we have.

I looked at IBM and Pure Storage during the last purchase cycle. The reason that PowerStore won that purchase was the pricing. They definitely set the bar high as far as pricing is concerned. Going with PowerStore would also help me to shrink the environment.

Don't shy away from the higher-end workloads. You don't necessarily have to go with a big iron box like PowerMax when PowerStore will suffice. It will then allow you to save some dollars and also meet the performance requirements that you have.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate PowerStore at ten.