Dell PowerStore Reviews

We utilize Dell PowerStore for VMware and to establish an OpenShift environment for deploying applications on the customer's end.

The solution is easy to use and has good performance.

Horizontal scaling has room for improvement.

The price has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for around five years.

I give the stability a nine out of ten.

I give the scalability a seven out of ten. While the solution can be vertically scaled without issues, horizontal scaling presents challenges.

The technical support is usually good but they are not very robust.

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward. I give the setup a seven out of ten. To ensure successful deployment, a certain level of technical knowledge is necessary. Typically, a team of one to two engineers can complete the deployment within a few hours. However, the duration may vary and take up to two days depending on the specific configuration requirements.

We implement the solution for our customers.

The solution is expensive. I give the cost a two out of ten.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

The solution requires hardware maintenance. Depending on the customer's contract agreement, we can maintain the solution and provide replacement parts by the next business day.

Our clients are enterprise-level.

I recommend Dell PowerStore because it is a highly stable solution.

Our company partners with the solution to offer customers storage as a service. We currently use the solution internally for our data center and to conduct tests or demos. 

We have not yet used the solution for customers because product lead time is slow and long. 

We are focused on providing our customers with quality service. The solution saves customers time and money because it handles migrations quickly and does not require additional IT resources or staff. 

The solution's scalability, capacity, and performance are great. 

Migrations are very easy and fast. The solution works well with native products such as VxRail, Unity, or VMware. 

Products that are not native sometimes cause migration issues. 

The solution should include access to Dell Demo Center. Our prior partnership included it and I was able to learn more about products, schedule demos, view functionalities, and run tests in real-time. Without access, I have to wait to get answers to my questions. 

More demonstration and training options are needed. It is important to understand the solution before speaking with customers about its functionality and benefits. 

Documentation and videos are not very rich and should include the whole interface with detailed information that can be shared with customers. 

I have been using the solution for one year. 

We don't have enough use cases to determine overall stability. The solution does perform well when scaling. 

The solution's scalability is great. Customers view this as an advantage because they can roll out in stages. 

The company previously used Dell Demo Center.

In my role as presales engineer, I implement products for a demo environment. I have knowledge of HPE 3PAR and NetApp but have worked almost exclusively with Dell products for twelve years. 

The setup is advertised as plug-and-play but it is not quite that easy. 

We installed the solution in-house for our demo environment. 

The price is high compared to the Tunisian market. The solution is T-level but is not priced that way. Customers want the option to scale in or out while managing costs. 

We are using PowerStore 1000 but that is already secondary level since 1200T and 1200X have been released. 

The price is more exciting when you consider the solution's scalability and performance. 

We were already with Dell so we knew the solution would easily manage our migrations. 

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We are a reseller, and we use them to demonstrate to our customers the PowerStore interface as well as to power our own lab demos, running vCenter, NSX, and other software utilities.

For our demo lab, before we got PowerStore, we were running on a really outdated storage platform that was running out of space and didn't have enough internal resources to be able to power our customer demos. This product really helped facilitate and we do quite a few PowerStore demos since we have that device. 

Our older PowerStore is where most of our demos are located. We're just using it as a block of storage and storage to power the VMware environment. That's been our main use case.

The networking was difficult and complicated. It took as long to configure it correctly for the networking, as to roll it out. It would be good if there was a way to simplify the network complexity. 

It's also only supported with a limited amount of switches. If I hadn't bought the Dell switches, I would've had some issues with my legacy switches. That's been our number one issue with customers, when they say, "oh no, I'm going to use this other switch."

We have two PowerStores. We have one that's three years old, and we have a new one we just implemented a couple of weeks ago.

The solution is extremely stable. We haven't had any issues with it.

We only have the product in one location. Only six people have touched the solution. That's between the people who maintain it and sales architects who use it for demonstrations.

We have full Dell support. One time, my engineer was in the lab and knocked a power cable loose. I got an email within 15 minutes saying "you had an unexpected node failure, and do you need help?" They were on top of it. They are right there and they reach out proactively.

Positive

We had Compellent previously and that had aged out. It was six years old. Then we had EqualLogic that was in place just for NAS storage. That one also aged out and was running out of space. This product replaced both of those units.

I was involved in the initial setup of this solution. It was pretty straightforward. With the first implementation, we were done in about 12 hours. That included the networking switches. The unit, PowerStore itself, is probably deployed in only six hours.

The solution requires maintenance. I am not the one who performs the maintenance. Our lead engineer handles it.

We used Dell Professional Services during the implementation. I also had my lead PowerStore engineer and some of our sales architects shadow it, as well as a couple of my other engineers who hadn't used PowerStore. Dell let us have about four people shadow the installation so that my staff could get some knowledge as it got deployed.

We've seen an ROI. We're a reseller. Being able to do those demos for our customers helps us sell more products.

I don't really have any line of sight on the pricing. I heard it's comparable to the other Dell storage units.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. It's a really good product.

I'd advise potential new users to have a demo or do a hands-on lab to try it out. Also, make sure you buy supported switches.

PowerStore is joined to four application servers in a cluster. We're running an application that we use to monitor our activity in the financial markets. We collect all the data from the market—books, trades, orders—that we send to the market. In terms of volume, we are collecting about 100 million rows a day for the books, 10 million a day for the orders, and about 500 rows for public trades.

It is a mission-critical application because of compliance and the regulators. We have to maintain this kind of monitoring because it's a direct link to our activity in the regulated market.

An interesting feature is the guaranteed reduction when it comes to the physical capacity of the disk. We have 30 terabytes of SSD and that is equivalent to 100 terabytes of effective capacity. It allows us to reduce the costs of capacity.

Our previous solution was Dell EMC Compellent. What we have seen immediately is how easy it is to use PowerStore compared to Compellent. PowerStore is much simpler to manage.

The most valuable features include 

• easy of use 
• performance in terms of read-write capacity.

It is also important that you can add compute and capacity independently. We have sized the solution based on our current needs, but in the future we can choose to increase capacity if we grow our activity in the market. And if we have more business in our monetary system, we can increase compute. The ability to choose what we increase is a good feature.

The only area I can highlight for improvement is that the 4:1 data reduction target has not been reached. This may be due to an issue with Dell EMC's initial analysis of data compression. As a result, we have had to add new physical disks to reach our goal of total available disk space. Dell EMC has met us partway on this DRR issue by providing some of the additional disks free of charge, but we have had to purchase the remaining quantity of the disks we need.

We have been using PowerStore in our production environment for a few months, after using it in pre-production for about two months.

The stability has been very good so far.

We have not tested the scalability yet. All our data is well supported in the current solution, but we sized the new solution with more capacity than the previous one had.

The initial setup of PowerStore is a straightforward process. Setting up the Compellent was much more complex.

Overall, the setup took us about three weeks.

We ran it in a pre-production environment initially. We loaded all the data that was in production into the new environment and ran our application in both the pre-production and the production environments, just to test the stability and the availability of the application.

There are four people involved with the solution in our IT operations, and there are about 50 people who use the application that runs on it. Our application is a specific, department-level application, that is used for monitoring the activity in financial markets, so its use is limited to our business area. That is why the number of users is limited.

Dell EMC's support was very efficient during the setup of the entire solution. They handled the complete setup in terms of connections and also helped us with the software configuration and moving data from our old solution into the new solution.

We haven't seen ROI yet, but the return for us will be in the efficiency of monitoring our activities.

The pricing is in line with other vendors' pricing, more or less. There are no costs in addition to the standard fees.

We did not evaluate other solutions because Dell EMC is a partner for us and we're satisfied with them. We have evolved with their solutions and PowerStore is the best. Dell EMC is our vendor and provides us with all our other client-server solutions.

At the moment, I am satisfied by the simplicity and ease of use of the PowerStore.

We primarily use the solution as a POC. We have Extreme IOs that we're looking to replace, and this was brought in as a potential replacement for them.

For our scenario, it doesn't really fit the bill for where we're trying to go. The unit's fine. Unfortunately, it's a relatively greenfield type of product and we're looking for something with a little more robustness that's been in the field more. PowerMax works great, of course, and that's probably what we're going to go to instead. We just decided Power Store was just not going to fit the bill for what we needed. We needed something with a higher tier in the end.

The support is very good. 

For smaller shops, the solution is useful. 

We felt like this was just kind of a mix of Extreme IO and Unity. We weren't happy with Unity, which is why we weren't going to use Extreme IO. It seems like they just kind of merged two products and made this solution and while I'm sure it's great for smaller shops, we are not a small shop. 

It needs more mature code. 

The VASA plugins for ESX could be enhanced. My understanding is that that is in the roadmap.

I've using the solution for about a year. 

I'd rate the stability at a three or four out of ten. It could be more stable.  

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the solution at a six for scalability.

We've been quite happy with support. they are very good. 

We're trying out PowerMax, and will likely move in that direction instead of sticking with this product.

We have not witnessed any kind of ROI while using the solution. 

The pricing could be better. I'd rate it four out of ten. 

For new users, I would heavily suggest they evaluate their environment with real-world loads, not synthetic loads, when considering the solution.

I'd rate the product five out of ten. 

Dell PowerStore is primarily used for high-performance applications, such as databases, but it is also suitable for virtualization and other applications.

Dell PowerStore has helped in resolving latency issues in our applications. Our customers mostly use it to improve performance.

The most valuable features of Dell PowerStore are the support for NVMe and SCM, which provides end-to-end performance and high IOPS, minimizing latency. It is a full-fledged storage solution.

Dell PowerStore is a good solution overall, but some models could support hypervisors better by allowing for more customization and flexibility for customer needs.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for approximately three years.

I rate the stability of Dell PowerStore a nine out of ten.

We have five to six customers using this solution and we plan on increasing our customers.

I rate the scalability of Dell PowerStore a nine out of ten.

The technical support from Dell PowerStore has always been good, they respond quickly and you can reach them 24 hours a day seven days a week.

The initial setup of Dell PowerStore requires expertise, but for someone trained in the solution, it's not too complicated.

One person is needed for configuration, and two people are needed for installation and cabling.

By using Dell PowerStore's best deduplication and compression features, its ROI is very good.

I rate the price of Dell PowerStore a seven out of ten.

We evaluated options like HPE Primera and Huawei Dorado.

Dell PowerStore provides the best performance, deduplication, and compression, although other storage is also supporting these features. However, the Dell PowerStore guarantees 4:1 compression and deduplication, which goes up to 20:1.

If anyone wants to implement Dell PowerStore, I would advise that they seek help from an expert rather than deploying it by themselves.

I rate the scalability of Dell PowerStore a nine out of ten.

We are using Dell PowerStore primarily for SAP applications as block storage, for replication across different locations.

We see a lot of value in the investment. Primarily, it's quite cost-efficient, and with the latest NVMe technology, we see the performance of this has improved compared to the previous generation VNX or Unity array.

When compared to Pure Storage, Dell PowerStore's cost was quite attractive.

The UI should be a little more user-friendly to manage. 

We want to see additional public to private cloud adoption features included if they are at all possible.

I have been working with Dell PowerStore for approximately one year.

We are working with Generation One, and we are looking for Generation Two.

Dell PowerStore is very stable.

Dell PowerStore is scalable. We can add multiple engines to it.

We have 200 users in our organization who use this solution.

We have not contacted technical support.

At the moment, I am using Pure Storage and NetApp All-Flash Storage Arrays.

We have worked with TCS. We chose it because of NVMe and the performance-enhancing technologies it offers.

We worked with HPE Alletra and Pure Storage.

Because HPE Alletra was not unified storage, we chose Dell PowerStore because it was.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It took less than a day to deploy.

This solution does not require any specific maintenance.

We carried it out using OEM and other methods.

We purchased it with a five-year warranty.

When compared to the technology that has been evaluated earlier or has just come onto the market earlier, it provides a good value for the money. Since the price is significantly lower and performance features have improved. That being said, I would recommend this.

I would rate Dell PowerStore a seven out of ten.

We use it to host all the VMware workloads in production. It has all the types of workloads that any data center would have, from AD to file servers as well as SQL, Exchange, and BI. It holds all our high-tier VMs.

PowerStore helps to simplify IT operations. At the site where it is installed, we have consolidated two tiers with the high-IOPS and lower tiers. We have enough capacity with lower power consumption and enough performance to handle the required overload.

It gives us the capacity and the performance we need. Before, things were on 10K disks, while this is flash. There is a very big difference. Previously, we were connected directly, with a back-to-back connection between servers and storage. Now, we have multiple servers connected to SAN switches and those switches are connected to the storage. For sure, the performance of the system is sky-high. In terms of IOPS we are fully satisfied by the PowerStore.

We use the solution’s built-in VMware hypervisor to run VMs and virtualized applications, directly on the storage appliance. We manage multiple sites and we don't have enough teams to allocate support at all sites. So our support team handles all our sites. It's very important for us to have a consolidated infrastructure that we can manage remotely, without needing someone available locally to do the patching/power-up/creation and life cycle management tasks. Having this box, along with the integration with VMware, and VMware's capabilities, gives us what we need.

I like the performance of the PowerStore. When you talk about PowerStore, it's mainly about flash systems and high-end IOPS. The 1000T is a midsize box, in terms of the way the vendor positions it, but it is more than enough for our needs. At the site where it is located, there are about eight servers connected. The high IOPS support our needs. It is very performant.

We have an issue with the integration of this box and VMware. I have downloaded so many books from Dell EMC's website. We created the volumes as VVols. The information they gave us said we would directly see the capacity. Unfortunately, that is not true. You only see it after you put data on it. When you create the volume but there is no data, you don't see how the actual capacity grows. This is peculiar regarding this box.

We installed it at the beginning of September, about three months ago. By the end of September it was put into production with all the loads we required.

It is stable, but we have only operated it for less than six weeks, which is not that much. But performance-wise it is giving us what was promised, so far.

Because we have changed the topology of our data centers' interconnectivity and the data movement between sites—we have multiple sites in multiple locations and countries—we asked Dell EMC to give us additional expansion for the box, but with disks at the lower tier. In that way, we are insuring our investment in this box and doing a consolidation. But it also means we don't need to buy high-end disks for it. We may go with 10K disks for the lower-tier data.

I think we will go for a second box like this one in the near future, but in a different location.

When I tried to open a ticket with the Dell EMC team, during the installation phase, they kept bouncing me from one support center to another, from the United States to France to wherever. I ended up preferring to finish the installation without continuing the case. Dell EMC's support case management wasn't really set up to suit our needs. When I gave them the serial number of the box, they said, "Ah, it's a PowerStore. It's not this department, you need a different department." The support is not very well structured.

In addition to the licensing issue I mentioned, we also opened a ticket concerning the dedupe and the data showing on the storage interface. No one answered so we escalated it to our partner and they escalated it to a consultant.

Overall, support is not smooth when it comes to the portal and the standard support system. I had to go to our reseller to ask him to get us the information we needed.

To be fair, I spent a huge amount of time working with IBM, versus only the two to three months on Dell EMC. But knowing Dell EMC as a brand, as a competitor to IBM, I know it can do much better in terms of support and awareness of customers' needs.

Neutral

We were not searching for a particular brand. We were searching for storage that would be delivered ASAP with a certain IOPS capacity. And, of course, pricing was part of it. The vendor that sold us this box said they were able to send it right away. From that point, the discussion went to Dell EMC versus ordering IBM. Our discussions about how to move forward with our storage took at least four to six weeks. If we had then put in an order with IBM, it would have taken at least another six weeks. So we would have had a 10 to 12-week process. We didn't have this luxury. We couldn't wait that long, so the decision was based on the time of delivery.

We will move everything off our old Lenovo storage that is now four or five years old, and that will be used for backup only. All our production VMs will be on the flash and all the less important pieces, like the file servers, will be on the 10K disks.

During the installation phase, the licensing part was not straightforward. It was very difficult for the technicians, who are not trained Dell EMC technicians, to do the licensing because the information on their website is not straightforward. You can't find your way easily. You spend some time getting the information. So the licensing activation was a little bit tricky for us. Maybe the installation issue was due to our lack of knowledge, but the licensing part and the escalation need to be smoother. Eventually, I had to pass this task to our business partner and they did it for us.

There is a web interface for LAN creation, host mapping, and digital capacity. We created it as a VVol, mapped it to the box, and started moving data from the old Lenovo to this box.

Because my background is not Dell EMC, it took us about two to three days to finish not only the boxes but the installation of the SAN switches as well. We had to migrate all the data from the old Lenovo to it, and we had to do work related to the ESX servers.

We only used internal resources.

I was a technical manager for about 20 years in a company that is a business partner for IBM. My "DNA" is in IBM. However, when I shifted to my current company, they have multiple types of hardware vendors, both IBM and non-IBM. Before the acquisition of the Dell EMC PowerStore 1000T, I did a comparison with information from IBM sources, from Dell EMC sources, and from neutral sources. At that time I downloaded information from IT Central Station. After that, we acquired the box.

I would like to wait another few months before giving any advice about the product, to see if there are any other hassles or any issues. But if someone is considering going with PowerStore, I would say yes. It's a good box.

Ultimately, it's about performance, capacity, and price, as opposed to AI learning et cetera, the same as it has always been.

I was not concerned about the fact that it is a relatively new platform because the Dell EMC brand is number-one in the market.