Dell PowerStore Reviews

Dell PowerStore has many use cases, such as in banking and virtualization, especially database projects. 

Regarding use cases, since it's flash storage, it's NVMe class flash storage, so it covers most of the cases in the industry. You can use it in mid to enterprise-class banking sectors; some customers are even using it in core banking, virtualization, and these kinds of workloads. Some other use cases are also being implemented since this is very common storage.

Many people really appreciate Dell PowerStore, and they choose it since, especially from a brand perspective, it's very strong. Dell has been in Gartner for the last 10 years or so, and it contributes majorly to the market. 

In Pakistan, Dell has a physical presence along with Huawei and IBM, so we can say Dell has a very reasonable presence in Pakistan. Many customers are using it, which is one of the reasons why customers still believe in Dell PowerStore products. 

The good thing about this storage is that it is NVMe storage and provides very good compression and data reduction ratios. If you purchase storage with 300 terabytes, you can easily achieve one petabyte of effective capacity. That's the value Dell creates; you invest less, and you get a better ROI.

It's unified storage, so it can cover file, SAN, and block both. It's good storage; it gives good IOPS and less latency. 

Sometimes they have equipment in stock. Sometimes they don't, so they have to arrange it from somewhere. That's been a challenge, and it's a negative point from a support perspective. Dell is struggling in terms of support SLAs as long as the Pakistan market is concerned since Dell has not been able to give a fixed time commitment from a support perspective, which is a challenge for customers.

We have heard that there are some challenges in terms of availability; if multiple controllers go down, this solution has certain limitations about how many controllers can be down before your environment is affected. This is a feature where Dell PowerStore is not the best product. From a stability perspective, Dell PowerStore rates six out of ten since, while it has good stability, it's not the best. That's why customers often choose to go for bigger and enterprise-level products, leading to a need for those enterprise-class solutions.

Cybersecurity, specifically ransomware protection, is a hot topic, and every vendor is working on this. I'm not fully aware of the extent of security Dell PowerStore provides; for instance, it can offer snapshot protections and immutable snapshots. However, there are certain features that customers are expecting more from cyber resilience. This is a question I'm still seeking from Dell's side. For example, does it scan for viruses from within the storage, specifically ransomware viruses in NAS and SAN? Mostly, ransomware attacks occur on file services, so does it scan those services? What I have heard is that some storage support SAN-level scanning as block-level scanning. Dell needs improvement in this area.

From a stability perspective, Dell PowerStore rates six out of ten. While it has good stability, it's not the best. That's why customers often choose to go for bigger and enterprise-level products, leading to a need for those enterprise-class solutions.

Although Dell PowerStore storage has a capacity of offering eight controllers or four arrays, what I've seen is that customers are normally using a single box that comes with two controllers. This is a normal practice since the market is not ready to go with scale-out architectures. 

What I've seen is that customers prefer to initially buy a better controller box for better processing, memory, and IOPS. Normally, I see that single clusters have one controller box only. I would rate the scalability and ability to expand of Dell PowerStore as eight out of ten.

As far as support is concerned, they are good. Still, when we talk about support in terms of part replacement, I would give them six marks out of ten. However, if it's a consolidated question related to warranty part replacement, for just support, you could give them eight marks out of ten.

I have an understanding of other solutions, however, I'm still with Huawei and still connected with Huawei.

Many people really appreciate Dell PowerStore, and they choose it due to the fact that, especially from a brand perspective, it's very strong. 

Dell has been in Gartner for the last ten years or so, and it contributes majorly to the market. In Pakistan, Dell has a physical presence along with Huawei and IBM, so we can say Dell has a very reasonable presence in Pakistan. 

Many customers are using it, which is one of the reasons why customers still believe in Dell PowerStore products. The good thing about this storage is that it is NVMe storage and provides very good compression and data reduction ratios. 

If you purchase storage with 300 terabytes, you can easily achieve one petabyte of effective capacity. That's the value Dell creates; you invest less, and you get a better ROI.

Dell is struggling in terms of support SLAs as long as the Pakistan market is concerned. Dell has not been able to give a fixed time commitment from a support perspective, which is a challenge for customers. Sometimes they have equipment in stock, sometimes they don't, so they have to arrange it from somewhere. That's been a challenge, and it's a negative point from a support perspective.

Dell PowerStore has better sales. PowerMax is a niche product, so mostly when we sell, we are selling Dell PowerStore. When we talk about PowerMax, unfortunately, its price is too high compared with Huawei. That's why when we talk about enterprise-class storage, we see a big challenge from the Huawei side.

In the public cloud, Dell PowerStore is a niche product. It's normally high in price, so people are not using Dell storage in their public cloud. Customers usually look for cheaper storage, which is certain; it's not a good storage option commercially. However, customers are using it in their private cloud, not a true private cloud, however, you can say the virtualization that we discussed, they are using for virtualization on-prem storage.

They need to reconsider their pricing strategies, especially in the Pakistan market, where they face strong competition from Huawei and often say they cannot compete with Huawei. The second challenge lies in their support structure; they cannot provide committed services including part replacements. For enterprise customers, having a committed service is very important. This is a significant challenge, though this may not be the case in other markets, the US. As long as the customer has the budget, I will recommend it as it is slightly expensive. 

Overall, I rate Dell PowerStore eight out of ten.

I am aware of this product, and your intention is to sell this product to my company. I am selling these types of products in Bangladesh, especially in the BFSI segment. I can give you the contact person number so that you can communicate with him.

I'm dealing with products such as PowerStore, PowerEdge, and PowerProtect. For servers, I use PowerEdge, and for storage, I use Dell PowerStore.

Since the launch of Dell PowerStore three or four years ago, I have sold more than around 25 Dell PowerStore storages to different accounts in Bangladesh.

The 1200T and 500 models are used mostly by my customers, and in most cases, it's the 1200 and 500.

My customers are not clustering multiple Dell PowerStore appliances, but I recently got a purchase order from a bank whose name I prefer not to mention. They are purchasing two units of Dell PowerStore storage.

In Bangladesh, Dell PowerStore users are very familiar with the product, which makes it easy to use for moving and optimizing workloads within the cluster. It is easy to manage for the end-user. I have been providing training to the respective clients accordingly, so they know how to manage and control it, and they are fully aware of it.

Dell PowerStore has definitely helped my customers improve their operational efficiency, as they can use their operations more efficiently with it.

Cybersecurity features are a point I wanted to mention. For the NetApp storage partner, we are also a partner of NetApp, but we face competition. NetApp storage has built-in ransomware protection, but as far as I know, Dell PowerStore still has not launched this type of security feature built-in with it. If Dell PowerStore comes with this type of security feature, it would be easier for me to sell those products to the end-users.

Ransomware protection is a built-in feature that NetApp has. NetApp already has this type of feature in their storage, but as far as I know, Dell PowerStore does not have this type of feature in the storage box.

Compression and deduplication technologies are very important for my customers because of the data size they are using. If these two technologies—deduplication and compression—are available, then it is a very reliable technology for storage.

The scale-up and scale-out technology is familiar to the end-user or customer in Bangladesh, and they know how to scale out or scale up the storage. It is also an important feature for storage expansion, so the client or end-user is very much familiar with this technology.

Response times have room for improvement. Basically, for after-sales support service in Bangladesh, it takes two or three working days to replace faulty parts. If this could be expedited, it would be more convenient for the end-user.

Stability could still be improved.

I have already faced competition due to the ransomware feature that Dell does not have as a built-in feature in the storage. My only challenge so far has been this. All other features and benefits are already there with Dell PowerStore, but ransomware protection is missing. My advice is to add ransomware protection first, as this is the primary concern. I have already faced competition with the NetApp brand for this type of built-in solution, and I did not get the deal because NetApp won it.

I have been using this solution for three or four years.

Out of 10, I would rate it 7.5 or 8.

I am satisfied so far.

Workload performance is assessed by the number or size of data customers are using. When I propose a storage solution, I usually ask the customer to share their usable capacity, and I think it is quite good or convenient for them since they are sharing their usable capacity at the time of purchase.

I am just taking over as a CAM, that is, Key Account Manager, and for the implementation of Dell PowerStore, my post-sales department is doing the implementation part. It would be convenient for you to get feedback from them.

I am providing training to our end-user or customer on how to manage or run this type of storage. They are fully aware of it. If they face any problem, they usually contact me and I help them accordingly.

Buying Dell PowerStore instead of buying too many servers with too many hard disks definitely reduces the capital expenditure for the particular end-user or customer. They already know that.

Pricing nowadays has been increasing tremendously, which is affecting my business as well. The previous price was good, and Dell PowerStore was priced well to sell, but nowadays, I am facing huge competition from NetApp, which is sharing the best price compared to Dell PowerStore.

If I were to give examples, I would have to mention the client name, which I do not want to share. In this case, we can skip this question. The clients usually do not want to share this type of data with me, but perhaps this type of data is available to my pre-sales or post-sales person, not to me.

I have been working in this sector since 2007. I started my career as an internee to learn how to sell ICT products in Bangladesh. I started my journey in 2007 and am continuing till now. I would rate this product and service experience an 8 out of 10.

We delivered and implemented it for multiple customers.

There was some workload involved in these implementations. One project was in the financial sector. Another sector was for premium watches where they had workload with respect to their engineering labs. We majorly used this for their virtual environment and databases. They had a lot of issues with their current Unity, which was another Dell product, with performance issues. As they were looking to upgrade on the Dell platform itself, we proposed Dell PowerStore. Initially, we had everything on SSD drives, which are solid-state drives or flash drives. We moved everything—the databases and the VM virtual infrastructure—to Dell PowerStore. As it was a Dell product, it was easy to migrate. They saw the improvement with that.

Majorly, it is an NVMe architecture—an all-flash system that improved our performance with low latency. It was supporting mixed workload, which is virtualization and database. The virtual machines were Linux, Windows, and everything.

The major thing is when we had the previous solution, which was a hybrid storage having SSD and NL-SAS and SAS drives, it moved to flash, where we have a lot of latency benefits. They had some tiering as well, where it was supposed to do virtual provisioning of some percent. Then if it increased, only then it increases; otherwise, it is quite better. Previously, when we had the previous solution, we had to implement it and then we had to upgrade the switches side and the port SFPs for getting good latency and handling the workload. As I mentioned, it is a financial sector, so there were a lot of production issues as well. When the customer moved to Dell PowerStore, there were no such performance issues.

These were clustered systems. Everything was distributed. This is where, as I mentioned, there was the issue with performance previously. When we had this one, it started giving us good performance.

Dell PowerStore is expensive. The best thing is the way it delivers performance. It distributes everything through the flash drive. The automation they have is excellent. We can integrate directly with VMware and make the VMware team storage administrators. The previous mid-range storage had scalability issues, but with this, scalability was not an issue. It was easy to adopt and increase the nodes so that it could increase capacity.

Some features I mentioned earlier include deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning. When someone is asking for one TB, we are assigning one TB, but that is virtual provisioning and it hardly assigns initially—perhaps 100 GB. It increases based on utilization. This is one of the significant advantages.

We had different workloads—database, virtualization, and all. We were able to provision everything from this storage. They were able to achieve all their required performance. The consolidation part means all workloads were consolidated to Dell PowerStore only.

It is easy to use. The best thing is the way it delivers performance and the automation they have. We can integrate directly with VMware. That was the major thing—the performance and then the automation.

No complexity was present with the initial setup of Dell PowerStore. It was very straightforward, but the only thing we worked on by providing IPs and details regarding where to install and switch ports where it needed to be cabled.

The deployment was done by the customer and the Dell team and one of the third parties they had. We majorly did not get involved in that.

Previously, whatever mid-range storages they had, compression and deduplication were very limited. With this, storage efficiency is there. Performance and low latency are there, majorly. This is compared to the other products. ROI is there, but not on the CAPEX side.

I have been working with Dell PowerStore for the last five years.

Previously they had performance issues, but it has been almost two years since we implemented this solution. There are no such performance issues. The major issue is with respect to the cost and somewhat to support.

We had the previous mid-range storage where scalability was an issue. With this, scalability was not an issue. It was easy to adopt and increase the nodes so that it could increase capacity very easily.

Dell PowerStore customer service is good, but sometimes they usually take a lot of time to understand the issue. We need to explain to them how it has integrated. Sometimes it is their firmware issues where they come to us very late, after the disaster has already happened. Before releasing any firmware, I think they should do lab tests with respect to all the operating systems. We do observe that during firmware upgrades, after upgradation, there were some issues with disconnectivity between server and storage, intermittent issues. However, they released a new patch and it worked.

Positive

I have worked on Veeam, AWS completely, Rubrik, Avamar, and Data Domain. I have worked on many technologies.

I have worked on NetApp, Hitachi, and Pure Storage.

NetApp is majorly used for the file system and is not preferable for very heavy workload such as databases. Compared to Dell PowerStore, if someone is looking for file shares, NAS, or SMBs, majorly NetApp is preferable. When you have enterprise workload with respect to application databases and you have completely a block storage requirement, then people should go with Dell PowerStore compared to others.

Deployment of Dell PowerStore was done by a third-party team. We were there for the rack and stack, supporting them remotely. We provided all the requirements of IPs, which they shared in Excel. They have a portal where we have to update all the required IPs for their nodes and the DNS. We did that and it worked.

The deployment was not difficult because you just need to plug and play and all the distribution and the workload will be done in the background. It will not disrupt your workload.

Deployment of Dell PowerStore was done by a third-party team. We were there for the rack and stack, supporting them remotely. We provided all the requirements of IPs, which they shared in Excel. They have a portal where we have to update all the required IPs for their nodes and the DNS. We did that and it worked.

The major thing is the performance issues we had previously. Now, it is a primary storage for the client. It was the best way where they even reduced to 95 percent where they had almost weekly P1 or P2 tickets. It reduced to hardly once a month or quarterly once.

Dell PowerStore is expensive.

I have been working with Dell PowerStore for the last five years. One customer used the 5000T model and for the other customer, it was the 3000T model.

These were clustered systems. Everything was distributed. This is where there was the issue with performance previously, but when we had this one, it started giving us good performance.

Deployment was easy. It was not difficult because you just need to plug and play and all the distribution and the workload will be done in the background. It will not disrupt your workload.

Tech support for Dell is seven or eight, not more than that. Dell PowerStore is nine. We can put 7.5 for Dell and for Dell PowerStore, we can take it as 8.5 to 9.

My overall rating for this review is 9 out of 10.

We are using Dell PowerStore for block storage to run Oracle databases, and we are using it for file servers with replication, and a lot of VMware data. By VMware, I mean it is all Windows-based applications we are using it for. 

We are currently using two models of Dell PowerStore: 3200 and 5200.

Benefits of Dell PowerStore compared to Unity 400 and 650F, which we were previously using, are significant. Firstly, we benefit from extensive deduplication for non-database applications, which saves us a considerable amount of costs. Secondly, the performance has improved dramatically due to advancements in technology, such as TLC disks and NVMe technologies. These two factors, cost savings from deduplication and enhanced performance across applications, are the primary benefits we are experiencing.

Dell PowerStore has not helped our company improve operational efficiency to a great extent, because that depends on administrator tasks; operational efficiency is mostly from provisioning and using it through block, but then the benefits are mostly with TCO and performance.

The most valuable functionality we find in Dell PowerStore is deduplication, which saves us a lot of cost with a dedupe ratio of 4:1, good when compared to Unity of 1.6 or 1.7, allowing for almost 2x or 3x cost savings for us. 

Replication is also more simplified, so we are happy with the replication feature, which is easy to configure and manage. 

It's simple and easy to use.

There should be improvements in Dell PowerStore regarding scaling up and scaling out. When it's a cluster, provisioning is basically not automatic, and it doesn't do LUN balancing, so that automatic feature of LUN balancing between the cluster should be looked into.

I would like to see more user-friendly reporting on provisioning, LUNs, and more extensive reporting usages in the next version of Dell PowerStore, as that would help us.

Another area that should be looked into for Dell PowerStore include our current use of TLC disks; we cannot expand our cluster with a QLC disk, leading to some problems.

We primarily use Dell PowerStore for mid-range applications, and we are satisfied with its performance in that context. However, we have tested it with high-end applications that have significant performance requirements. In one instance, a single PowerStore array provided only 3 to 4 GBPS, which was not satisfactory. For applications requiring 15 or 20 thousand IOPS, PowerStore performs well. However, when an application needs around 50 thousand IOPS or 3 GBPS transfer rates, there tends to be noticeable lag.

I have been working with Dell PowerStore for close to two years.

I would rate the stability of Dell PowerStore as a seven out of ten. When it's clustering, it's not straightforward rebalancing, and there's a lot of tasks that need to be done to keep the array more performance-oriented.

Technical support is good, and I would rate it an eight out of ten.

Positive

We have worked with HPE, and compared to HPE, we believe that Dell PowerStore is good. We have also worked with Nutanix, which is also very good, and we feel Nutanix performs better than Dell PowerStore, while HPE is a little lagging in this area.

Single-node deployment is a little easy. Multi-node clustering takes a lot of understanding. It should be simplified.

We purchased Dell PowerStore through a partner. We do in-house deployment for Dell PowerStore, and Dell Technologies is always the implementer for us.

In terms of lifecycle management, we are connected through ESRS for Dell PowerStore, and all those reports get back to us from Dell EMC. We have our account manager who periodically schedules these upgrades.

The price of Dell PowerStore is decent. It provides good value, and it is a fair value product.

We have a two-node cluster. We are not directly using Dell PowerStore for optimizing workloads; basically, it is more of Oracle and SAP applications, only these things we are using it for.

We use Dell PowerStore for both Linux and Windows. They have an equal footprint. We have integration with Kubernetes. 

Overall, I would rate Dell PowerStore a seven out of ten.

Dell PowerStore is mainly used as a core storage platform for scale-out and file storage with NVMe storage. 

Clustering multiple Dell PowerStore appliances is straightforward from a presales perspective, with everything managed from a single dashboard. 

The data resiliency features include single or double drive resiliency for quick recovery from drive failures. The NVMe SSD drives enable fast data rebuilding, replacing traditional RAID systems.

It provides efficiency. The solution uses NVMe platforms and NVMe drives, making it very fast when writing data. While NVMe can be costly, Dell enables always-on data reduction, which means data will be deduplicated with thin provisioning and compression to ensure efficient use of the platform.

With deduplication and compression always on, it offers data efficiency and saves space, which can lead to fewer rack requirements. It can be easily consolidated into half of the space, in turn reducing the power and cooling needs. It reduces the overall footprint by reducing the amount of data that we are managing.

Regarding security, Dell PowerStore includes integrated features such as encryption and anomaly detection to reduce attack surfaces. 

The performance has been good. I haven't had any complaints from customers.

The solution offers tight integration with VMware, Kubernetes, and containers through numerous APIs and tools. Tasks can be performed from vCenter or PowerStore Manager.

The beauty is the simplicity - customers can manage multiple workloads from a single dashboard with scale-out architecture. The new binaries for Dell PowerStore are built on microservices, so updates can be easily deployed on the appliance without hardware changes. In summary, it offers scalability, simplicity, and performance as its magic triangles.

The solution has a very efficient data reduction guarantee of 5:1 based on the workload, which is supported by Dell. The Dell support and services make it easy to sell and easy for customers to use.

It is also very easy to use. The solution is easy to maintain and scale.

Dell PowerStore has minimal areas needing improvement, as it is one of the best products in Dell's portfolio. However, migration services could be included, especially for Oracle migration. Additionally, more documentation specific to Dell PowerStore is needed.

My experience with Dell PowerStore spans five years, starting from its launch.

The solution's scalability is a ten out of ten. When needed, the appliance head can be changed for higher implementation. For example, when starting with 1200 and requiring more IOPS, the head can be upgraded through an in-place upgrade. The scale-out architecture and scale-up architecture give customers options to easily scale performance or capacity. Scale out adds additional appliances to increase performance for more workloads, while scale up adds drives to increase performance for certain workloads.

We have clients from small, medium, and enterprise segments. We have all kinds of clients. The models that we are selling depend on the segments. For example, SMBs mainly go with PowerStore 500T, which is a single appliance. Government or higher sectors take multiple appliances. They have recently launched a new appliance, 200Q, which is very popular because it has a QLC drive. For higher capacities, it is more convenient for the customer, with almost the same performance as well.

We have about five people working with this solution in our organization.

Technical support rates at a seven out of ten, primarily due to response time rather than knowledge. Issues arise when customers try to reduce costs by not purchasing the appropriate support contract or SLAs. This leads to customer satisfaction problems when they expect immediate fixes, but their contract specifies next business day resolution.

Neutral

Comparing Dell PowerStore with other vendors such as Pure, IBM Storage, and Unity, Dell PowerStore stands out for its performance and simplicity. Partners report that customers feel the difference with Dell PowerStore, experiencing higher performance and fewer administration tasks.

It's easy to deploy. The deployment process is straightforward and takes approximately half a day if pre-configured. The process is automatic and requires minimal cabling.

The pricing rates at seven out of ten as it is considered overpriced. Entry-level models are reasonably priced, starting around $30,000 for a base model with 6 drives. However, upgrades become costly - adding 6 additional drives can cost another $30,000.

While Apex AIOps is promoted for health insights and recommendations, I have not personally used this feature.

Overall, I would rate Dell PowerStore a nine out of ten, leaving room for further development.

We are partners and an integrator. We work very closely with Dell and Pure on both technologies. Recently, I have been working on another storage array primarily for a client-specific requirement for a VAN-level data migration. We have been evaluating Hitachi and NetApp storages as well.

We have been working with the 5600 series mostly, and there are 6000 series and 7000 series as well. We have been working and consolidating on multiple storage arrays, and recently we have been working on the 5000 series storage array.

We are looking at options to evaluate. The requirement is slightly different from the data sovereignty and long-distance migration perspective, so we are evaluating multiple options.

The deduplication and compression ratio that we get out of Dell PowerStore is really good. The immutability that comes along is coming in handy. The ease of managing the storage arrays is a standout feature. Because I have worked on medium to enterprise-grade systems, I see that provisioning, supporting, and managing Dell PowerStore is a lot easier and convenient.

Dell PowerStore provides very good clustering capabilities. You can increase your number of drives vertically and horizontally with the controller. Dell PowerStore provides good scalability.

The model which we have selected provides us with the required features that we are looking for, so I cannot complain or say there is room for improvement at this point in time. However, this is a normal trend across the industry where we are talking about cybersecurity and cyber resiliency. We can take snapshots of these LUNs and storages, which is a common feature across all storage systems now. If I want to generalize, there should be some method of intelligence put into the storage that can identify anomalies while writing data onto the blocks. This is not just for Dell PowerStore, but this is across all industry-wide storages. Pure recently has come up with some intelligence with immutability. It would be good to see across all storage systems having such a feature where any random blocks read and write can throw an alert showing that some irregular pattern has been identified and can raise a risk to operations.

It has been a couple of years now, at least two years.

Dell PowerStore is meeting my needs and requirements. It is meeting my performance, read and write performance, for my enterprise-grade applications. I am happy with the decision that we have taken and have worked with Dell PowerStore.

Dell PowerStore provides very good scalability. You can cluster Dell PowerStore instances and increase your number of drives vertically and horizontally with the controller.

There are no complaints. The same performance level is seen across even when doing multiple array consolidation into a specific cluster.

We were considering Primera Storage, Nimble Storage, and HPE. We were also looking at Pure Storage. We had multiple options to choose from. We chose Dell PowerStore because of the larger partnership that we had with Dell. Second, the kind of competitiveness that we were going to get out of the storage in terms of pricing competitiveness. Third, from a strategic partnership with Dell, apart from the technical feasibility and technical scalability options.

Because of the implementation that we have done and the ease of deployment, I would give it an 8.5 to 9. I do not know how it would perform once we start consolidating the workload. Based on the feedback and technical discussions that we had with the Dell technical team, the feedback has been really good on that front. However, I do not know at this point in time how the migration, workload consolidation, and future deduplication and compression will perform, but I would still give around 8.5 as an overall rating.

The setup cost is reasonable. What I do not like about Dell PowerStore is the software licensing, which also has to be brought in. There are two elements of components that we probably have to bring in. One is the hardware block increase or storage increase. Then, as we increase the hardware level, we are also required to buy additional licenses to augment that capacity and use that capacity. The pricing could be much lower if they can reduce the fee on the software licensing portion.

Dell PowerStore provides the required latency of a few milliseconds, which I operate with for major enterprise-grade applications, including SAP. It is delivering the required performance parameters to continue operating on Dell PowerStore.

There is a project running to evaluate AIOps. At this point in time, we are not consuming it in the production stage.

AI is taking over everything, and we are solutioning AI everywhere. There should be some level of integration. AIOps does integrate with Dell PowerStore. I do not know if there is a security that can be brought in, which could be part of the current storage portfolio, which could be an AI-enabled security. I would like to route this back to the cybersecurity that I was mentioning.

We are using Evergreen FlashArray, X90.

We have done our CAPEX with Dell PowerStore. These are brand-new storage systems that we have gotten for our project. At this point in time, we are not looking at any lifecycle extension. Probably down the lane in the next three or four years, when the project maturity comes, we will have to think about the storage lifecycle.

We will be exploring integrations in the future. At this point in time, we just commissioned Dell PowerStore, so we are exploring options for integrating with other systems. We also need to make sure that we meet our own internal security and compliance guidelines. We are looking at options for expanding the capabilities that we see with storage.

I have given Dell PowerStore an overall review rating of 8.5 out of 10.

Mainly, we use Dell PowerStore as the central storage for all our production workloads. It’s the backbone of our virtual environment—mostly VMware—and it handles all our critical databases. Since we can't afford any downtime in production, we rely on it to keep everything running smoothly across our data centers.

We haven't had a single production incident.

While I don't manage the day-to-day storage administration, I rely on our dedicated subject matter experts who have consistently validated Dell PowerStore as a high-performing solution. From a leadership perspective, I view it as a premium, 'upper-tier' infrastructure investment that significantly enhances our production security.

So far, our experience has been great—we haven't had a single production incident. One of the main reasons we chose PowerStore was its ability to handle active-active configurations across our data centers. That architecture is a big part of our stability strategy, and the platform has been a perfect fit for those high-availability needs.

We are currently evaluating our connectivity strategy for the new data center, as we haven't deployed a traditional Fibre Channel SAN or dedicated SAN switching yet. Instead, we are exploring more modern protocols like iSCSI and NVMe over TCP.

We are in discussions with Dell regarding official support for these over-the-fabric protocols on our specific PowerStore model. While we are still confirming the roadmap and compatibility, moving away from a traditional SAN and toward an NVMe/TCP architecture is a key point of interest for our future infrastructure.

Personally, I have over two years of experience with Dell PowerStore, but our team has been utilizing Dell PowerStore for nearly four years now.

We haven't had a single production incident.

Our relationship with Dell has evolved into a true partnership over the last two years. We have weekly touchpoints with our account team, and I feel confident that they are genuinely invested in our success. 
On the technical support side, the experience has been generally positive. However, regarding our new data center and the PowerStore integration, we’ve noticed some hesitation when exploring newer, non-traditional configurations. It seems there is a cautious approach toward supporting architectures that haven't been extensively tested in-house yet. While this caution is understandable, we look forward to Dell leaning in more as we push the boundaries of their newer solutions.

I would rate our technical support experience a 7 out of 10. Over the past two years, we have encountered a few configuration challenges on our servers. In some instances, these issues were complicated by the involvement of intermediary partners, making the resolution process less direct. While there have been minor hurdles to overcome, a score of seven reflects a generally solid service that has room to improve in terms of coordination and initial setup accuracy.

Positive

Before, we had an Isilon product from Dell.

I don't have much experience with products similar to Dell PowerStore yet, as it is a new solution for us at France Télévisions. The pricing so far has been fair, and we are satisfied with the purchase price. Support has also been fine.

However, looking at servers like ReadyNodes, we’ve noticed that anything involving AI becomes quite difficult and very expensive—actually, really expensive. We understand the market context, but we wonder if it’s only the context driving those costs. Because of this, we are starting to talk with other partners to compare. As for the PowerStore itself, it’s a good product. It may be a premium price, but it’s high-end equipment, so the investment makes sense.

My overall rating for Dell PowerStore is eight.

Dell PowerStore is typically used for virtualization projects at customers and for cloud environments, serving as pure virtualization block storage.

Before Dell PowerStore, I used a different solution for these use cases.

I use this solution on VMware.

Dell PowerStore has impacted my organization positively as it is a very easy system to use, so from an operational standpoint, I would emphasize its ease of use.

Ease of use is something that I value the most.

The deduplication and compression features of Dell PowerStore are quite amazing, and the data reduction guarantee is also very good. It is not a technical feature, but rather a commercial feature, and other vendors are quite difficult regarding that; Dell PowerStore delivered quite well on the promised deduplication and compression.

Dell PowerStore has helped my organization improve its operational efficiency.

It is quite an install-and-forget system that runs stably in the background, and we do not need to do much around it to maintain it except for an upgrade now and then.

The data resiliency and cybersecurity features of Dell PowerStore are quite good, especially the immutable option, which is very important because it helps recover quite fast from a ransomware attack.

Whenever I have any ransomware attacks, the immutable snapshots help me easily recover without needing to do complicated restore operations.

I have been able to consolidate data using Dell PowerStore, and the data reduction is quite good on it.

I would say a bit more user-friendliness and in-depth features in the monitoring interface of CloudIQ would be an improvement; sometimes it is quite difficult to find the information I want.

The insights offered by CloudIQ involve difficult parts regarding good reporting, and shared reporting is mainly the issue. You can build reports in there, but you cannot share them between colleagues, so if my colleague builds something, I need to log in with my account to see what he built.

I have been using Dell PowerStore from 2021.

Dell PowerStore is stable, so there are no issues that caused any downtime.

The stability of Dell PowerStore is very important because we run multiple customers and our own SaaS platform on it, and if it is not stable, it will cause many issues for many departments.

I have never had any outages or downtime so far.

Expanding Dell PowerStore in terms of scaling up and scaling out is super easy.

If I need to add additional drives, I just insert a drive and the system expands automatically, so there is nothing to do; it is super easy.

It is very intuitive and automatic.

I have contacted technical support for Dell PowerStore multiple times.

My experience with them was quite good; overall, the support is good, and we are satisfied with it.

Positive

Before Dell PowerStore, I used a different solution for these use cases.

I used IBM storage.

I decided to switch from IBM to Dell PowerStore due to some performance issues on the IBM system.

We deployed Dell PowerStore ourselves.

The deployment process was quite straightforward, and there were no complications to install and set up those boxes.

The initial setup process involves racking, cabling, and then doing the initial setup, but that is quite easy and straightforward.

I have seen a return on investment with Dell PowerStore as there is much less performance troubleshooting than in the past, so we definitely save time and human resources due to that.

Dell PowerStore helped reduce my organization's capital expenditures, but I am not sure in what size or metric.

The data reduction guarantee is a key factor; if we do not obtain the reduction ratio, then Dell will provide additional drives to compensate. That is really good from the commercial standpoint, and we view that as a price per gigabyte standpoint, which all depends on the price we pay for the system's compression.

It has been a long time since we bought one, but in the past, it was quite satisfying; I am not sure about the prices now.

Before choosing Dell, I evaluated other options including IBM and Pure Storage.

I decided to go with Dell PowerStore mainly due to a relationship perspective, wanting to do more business with Dell from a business perspective, and I was convinced of the product and the price—those were the three main drivers.

We are both a customer of this solution and an IT partner, so we are also cloud service providers, thus we use them ourselves and do reselling.

I am currently working with Dell PowerStore version 4.2.

We are using seven appliances, and we have a mix of models including 1000, 3000, 2200, and 3200.

We are not clustering multiple Dell PowerStore appliances, but we use the Metro functionality.

We are satisfied with the workload performance offered by Dell PowerStore.

The management capabilities of Dell PowerStore are very easy to use.

It is very user-friendly and intuitive; Dell did a great job streamlining the user interface over different platforms.

I am not enrolled in Lifecycle Extension, formerly branded Anytime Upgrade.

I have rated this review an 8 out of 10.