Dell PowerStore Reviews

Dell PowerStore serves multiple critical functions for our organization. We were initially a cloud customer who became caught up in the cloud trend of putting everything in the cloud, but this approach became cost prohibitive. We had to repatriate and bring what we had in the cloud back onto on-premises infrastructure into a colocation facility. This is where we approached Dell, and they provided us with the ability to add both compute and storage capabilities. When they provided us the storage, the compression capability was exactly what we needed.

Our second use case involves our typical operations in the oil and gas industry, where we use a data historian, which is a very proprietary software with a proprietary database structure. We were not getting much compression on that system at all, and Dell PowerStore provided us with decent compression so we did not have to continuously expand our storage.

The features of Dell PowerStore that I appreciate most include the ability to move our data from one site to another site without needing VMware software, which we used in the past for this purpose. With Dell PowerStore, that capability is one of the things we love the most about it. This goes back to our point of having remote operations, and when we lose that remote site and need to restore something or operate without that site, we can do so because our data is already moved to the other sites, and we can simply pick that data up and start running.

Many of the features of Dell PowerStore have benefited our organization through the management of storage across the whole enterprise. The team has really enjoyed the single pane of glass for management instead of logging into each individual site to manage their specific versions and setups. The ability to upgrade and keep everything consistent has made the team very satisfied.

Dell PowerStore can be improved by better integration between Dell PowerStore and PowerProtect, especially on the cyber resilience side. We are very interested in how they will integrate those two products. Additionally, even though we are not heavily using AI on the Dell side, we have been working with them and challenging them to turn some of that functionality into agentive AIs, where programming or configuration for different policies could be done through natural language. We want to work with Dell to speed up everyday repetitive tasks through agentive agents.

I have personally been using Dell PowerStore for over the last three years since we moved off of Dell VxRail to Dell PowerStore.

Dell PowerStore has demonstrated strong stability and reliability. We have not experienced any P1s, which is what we call problem level one incidents. We have been very satisfied, and Dell has always been proactive, providing timely support when needed.

Dell PowerStore scales well with our growing needs, which has made us very satisfied. Some of our locations are very small, and Dell has provided us with small units that work well there. As we expand, they allow us to flex up and down, accommodating our larger sites and smaller sites with ease.

We have limited capabilities to consolidate data using Dell PowerStore because of our operational structure at each site. Data is more unique to the individual site, but we have had the ability to consolidate back to the compression capability that Dell has provided us.

I cannot complain about the customer service and technical support. We have received rock-solid support from Dell, especially during our transition from VxRail to Dell PowerStore. They have provided us with white glove service, keeping us on track with our project plans even during challenging circumstances. On a scale of one to ten for customer support, I would give them a nine. There is always room for improvement, so the account team should have goals to strive for.

When considering a change to Dell PowerStore, the factors included a simplification of our environment, as VxRail is an integrated solution that requires familiarity with the Dell platform. Dell PowerStore's current design, which splits computing from storage, worked better for us. VMware licensing also played a significant role in that decision since with Dell PowerStore and PowerEdge, we have a different type of licensing compared to VxRail.

Upgrading with Dell has been extremely straightforward. That is one thing that we have been very satisfied with Dell about. We were skeptical, but when we migrated from VxRail, a core Dell product, to Dell PowerStore, it was actually quite simple. We have been very satisfied from that perspective.

We have definitely seen a return on investment with Dell PowerStore. If we had not, we would have returned it already. Dell was very competitive when we shifted from VxRail to Dell PowerStore, and financially, we have seen ROI during that transition because they were flexible with us.

Ultimately, Dell PowerStore has been a rock-solid product for us. It has provided the capabilities we were seeking and yielded both efficiencies and financial value. When we shifted from the cloud to on-site, we saved $150,000 a month, which is significant for a small organization like ours. The relationship with our Dell account team has also been crucial—they have always looked out for us as a customer. I am totally comfortable with that information being used as it reflects what we have achieved, and we are not going to shy away from sharing that information.

My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing is generally positive. One of the biggest reasons we chose Dell was the competitive pricing and strong partnership. They could be better, as some of their peers have lower pricing, but we get what we pay for. Dell has been extremely kind to Ascend Performance Materials. When I say it could be better, I mean some of their competitors have a more competitive cost structure and licensing model. I believe that is where Dell will face challenges, especially as competitors are working to attract business.

We continuously evaluate other competitors before the refresh cycle comes up, which is part of our business nature. We shop around with all the big players, including HP, Everspin, and NetApp. It is simply a normal part of the market review we conduct.

The solutions between Dell integrate well. I have been a long customer, and I remember the days of Dell EMC. There were some integration issues back then, but it has improved greatly. It is not as tightly integrated as their VxRail solution, but from what we see and what we have been using, we have been extremely satisfied.

At this point, we do not use Dell AIOps, also known as CloudIQ or APEX AIOps. That is something we, as a company, are starting to explore heavily—how to use AI in general—so Dell and I have had some conversations around that, but we are not using it yet. It is just more about timing and resources; we have not gotten to it. We run a very small team, so a lot of the functionalities or features that we want to use, we have not gotten to it.

We have Dell support, but we are not enrolled in the lifecycle extension, also known as the Anytime Upgrade program. However, we believe in refreshing equipment. What we do with Dell is refresh all of our end-user clients, servers, and storage, including Dell PowerStore, on a four-year cycle. We have not seen significant cost savings or operational efficiencies based on that. As I mentioned, we have such a small team, and if I were to push for it, I would say we have seen some efficiency, perhaps freeing up five to ten percent of our team's time, but in the grand picture, we have reallocated that to other uses. There is definitely efficiency, but not to the level where we have had to reduce headcount.

I would have to check with the team about utilizing any built-in integrations for VMware, Kubernetes, or other ecosystems. That is a little beyond my responsibility.

The pros of going with Dell PowerStore include the strong relationship we have built with Dell, which facilitates operations. The biggest con could also be that same relationship, as it can be difficult to move away from them with the entire Dell stack. Integration is extremely important, and while Dell excels in some areas, they may lag compared to vendors focused solely on storage.

I would rate Dell PowerStore between an eight and nine overall. We are extremely satisfied with it, but we recognize there is always room for improvement, particularly regarding automation and balancing innovation with integration. My advice for other organizations considering Dell PowerStore is to look closely at your use cases and ensure that what you are trying to achieve aligns with what they can provide. It is imperative to be honest about your growth plans, so you do not fall into the common trap of undersizing, which can lead to financial issues down the line. I rate this review a nine out of ten overall.

Dell PowerStore is used for mixed workloads based on virtualization, primarily VMware. Many customers choose iSCSI, and the newly formed protocol NVMe over TCP is also available. Fibre Channel deployments have also been completed. The main reason many customers have selected Dell PowerStore is based on the 5-to-1 dedupe and compression, but workloads must be sized according to the customer's specific requirements to guarantee the 5-to-1 dedupe and compression.

I have completed Dell PowerStore installations for small, medium, and enterprise businesses ranging from PowerStore 500T, which is the entry level, up to PowerStore 9000 series. These installations have been completed on NVMe, SAS, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NVMe protocols across all models.

From an entry-level perspective, PowerStore 500T has limited expansion capabilities. A couple of shelves can be added, but the controllers cannot be upgraded. Starting from PowerStore 1200T, expandability is available with their performance guarantee program where controller upgrades can be performed. The latest features with PowerStore 300Q use QMLC drives, providing bigger drives and expansion capabilities. Dell also offers a 5-to-1 dedupe compression guarantee. Dell PowerStore directly integrates with Dell Data Domain where backups can be offloaded directly to the Data Domain side.

Based in South Africa and the SADEC region in Africa, many customers use co-locations or their own data centers. There is no Dell PowerStore offering in the cloud as a storage-as-a-service option based on the Dell APEX model. Many customers tend to have it deployed on-premises.

From a Dell PowerStore perspective, the most valuable feature is how easy it is to set up the appliance and integrate it into either a VMware environment or any virtualization environment. A majority of the configurations and setup completed have been based on iSCSI with a couple on Fibre Channel. The ease of use and the deployment cycles are very user-friendly, as well as the Dell support site.

From an AI perspective, the initiatives that Dell implements in Dell PowerStore are exceptional because they provide proactive analysis on any ransomware detection as well as future capabilities of how storage is performing. If additional workloads are being brought in, a simulation can be done to show the impact that would occur on that specific device. This includes how the workload would impact performance from an IOPS, throughput, and utilization perspective.

I have worked as an integrator, pre-sales representative, solution architect, and implementation specialist for Dell PowerStore. Currently working for Nutanix, which is a hypervisor company, I previously worked for Dell for a long time. The beauty of Dell PowerStore is that it can be right-sized and when expansion is needed, instead of certain other vendors where a drive pack must be added to expand capacity, a single drive can be added at a time because of its dynamic RAID configuration. Multiple drives of a minimum of four or five do not need to be added. Small drives can be added in increments to increase capacity.

I used to work for Dell and there were certain limitations in the past. At the current moment with current features, because they guarantee 5-to-1 dedupe and compression, they also now natively have the MetroSync capability built in to have active-active data centers. Dell PowerStore is leading edge and bleeding edge, using the latest technology. The only thing that could be improved is having the entry-level PowerStore 500T be able to do multi-clustering. Additionally, for an entry-level option, introducing something like PowerStore 500X where native virtualization workloads can be run, similar to the other models like the 1200X where containerization and virtual machine workloads can be run natively, would be beneficial.

In the last 12 months, I have been working with Druva, Veeam, as well as Dell PowerStore. I have also worked with Nutanix, NetWorker, Data Domain, and VMware.

Scalability depends on the model that is started with. If PowerStore 500T is the starting model, scalability is limited. Once PowerStore 1200T is chosen, controller upgrades can be performed up to PowerStore 900. Additional DAEs or disk shelves can also be added and additional controllers can be included. Scaling up can be done from a single enclosure that already has two controllers to a maximum of four storage units with up to eight controllers, and a massive amount of storage can be added.

Serviceability, scalability, and supportability depend on the region. Based in South Africa, Dell South Africa has one of the best support aftermarket services within service time frames. ProSupport and ProSupport Plus options are available. Generally, any failure such as a hard drive is shipped within four hours before a technician arrives.

Customers can either self-install their drives, but Dell also has a 24/7 follow-the-sun procedure across the globe. During my 13-year tenure working for Dell and installations into Africa for First Bank Nigeria and others, there have never been any failures besides a DOA or an on-site failure as it ships out of the factory. Perhaps a hard drive was damaged due to electronic interference.

Other than that, supportability from a Dell perspective is excellent. Currently working for a software company and previously working for a reseller where I have been selling Pure Storage and others, I believe that Dell PowerStore is one of the top mid-range storage products.

Positive

There are three different ways of setting up Dell PowerStore. One is iSCSI, one is Fibre Channel, and one is NVMe. Elaborating further, the setup depends on whether it is into a VMware environment, a bare metal environment, or Hyper-V. All of those have their own complexities, but the initial setup is literally unpacking, racking it into the cabinet.

For instance, with a normal iSCSI deployment, once all network connectivity is connected into the servers, it literally takes about half an hour from the initial initialization, setting it up, connecting it to ESRS, and then carving out volumes and presenting that to a VMware cluster. The last time this was completed, it took a maximum of 45 minutes from racking, stacking, and initializing the actual Dell PowerStore unit to carving out volumes and presenting it in vCenter for transition.

A brilliant use case is transitioning a customer from Pure Storage over to Dell PowerStore. The entire migration took about four hours to migrate approximately 40 terabytes of data across to Dell PowerStore. The customer was impressed with no downtime during live hours. The company, called Ficon, is an ISP company that provides service provider services. The migration was completed during production hours with no impact, and the company actually experienced a 25 to 50% improvement in performance as well as dedupe and compression.

Dell PowerStore is highly versatile and offers numerous features that can be tailored to specific customer needs. It also features ransomware protection and integrates with a centralized management platform where functionality, dedupe compression, and analysis can be viewed.

I have comprehensive experience from a Dell PowerStore perspective due to working for Dell. I have used Druva internally from a company perspective and attempted to resell it. I have experience with Veeam as well.

From a supportability perspective, the highest rating would be given, but on NPS, a rating of ten is the maximum. This review has been given an overall rating of ten out of ten.

Dell PowerStore serves as the heart of our VDI environment. All of our servers, virtual servers, and client VMs live on Dell PowerStore. Dell PowerStore is responsible for the daily operations of our VMware environment.

The features that I appreciate most about Dell PowerStore are the ease of expansion. If you want to grow Dell PowerStore, you simply tell it how big you want it, and if the data reduction makes sense, then it will grow as you need it on demand. The high availability of Dell PowerStore is another aspect I really value. It is built to stay available under many abnormal conditions. If you have equipment failures, it will still stay up and running. This is very important to us as we have to maintain availability for our engineers.

Dell PowerStore is greatly expandable and easily expandable. We have had to expand during our use of Dell PowerStore from inception until today, and it is super easy. You simply go into the size of the volume and tell it what you want it to be, click okay, and it is right there. It is very, very fast and very simple.

I have seen some benefits in the use of Dell PowerStore when compared to our legacy systems. The legacy systems were about 25% slower, maybe up to 40% slower as far as response time and performance. With Dell PowerStore, it is much quicker and near real-time, and it keeps our engineers productive without any delays. The legacy system had some downtime, and that downtime equated to production billable hours lost. The investment that our company made in Dell PowerStore has more than paid for itself with its continued uptime, reducing any downtime, and keeping those billable hours flowing.

Thankfully, we have not experienced any downtime or performance issues through the entire use of Dell PowerStore.

I do not have any input for improvements for Dell PowerStore because it is expandable and scalable. I cannot think of a newer feature that I would suggest for a next release. It meets all of our needs, and I honestly cannot think of how to improve it. In my particular use case, I cannot come up with anything that I would wish they would improve on. The UI is great, the expandability is great, the physicality of it is great, and the high availability is great. I am not even maximizing my use of it. It is well more than enough for us, and I really genuinely love to use the product. I do not have any suggestions for improvement.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for about a couple of years.

When working with the customer service people at Dell, it was always a good experience. They were very knowledgeable about the product and they knew exactly where to point me to help me. I had a licensing issue where a particular OS level conflicted with a license, and they were able to sort it out real quick. They knew the product, and that was very comforting and a good experience.

Dell PowerStore's customer service receives perfect scores. They get perfect scores across the board.

Our legacy system prior to adopting Dell PowerStore used a completely different architecture. It was a vSAN type architecture where the storage was spread across the user nodes or the compute nodes. That solution was not going to be viable for us. We needed a highly available, single, isolated storage solution, which we found in Dell PowerStore 500T. All the compute is separated in the PowerEdge. These two systems work seamlessly together, and I do not run into the same problems of storage availability when I am using Dell PowerStore that I did with the legacy system.

The setup cost was next to zero because we actually did it internally ourselves according to the books and the diagrams that were provided. When we had an audit come in and look at it, they said we did it all 100 percent correctly. I feel good about that.

I definitely have seen a return on investment with Dell PowerStore because when we have downtime, we lose billable hours, and that equates to revenue lost. By putting Dell PowerStore in place, we have maintained uptime and billable hours, equating to much more than the cost of Dell PowerStore solution in total. It has paid for itself by being up and available.

The pricing for Dell PowerStore is comparable. The licensing is pretty direct and simplified. The licensing and the price were comparable and nominal compared to other equivalent solutions.

I looked at Unity and other systems and looked at the specs primarily to see which had the highest IOPS and which supported the highest networking bandwidth, because we have to connect it to our switching infrastructure. Dell PowerStore stood out because it was upgradeable to go beyond our switching infrastructure, but at least meet our switching infrastructure speed. I went with Dell PowerStore because the same equivalent space took up much more rack space with other systems. Dell PowerStore condenses rack space down and reduces the need to a fraction of what I needed with another system such as Unity, by a factor of 75 percent, which is significant. This results in less power, less cooling, more performance, and equivalent space with Dell PowerStore.

I do use Dell AIOps to manage all of my PowerEdge servers and Dell PowerStore. Dell AIOps definitely helps me manage my PowerEdge servers and Dell PowerStore appliance. It keeps them up to date, lets me know if something is out of compliance, and it is a single pane of glass for my entire environment.

Dell AIOps tells me when I need firmware. Firmware is important to keep up to date. Additional downloads that keep the system running and optimized for optimal performance are very important, and Dell AIOps keeps us and our team well-informed.

I do not use Dell PowerStore's built-in integrations for VMware, Kubernetes, containers, or other ecosystems presently. I may look into them later, but I would use the VMware integration if anything. However, we have a separate VMware system in place and that currently suffices.

I rate Dell PowerStore with a 10 because it does everything that it said and more. For instance, we got a guarantee of 5-to-1 data reduction, and we are getting 13-to-1. That is incredible and more than twice the guarantee. We are getting ease of use, and it is very intuitive. I can change the storage within 60 seconds and grow and expand the storage. It is scalable and just meets all the needs that we had in looking for a storage solution. I recommend Dell PowerStore because it is highly available. It is something you can rely on and count on to stay running. Even when some of the components fail, it will still be up and running. A lot has to go wrong for it to fail, and that is one of the reasons I would recommend Dell PowerStore.

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.

I am supporting one of my defense customers for Dell PowerStore where my VDI solution is hosted.

We have to host 500 users' VDI for one of the prestigious defense customers. We have this in a DCDR architecture where we require active passive DCDR, and there the RPO is required for 5 minutes only. RTO is 15 minutes, and these are the expectations. They want to scale up and scale down their infrastructure depending on the workloads, especially during a war situation. They want server storage, compute, and storage arranged so that they can scale up and scale down at any time. They prefer a single console for management, and from a security perspective, they are getting encryption both at rest as well as in transit, along with self-encrypting drives with Dell PowerStore. This solution has secure boot, root of trust, and is integrated with the existing LDAP. They are able to get all the logs integrating with the SIM solution.

Dell PowerStore is in a cluster configuration.

It is very easy to use Dell PowerStore for moving and optimizing workloads in the cluster. We are using the mid-range Dell PowerStore, which integrates seamlessly with the VMware hypervisor and vCenter Management Console, and we can utilize optimal memory and the maximum compute and storage efficiently.

We are able to successfully achieve the SLA requirements, and the SLA asks for 99.99969 availability. Dell PowerStore helps achieve the 69 availability part from the SLA perspective, and it also reduces OPEX costs since it requires fewer admin staff to manage. Most tasks are automated, and there are a few AI-driven operations built in that do not require internet connectivity, such as health monitoring, proactive alerting, and intelligent load balancing.

With the upcoming DPDP Act, we are following all compliance considering sensitive data. We can encrypt the data, which is policy-driven, and we support multi-factor authentication with this solution, which integrates well because it is supported by REST API. This REST API allows easy integration with existing infrastructure like SIM or firewall. Furthermore, this solution is FIPS compliant, which is also an important criterion for government regulatory compliance. For high availability, Dell PowerStore has dual active controllers, so there is no need to worry about a single point of failure. All firmware upgrades occur regularly, and we receive offline upgrades with Dell's support team, making failover automatic and reducing downtime.

Due to hot-swappable drives, fans, and power supplies, we can upgrade software applications seamlessly without needing to shut down anything.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for the last three years.

Dell PowerStore has intelligent load balancing, which means we do not depend on manual intelligence or skill set most of the time. Features like capacity forecasting and predictive analytics are part of Dell PowerStore. It has built-in health monitoring, and management is supported with VMware plugins, SNMP protocol, and it provides an HTML5 graphical interface.

Dell PowerStore is highly scalable, enabling scale-up and scale-down as per customer demand, because it is essential to be able to scale down sometimes, not just scale up.

They are the best. From Dell's perspective, they have improved significantly. They provide a response time of 30 minutes for customer inquiries. While they may not resolve issues within that time, they consistently respond quickly.

I have worked with Check Point Firewall in the past.

We take help from the Dell PSO service, which has helped us host our VDI solution on top of Dell PowerStore platform.

We see good ROI from the third year to the fifth year. If you calculate the entire infrastructure, including the VDI setup, VMware licenses, and Microsoft licenses, we achieved cost efficiency beginning in the first year, but from the third year to the fifth year, we see measurable ROI.

Cost is a secondary concern for the defense kind of organization, but because of compression and deduplication, they can also reduce costs since most data are duplicates. It is a good feature that compression is part of Dell PowerStore.

In the current situation, I do not think Dell PowerStore helps to reduce CAPEX due to hardware shortages and delays. Customers expect hardware delivery within four to six weeks, which currently is not possible, and costs remain high due to global supply chain issues and demand from AI companies taking up available resources. Price negotiations seem unlikely to yield better pricing in the next six months.

HP is coming with their hypervisor, which raises questions about how they will integrate with Dell PowerStore for enterprise customers who have both HP and Dell servers.

I am using all of it now, including Forcepoint, VMware, and HP.

Other firewalls, including Fortinet, I am working with today.

The market's compute and storage shortage has driven costs up, so a 60 crore rupees BOQ is now reaching up to 200 crores. The price is very high.

For Dell PowerStore, except for the pricing issue, I would rate it eight points out of ten. I have assigned a review rating of 8 to this product.

I help install and manage Dell PowerStore. I installed the equipment with my supervisor and then manage part of the storage, redirecting files there. Currently, we are transitioning to a new domain and moving entire on-premises drives into that environment. I have multiple roles with it between networking and actual maintenance of it, managing the backup, and managing the data itself.

Currently, the models of Dell PowerStore are configured as stand-alone systems, but eventually, we are going to move into a vSAN between our two data centers and some of our on-premises resources. Right now, they are solo, but we are going to expand later.

Dell PowerStore has definitely impacted my organization positively in terms of operational efficiency. It collects our backups for our virtual machines, keeping those on cycle with no issues. This has definitely improved our efficiency.

I find it very easy to deploy Dell PowerStore. I thought it would be far more complex, but it probably took us 30 minutes. It was very straightforward. Dell made it incredibly easy.

If I could improve Dell PowerStore or have any additional features, I would want nothing because nothing is perfect in technology. We are always seeking the one piece of glass for everything. I know Dell is working on that through all their offerings, and I just have not talked to the right person yet or maybe it just has not been released. But integrating it into one big piece of glass along with servers and everything else would be great. A single pane of glass would be ideal. I am not saying they do not have it now, I just have not seen it yet, but if that were to be my one thing, because I know everybody has probably asked for the same thing, a single pane of glass for everything would make life easier, especially when I am managing on the back end trying to do updates and firmware without having to go to this iDRAC or that management site or this over here or that over there. We run a lean team for our IT department, so it just makes it easier on me for scheduling and planning. When I have to tell people that we are going to have an outage or they are not going to be able to access something, it will just go faster.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for about eight months.

I describe the stability of Dell PowerStore as high. If anything goes out, I am more worried about my Cisco switches going out before that does.

Going to the vSAN will help us consolidate data because we have to travel back and forth, and our company is spread out in oil and gas, very spread out with our data. It helps to consolidate it from one position to the other and also have that redundancy. Dell PowerStore will help us do that when we get that all set up. But right now it is set to replicate, but it will be more efficient later on once we do that.

My experience with Dell's customer support overall has been amazing. Every time I have had to call in, I always get someone who really knows their material. Even when they do not know, they are going to find out from someone else and bring it back to us later. I have yet to have a bad experience with Dell.

I would rate the customer support a 10.

Prior to using Dell PowerStore, my company was just using a few QNAP NAS drives and NAS devices. We managed to move everything into our scale environment, but we were using a setup based off of 2012 small business server like Active Directory. We have tried to rid ourselves of it, but it has all been mixed between there and our QNAPs, and it has been a nightmare to make sure someone has access to this and that.

Dell PowerStore will not need to integrate well with the QNAPs because we are getting rid of those, so we are moving it all into Dell PowerStore and then not even worrying about the integration.

I find it very easy to deploy Dell PowerStore. I thought it would be far more complex, but it probably took us 30 minutes. It was very straightforward. Dell made it incredibly easy.

We deployed it with an advisor from Dell's partner, Polara. They were great, but everything they were telling us, it was as soon as we read it, they did not really need to provide us more. They just told us their opinion, and it was a good opinion, but I do not think if they were not there, I think we could have done it just fine without them.

I do not have any measurable ROI benefits that I have seen. My boss or my VP might have it, but at the moment, I do not have it.

We have evaluated other products besides Dell, like HPE. There are just some things about their customer service model and then just a lack of response in certain situations, so I felt like they did not want people's business. We have worked with other vendors who use Dell equipment, so right now we have a couple of scale clusters, but they are using Dell PowerFlex currently in our environment. Other storage options, other than just making it on our own, did not appeal to us. We wanted the support, we wanted the redundancy, we wanted the availability, we wanted everything Dell offers with their platform. My supervisor has worked with Dell for a long time, so he does not have many bad stories, and every time he has had an issue, like drive failure, anything, they are there instantly fixing it.

I do not have the models of Dell PowerStore off the top of my head.

I have had no issues with Dell PowerStore's data resiliency, availability, and cybersecurity features. We have not had any incidents, so I cannot speak to problems with the cybersecurity resiliency. I know that is part of me on my network portion to make sure I harden it, but availability has been fine. It responds quickly. I have not had any failures of any sort yet. It has proven to be a very redundant machine overall.

I currently use the iDRAC feature with Dell PowerStore, but we know they have a GUI interface for it. We just have not gotten there to getting it fully integrated yet.

I have never had a problem with the iDRAC in general. The only weirdness is we have a 7920 that trying to get into with the password is just not the same as the other enterprise models will have it. You have to use Bluetooth, have it on Wi-Fi, and it is very complex in my environment to just do that. That is probably the only issue. But otherwise, I have never had a problem with the iDRAC. I updated it just fine, never had any issues. It is pretty accurate in resolving issues.

I do not yet use the AI Ops feature from Dell, such as CloudIQ or APEX AIOps. We are here today to try to see how we can incorporate that.

Part of the reason we have not incorporated AI Ops yet is due to a lack of true understanding. AI is cool, but it is not the end all be all of everything. I know it is supposed to make our lives easier, but at the same time, I need to make sure it is doing what it needs to do. I need to know what it is doing before I just completely commit to it. There is also the danger of it collecting data and someone exfiltrating it in a path we did not know about. So, we are trying to get all the angles from our security engineer to ensure that we are not vulnerable on that side, but also, we want to make sure we know what it needs to do so it does just what it needs to do.

I have been able to consolidate data using Dell PowerStore. We have managed to pull in a couple of different shared drives we had and pull things out of our SharePoint environments to alleviate things in the cloud that we do not need in the cloud.

My company runs about 600 employees right now, but we run lean. We are probably a medium enterprise. The best way to put us is that we have big assets, but a very lean workforce.

I give this review an overall rating 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.

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.