Dell PowerStore Reviews

We have two appliances — a primary and a secondary — and they are synchronized, so all the volumes are replicated. If the primary appliance goes down, we can get functions on the other side. When it's writing on one side, writing is disabled on the other side. In the event of disaster recovery, we can enable writing, and then we can do anything from there.

PowerStore simplified everything because we have a duplicate copy of all the volumes on the primary side. If anything happens, we can get data from the other side. It also takes hourly snapshots. If anything gets corrupted, we can recover using the snapshots. It's easier for our business to create volumes and allocate space on a volume. You don't have to go through the hassle of zoning the volume and doing everything else. It's simple.

PowerStore is easy to use. All the drives use soft encryption. To upgrade it, you download the app, and it runs by itself. It's very easy to deploy, share, and create volumes. It's active, so you can have two nodes on one appliance. If Node A goes down, you still get node B at the bottom running. 

I would rate PowerStore's machine learning and AI eight out of 10 because customer automation is very easy. It's just a click of the button, You can also use what they call Cloud IQ, which is an online storage and monitoring software. If you log on to the internet, you can check on your plans to see how much space is left. Cloud IQ analytics software is free as long as you have an account with Dell.

Dell's built-in intelligence is the best because it can also calculate how much data is needed for storage beforehand and if you need to add more drives or anything. The built-in intelligence can adapt quickly to changing workload requirements. We were able to migrate from IBM storage by uploading an image. With other devices, it's sometimes hard to migrate from different forms of storage, but PowerStore was very quick. We didn't have any downtime because once we were able to create the image, we just had to do a cut-over on the other side. 

Pretty soon it's going to be Meditech certified, so it's going to be able to run Meditech. Right now we are using a different solution to run Meditech, but once it gets certified, we'll be able to move from the other appliance. VMware integration is very easy too. PowerStore gives us leverage, we can tell how much space is allocated to the VM and what's happening on a VM.

We just installed PowerStore this spring.

PowerStore is highly stable. If one node goes down, it's going to alert you at any time. And then since you're using Cloud IQ, you can see all the alerts and everything. You can install Cloud IQ on your cell phone, so you'll get a notification on your phone.

You can scale PowerStore. If you look at the cost of getting a next-generation XtremIO, we can get two PASTs for the cost of one XtremIO, so it's cheaper to get the PAST. It just came out. It's new, so I don't know about the usage out there, but for us, it's a small beast. It does everything.

Dell's support is perfect. I rate Dell's support nine out of 10. You call them when you have an issue, and they'll get back to you within 24 hours. If it's a serious issue, they respond in four hours. The system itself does a lot. It lets you know when it needs to be updated. And if the upgrade fails, you can just revert to the previous version. This happened once, but we tried again and I didn't have to revert to the older version. 

Positive

Before PowerStore, we were using IBM SVC. We switched because we are getting more virtualized. PowerStore is a new solution, but we were not concerned about switching because we went through a third party called SIS, and they've already installed a couple of PowerStore storage devices in different hospitals. If you look at the DS 7000 in the data center, it's a rack. There are maybe four racks for the same storage solution on one parcel. So it also minimizes space. We only have one 2U rack and it's running like 96 terabytes. 

PowerStore is easy to install and deploy. It takes less than a day.

The price is on the higher side. It's alright relative to what PowerStore does. 

I'll rate Dell EMC PowerStore 10 out of 10. I haven't had any issues with it since we've installed it. PowerStore is easy to adapt, and it's straightforward to use. You cannot even make a mistake on anything because it's going to make sure you confirm everything before you go to the next step. I haven't seen anything that needs to be improved yet. If I compare it with what we were using before, this one is genius.

We use it for machines from VMware vCenter which we keep separate from the PowerStore. It is only the storage. They are connected with iSCSI and NFS. We have no virtual machines directly on the PowerStore.

We are very impressed by the power of the system. We have gained performance for all our virtual machines and our system is running very fast.

Another benefit, for us, is the dedupe rate.

For access from virtual machines, iSCSI, and NFS, it is very good. It helps increase performance.

Also, the live dedupe application is very good.

In the first weeks, we had some problems with the dedupe. According to the warranty, we should have had a dedupe rate of at least two and we had not reached this value. We got an additional hard disk to match the planned capacity of the system and this helped a lot. We got to a dedupe rate of 1.9, and this was very good.

What we are missing is the monitoring. We cannot implement the health check of the system in our monitoring system. We have to open the PowerStore GUI every day.

Also, we have tried to install a separate virtual machine to integrate PowerStore to vCenter. VMware then provides a virtual machine with Photon OS. We have done this integration two times and it has run for some weeks. Then it stops working and I don't know why. We have not used it again. It has nice features and has saved a lot of time and creates a good integration, but it needs to be more stable.

Overall, they need to make the system stable. Again and again, we have problems with upgrades. The upgrades themselves are running fine, but after the upgrade is when we have a problem. With the update to 1.4, we had a head crash. They told us, "This is a known issue. Please upgrade to 2." We upgraded to 2 and, one week later they told us, "Yeah, there are some issues in 2.0.0. You can lose data. Please upgrade to 2.0.1." Overall, they need to make the system stable.

I try to avoid updates for such important, central systems. They require downtime for the whole company, as this is our only storage. It's not good to do so many upgrades. I have used other storage systems and, with them, it was never necessary to do so many upgrades in one year. Last year, I did four upgrades for the PowerStore but I have never done four upgrades over the lifetime of other storage systems. They have run four, five, or six years, sometimes more. I have never patched so often as I have with PowerStore.

We have been using Dell EMC PowerStore since December of last year, so almost a year.

The problem is the stability. We have a single system and on three occasions we have had unplanned head reboots because of a software failure. The positive side is that there was no impact as a result because there are two heads. It's not good to reboot a head, and we have submitted tickets about it, but the performance and the failover have been good.

We only have a single machine and we are currently using half of the hard disk slots. We have asked for an upgrade for the rest of the hard disks but, from my point of view, it costs too much. We have 12 to 15 hard disks inside and if we try to upgrade only the hard disks, it costs the same as the complete system. This is something I don't understand. It makes no sense. Buying 16 hard disks with storage costs about €40,000 and buying only 16 hard disks costs the same.

Dell EMC's first-level technical support is very fast and they communicate well. Sometimes they explain things so I can understand why something is working the way it is. But currently, we have a ticket at the second level and for two weeks I have had no answer. 

The issue is that each day we get a message from the storage, every three hours, telling us the network connectivity is lost. I don't know if this is true or not, and whether it is a failure. That is the ticket at level two but I have had no information about its status.

Neutral

I have used NetApp as well as HPE in the past. In this company, they replaced NetApp with PowerStore because the NetApp system was slow. The dedupe needed much improvement. If they stopped the dedupe, then the system power would go down. And the backup procedure took a lot of time. With PowerStore we have reduced the time for the backup by half or more.

In terms of the decision process to go with PowerStore, I was not working here at the time. After I started the company said, "Okay, in two weeks we are getting new storage. Please integrate it into our infrastructure." I know they needed a more powerful storage system and they wanted an upgrade option for the system.

The integration of PowerStore into our existing environment was very straightforward. We had an external partner that helped us, but we had prepared the system in a test environment. We took that system and put it into the production system in about eight hours and the system was running. We then started to migrate the machines. It was a good implementation process and very fast.

We have two administrators of the solution. They are working with the system full-time handling requests to change hard disks or volumes, and they create new volumes. Across the company we have about 300 users using virtual machines and virtual desktops that are stored on the PowerStore.

The performance of PowerStore is good, but I don't feel the software is completely ready. We have upgraded the system and have had failures on the system. I have never seen as many head crashes on other systems as we have had on the PowerStore in the last year. The system is fast but not stable enough.

I would not buy the system again. You should wait some years until the software is ready and doesn't have a new software release every two months.

We do a lot of cloning of databases for either troubleshooting or to stage and prepare implementation. We are a SaaS provider in the real estate industry and we're either using the PowerStore to help expedite things in our development environment, or we're using it to help troubleshoot any problems that we have.

We have north of 13 petabytes of storage in our environment.

PowerStore has enabled us to add additional storage to that we hadn't planned on, which allows us to defer the purchase of some additional storage.

We've really improved the amount of storage that we're able to effectively utilize because of its better deduping. It has about a 50 percent better dedupe rate, with its intelligence, than we had been previously getting. Overall, we've benefited from the dedupe, compression, and replication, the advanced technology, of this frame. It's all better than what we had in the previous generation of XtremIO appliances, and above what we were getting in the Dell EMC Unitys.

My guys have told me that the administration tools take advantage of machine learning and make recommendations to the admins, and that makes the administration easier.

We've been using Dell EMC PowerStore for about six months.

We've had no issues with the machines since turning them on.

The machine supports "six nines" of availability. Anything they could do to push it closer to "seven nines" of availability would be extremely beneficial.

It scales both horizontally and vertically.

The support has been phenomenal.

We replaced an older, high-performance storage device that was very expensive. With PowerStore, we were able to achieve the IOPS, and we were also able to get a data compression rate significantly above what we had expected. We were able to retire that older, very expensive piece of storage by bringing in the PowerStore. It's been faster and cheaper than we had expected, per terabyte.

Another reason that we were after this machine was PowerStore's VMware integration. We're a very large VMware customer. Some 98 percent  of our workload runs on VMware.

The setup was very straightforward. We bought it with the setup from Dell EMC support. We bought it, they shipped it, and a Dell EMC engineer coordinated with my storage engineer. We set it up and then did the data migration. On these particular frames, we needed very little help. It all went very seamlessly.

We had a couple of data center engineers involved, as well as a couple of storage admins, and a storage architect.

Our storage administrators took very limited training to get up to speed on the machines.

Dell EMC was involved and the experience was very good. They showed up when they were supposed to, all the pre-work was done. They did the post-work, and there were no concerns from our team.

We exceeded the business case of the device that we had. We were able to add more workloads to the environment than the business case allowed, and we are still migrating more. So our cost per IOP and our cost per gigabyte have been substantially lower than our business case.

We did a very competitive analysis on the pricing and compared it against the tradeoffs of the other storage products that we had previously bought, and we found PowerStore to be favorable on a cost-per-compute basis.

There's still a cap on the upgrade path, where you can consume all the engines within the frame before you have to go to another frame. I would like more flexibility to increase the number of engines on the frames. Normally, we exceed the IOPS on the frames before we can ever exhaust the storage, so anything they can do to help us avoid stranded storage capacity, capacity that we couldn't get to, would be beneficial.

We've looked at several other solution environments, including Pure, HPE, as well as Violin and a couple of the other vendors that rate high in industry reviews. For us, with our large dependence on VMware, if we can get a cost-competitive solution from Dell EMC, with their ability to support VMware, we end up with a whole lot less finger-pointing in the mix.

You can add compute or capacity independently, meaning it has greater capabilities than the Unitys that we had been targeting for our non-SaaS environment, and it has performed admirably.

Clearly test out the workloads and don't necessarily be afraid because it's a new device. Work with Dell EMC to get a great contractual solution that will protect you with the new technology. This new technology does perform. It's a great performance machine.

Although it's a relatively new platform, I was fairly confident in Dell EMC technology's support for the environment and in the performance that we had had with other machines. I felt there was very little risk in the migration to this solution, and we were really excited about the improved capabilities.

In terms of PowerStore's built-in VMware hypervisor, we really haven't used it at the edge, although I can see its capabilities there. As a SaaS provider, we generally provide in the center. For the targeted workload that we have, it's performing substantially better than we had expected within our business case.

We're very happy with the machine. It has multiple CPUs per storage frame, which is better than the predecessor machine, and there is a RAM increase as well. We got what was advertised and even a little bit better than what was advertised.

We've been very excited by the capabilities of the appliance, to the point that the person who runs the infrastructure for me is now looking for a proposal to consolidate all of our non-VMAX work on PowerStores. The performance and the administration of the machine have been great and we're looking at how we can get additional returns on this targeted workload.

The use case for this solution is based on VMware and that is why we chose PowerStore X. During the first period of the pandemic, we decided to use our VMware infrastructure for HPC workloads. We were looking for high-performance storage that could be inserted inside our VMware environment in an easy way. PowerStore, which had just been announced, seemed like the right solution and so we decided to buy. We have this storage environment inside the virtual HPC.

In our environment we are doing medical analysis related to genomic workloads. The data are acquired remotely from experiments and stored on the PowerStore. The PowerStore is exposed to the user through virtual machines, and the data are analyzed in this environment.

During the pandemic, we were looking for something that could easily increase our scientific computing capabilities. It was not for something related to our university's enterprise applications. We were looking for something that was easy to provide inside our virtual scientific computation environment. PowerStore was really the best we could buy. And it has changed things completely. Our scientific computations were traditional before, in the sense of NFS or traditional HPC. PowerStore, now, is a key factor for the virtual HPC environment that we have.

Also, the solution's Anytime Upgrade program is a key factor so that we can keep the storage upgraded without any downtime. We have experienced some software upgrades on the system over the last year, and everything has run quite smoothly and we are very happy about that. I expect the Anytime Upgrade program will save us money and it saves time, for sure. It's difficult, in our environment, to estimate how much time this program has saved us because we don't typically track the time we spend. But if you take into account the fact that the upgrade is almost automatic, almost without people intervening, that is the reason we save time. You can schedule an upgrade, so you know when you are upgrading, but you don't need people looking into it. We save the amount of time people would typically have to devote to an upgrade.

We bought the PowerStore for performance and flexibility, and we are 100 percent satisfied with both.

• Flexibility
• Performance
• Easy of use

It also has some very good compression capabilities. 

We were looking for a solution that was easy to install in our VMware environment, that was flexible. PowerStore X is a type of a VMware cluster that you install inside your environment. If you have a VMware environment, like we have in production, it's easy to install and use.

It enables us to add compute or capacity independently. We have also deployed some apps on PowerStore, even though the PowerStore we have is not the biggest one you can buy. One of the main characteristics of PowerStore is that it is like another piece of VMware, so you can run applications on top, applications that have direct access to the storage. The ability to add compute or capacity independently is great because it adds more flexibility to our environment. You are not adding only storage, but you're adding some not-so-big computing capability. You have the possibility of adding some virtual machines, running NVMe storage, and that is a real plus for this solution.

In addition, PowerStore's built-in intelligence for helping to simplify IT operations is incredible. When we approached PowerStore, we had an idea that it was a normative platform, but we were impressed by the capability of the solution. It's probably one of the best pieces of storage that we have installed here.

Where the system needs to improve is by adding more enterprise features like replication on other sites. We would also like it to be much more aligned with the VMware version. For example, today we have two different versions of VMware ESXi running to keep the PowerStore online. It would be better if the software cycling was faster.

We have been using Dell EMC PowerStore for almost a year. 

It's a stable solution.

PowerStore is the latest and the best technology available. The design for scalability of the solution is perfect. It's something that can grow vertically and horizontally, by design. Of course, it's NVMe storage, so it's not cheap. You can expand the solution using less expensive storage upgrades in the PowerStore, so it's very good. By design, it's a wonderful machine. Of course, if you want to go all-NVMe, you have to be able to afford it.

Dell EMC's customer and technical support are the best in the market, for sure. We have almost all the Dell EMC solutions here, so we know the support very well and it is absolutely the best in the market.

The installation was quite smooth and easy. After one week, everything was up and running.

The installation was done by Dell EMC people and us, together. Our experience with them was incredible, as usual. We have several types of Dell EMC storage here, so we know their abilities. Everything was smooth.

ROI was a key factor for us, for this infrastructure. We have seen ROI in that we have been able to give our researchers an environment that they didn't have before. It has been a complete success. It's a completely new environment. We didn't have anything similar before. Every cent spent has been worth it.

The price is not cheap, but it's worth it for the features you get from the storage. If you can afford it, you are probably buying the best solution that you can have for this virtual environment.

For this environment, PowerStore was almost unique when we chose it, so we did not evaluate other solutions.

We weren't concerned that PowerStore is a relatively new platform. We were not inserting it in an enterprise environment. We were inserting it in a scientific computing environment, which is where we tend to install all the latest technologies. It was not a problem.

If you have a production VMware environment, the platform is no longer new and is probably the most flexible performance storage system that you can buy today.

We are not using the solution's load balancing at the moment but it's something that we are looking into. We use PowerStore's built-in VMware hypervisor to run VMs and virtualized applications, but we are not using it at the edge. We know that is one of the capabilities of this kind of solution, but we are using it in our central computing facility.

We experienced some small issues, but the virtual machine was new. But our choice was a good one. The machine is easy to use, the performance is there, and we are happy.

Our primary use case for Dell PowerStore is for data protection and data transfer.

I find all of the Dell PowerStore features to be valuable. 

When it comes to Dell PowerStore, I would like to see more integration and more security features included. It's unfortunate that the solution does not feature Flash trace. 

We have been using this solution for the past one or two years.

My impression is that Dell PowerStore is highly stable.

My opinion is that Dell PowerStore is highly scalable. Currently, we have many users of this solution as we have three hundred people in our company. We also have plans to increase the usage of this solution, but that will depend on the storage and customer data and its size.

My opinion is that the initial setup process is quite straightforward.

I would recommend this solution for middle-range customers.

Overall, I would rate this solution a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

PowerStore's management console could be improved. In the next release, PowerStore should add more artificial intelligence features.

I've been working with PowerStore for a year.

PowerStore is stable.

PowerStore is scalable.

Dell's technical support is ok.

The initial setup was straightforward.

PowerStore's pricing is reasonable.

PowerStore is more suitable for enterprise companies than smaller businesses. It is reliable, with comprehensive features and a well-established support base. I would give PowerStore a rating of nine out of ten.

We use this solution for VM and some AI storage. It's mostly an internal use server. We use it for the lab, and customers can access it. We use iSCSI on it. 

This solution is very useful to us as we use it internally for all of the services that we need. We use it as a lab and we showcase new technology to the customers and how it can help them going forward.

The interface is very easy to use and easy to install. Everything essentially comes with it. All of the software is there for us.

I do not like having to use VPLEX for synchronous replication, as opposed to having the store software built-in.

We have been using this solution for one year. 

This is a stable solution. 

We use the 500T model which is not scalable but there are other options that offer scalability from Dell. 

The technical support for this solution is really good. I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. We did all our prerequisites before the Dell representative came on-site to help finish it off. It is a plug-and-play setup. I was the only person involved in setup and deployment. I made sure that all the information needed was provided to Dell. The only maintenance that has been needed so far is some software upgrades.

We implemented this solution with help from Dell. 

The licensing for this solution is good and is in the mid-range tier. It matches the old UDXT platform.

PowerScale does everything you need it to do. That said, the advice I have is to determine what you need it for upfront because there are some decisions you have to make upfront and if you don't make them then, you'll have to restart later on.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

Most of our PowerStore units are used for VMware VMs and vSphere. We migrated the VMs from our Unity storage.

We have two sites; the data center site (DC) and the disaster recovery (DR) site. We only use the PowerStore on the DC site. The project was put on hold due to COVID but we plan to continue with it this year.

VMware integration with the product is good. We use vSphere, which is one of the main VMware functions. In addition, we use vSAN for storage, and we have to use the SIEM.

This solution has helped us to simplify our storage operations, although we have a lot of storage devices and too few administrators. Because of this, we're looking for a software solution to assist us with administration. This is something that we will be doing next year.

Overall, we're quite happy with the product because we can move the data that is stored on more than 10 of our current storage devices to a single PowerStore. In terms of efficiency, this solution is the best choice for us.

The deduplication and compression features are quite impressive because when we enable this feature on other products, such as HPE 3PAR, we have a lot of latency. With PowerStore, we don't have that issue.

This device is less CPU intensive than the EMC Unity and the HPE 3PAR.

PowerStore supports the iSCSI interface, which we find helpful. We use one for our fiber channel but another one for iSCSI.

There is no Synchronize replication feature on the storage.

PowerStore should include more NAS functionality.

I have been using EMC products since 2003, although I began using Dell EMC PowerStore only last year.

Stability-wise, we have had no issues at all. In the past, all of our EMC products have been stable. We have not had the storage fail or had a faulty port. We have not even had to call support since putting it into production.

We plan to expand our usage in the future. One of our next goals is to purchase a PowerStore for our DR site because we need to have replication for our financial use case. We also plan to replace some of our other storage devices with PowerStore because we need to improve the overall efficiency.

We have not opened a technical support case with Dell for PowerStore but because most of our products are from Dell, we have dealt with them in the past. We have purchased approximately 100 servers from Dell and we have always been quite happy with their support. We don't have any issues with them and I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Every time we have an issue, they work with us to resolve the problem. There has never been a need for a repeat call and we are quite happy with that.

We have many Dell EMC Unity storage devices, including the Unity 450 and Unity 650, but we wanted a new, smaller storage unit.  

The main reason that we moved to PowerStore was the compression and deduplication.

The initial setup is easier than other products, such as Unity.

We were able to set up the storage and put it into production within one day. PowerStore is very quick to set up. By comparison, Unity will take at least two days to install.

We are happy with the pricing that we get from Dell.

This solution enables us to add compute and capacity independently, although we have not had to change our configuration.

PowerStore uses machine learning and automation for optimizing resources but we are just starting with it, so I don't know much about these features.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.