Dell PowerStore Reviews

Dell PowerStore is a really interesting array because since it's a full NVMe array, we can consolidate all types of workloads on it, including virtualization. It's an array that can be set up in block mode or unified mode with file, so we can even put file on it and now replicate them in synchronous mode. It's really a multi-environment array. We use it a lot to implement Oracle OLVM clusters. It's really an interesting solution for doing that, in terms of its performance, and also because it supports Linux metro-cluster. We can consolidate Oracle databases with this solution under very good conditions with an excellent level of performance.

Dell PowerStore can help consolidate the data on the storage part. After that, it's clear that Dell PowerStore will be able to interface with AI solutions to provide services. That's a certainty. However, it will remain just a block on the storage side.

The feature I like the most about Dell PowerStore is the simplicity of configuration with DRE. You no longer need a storage expert to configure the array for the client. We have a lot of expertise with people doing storage who have more than 25 years of experience, so installation is no problem for us. Once the array is configured, having this intelligent engine that will organize the blocks, organize the stripes, and manage all the complexity of storage brings a lot of ease of management for the client. They just have to create a volume and present it to their servers. The simplicity is what's interesting about the array.

Dell PowerStore arrays have a range that is broken down in the sizer, where we can see the maximum IOPS we can get and the maximum bandwidth depending on the models. It's important to carefully analyze the customer environments to place the array in the range that will properly meet the expected performance. Since it's a full NVMe array, by default it's a very high-performance array with low latency and really strong performance. I've never come across a workload where the array did not meet the expected level.

The feature we'd like to have in Dell PowerStore is coming, which is metro-cluster over Fibre Channel. That's really the last solution we're waiting for. The advantage of Dell PowerStore is that it's developed as microservices and that it's very software-driven and very automatable as a solution. We can integrate it into modern environments like OpenShift. FC replication is something we didn't have yet, and there are many customers for whom that's a prerequisite.

We can get performance information because when Dell PowerStore array is connected and interconnected to CloudIQ, we send up all the performance metrics needed per volume. We can see perfectly how it behaves. The only thing we don't have is the ability to customize it. Since it's the array itself that manages the organization of the blocks, it's both an advantage and a disadvantage. It's easy to manage for the client, but for an admin looking for specific customization, Dell PowerStore is not the right choice.

We can customize it regarding workload usage. For example, I have a client who was on hyperconverged. I migrated him to Dell PowerStore. He told me it's so much better to customize the usage, put volumes into replication, and segment clusters. On Dell PowerStore storage array, I can very well have a VMware cluster and next to it an OLVM cluster, and manage my VMware part and my Oracle part independently to comply with licensing. Being able to segment environments on a traditional environment allows the client to better manage licensing compared to hyperconverged, which will put everything in the same basket and cause more problems. The array really allows customization if we want to do file system replication. However, if you want specific customization at the RAID group level, that's something you can't do with Dell PowerStore because that feature is handled by an automatic engine. There are admins who rather use Hitachi arrays for that, where they really want to customize their environments down to the core. Dell PowerStore doesn't allow you to do that because it's not its objective.

I've really been using Dell PowerStore since version 3.6 of PowerStoreOS, when we were able to build a redundant architecture with two PowerStores. Before there was replication between two arrays with the witness, it was difficult to build Dell PowerStore architectures because it lacked this feature for securing across two rooms and two sites. With customers, we always need to secure things.

Dell PowerStore is stable and reliable. The only problem is that it came out a bit early. Before version 3.6, it didn't have the features that customers expected, and it was difficult to work with because we didn't have metro-cluster. Metro-cluster in France is less put into production than in the United States because their distances are totally huge, so they tend to do asynchronous replication instead, but in France it's necessary. Before, you had to work with metronodes and virtualize the array. It wasn't integrated, so it was more complicated to put into production and it was less attractive for customers. Now we've reached the level of functionality that's good so that it's really positioned on the market.

Dell PowerStore adapts to growth because it already grows unit by unit at disk level. It has growth that can be both scale-up and scale-out. Let's say I did my sizing badly or I did sizing for a client who then integrates other entities, buys companies, and the need completely changes. I'll be able to add not just shelves to increase capacity, but new primary nodes to increase power and have a cluster that grows in power rather than capacity. When we add capacity, we ask ourselves whether we just need to add capacity, in which case we add a shelf, or to add power. Then we add a Dell PowerStore node directly into the cluster to add capacity and power at the same time.

We've already used Dell PowerStore support to fix issues. I particularly remember a case when we were on 3.6 with an array that had been installed with the wrong name. There was a bug with renaming. When we renamed the array after it had been installed, it caused problems on the file system, and we resolved it with support very quickly.

For support with Dell PowerStore, I'd rate it a 10. It's very good support.

Deploying Dell PowerStore array is done very efficiently. Once the racking is done, the racking and organization part is always very important. We take the time to do it properly, and the cabling has to be perfectly done. The interconnection to the SAN has to be very well done and well identified. Once that's done, starting up the array is completed within the next day and a half. It's really very fast.

I've tested quite a few storage systems, and I find Dell PowerStore really highly suited to modern, diverse environments. It adapts to pretty much all the cases I encounter with my clients. What I find really interesting is that we can standardize installations a bit, and then interconnect workloads and the array responds. Especially what I see with clients is more a decline in specialists in customer teams, except in very large structures. With mid-sized customers, people are very generalist and use everything. I no longer have a storage expert who can take care of the storage array. Having an array that's simplified and can be managed by someone who is less specialized is a huge asset today. That's why I referenced it and why I really appreciate this technology.

Even with the customers, they told me the other day that it's the death of hyperconverged with Dell PowerStore because it integrates so well and it's easy to use.

I would rate this product a 9 because I'm just waiting for the FC replication feature. I think that when it has that, we'll be able to give it a solid 10.

Our specific use cases for Dell PowerStore at my company include all of our VMware virtualization, six clusters of five or six hosts each, Oracle clustered databases, and SAP hosts, totaling about 60 physical hosts hooked up to each unit, with performance being very good, and we are very happy. 

Currently, I do not have any AI use cases for Dell PowerStore yet. We might plan to implement AI use cases for Dell PowerStore, as I've been learning about it, and would say that most likely in the next six months, we're going to do a pilot using Dell PowerStore with some other hardware as well.

The most valuable features of Dell PowerStore for us are the top performance, which is very fast and efficient, and the user interface, which is very intuitive and easy to use for maintaining or creating LUNs or whatever else we might need to do. 

The benefits I have seen from using Dell PowerStore so far include taking advantage of Dell's Anytime Upgrade. It is now renamed but remains the same thing. Last November, I upgraded both units to the 9200s with no outage, and it was really amazing, along with the full Fiber Channel support, as our previous storage used to be FCoE, an older Fiber Channel technology. Now it's Fiber Channel 32, making Dell PowerStore instrumental in that.

I am very eagerly anticipating the next generation of drives, specifically the 30 terabyte drives, but beyond that, it's really been great, and I have no complaints or pain points at all.

I have been using Dell PowerStore since we implemented it in the summertime of 2021.

I assess the reliability and stability of Dell PowerStore to be very stable and reliable, as we have not gone down at all, and every maintenance window has gone without a hitch and been very successful.

Dell PowerStore scales very with the growing needs of my company, offering a four-to-one or five-to-one DRR promise, and while we're not getting quite that level of deduplication, we are very happy with its efficiency in compressing data and making better use of our SSD storage.

My experience with technical support from Dell has been pretty good, although I have occasionally encountered situations where the person I spoke to did not fully understand my issue, but I've learned to simply hang up and call again to usually get a better response. 

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate Dell PowerStore support as maybe an eight or nine, as there have been a few instances that were less than stellar, but overall, I am very happy with the support.

Before using Dell PowerStore, I had extensive storage experience with Compellents and Unity SANs, along with some others EqualLogic and PowerVault, and I found that transitioning to Dell PowerStore has been a very good upgrade, combining the best points from those solutions into one platform.

I have seen a return on my investment with Dell PowerStore. The cost savings come from being much happier with the faster processors that I installed with that Anytime Upgrade, and it's been trouble-free the entire time, with very high performance, as it has been designed and built properly, and we're very happy with that.

My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Dell PowerStore was that pricing was very competitive, as Dell went head to head with Pure, which is normally known to be a lot more expensive, and Dell won our bake-off between the two vendors because of price, value, and comparable performance to Pure.

In my evaluation process, I considered Pure and found the main differences are that Pure has an active-passive design with their controllers, while Dell PowerStore load balances amongst both controllers actively, allowing for better performance benefits. Pure's integration with their monitoring app was a little more polished than Dell's CloudIQ or AIOps, but overall, we're super happy with Dell PowerStore, especially given its more flexible lifecycle policy compared to Pure's more rigid three-year renewal requirement, which allowed me to take advantage of the Anytime Upgrade.

My role in managing Dell PowerStore is as the storage engineer for my company, where I did the proof of concept before purchase with Dell, and I also designed, implemented, specked, and deployed it myself. We are using a pair of Dell PowerStore 9200Ts in production, which is the top-of-the-line model, and the software version is 3.6.1.2, with plans to upgrade to the 4.X code soon.

The performance metrics I use to measure success with Dell PowerStore include IOPS, latency, and raw throughput for performance aspects, as well as the soft skills, the human interaction of having to create or change things, which has been a very smooth operation all the way through, with everything coming out perfect.

My advice for someone considering Dell PowerStore is to have a bake-off or proof of concept, as Dell is very good at putting their product into your data center for a try and buy, which helped us decide that it was the right product for us, and we really liked the equipment. I rate Dell PowerStore a perfect 10 out of 10.

Dell PowerStore is used in my company for storage for virtual machines and backups, and we are growing into working on doing stuff with large language models and AI. At the moment, we do not use Dell PowerStore for AI, but we're expanding into that business case. 

The business case for us when we actually do expand with Dell PowerStore involves real-time analysis of phone calls, providing solutions to our customer base when they connect in with problems related to X, Y, and Z. Here are some solutions you can try to reporting code review, and all the things.

The overall solution of Dell PowerStore benefits our organization by offering affordable and expandable products that meet the needs we have as we grow since we are a three-year-old company and our growth pattern has just been skyrocketing.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is its expandability and reliability. The user interface is really simple to get behind and makes it really easy to expand and utilize the tools. 

Regarding Dell PowerStore, the storage gateways and the tools that Dell has to monitor the storage arrays and the servers provide real-time issues and open up support cases that are very beneficial. 

The ability to just slap in another tray of disks and expand that storage as needed without a huge array rebuild is very beneficial for keeping the business running and expanding as needed.

Dell PowerStore supports growth or operational success for my business through the ease of transition for data growth as we continue to grow our product lines and storage requirements, having the onsite storage with PowerStore to grow into versus the rather salty premiums that one pays for additional storage through cloud providers such as SharePoint Online and OneDrive, which offers a more cost-effective path of growth.

If I could improve Dell PowerStore, I would suggest that integrations into backup platforms be a little more streamlined. We are a VMShop, so just a little more intuitive connections between those systems for advanced functionality such as storage level snapshots versus just the basic VML or VMware level snapshots when doing those backups would be beneficial.

At this company, I have been using Dell PowerStore for a little over a year, and in total, with all Dell products, it is closer to 12.

When it comes to stability and reliability of Dell PowerStore, I can affirm its reliability.

My experience with Dell's customer service and technical support has always been that they've been very helpful and gotten me to the solution I needed every time I've needed to use them. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Dell's customer service as a solid nine. There could be times when I need an answer quicker than I can generally allow, however, that's just more of my impatience and my emergencies not being everyone else's emergencies.

Positive

Before Dell PowerStore, we were using the built-in storage in the VMware server, which provided zero redundancy and expandability; we needed more storage than what the server could offer, leading us to look at on-site storage in the PowerStore.

My experience deploying Dell PowerStore was simple. I worked with a Dell Solutions Architect to help get the deployment in place, however, I have some familiarity with the Dell products, so I found it very simple to do the rack and stack, get the configuration going, and then build out my different storage pools and everything from there.

I worked with a Dell Solutions Architect to help get the deployment in place.

As for a return on investment with Dell PowerStore, I haven't calculated it to see if we've hit return on investment. It was a necessary physical need for onsite storage for running our virtual machines to avoid single points of failure in our phone system or other critical systems. 

From that standpoint, we've hit our return on investment because we don't have a single point of failure for critical business systems. The success metric I use regarding Dell PowerStore is that I no longer have that single point of failure.

With regard to the pricing and licensing of Dell PowerStore, it seems affordable compared to some of the other storage platforms; outside of doing something such as data domain, the expandability and scalability of what you need make the PowerStore a very palatable price point. 

You get what you need and expand as you grow. If you need to add another tray later down the line, the fact that they can support up to six trays of disks to meet your needs, and you can put in spindle disks or high-speed SSD disks to accomplish your tasks just makes it very palatable on the budget.

We did consider other solutions besides Dell PowerStore; we looked at a few other solutions provided by the vendor we were working with, a Dell partner, CDW, and my familiarity with the Dell product line and the price point made it the easy choice.

For organizations considering Dell PowerStore, my advice is to ask questions, even the ones that you don't think are relevant because what you don't know is often a decision factor that pushes your decision one way or the other. 

I see Dell products, including Dell PowerStore, growing with our future needs, as we continue to grow; we're primarily a Dell shop, with the exception of a handful of Mac devices needed for marketing. Dell is our primary source of compute and storage. 

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Dell PowerStore a ten out of ten.

My team's role in using or managing Dell PowerStore is that we run all our infrastructure for our shared infrastructure in all the data centers, and we run Dell PowerStore for our IaaS solutions and some backup DR solutions. 

Currently, we are not using Dell PowerStore for any AI initiatives in our company or for our clients; it's primarily for IaaS workloads, so Infrastructure-as-a-Service on our shared platform for customers. 

Currently, we are utilizing the 500Ts and 1200Ts models of Dell PowerStore.

We have seen the benefits of consolidation, compression, and reduction in overall storage.

I can share a specific example where Dell PowerStore made a noticeable improvement in our business operations; we were running an IaaS platform for one of our acquisitions on a different vendor, and we've moved that to a brand new platform we built based on PowerEdge and Dell PowerStore. All of our performance is now improved, and all of our customers are happy; they're not complaining anymore about performance. We've recently received feedback that there's a massive improvement—boot times are quicker, and responsiveness from their workloads is quicker.

We have realized several benefits from using Dell PowerStore; we migrated to the current Dell PowerStore models from tiered storage, and now we're using all flash. 

The dedupe and compression has been a big benefit for us versus the old storage that it was running, and we've seen the performance of all flash for our storage services. 

My company finds particular features within Dell PowerStore valuable, primarily the cost benefits for the performance that we get out of the platform. We've definitely seen the benefit on that side of it, including the cost per terabyte, and the support from Dell has been excellent as well. 

We haven't had any issues with it, so it's been very reliable as a platform for us.

The performance metrics I use to measure success with Dell PowerStore are all IOPS and throughput. We are not using it with AI workloads on Dell PowerStore, so it's primarily just customers running IaaS, however, it is important that it's reliable and performs well, and we get that from Dell PowerStore.

Dell PowerStore has supported growth and operational success for my business; a key driver at the moment is consolidation, and the dedupe and compression ratios allow us to standardize on a single platform. This has helped improve our operational metrics and overall operations, as we now have only one vendor to support and one set of storage arrays to manage. We have a very clear path into support and escalation if there is an issue, and we are not dealing with multiple vendors.

It could be improved to be cheaper for us. Cost versus performance is crucial, and it has to have the performance and capabilities that we need for that price point.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for years.

I would assess Dell PowerStore's stability and reliability as excellent; the latest generation of Dell PowerStores that we put in has had no issues and no downtime.

I see Dell PowerStore growing with our future needs; as a company, we have standardized our compute and storage now on Dell, so that's the way it's going to grow.

Our business has around 1000 employees.

I would evaluate Dell support as a nine out of ten.

Any instance that we've had to open with Dell or any support ticket we've had has been responded to very quickly, and the quality of the team we deal with is very good. 

There's not much more I can get out of support really. They are responsive, and I've very little to complain about from a Dell perspective. There are always going to be issues with a support department, and we understand that. The escalation paths are clear, and the account managers and team I work with at Dell Ireland are always proactive in reaching out if they identify an issue.

Positive

Before moving to Dell PowerStore, I considered NetApp and Pure Storage as two of our large vendors, and we've also used HP. 

We've explored a large range of them. A huge standout in my evaluation process, both positive and negative, comparing these options was realistically the performance for the price; since we use a significant amount of Dell, they are our number one vendor for compute, and it makes sense for us to standardize our compute. When we compare the performance to the cost, it's a no-brainer for us.

We have seen a return on our investment in Dell PowerStore; definitely our cost per terabyte has been very good compared to some of the other vendors that we would have been using previously, and our performance benchmarks have exceeded what we were expecting.

At the moment, I can't think of any area where Dell PowerStore could be better; my engineering teams aren't complaining about anything, and we're happy with the performance, support, dedupe, compression, and costs. 

My advice to others considering Dell PowerStore is that the more you understand about the workloads you're going to run on the storage, the more accurate you can be, and the better solution you'll end up with. I would rate Dell PowerStore as an eight or a nine out of ten.

In my role, I am both the storage engineer and administrator and architect managing Dell PowerStore. Currently, we have two 3200T models and one 3000T model, which is a Gen 1, all running Dell PowerStore version 4.0 OS. 

We use Dell PowerStore almost exclusively for high-performance workloads, mostly Oracle, Microsoft SQL, and MySQL databases.

The thing that I appreciate the most about Dell PowerStore is how easy it is to upgrade; the upgrade process is very simple, and I really appreciate how easy it is to connect my hosts to Dell PowerStore, as the environment automatically detects new fiber channel HBA ports for all the hosts that we connect to.

Dell PowerStore has simplified my workload pretty dramatically as an organization. It is very easy to manage Dell PowerStore; we have other Dell products, such as Dell Compellent and Dell PowerVault, and the PowerStore is much simpler to use. I have experienced dramatic time savings with Dell PowerStore. I estimate that I'm probably saving six to 10 hours a week in management with Dell PowerStore.

I would really appreciate the ability to implement file on Dell PowerStore after I've already provisioned the environment, as right now I have to choose between unified file and block or exclusively block when I first deploy.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for three years.

I have experienced some downtime with Dell PowerStore, particularly due to a bug with Emulex HBAs during an upgrade process.

Dell PowerStore has been able to grow with and scale with the growing needs of our organization. We started out with just the 3000T, and then we bought one 3200T, and expanded to another 3200T for our production environment, slowly expanding as we need.

I evaluate Dell support as incredibly good, as I've dealt with a lot of support companies and found their service much better than others. Dell differs positively from HPE, as HPE support tends to be extremely proactive, but not as technically skilled, making my interactions with Dell support much easier.

Positive

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Dell PowerStore was that the Dell team was very open, and their expertise makes me want to only buy Dell products, even though the university requires multiple vendors.

I do not have any AI use cases on Dell PowerStore. I'm not sure if we're planning to use Dell PowerStore for AI workloads, but we are planning to use AI in the near future. As a university, we are still trying to figure out how to implement AI in our environment. T

he feature set of Dell PowerStore is extremely robust in comparison to other storage arrays that I manage, and I would appreciate feedback that makes the Dell ME storage arrays as good as the old Dell Compellents. 

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Dell PowerStore a 9.

The use case for purchasing is that I am doing a hyper-converged infrastructure on Hyper-V. My main goal has been to really have redundancy and reliability in the system based on our production schedule. We cannot afford to have much downtime. Therefore, I needed a setup. We purchased Dell PowerStore at the same time. I needed a setup that would give me the reliability to run my operations pretty much all the time.

Our production runs from about 3:00 AM until about 5:00 PM, which is a very long production run. During that time, we have PLCs and data collection equipment on the production floor. If they were offline, that means the production is not running. Therefore, having that reliability with Dell PowerStore, with the PowerEdge, with the setup that I have, enables us to keep the production running.

For small medium-sized businesses, Dell PowerStore has supported growth and organizational success because our company has been growing for several years, and we expect it to keep growing over the next several years. Having that infrastructure behind the systems is going to definitely allow us to keep operating with our production schedule, which is very demanding as per our customers' needs, and then also improving our production efficiency and quantity through efficiencies. I see all the Dell products growing with our future needs. We have been a Dell customer for a long time, and as far as I can see, we will continue to be.

The most valuable thing for me is that what we do is not really resource-intensive. Most of our work is regular office tasks. We do not do a lot of high bandwidth tasks or tasks that require a lot of storage amount or compute power. What I am looking for is reliability and redundancy. That is built in at every level of the system. It is built in at the component level, and it is built in at the whole system level too.

I have seen a reduction in downtime. Unfortunately with the PowerEdge and the new setup, I cannot really answer that because it is so new. We have not had any downtime yet with it. Hopefully, we will not, however, so far we have not had any downtime.

I like having products from the same vendor. It reduces a lot of headaches. When you have multiple vendors, there can be finger-pointing. With one vendor, you can get a turnkey solution.

The big problem that we had with Dell PowerStore comes to pricing. There seems to be a lack of a price range in the small company, small medium company segment. There is a bit of a blind spot.

Regarding additional features, it is so new that I cannot really give a comprehensive answer. I think feature-wise, it is very feature-rich. Maybe some of those features could be paired down in order to give lower price range options for companies such as us that are not IT companies, but manufacturing companies, where IT is not at the forefront of things.

I have been using Dell PowerStore since January when we bought our first one very recently. That is our first Dell PowerStore product.

It is scalable with those needs. Our growth in that sense is not very intensive as far as storage or compute goes, but it has been scalable when we have needed it.

I assess customer service and technical support as very good. I have found them to be very knowledgeable and very responsive. I do not really have any problems there. They have been very great to deal with. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the customer service as a nine.

Positive

Before purchasing Dell PowerStore, we were using a Hyper-V cluster with the Hyper-V purpose-built servers from Dell. That product line has been discontinued now, so we had to go with Dell PowerStore instead.

I have seen some return on investment. Since we were refreshing our infrastructure, the return on investment has been that I am able to concentrate my time on high-level items rather than small-level items that come from the aging infrastructure that we had before.

There is a big pricing increase once you get to our level, and for our size company, it was almost too large when we went from previous generation products to current models. It was a sticker shock, I have to admit.

I did not consider other solutions before purchasing Dell PowerStore.

The advice I would give to other organizations who are considering Dell PowerStore is because of the price, make sure that you right-size the equipment so you are not paying more for capacity that you are not going to use. That is probably my best advice.

To assess that before purchasing, you basically have to look at a couple of things. First of all, what is your current use of storage? Then, of course, you have to figure out how this is going to grow over the lifetime of the next product. From there, as an IT manager, director, or CIO, you have to be tuned into the company's C-level perspective on what they think the growth is going to be over the next four or five years of the product lifecycle.

We don't currently have any AI initiatives; we may in the future. Right now, our business is manufacturing and very traditional. 

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Dell PowerStore a nine overall.

We use Dell PowerStore for the data centers and mostly for virtualization to provide storage capacity to hypervisors, using it for different use cases such as SQL databases, Exchange servers, and custom-based applications that serve different purposes.

Use cases that are mostly used involve some clients in the banks hosting main applications on Dell PowerStore, and sometimes it is used to replace previous generations of Dell products, such as Unity or VNX, where the customer base primarily consists of traditional Dell customers, along with some government institutions.

Some use cases with Dell PowerStore that can impact involve a client hosting an application for a public service that people use, and they provided feedback that the application performance has improved, and they are happy with this product.

The best features of Dell PowerStore are that it is really easy to use and really easy to set up, and a great feature is also the performance, which is really good, and it is very easy to integrate with VMware, for example; it has great integration.

Apart from the pricing, the key differentiator for Dell PowerStore in comparison to competitors such as IBM and Hitachi is its performance and data reduction, which is a really great feature since the data reduction ratio is much better on Dell PowerStore.

From a technical perspective regarding Dell PowerStore, I am not certain what improvements or enhancements should be made because it is a really good product; however, from the price perspective, I think it should be less expensive to better position it against vendors such as IBM or Hitachi, since sometimes it is hard to sell it due to higher pricing.

Disadvantages of Dell PowerStore, apart from the price, from a technical perspective, do not exist.

For growing needs, Dell PowerStore is easy to scale, but I had an issue where if a client wants to buy additional drives after the initial purchase, the price is quite expensive because they do not get the discount from the initial purchase; thus, they should plan to buy more capacity up front.

We have been working with Dell PowerStore for approximately two or three years.

I have not experienced any downtimes or crashes with Dell PowerStore, as it has been really stable, and we have not replaced any part except perhaps some hard drives.

For growing needs, Dell PowerStore is easy to scale, but I had an issue where if a client wants to buy additional drives after the initial purchase, the price is quite expensive because they do not get the discount from the initial purchase; thus, they should plan to buy more capacity up front.

We had cases when we needed support from the Dell technical support team, which is quite good for consultancy and firmware issues; however, in our region, it is a bit more challenging to get hardware parts since everything goes through partners, which can create a bottleneck.

I would rate the tech support an eight on a scale of one to ten.

Positive

Deployment of Dell PowerStore is quite easy, and compared to previous generations of Dell or other vendors, I think it is really easy for us as system integrators, although sometimes it is not great for us as it limits the services we sell since clients can even do the deployment themselves.

We are a partner and a system integrator with Dell, and also we are an authorized deployment and support provider.

Apart from the pricing, the key differentiator for Dell PowerStore in comparison to competitors such as IBM and Hitachi is its performance and data reduction, which is a really great feature since the data reduction ratio is much better on Dell PowerStore.

We work with Dell PowerStore and with Unity.

Performance metrics with Dell PowerStore actually depend on the case, but for some clients, the most important is the latency and write latency, and they use various tools to measure, mostly with VMware's vCenter that has some metrics they can monitor; however, to be honest, the clients or institutions using it are not utilizing the maximum performance or capacity that it can provide.

Most of our clients are small to medium businesses, but Dell PowerStore is not really a fit for small businesses since they tend to go with lower models such as PowerVault or less expensive products.

I do not have specific analysis on how Dell PowerStore has supported the growth of operational success for medium businesses, but since it is easy and has no issues, I think the IT teams do not have to worry and are happy with it.

I can recommend to other organizations considering Dell PowerStore that if they want an on-premises solution, they can count on it for performance and reliability, making it a really good product. This review has an overall rating of nine out of ten.

Multiple Dell PowerStore appliances can be clustered, with the capability to connect four nodes to a single cluster. Dell PowerStore solution is used on Linux, and a customer connecting storage space from Dell PowerStore to their server can use Linux as well. We are mostly using Red Hat Linux, Oracle Linux, and SUSE.

I have implemented many boxes recently and have been working for Dell as an IMAC deploying and implementing Dell PowerStore products in Pakistan. The solution is very easy to use. Moving and optimizing workloads within the cluster is straightforward on Dell PowerStore. The workload performance delivered by Dell PowerStore is very good.

The compression and deduplication technologies of Dell PowerStore are satisfactory, with a 2.1 ratio being sufficient and meeting customer requirements. Expanding and scaling Dell PowerStore is simple. When scaling up, you add the DAEs, and when scaling out, you add the next node on the right side. After initializing the next node and connecting it to the TOR switch, you can add it to your cluster, and the new node will join the cluster automatically.

For connectivity, we can use 10G primarily because it uses IP for cluster connections. Dell PowerStore has different ports used for the cluster, management, and other activities for interconnectivity. Lifecycle control for Dell PowerStore is also better, though we normally use the baseline to upgrade by manually uploading files through IDRAC rather than through the Lifecycle feature.

Some features are not easy on Dell PowerStore. For example, changing the IP is not straightforward like on Unity or other storage solutions. You must run a command in the CLI to replace the IPs, remove the existing IP, and add the new IP. A user cannot change the IP easily and will require technical support and expertise from a partner or from Dell.

There should be an easy way to change the IP from the GUI in Dell PowerStore. In the manageable settings, anything can be changed from the GUI after installation and initialization. The other features are satisfactory and very advanced but easy to manage, with nothing difficult about them.

The IP change issue is important in Dell PowerStore as there are four IPs to consider: a cluster IP, a management IP, and two nodes' IPs. These cannot be changed easily, and the subnet mask is also involved. You need to write everything in a two or three-line command, starting from the IP, removing the existing IP, and adding new IPs one through three, all in sequence separated by a comma. There is a very small tab in the management IP modify section. When clicking on modify, it shows delete, but the delete function is not working as it is not highlighted because it can only be done with the service password.

The service password is not able to log in with the GUI and is only used to log in with the CLI. In the previous Unity, you could log in with both the service account and the GUI, where you could use either the admin or service user. In Dell PowerStore, the service user is only used with the CLI and cannot log into the GUI, which is not a good feature because you cannot perform any maintenance from the GUI.

I have not used Dell PowerStore's built-in integrations for VMware, Kubernetes, containers, or other ecosystems. However, if you are using a different model, not the T model of Dell PowerStore but the S model, which has all VMware products built-in, it would be suitable.

There should be direct connectivity between the nodes in Dell PowerStore. An additional add-on card in Dell PowerStore would allow you to add four nodes in a cluster that can connect directly to each other without utilizing switching in between. We are using two switches as VLT with RedStack, using a direct cable between the switches to become a VLT, making it a single logical switch, though the management is separate. If the nodes in Dell PowerStore could communicate directly with each other through a direct, dedicated media, like a stack cable to form a cluster, that would be a better feature.

For the last three years, I have been working on Dell PowerStore and have implemented several boxes.

I do not have a good experience with the technical support for Dell PowerStore. The technical support by Dell for Dell PowerStore is a seven or an eight, which is better. The engineers and their team were very good.

Positive

The IP change issue is important in Dell PowerStore as there are four IPs to consider: a cluster IP, a management IP, and two nodes' IPs. These cannot be changed easily, and the subnet mask is also involved. You need to write everything in a two or three-line command, starting from the IP, removing the existing IP, and adding new IPs one through three, all in sequence separated by a comma.

The service password cannot log in with the GUI and is only used to log in with the CLI. In the previous Unity, you could log in with both the service account and the GUI, where you could use either the admin or service user. In Dell PowerStore, the service user is only used with the CLI and cannot log into the GUI, which is not a good feature because you cannot perform any maintenance from the GUI.

We are not using CloudIQ in Dell PowerStore and have not utilized it at any time in Unity either. We call and open a case on support@dell.com instead of using CloudIQ. Most customers do not connect their systems to the internet or allow such connectivity. Therefore, CloudIQ is not beneficial for them.

Regarding the ability to add capacity in single drive increments, a single drive can be larger, but it depends on the rebuilding rate. When rebuilding capacity in case of a disk failure, a larger drive will take a longer time. There should be concern if these are slow NL-SAS drives with 4-8TB capacity, as you cannot configure them to RAID 5 and must configure them to RAID 6 instead. The rebuild will take a longer time, and in case of a disk failure in RAID 5, you will lose data. Where the pool is involved, it is easy to use the entire disk. Dell PowerStore mostly uses NVMe disk, ACM disk, and SAS disk, SSD disk, and does not use NL-SAS in the base chassis. My overall review rating for Dell PowerStore is eight out of ten.