Dell PowerStore Reviews

My use case for Dell PowerStore is for database information and database protection.

Dell PowerStore has helped me address challenges in my organization. The old storage was too slow, while with this storage, we can recover the information very fast.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is the speed. The speed of information and the ability to recover information are exceptional. 

To be honest, I don't think I could improve Dell PowerStore..

I've used the solution for about four years. 

When comparing the stability and reliability of Dell PowerStore to the old storage, the old storage never worked properly. This solution is more stable from that standpoint. 

The scalability of Dell PowerStore is very good. It's easy to expand. Though I'm not a technician, we have added more memory twice.

I have never worked with the customer service support for Dell PowerStore.

I previously used HPE, though I don't know which specific product.

Dell PowerStore is a very expensive storage solution. That said, the speed for recovering information is amazing. I would make the product cheaper. The discounts from Dell to South America are not sufficient because we need better pricing. 

The discounts for small PowerStores are not enough to close deals since I'm a distributor. As both a user and seller, it's challenging to sell Dell PowerStore to the channel or final customers because we don't have enough discount from Dell. We need to find deals worth a million or higher, and in my country, I have never sold a Dell PowerStore worth one million dollars.

I did not evaluate other solutions besides HPE because we are distributors of both Dell and HPE. The other vendors didn't have suitable storage solutions for us.

I am only a user of Dell PowerStore. 

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Dell PowerStore a ten. It's working now, and I never find problems with this storage.

I work with Dell PowerStore for our key VMware environment. Dell PowerStore is easy to set up, and we have experienced no issues thus far. It works well, and we have achieved the performance we were looking for. It is quite scalable for our environment, and the VMware integration is also available.

We are using Dell PowerStore 5200T model with almost 500 terabyte capacity, and we have almost four appliances.

We have been able to consolidate data to a certain extent using Dell PowerStore. From a couple of storages, we were able to consolidate them into Dell PowerStore, so consolidation was achieved.

I have not experienced any crashes, downtimes, performance issues, or stability issues with Dell PowerStore. However, I think the upgrade process could take some time, and if it becomes faster, it would be helpful.

Dell PowerStore has helped to reduce our organization's CAPEX, capital expenditures, to some extent. I would not say completely, but we are able to consolidate to reduce it.

The ability to add capacity in single drive increments versus drive packs is not very important for us because these enhancements typically do not happen at that level. It may be important for some other organizations, but not for us.

The initial setup and onboarding process of Dell PowerStore was straightforward.

The powerful features of Dell PowerStore include its unified architecture, which offers scalability, and the NVMe support that enhances performance. The data resiliency and cybersecurity features such as immutable snapshots and multi-factor authentication are crucial for data safety.

Dell PowerStore's workload performance is robust, supported by NVMe, ensuring no issues with performance. Reliability is critical, and Dell PowerStore is dependable with no major issues.

For those looking for reliable storage that works well with most workloads, and if they are part of the Dell ecosystem or looking to consolidate storage with good performance, then Dell PowerStore is a suitable option.

The management capabilities of Dell PowerStore, especially in terms of ease of use, are excellent.

The built-in integrations of Dell PowerStore with different ecosystems including VMware, Kubernetes, and containers make configuration easy, enhancing productivity.

We are not clustering multiple Dell PowerStore appliances currently because we are spread across geographies in different locations.

The support for Dell PowerStore is similar to others; not too extraordinary, but acceptable. It could be better, approximately a six out of ten.

Apart from the upgrading process and technical support, these are the main areas of Dell PowerStore that I would like to see improved or enhanced in the future.

There is nothing particular that comes to mind as a missing feature for Dell PowerStore.

I have been working with Dell PowerStore for three or four years, since the different iterations have been coming.

I have not experienced any crashes, downtimes, performance issues, or stability issues with Dell PowerStore. However, I think the upgrade process could take some time, and if it becomes faster, it would be helpful.

Dell PowerStore is easy to set up, and we have experienced no issues thus far. It works well, and we have achieved the performance we were looking for. It is quite scalable for our environment, and the VMware integration is also available.

The main benefits I have seen from using Dell PowerStore include its unified architecture, which provides scalability. We have not scaled it yet, but there is scalability available, which is useful.

The support for Dell PowerStore is similar to others; I would say not too extraordinary, but acceptable. It could be better, approximately a six out of ten.

Positive

I have partially switched from NetApp to Dell PowerStore because a portion of NetApp is still in use.

The initial setup and onboarding process of Dell PowerStore was straightforward.

I was involved in the deployment aspect, and my experience with the deployment of Dell PowerStore was that it was easy. Since we already had experience with other Dell products, it was quite familiar for us, and it was smooth.

For some things, we use Dell professional services for the deployment of Dell PowerStore. The rest we do ourselves.

The benefits from Dell PowerStore have been present in terms of ROI, mainly because of consolidation, which saves on power and provides a benefit in terms of ROI.

Dell PowerStore has helped to reduce our organization's CAPEX, capital expenditures, to some extent. I would not say completely, but we are able to consolidate to reduce it.

I would say we have reduced CAPEX by around ten percent, not more than that.

The pricing aspect of Dell PowerStore is comparable to others; I would not say that anyone is too cheap or too costly in this context. It is certainly equivalent to others.

The Dell ecosystem is huge, and if you are in their server, storage, compute, and everything, it makes sense because the integration is good. In other ecosystems or storages, there are multiple stakeholders, and sometimes it becomes difficult while troubleshooting things.

Reliability is the most impactful feature of Dell PowerStore for my organization. It works well, with no issues at all, and that is very important.

Dell PowerStore's compression and deduplication technologies are important for us, but I would say they provide a good amount of deduplication or compression, although it is not something groundbreaking or very extraordinary. It is decent.

We are looking to address specific challenges or goals by implementing Dell PowerStore, such as security features including immutable snapshots, using the AIOps features more to take corrective action when required, and reducing operational efforts with AIOps.

I do use Apex AIOps, also known as CloudIQ, with Dell PowerStore, but I would say we do not use it much. I know it is very useful, but we do not use it much.

The insights offered by Apex AIOps are insightful, and I would say we have not explored all the features thus far.

I have been working in my current field as a solution architect or technical architect for the last twenty-four years.

We are a customer of Dell, and for some use cases, we have also resold it, so we could be considered a reseller in some capacity.

I am still with LTI Mindtree as a practice lead for storage and backup.

I rate Dell PowerStore as a product and solution an eight out of ten.

As a reseller and Dell-only reseller partner organization, I have a number of customers who are currently using Dell PowerStore. It's a solution that we find is a great solution in the market. When Dell PowerStore first came to the market, a lot of our clients had VxRail with the convergence offering that Dell had. However, now with the Broadcom split from Dell with the VMware licensing, we're finding that with having Dell PowerStore with the AX nodes and the OEM Dell VMware solution built in, it's providing a very comprehensive solution to our customers. That's really helping us grow. We certainly find Dell PowerStore to be one of the best products out there in the market in terms of use cases for a lot of our customers across the board.

Because Dell PowerStore is built in with the all-flash and the NVMe platforms and the United offering it has with the single architecture for block, files, and the virtual volumes, it provides functionality and flexible functionality for our customers. They can use Dell PowerStore for various use cases. We've got customers in FinTech, in manufacturing, and in different industries as well. It's not really just suited for one type of industry; it can be used for many types of organizations.

We're in conversations with several organizations about using Dell PowerStore for AI initiatives. AI is obviously something that's more prevalent in the market and growing. We recently had a customer who had an 82-node VxRail. They had a refresh earlier in the year. Now they have Dell PowerStore with AX nodes. They have a cyber recovery solution as well, an air gap solution with a clean room. They're looking at how they can make their supply chain more efficient since they produce manufactured kitchens. A lot of it is learning what AI is capable of doing for their business and trying to see the benefits. We tend to find that FinTech organizations and companies doing trading are more interested in that type of technology. As AI matures, we will see more use cases for them.

Being a Dell-only organization, I have been working with Dell PowerStore from the concept when it first came out, replacing the Unity devices and becoming more of the go-to-market. We've been working on it from day one. We've got customers with quite a lot of data on Dell PowerStore, quite large organizations that are carrying hundreds and hundreds of terabytes of data. It's fantastic, and the customers find it very easy to use. We've not had any complaints around it being a difficult product in terms of simplicity and use. It's been great.

The fact that Dell PowerStore has cloud integration really helps. Many of our customers have hybrid cloud environments where they're holding data on-site, but also they push some of the data up into the cloud. Having that cloud integration is really useful for us. The business continuity and disaster recovery features provide robust data protection capability, including snapshotting and replication for both planned and unplanned downtime. Mixed workloads are also supported, including Microsoft SQL servers and container-based applications.

The ease of use is significant. Dell PowerStore has one GUI in terms of how to use it. It integrates very well with the data protection suites and the cybersecurity side. It's a storage platform that allows efficient data access and makes upgrades very easy to do. In the past, with a three-tier system, it was very difficult to do everything in silo, whereas with Dell PowerStore, upgrades, management, and maintenance are very easy.

With the anytime upgrade options that Dell PowerStore has, it really fits and suits our customers. They can upgrade anytime they want and add extra capacity without having the constraints of acquiring a different solution or re-architecting the environment.

What would make it perfect is addressing the occasional lack of continuity with consultants who are on projects for five to six weeks regarding Dell PowerStore. With any type of support, there will always be some types of breakage. We find the support very easy to access and helpful. A recent customer reported that the support representative was completely dedicated to helping them. The support representative was almost emotionally invested in the problem. There are some excellent technical professionals in the team who are dedicated to resolving issues.

Information regarding performance metrics or benchmarks used to measure success with Dell PowerStore is not available.

Dell PowerStore is a very reliable product that our customers love. In the early days, there were some challenges with the new product, but it's now a very mature product that works really well. When Dell PowerStore is implemented properly and integrated within a customer environment, it performs as expected. We've always had confidence with the product.

We handle deployment of Dell PowerStore as one of the highest certified Dell partners in the UK. Our success has been driven by our delivery capabilities. We've won numerous awards, including EMEA Services Partner last year. Our deployment expertise is why customers choose us. We understand the products thoroughly, can drive solution value, and implement it within networks, bringing in different applications. Our implementation skills are highly certified on these products.

Being a Dell partner for the last 12 years, we know who to contact when our customers have problems with Dell PowerStore. We've built personal relationships with teams, line managers, and senior people, which helps us get things done for our customers. Dell is a large organization that serves many customers, but we're fortunate to know who to call when issues arise. Our managed service team is very technical and can fix most problems. When customers need to contact Dell, we maintain the relationship and handle it on their behalf as part of our services.

Positive

We have seen return on investment from selling Dell PowerStore. We see significant customer loyalty towards the brand and solution. A customer we met last week who has Dell PowerStore stated that they love the solution because it works and does what they need it to do. They can sleep peacefully at night knowing it will perform without issues. This gives us customer retention and loyalty back to us as a solution provider, having full confidence that when we sell this to a customer, we can guarantee it will work and meet their needs.

I would advise potential users to definitely conduct a POC with Dell PowerStore and examine the product. It is a very comprehensive solution with capabilities that are superior to many other vendors. Dell has hundreds of case studies available for reference. Testing the product would make it difficult to choose another vendor's solution. I rate Dell PowerStore a 10 out of 10.

We mostly use Dell PowerStore to replace people's outdated technology. Most of the time, if it is Compellent, we use it for that. It easily outpaces Nimble, even though HPE changed its name.

We are using PowerStore 500T and PowerStore 1200T. We have multiple appliances. We have clients that have five and six now, but they are not clustering them.

We recommended Dell PowerStore to one of our clients. They have since standardized on Dell PowerStore. They are setting up a data center and chose Dell PowerStore 5200T to meet their needs. Their deployed ones were all 1200s or 1000s, and now, they are going with much bigger ones for the data center. They like having one interface and one vendor. It has been extremely good.

Overall, it is fairly straightforward. They have standardized the platform for many of their solutions because it makes it much easier to sell and support since PowerFlex and PowerStore have the same footprint. They just put a different OS on them. The standardization makes it very handy. They can hopefully drive the prices lower, but we do not see them having any competition right now.

The management is easy. Intelligence is built into it. Most of the people just set it and forget it. It takes care of itself. It adjusts itself. I am not saying that you should set it and forget it. You should be checking it once in a while, but most of our clients do not. They just set it, and if something goes drastic, such as running out of disk space, they call us, but it warns you early enough. They get a warning, and then it is just trying to get dry fast enough depending on what they are doing.

Compression has improved, which is one of the enhancements that came with an update, which is great. Dell now claims 5:1, which I do not believe, but it used to be 4:1. The compression is really good and extremely important because you do not have to buy too much, and you can grow it when you need to. Compression is probably the key feature that allows us to slay the competition. I am not aware of the competition having as aggressive compression.

PowerStore improves operational efficiency. Having the NVMe drives is much faster than having SSD drives. We are in a new world there, and the compression is inline, which is awesome. It is just a sweet ride.

We utilize PowerStore’s built-in integrations for VMware and Kubernetes or Containers. VMware integration is very important.

Updates come with enhancements. Each time we do an update, there is an enhancement, like new features, which is extraordinary. Other companies would try to charge for all that, but the enhancements just come with it. 

The maintenance is a bit expensive. The service and support are there for three years, but after the third year, it is pretty pricey for renewal. I hope Dell addresses that. Everything is pricey these days anyway. It is not like the old days of Compellent.

We used to be able to see the metrics for our customers. On Compellent, we could look up that customer and see all the metrics. That is not allowed for us now. We cannot do that anymore. I have to be explicitly allowed by the customer to do that, and some companies' security does not allow that.

I have used the solution for at least four, or maybe five, years.

The stability has been excellent. We have not had any issues with that. I have had a client that had a fire. It was a pretty bad smoke fire, and PowerStore came through it like a champ. It is still going. However, it needs to be replaced. It is on one processor until the insurance comes through. It is a 500T.

The scalability has been extremely good.

The customer service has been excellent. I would rate them a solid nine out of ten.

Positive

We have used different solutions. We moved to Dell PowerStore because it is easy.

If you look at the pricing in the field right now, are you going to buy a storage product from HPE that pretty much has a different engineer every week? Also, HPE makes their products in China, which Dell is not doing anymore. They got rid of making products in China. I believe the Dell PowerStore and PowerFlex are produced in the Northeast, so it is a US-based product. The components do not come from China. That is a very strong aspect. With the advent of AI, you need the IO that a PowerStore can give you because things are not getting any less complicated. They require more and more data every day.

The deployment is easy. With the tools that come with PowerStore, you can pretty much migrate from anything.

We are deployment-certified, and we can have everything done within two days. However, we are not Dell. We got ourselves deployment-certified because we wanted to save money on the deal, and we did not want to get sucked into the vortex of the deployment process because there is so much minutiae there.

We are a partner with Dell, and we advise our clients. We are technical advisors for our clients, and the good thing about us deploying is that we can migrate their setup over several weeks. They do not have to do it all at once like with Dell. 

The rate is always too high. Nobody likes paying for it. I have not seen a client yet who says that the price should be higher.

Initially, people look at it, but when they see what the benefits are, it is a no-brainer. We can give them good pricing at the outset.

I would rate Dell PowerStore a nine out of ten.

My main use case is datastore storage, specifically for storing VMs.

I think it improves my work, not necessarily the organization, because I spend very little time managing it; it saves time. I spend little time administering it, and it's simple; you do it once, it works. You come back to it when you need to reallocate from time to time, but otherwise that's it.

The features I find the most valuable, the best ones that I especially like, include the allocation and the provisioning, which is quite simple for creating a lot of LUNs and assigning them to a particular host or host group; it's something that is done really quickly. The graphical interface does everything and we don't need to use the CLI; we can do everything, and it's user-friendly and simple.

I believe the solution could be improved through better unification with the NAS file storage component. While the product currently fulfills its role perfectly for the SAN portion, it lacks the necessary versatility to natively handle all protocol types, specifically NFS and SMB or CIFS.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for 3–4 years.

I did not have downtime or outages; we haven't had any major issues; it's quite stable and reliable in general. We touch it very little; we configure it and kind of forget it, coming back only if there's a need to evolve.

I think it adapts well to my organization's growth because for now the scalability is sufficient for our current use; for the future as well, we can also add more alongside if needed. Since it's managed at the SAN level, we can assign the LUNs as we want.

I have used technical support sometimes, more for feature requests and to know how to use a given feature; Disk replacements are managed proactively by Dell. The system triggers automated alerts, and replacements are handled directly by the manufacturer rather than a third-party reseller, which guarantees faster turnaround times.

I would rate the support an 8–9.

Positive

Before adopting Dell PowerStore, I considered other solutions; for example, we had other solutions with HP, which are still more complex to use. We also looked at NetApp for the file part, but Dell PowerStore seemed to us to be the best value for money.

I would describe the deployment experience as quite simple; assigning IP addresses, cabling, and racking is quite simple, and then the configuration part with the guided configuration is fairly easy.

I can confirm that I see a return on investment; I don't have the figures for you, but clearly a return on investment exists. Essentially for a lower investment than other solutions, we have an equivalent service.

I think the price and the licenses are very consistent compared to the competition.

We also looked at NetApp for the file part, but Dell PowerStore seemed to us to be the best value for money.

One of the challenges I'm trying to address by choosing this specific Dell PowerStore is that I knew the previous products, VNX and Unity, and I find one of the advantages is the simplicity; it's much simpler to use than competing arrays. I don't know if I should give names, whether it's HP 3PAR or NetApp – they do other things but they're more complicated, whereas Dell PowerStore remains very simple to use.

I have performance metrics that indicate the success of working with Dell PowerStore; built into Dell PowerStore are some reporting tools, which show ways to see the load, allocations, and remaining free space.

We use those tools; if we encounter performance issues, we look at the entire SAN chain, whether it's on the array side, switch side, or initiator side.

It gives a report that focuses mainly on the backend part; however, it's true that we perhaps lack a tool to cover the whole chain from A to Z, and we do that more at the SAN fabric level.

At the range level at Dell, I find it a bit complicated between PowerScale, Dell PowerStore, and the older systems; trying to understand which product is best for our needs is a little bit complicated, and we need support from the pre-sales team.

I give this product an overall rate of 8 out of 10.

We store all our critical business databases and applications on Dell PowerStore, and we use it as the storage for our virtualization environment, so pretty much all our workloads from virtualization to database, it's the main primary storage for everything.

Dell PowerStore has supported the growth and operational success of our organization by reducing the footprint, rack space, power consumption, and the resources needed to run the backend storage, which has been consolidated into just 2U, thereby enhancing efficiency. We now know everything is there, as there's one GUI, and that's where it is.

The features of Dell PowerStore that I like the most include the simplified web GUI, and setting up replication to protection groups on the other site was pretty straightforward. I have presented straight-up Linux NFS shares off it as well to certain systems, which we weren't able to do on our old storage, so that was very useful.

Nothing comes to mind at the moment on how Dell PowerStore can be improved or any additional features I would like to see included in the next releases. I do not have any current pain points that I would like them to fix, although we did have one issue when an update stopped the phone-home solution, however they fixed that via support.

We've had Dell PowerStore for the last two years.

I assess the stability and reliability of Dell PowerStore as very reliable, as we've only had one alert that had an issue with it in the last two and a half years of our full operational load.

As we require additional storage, or once we hit the capacity limit, Dell PowerStore is easy to expand and add extra capacity, so it will be there for years to come.

I evaluate Dell's customer support as good, as we've always been able to upload the logs and get the parts within the four-hour deadline on the one occasion that we needed them. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Dell support a nine. What would make it a ten is that sometimes we go through an initial triage that repeats a lot of the initial triage steps that would have been done by my own engineers, so sometimes it would be nice to skip the starting point.

Positive

We transitioned from an HPE Nimble Storage and an HPE 3PAR, which are no longer supported or offered, to Pure Storage. We had also previously considered an EMC solution.

There was a general ease of deployment, as it was a fairly intuitive web GUI that was self-explanatory once it was racked.

I evaluated the market and the competition, and we settled on Dell PowerStore as our preferred NVMe flash storage solution, so my initial role was to set it up, get it configured, and get it active in the environment, and then plan the migrations to it.

I have seen some return on my investment with Dell PowerStore. You're getting rid of equipment, with the first 3PAR being a full rack, the other 3PAR being half a rack, and the Nimble being more 8U, so we've basically gone down from two rack spaces to a 2U server space. 

I have realized some money and time savings with Dell PowerStore. We're not spinning up that amount of power, and in terms of time saving, I'm sure it's performing some workloads quicker than the previous disks had to, but operational stability and 24/7, 365 operation is more what we need in our environment.

The advice I would give to other organizations considering Dell PowerStore based on my experience with it is that it has to be highly considered, as the price point was not really any better than the competitors; it was close, and it has worked out well, so stick with your account manager and they will do their best to get you a good deal.

Examples of how features benefited our organization include: previously, for the NFS, for the SIEM cybersecurity solution, we had to have a separate Linux server, where we were able to just do it straight from the Dell PowerStore GUI, so we got rid of three layers of complication and resources that weren't needed. 

I rate Dell PowerStore a perfect ten out of ten.

We were end-of-life on our current Unity 480S all-flash arrays and needed to upgrade to a newer array, and we didn't want to have to pay the extortionate costs for renewing our support for Unity.

Dell PowerStore outperforms Unity by approximately ten to one. 

In terms of performance, it performs very well. Implementation went well. The console GUI is very similar to all the other Dell flagship products, such as Dell PowerProtect Data Manager or Dell Data Domain. All of the front-end console GUIs have been brought together to provide one seamless pane of glass ecosystem, which makes it really easy to move around in the environment. When I'm managing all these systems, that helps me quickly get familiar with where things are going to be placed, which then helps me speed up and do my job a little bit more efficiently.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is Metro Volumes. It allowed us to remove our current Recovery Point/Broadcom VMware SRM licenses, which cost a fortune, resulting in significant cost savings.

The product stands on its own merit. It does exactly what it's meant to do. It's very scalable, very efficient power-wise and performance-wise.

Cost is one aspect that needs improvement, as selling the drives after purchasing the solution makes them incredibly expensive. The reason we buy it as a whole complete system is because we get such a discount on the drives upfront. When we go to buy or populate more drives in the storage array, they're so expensive. If they could lower the cost for components, we would definitely expand them more and be more inclined to buy more storage units, but it's currently a price crunch for us. Price is a deterrent to scalability.

We have been using Dell PowerStore since implementing it two months ago.

We've actually crashed the system on purpose and watched Metro do what it was supposed to do. The product does exactly what it claims. We saw that on keynotes at Dell Technologies World 2024, and to see it actually work in our data center was impressive. When I removed all the cables, it failed over within five minutes. It's remarkable to see that actually happen in practice. You hear a lot of talk, but to see the talk go into action is another thing in itself.

We have 700 to 800 people. Dell PowerStore has models such as the 500T that we have in one of our smaller data centers. This solution is more suitable for mid to large-sized businesses. As a Dell company, it's definitely growing with our needs in every aspect, from data protection to storage capacity to the workstation level.

The deduplication feature set built into Dell PowerStore helps us with current scaling for storage because it provides significant data reduction. However, when we need to grow, the price point of buying external storage and filling up new LUNs and racks becomes expensive. We try to budget our storage for Dell PowerStore ahead of time to avoid populating it with more drives later, knowing that adding another rack will be costly. If they can help offset that cost, it would be beneficial.

They provide the same great support that I always receive with all Dell products. Their support is one of the best. That's why we're with Dell.

It was incredibly easy to deploy Dell PowerStore. The deployment time from start to end was a week, which included cabling, configuration, migration of data, and everything coming together.

We've received a return on investment in the coming renewal of our Broadcom VMware licensing. In terms of licensing, we're paying less due to the implementation of the new PowerStore system into our infrastructure.

After attending Dell Technologies World 2024 and seeing the new iterations and feature sets coming out in version five, we were further convinced to go with Dell PowerStore.

There are plans for an AI implementation, a kiosk-type system, that will utilize this storage, but it has been tabled for now. It will likely be picked up at the end of our quarter or beginning of next quarter.

I would rate Dell PowerStore an eight out of ten.

I mainly use Dell PowerStore for the storage area for customers in the SAN environment.

I find Dell PowerStore's solution most valuable, especially in the area of data deduplication and compression, which Dell PowerStore performs very well.

Dell PowerStore plays a very big role in our company regarding AI initiatives because we have many companies that already use AI and want to expand it further. Performance is definitely in demand there, and that is why Dell PowerStore plays a very significant role.

Dell PowerStore can contribute to growth and business success because it has enabled a rethinking, especially with NVMe and the all-flash system, which it also provides for smaller mid-sized customers. This simply eliminates the discussion about whether there is enough performance, and mid-sized customers have already gained experience in how well and quickly they can cover their workloads.

I find the design of the products somewhat negative because they are different in terms of expansion level and are somewhat oversized, especially for small and medium-sized customers.

That would be an area where Dell PowerStore can be improved. We have the 500T, the 1200T, and then already the 3000. I think the jumps between the series are simply not explained in a meaningful way to me or to the customers. It is either called small, then really very small, or large, and then it is called large again. It is then not really intended for small or medium-sized German companies.

When we talk about disaggregated infrastructures, the native integration into HCI solutions is currently still not available with Dell PowerStore. When it comes to hyper-converged systems, enhancing them with Dell PowerStore would be desirable. Functions such as transparent failover are also missing, which we still miss at the Fibre Channel level. Because synchronization is currently only available at the iSCSI level, and that also hurts us significantly at the moment.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for more than five years.

I rate the stability and reliability of Dell PowerStore as very stable and very reliable, due to the existing NVMes and all-flash systems. However, it has also become a more sophisticated SAN solution that may appear somewhat oversized for existing customers. We have the feeling that the gap is widening even further. I hope that we can therefore also use the solution for smaller mid-sized companies in the future.

I find the pricing and licensing for Dell PowerStore very difficult in recent months because the situation has deteriorated significantly. The pricing policy in particular has been different in recent months for unexplained reasons. We are not referring here to project discounts, but rather to list prices and where the list prices actually originate. We question that quite often because they have been increased by thirty to thirty-five percent every quarter for unexplained reasons, and that definitely does not go down well with customers. We do know that demand is very high, but it is not suitable for the midmarket.

We consider other solutions like IBM storage solutions and HP storage solutions before deciding on Dell PowerStore. There are different manufacturers. However, if we look specifically at the Dell portfolio, then it is either PowerVault or Dell PowerStore itself. Otherwise, if it gets larger, PowerFlex.

I am directly involved in working with Dell PowerStore from the beginning in sales, pre-sales, through to implementation and execution in the projects, and it works perfectly.

I also handle the installation of Dell PowerStore, not only directly, but also indirectly through distribution or with our own resources. That indeed runs smoothly with Dell PowerStore, and also much faster than what I used to know from other products.

We measure success with Dell PowerStore using installations of very different sizes, as we also cover various workloads. Dell PowerStore is one of our central solution approaches that we pursue, especially in the SAN environment. Only in the area of unified or object store does Dell PowerStore appear to be not the simplest or best solution. Dell is having a hard time bringing Dell PowerStore properly to market, and there are other solutions that Dell is marketing, which we also have in view. I rate this review as an eight out of ten.