Dell PowerStore Reviews

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.

I use Dell PowerStore for an application. In my last work at B3, we bought Dell PowerStore for a specific corporate back-end, back-office solution for one application to solve problems with the service desk. We created some LUNs for a SQL Server and presented them to some Microsoft Windows Clusters using Dell PowerStore, but we don't use remote replication for Dell PowerStore; it's in a single, specific solution for an application attending a SQL Server.

The solution is implemented in finance. B3 is the Brazilian stock exchange, and all the solutions I worked on there for the last 15 years were in finance.

It reduces the time and complexity of the deployment process. It’s quite simple and can be done quickly. I believe it has significantly reduced the time required to deploy. Overall, the deployment process is very straightforward.

I really appreciate the management and the management console of Dell PowerStore along with features such as deduplication. It's good and sufficient.

Additionally, it's very easy and simple to use Dell PowerStore for moving and optimizing workloads within the cluster. It's just to provision the LUNs for the cluster. If we have a virtual environment like VMware, we can easily perform storage migration from a source disk to a target disk. This process allows us to transfer data seamlessly. In my previous jobs, we typically utilized tools such as Open Replicator, which is provided by Dell EMC, to move data between Dell EMC storage systems.

Furthermore, Dell's post-sales support is strong and very good.

If Dell PowerStore had more controllers, making it more reliable and resilient, it would be better. The most important thing for the customer is resilience and business continuity. When we have a failure in one controller and only two controllers, that's not good enough. If we could scale Dell PowerStore to four controllers, it would be better than what we have today.

I have worked with Dell EMC for more than 15 years, and also HPE, including 3PAR.

Dell's post-sales support is very strong and good. I trust in Dell's post-sales support. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with NetApp storage solutions, hybrid NetApp, all-flash storage systems, and Hitachi models such as USPV and VSP, but my strong knowledge is with Dell EMC, PowerMax solutions, PowerFlex, VXRail, and hyper-converged infrastructure solutions.

I have deployed Dell PowerStore just once, but I have deployed many other products such as PowerMax 200, PowerMax 8000, and others. I have deployed a lot of high-end storage platforms from EMC and Dell EMC including DMX series.

I deployed it on-premises; the model is 500T. It was very simple and easy to do. I particularly really appreciate using the Apex AIOps or the CloudIQ solution from Dell EMC as it allows me to observe all the metrics and telemetrics from the performance through the SAS portal, which I think is very good for knowing about the workloads and how the equipment is working.

When it comes to Dell solutions, I find PowerMax to be the most comprehensive option. It offers a range of features such as remote replication, security snapshots, immutable security snapshots, and SRDF capabilities—both synchronous and asynchronous. It also includes features like chip copy disk mode, deduplication, peak provisioning, and effective data reduction. There are some similarities between the two, but PowerMax has several advantages. It comes with more controllers and greater resiliency, making it better suited for critical mission environments.

I would rate Dell PowerStore an eight out of ten.

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.

Our main use cases for Dell PowerStore include making it our primary storage platform, and we use it for our active-active data centers with synchronous replication.

The features I appreciate most with Dell PowerStore are synchronous replication and performance.

We are able to do stretch clusters, VMware stretch clusters with the synchronous replication, which benefits our organization.

The immutable snapshots have made a huge difference for our business, and the synchronous replication gives us active-active data centers.

I use Dell AIOps, and while I am not as familiar with it as some other analysts, we do use it.

We like what we are seeing from the insights offered by Dell AIOps, as it has come a long way in the last couple of years.

The impact of Dell PowerStore on our organization in terms of performance and operational efficiency is amazing. I forget how many IOPS we are seeing on it, but we had the Unity before, and it trumps it by 10.

I would like to see more performance and more dedupe and compression features with Dell PowerStore in the next release.

We have been using Dell PowerStore for about three years now.

I would describe my experience with Dell PowerStore data resiliency, availability, and cybersecurity features as great. We are still learning more about the cyber resilience, but we just implemented the immutable snapshots, and so far it is great.

Regarding dedupe and compression with Dell PowerStore, we are seeing about 5-to-1 currently in our consolidation of data.

On a scale from 1 to 10 in rating customer service and tech support, I would say a nine.

We are happy with tech support.

We used the Unity previously to address similar needs before Dell PowerStore.

We looked at Pure when considering other solutions before choosing Dell PowerStore.

We are enrolled in the Lifecycle Extension, formerly the Anytime Upgrade program.

We just found out the new generation is coming out, so I am sure it will be happening soon, which will benefit our organization.

My advice to someone who is considering Dell PowerStore for their organization is to buy it, as we love it. I would rate this review a 9.

I am still dealing with Dell PowerStore storages, as it is still under my job scope. I have been able to consolidate data using Dell PowerStore through migration. This consolidation is a business-as-usual job for me.

Since using Dell PowerStore, I have found features like scalability and replication most valuable, as they are very solid for their product.

It is easy to use Dell PowerStore for moving and optimizing workloads within the cluster, based on monitoring performance; I normally use migration or add more paths for load balancing to optimize the storage.

The importance of Dell PowerStore's compression and deduplication technologies lies in achieving cost savings, and I find that the ratio is very good; it ranks at the top in terms of storage compression and deduplication rates.

I see room for improvement for Dell PowerStore, especially since the market is moving towards AI, cloud, and virtualization; I believe AI can greatly help with troubleshooting, data analysis, performance monitoring, and reporting, and I think Dell will invest a lot to enhance these features.

I assess Dell PowerStore's data resiliency and cybersecurity features as very secure, from my point of view, because it is not like an open system; however, I believe there is still room to improve, as I need to raise requests for vulnerability fixes to Dell on a monthly basis.

While I consider the product to already be complicated, I believe it still has room for simplification, such as enhancing the centralized GUI features and allowing for batch jobs instead of having to click through tasks one by one.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for many years, more than ten years.

Regarding its management capabilities, I think if it comes to new users, they may not be familiar with the command line; however, from my point of view with many years of experience, I find it very stable and manageable.

It is easy to scale Dell PowerStore, whether to expand, scale up, or scale out, as it is straightforward with just a few commands.

I would rate their technical support as an eight, noting that personally, I feel the support was better ten years ago; back then, I received more help from storage support, especially regarding non-storage issues. My current assessment of their support would be about seven or eight.

Positive

I have experience with other products with Dell, as I already left Dell for a couple of years and I'm currently in an end-user company doing maintenance for storage, where I also support IBM and Hitachi products.

In evaluating other solutions, I see that the competition to Dell PowerStore is not much, with the majority being Hitachi, Huawei, and Pure Storage, which is also quite good.

Besides Dell PowerStore, I am using other storages such as IBM, Hitachi, and Huawei from multiple vendors.

My experience with the deployment of Dell PowerStore has been substantial, as I was a so-called delivery engineer in Dell for more than six years, being the person to deploy.

I find that deployment can be quite difficult for non-experienced people, as new team members coming to Dell might not pick up the concepts quickly without proper training and many years of real physical experience.

As for Lifecycle Extension, also formerly branded Anytime Upgrade, I manage scheduling and coordination as an end-user; most work is still done by Dell support representatives, so I do not have much to comment on in this area.

Personally, I feel that Dell PowerStore is a little bit costly in the market compared to other products, but this is just my personal perspective.

I do not have experience with IBM Maximo; I primarily worked with IBM SAN storage products like V Storage and S Storage. I have only a little experience with Nutanix Unified Storage, not being really hands-on with it.

I would recommend Dell PowerStore to others and I think it is the best option on the market at the moment, especially for enterprise storage where Dell PowerMax is still the top storage solution.

I assess the workload performance offered by Dell PowerStore as very good, and I am very satisfied with the performance from Dell PowerStore, as it is a high-end storage solution.

I do not really use APEX AIOps, also known as CloudIQ in Dell PowerStore, but I have seen some demos and find it to be a very impressive product that consolidates everything together; I really hope we can have this in the future.

While I work with Dell servers, including Dell PowerEdge, there are not many because I am from the storage team and servers are managed by a different team. I purchase products directly from vendors rather than through the AWS marketplace.

I have been working in this field overall for about six years. I am definitely planning to use other all-flash storages in the future, as I need to see different angles and requirements; storage requests come from application owners, and I strive to fulfill those needs.

I would rate this review an eight overall.

My customer typically uses block storage. They have Dell PowerStore in two different locations, with one serving as the production environment and the other as the disaster recovery site. Replication exists between these two locations. One hundred percent of these volumes are allocated to VMware hosts. Approximately ninety percent of the environment is virtual, but the physical machines do not have contact with the storage; only the virtual machines do. The storage is provided to the hosts, which create the datastores, and these datastores are distributed between the VMs.

The organization has Linux VMs, but the storage is not directly connected to any physical Linux machines. Dell PowerStore integration with VMware is implemented, though not with VASA, as the VASA provider was not installed because we did not want the Windows server administrator accessing the storage. However, I can see all the VMs and which datastores they are from the storage view.

Deduplication and compression are very important features because space is always an issue with storage. I consider space constraints to be the main concern for a system storage administrator. Deduplication and compression perform exceptionally well, especially on Dell PowerStore. The compression rate has been very good so far, and we have been able to save several terabytes.

I use Cloud IQ, and it is very important because we get lost in daily tasks and sometimes have no time to actively monitor the systems in the environment. A tool like Cloud IQ keeps sending emails if anything happens, so it provides an important overview of the systems. We also use that tool to collect capacity reports from our environment. I think it is versatile and very useful.

We had a significant incident two years ago when I was preparing one of the Dell PowerStore systems for an upgrade. While running the health check, it started to corrupt every volume inside the system. We had to recover everything from the DR site because the storage became unusable. The issue was eventually found to be a bug inside the health check package. I think Dell should do better at testing those packages before applying them to the public.

I did not have an opportunity to work with it, but I think it would be beneficial to have the ability to increment a disk one at a time.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for four years.

Apart from the issue we had in the past, the system has been quite stable and the performance is amazing. I have no complaints about that.

Scaling has been pretty easy. I did not scale out, only scaled up. When we received a bunch of disks from Dell as compensation for the issue we experienced, we added them to our DR environment because we needed to recover some machines that were not on the replication and had to be recovered from backup, which required additional space. Expanding the space on Dell PowerStore was straightforward, and we had no complaints about that.

During the upgrade I mentioned, I was scaling up with a pack of disks rather than one at a time.

I have contacted technical support multiple times. Support response is reasonable, and they usually reply in time. The team members I have worked with were versatile in their knowledge of the system and never seemed lost regarding Dell PowerStore. I was always well served.

Positive

I have prior experience with other storage solutions. Before Dell PowerStore, we also had Dell XIOs, which was a similar storage system but an older version and model. Comparing the two, Dell PowerStore is much faster and more reliable than the XIOs were. I also have experience with IBM equipment, such as the DS9000 and other IBM devices. I think Dell PowerStore can keep up with them in a middle-class or enterprise environment.

During the initial deployment of Dell PowerStore, I only participated in one deployment. I did not directly work on the deployment itself because it was not my function; the company hired someone to handle that. However, I followed the process from beginning to end and found it quite easy. If I had to do it myself, I would be capable of doing so.

The setup is straightforward and one of the easiest I have worked with. Even people joining my team who have no previous experience with storage can learn through the interface in a single day session. While some doubts naturally arise, by the end of one session, they are ready to work with it.

Dell takes care of all implementation needs. I only need to identify the issue and send it to them, and if hardware replacement is required, they will go in and complete the replacement.

I do have two new machines that were installed a couple of months ago. There are two Linux machines that are connected directly to the storage, though I do not have access to those machines.

For me, Dell PowerStore integration is neutral in that the environment would function well without it, but it proved valuable in one instance because we had discrepancies in naming conventions between the storage and VMware. Using the integration, I was able to fix all those discrepancies and keep consistent naming conventions across the environment.

I would rate this product a nine overall.

For Dell PowerStore, the major use case is for data, primarily in banks. Dell PowerStore was sold for their data, which supports their FinTrak applications. For Unity, the use case is for their VMware environment as a data store.

Dell PowerStore has helped reduce my organization's capital expenditures because once the storage is made available to the VMware environment in a clustered way, it makes it easy for the end user or VMware administrator to deploy virtual machines instantly. The protocol between the VMware environment and the storage, whether it is 16 gig, 25 gig, 32 gig, or 100 gig, makes deployment faster.

For data resiliency and cybersecurity features in Dell PowerStore, Dell has another solution called Dell PowerScale, which is what most customers we sold Dell products to leverage. That solution works with their data domain appliances along with NetWorker, which is the backup software, and then the Vault infrastructure that also backs up with the data domain for vaulting and backing up or replication to the Vault environment.

Compression and deduplication features in Dell PowerStore are important because they allow me to save data and remove duplicate data. When replicating to another site, these features reduce bandwidth, which also reduces pressure on the network. This is why enabling deduplication and compression is important.

Regarding areas for improvement in Dell PowerStore, I noticed a minor inconvenience. I would have preferred if Dell PowerStore could have a common operating system across all their products, as that would be of great advantage.

I have been working on Dell PowerStore for five years since I joined Tennessee.

I do not have significant comments regarding the stability of Dell PowerStore.

In terms of scalability for Dell PowerStore, a few months ago we completed a scale-up for one of the banks, Stanbic Bank, by adding an additional shelf to the controller. They were running out of space, so we had to scale up by adding a shelf. There is no difficulty in that process because space was allocated before the addition of the shelf.

My experience overall with technical support from Dell for Dell PowerStore is very satisfactory. Their support is good and helps you through to the point where all problems are solved. I rate technical support from Dell for Dell PowerStore as 10 out of 10. Their support has been fantastic.

Positive

The solutions I have worked with that are similar to Dell PowerStore are NetApp and Huawei.

The experience with deployment for Dell PowerStore is not complex. It is simple and straightforward.

Because we are a partner, we purchase Dell PowerStore directly from Dell through our distributor.

I feel the end user will be able to speak much about return on investment with Dell PowerStore and should be able to provide detailed feedback on that.

Dell PowerStore is expensive, but those that can afford it can purchase it.

When I compare Dell with other vendors regarding technical features and pricing, I think both are better, but there will always be one ahead of the others. Even though they are good, there is always one ahead.

The best features in Dell PowerStore that I find most beneficial are generally those that are most important. If they were not important, I do not think the OEM or the product owner would include those features there, as they are based on the benefits they render to the customer or to the end user.

The workload performance in Dell PowerStore is great. As I mentioned earlier, none of the customers have complained that they had any issues with workload or writing to the storage.

I work with management capabilities in Dell PowerStore mostly with the implementation and then administration, focusing on how to administer it and how to implement it.

I do not work with CloudIQ in Dell PowerStore, which is also called APEX AIOps.

I have not enrolled in the Lifecycle Extension, formerly branded as Anytime Upgrade.

The decision to choose Dell PowerStore is the customer's choice. I can present two or three solutions to the customer, and because of the features and the customer's needs, their experience, or what they have read about the solution, it depends on the customer to choose the one that suits their demands.

I only integrate Dell PowerStore with VMware.

The integration of Dell PowerStore with VMware is seamless.

I have given this review an overall rating of 10 out of 10.

My main use cases for Dell PowerStore are running mission-critical production workloads where low latency, high IOPS, and predictable performance matter. Most deployments are for virtualization platforms (e.g., VMware vSphere) hosting mixed workloads such as application servers, databases, and general VM farms.

I also use it for storage modernization and consolidation projects, replacing legacy arrays, improving performance, and simplifying operations, while keeping room for easy scale-out/scale-up capacity growth as demand increases.

Dell PowerStore has had a positive impact mainly in performance, stability, and operational efficiency.

Better performance and consistency: we’ve seen lower latency and more predictable behavior for mixed workloads, especially in virtualized environments, which improves overall application responsiveness.

Reduced operational friction: provisioning and day-to-day management are straightforward, and scaling capacity is typically an online, low-risk process—so it’s easier to evolve the environment without disrupting production.

Improved consolidation/modernization: in modernization projects, PowerStore helped simplify the storage footprint while delivering a more modern all-flash platform and a cleaner operational model.

Support and reliability: when issues arise, having responsive enterprise support and a solid platform reduces downtime risk and increases confidence for critical workloads.

Overall, it helps teams spend less time “babysitting storage” and more time focusing on delivering services to the business.

Consistent performance with low latency (all-flash NVMe architecture): it handles demanding mixed workloads very well, especially in virtualized environments where “noisy neighbors” can be a problem.

Simple, online scalability: expanding capacity is typically straightforward and doesn’t require disruptive operational steps, which is critical for production.

Modern, easy-to-manage platform: the management experience is clean and the overall day-to-day operations (provisioning, monitoring, maintenance routines) are efficient for infrastructure teams.

Strong support experience: when something needs attention, Dell support tends to be responsive and effective, which matters a lot in critical environments.

PowerStore is already a strong platform, but I’d like to see improvements mainly in operational maturity and automation, especially for large or mission-critical environments:

CloudIQ / APEX: more actionable insights
Fewer generic alerts and more “what to do next” guidance, better root-cause correlation, smarter prioritization, and clearer remediation steps.

Upgrade experience: stronger guardrails and pre-checks
More robust pre-upgrade validation, clearer impact analysis, and safer/cleaner workflows to increase confidence, particularly in conservative environments (e.g., healthcare).

Proactive lifecycle and certificate management
Better built-in visibility and notifications for certificate/lifecycle items, with clearer guided actions to prevent surprises.

Deeper automation and API-driven operations
More ready-to-use automation examples/integrations (Terraform/Ansible style patterns), and richer API coverage for day-2 operations beyond basic provisioning.

If the next release pushes harder on these areas, it will reduce operational overhead and make the platform even more compelling for critical workloads.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for approximately five years.

I have contacted Dell’s technical support and customer support multiple times, and my experience has been very positive.

I can’t speak for every region, but in Brazil the local Dell support team is responsive and knowledgeable. When something is urgent, you can reach the right people quickly and get practical guidance without unnecessary back-and-forth.

That said, in rare complex or high-impact cases, resolution can take longer because the issue may need escalation to specialized teams outside the country. This is expected with enterprise products, and communication throughout the escalation process has generally been clear.

On a scale from 1 to 10, I would rate Dell support a 10 based on my overall experience.

Positive

Overall, the initial setup is straightforward for an experienced infrastructure team. The deployment flow is guided and clear, and if you follow Dell’s documentation and best practices, it’s usually a smooth “step-by-step” process.

The part that can feel more complex is the upfront planning, mainly networking and host connectivity (iSCSI, NVME/FC, NVMe/TCP), multipathing, and getting the environment aligned with the customer’s standards. Once those pieces are validated, the rest of the deployment tends to be quick and predictable.

PowerStore vs Unity XT (Dell)

PowerStore – Pros: more modern all-flash NVMe platform, strong performance/latency, and a forward-looking feature direction.
PowerStore – Cons: typically positioned at a higher tier, so it may not be the best fit for simpler workloads or tighter budgets.

Unity XT – Pros: very solid and mature array, often a great fit for “general purpose” enterprise workloads, usually with a more budget-friendly positioning.
Unity XT – Cons: may not match PowerStore’s performance ceiling and modern architecture for more demanding scenarios.

I’d rate Dell PowerStore 9 out of 10 overall.

Advice to other organizations considering PowerStore:

Validate the use case and sizing up front: be clear about performance needs, growth expectations, and workload profile (especially in virtualized environments).

Plan the connectivity properly: iSCSI/FC/NVMe-TCP design, multipathing, and networking standards make a big difference in having a smooth deployment and stable day-2 operations.

Adopt a solid upgrade/change process: in critical environments, treat firmware upgrades with proper pre-checks, a maintenance window, and, when needed, Dell support involvement.

Get value from monitoring and best practices: use CloudIQ, health checks, and recommended configurations to stay ahead of issues.

If performance, scalability, and enterprise reliability are priorities, PowerStore is a strong choice, just make sure the environment is well designed and managed with good operational discipline.

Dell PowerStore is mainly used for shared storage platforms in small to medium-sized environments where performance is needed, but not necessarily extreme performance, and where a robust and easy-to-use platform is required.

Dell PowerStore could cover use cases in large enterprises for specific domains where organizations want to work in silo mode and avoid high-end platforms that require substantial investments. However, it is clearly built more for small and medium-sized businesses. We use it both internally and for projects we carry out with our clients.

The features I find most valuable in Dell PowerStore are the simplicity of use and the variety of configuration choices available, which are more important to us than performance alone. We wanted integrated environments that include the server, switch, and storage components in relatively small form factors, with controlled power consumption and the ability to scale in a flexible and linear way.

Compared to previous solutions, Dell PowerStore mainly improved scalability. We realized we could make smaller upgrade steps and better support the growth of our different sites. Previously, with each storage upgrade project, we questioned whether we should replace the entire infrastructure because the costs were disproportionate. We wanted to move towards something more compatible with an OPEX model for internal re-invoicing rather than major investment projects.

Dell PowerStore helps with growth because we operate in an economic context that remains relatively tight, with a market that has shown uncertainty for at least the last eighteen months. This scalability and predictability allow us to make the right decisions when launching a project. We can determine exactly how much a project will cost in terms of infrastructure needs. We can also make it easier to launch new projects because we have scalability with relatively small steps, unlike before when major investments meant new projects might not consume all the hardware we provisioned. We had to amortize the volume, CPU capacity, and memory, which were not necessarily consumed right away, resulting in wastage relative to our investments. This situation eventually led us to favor the public cloud, and now we are returning more to what we control: on-premises and sovereign cloud.

Dell PowerStore could be improved on the recommendation and dashboard side. I would also mention overall visibility, having a single ecosystem in which we can find all of our hardware, whether it is Dell PowerStore or other Dell equipment, and ideally, third-party integrations to have complete visibility into what is happening on the different sites and to integrate it quickly into a global dashboard and single view for users and administrators. This would allow us to know where we stand in terms of capacity planning and performance. A section on corporate social responsibility and energy consumption with advice on what we could improve compared to new hardware and new disk formats that could reduce our footprint would also be beneficial.

I would rate Dell PowerStore seven or eight out of ten. There are always areas for improvement, which I mentioned earlier. However, it does meet day-to-day needs. What we would like is perhaps more visibility, especially on the corporate social responsibility aspect, which is becoming important as we are being pushed for increasingly detailed annual reports covering power consumption, CO2 emissions during operation, emissions during production, and transport costs. Software-based optimizations that help us gain efficiency on the storage side would also be valuable. These optimizations could tell us how much less we consume compared to traditional equipment and how much more storage we provide per square meter. Those are things that could be interesting.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for approximately six years.

Dell PowerStore is rather stable as a system and reliable. When there are disks to replace or cards, it is done on time. I believe we have good support from Dell. The support teams handle that part effectively.

We have not used technical support for Dell PowerStore on these environments, or if we did, it was not for major, crippling incidents. Any questions that arose were handled by the internal technical teams.

The good relationship we have with Dell today and the partnership we have developed with them, both for our internal uses and for our external customers, made us choose Dell PowerStore in the end.

Positive

We looked at other solutions that are perhaps a bit more low-cost before choosing Dell PowerStore. We evaluated solutions mainly for file use cases, such as QNAP or Synology, and for slightly more machine-hosting needs, we looked at DataCore as well.

The deployment experience with Dell PowerStore is relatively simple, consistent with all Dell products. We have teams who have been trained on these technologies since the EMC days, so we are in continuity with what we have known previously.

We have teams who have been trained on these technologies since the EMC days, so we are in continuity with what we have known previously. There was good support from the internal teams with real expertise, and the product remains fairly simple nonetheless.

With Dell PowerStore, we have achieved twenty percent savings compared to the previous solution. The savings are mainly on the upgrade thresholds. It is hard to provide a definitive ROI figure because it is more about savings and flexibility that we have gained. For us, there is a real simplification in terms of administration time and a direct saving. We would need to push the analysis further, and that is why we are waiting for those metrics on energy consumption.

We bought Dell PowerStore because it suited us, so I do not really have any comment to make on the price. After all, it is always too expensive, but that is the argument of a buyer.

Around eighty percent of our remote sites are equipped with this type of machine, which is what makes the solution successful, with a total cost of ownership that has perhaps been optimized by twenty to twenty-five percent compared to what we had before. The main gains are on the upgrade steps where we gain financial agility. The overall rating for this review is seven out of ten.

I have been working with Dell PowerStore for many years now, at least five to seven years. I have held many different positions during that period where Dell PowerStore was a component in the solutions. We have used it with VMware for both traditional VMware VMFS, as well as VVol implementations. We have used it with VMware for VDI. We also have many uses for it; we use it as a unified storage array, meaning it does block and file. We have activated the file side and are doing SMB and NFS off of it.

Working in dark sites, they are all sandboxed. From the cybersecurity perspective, you are really worried about either insider threat, meaning a rogue admin is doing bad things on the array and making problems for everybody, or you are worried about outsider threats, like trying to get malware into it. But if it is in a dark site and sandboxed, it does not have that connectivity outside and you have solved your insider threat issue, then from a cybersecurity standpoint, the array is fine.

I appreciate that the NPIV on Dell PowerStore is a very good functional feature. When you plug everything into your Fibre Channel switches, you see both your FC SCSI path and your FC NVMe path. You can choose which topology you want to be presenting your volumes out of.

As far as data resiliency with Dell PowerStore, I have not had any problems with corruptions. I have not had any problems with data being unavailable, other than the previous issues that I have already mentioned. If your NVRAM cache and your read-write cache is too full, then the array comes to a screeching halt. It is still connected, but it is not necessarily processing reads and writes as it should with efficiency. That is where you run into a bunch of your problems. However, you are not losing anything, and the data is still good and intact. Once you solve your NVRAM issues, the data goes back to normal.

One of the big drawbacks on Dell PowerStore that I have run into is the NVRAM cache battery. It does not operate as a traditional active-active storage array, meaning the NVRAM cache on the primary controller is the one that has the NVRAM cache, and if that battery goes dead on that primary controller, it has caused outages.

That is where my biggest issue is with Dell PowerStore. I work a lot of dark sites, and that means they are not internet-connected. Having to call and then give all the information tends to take a lot longer to get to a resolution because they want to follow a script and they want all these things to be given to them. When you work in dark sites, you are not allowed to provide some of that information. I cannot just take the support bundles and ship them off. Dell PowerStore does not have a very good architecture for being able to sanitize the logs so that they could be consumed outside of the dark site. As a result of that, I would say eight out of ten times I usually end up coming up with the solution that fixes the problem with their very agnostic answers.

The big issue with Dell PowerStore is when those NVRAM batteries go bad. The other aspect would be the sizing of what you are putting into the environment. If it is not sized properly for all your hosts and you have put too much in, it does struggle with the read-write cache getting too full. Once that happens, you run into the same problems as if the NVRAM battery has gone bad. It is really about trying to figure out what the sweet spot is. You can have this many ESX clusters attached to it, or you can run this many VMs off of it. Once you do have file enabled, if you are doing it in a unified way, then there become a lot of transactional things that are happening with the NFS or SMB shares. That drives the performance of the overall array down. I have seen where we had NFS for our VDI profiles. That means if you have 10,000 users and they each have their own profile, and you are loading them up at 8:00 in the morning, everybody is logging into their thin client on their VDI. It is going to take a huge performance hit during that timeframe. As a result of that, then you start seeing disk latencies on the actual VMs that are doing their own workloads as well. Going back to my previous statement, once you turn on unified, you are automatically losing 20% of your performance cap off of the physical box itself.

I have been working with Dell PowerStore for many years now, at least five to seven years.

I have experienced many stability issues with Dell PowerStore. Every time we get a bad battery, we encounter problems.

Dell PowerStore is very scalable because they can do clustering, so you can put more Dell PowerStore appliances into a fleet. You can then load balance your work. In certain aspects when the price works out to be able to do some of that, then that is how you would get into the realm of performance that a Pure Storage array gives you.

For the support of Dell PowerStore, I would give them a rating of six out of ten.

I use everything in my environment. I have Hitachi, Pure Storage, Western Digital and TeleFlash, Oracle ZFS, Cohesity, and many others.

The initial deployment of Dell PowerStore is easy. It is really about getting it set up and putting on the latest version of the PowerStore code, and then running through your initial setup, defining all your networks and defining your use cases. It really is dependent upon what you are purchasing it for.

We have maintenance contracts for Dell PowerStore, but in terms of doing firmware upgrades and life cycle replacements and other activities of that nature, that is all handled at my level.

Pure, hands down, is going to be the best. With their software and everything else, it is very intuitive, very easy to set up, very easy to manage. It just depends on what kind of environment you are building and will use, but on the Purity arrays, you get your block, you get your file, and they are all integrated in. With the later versions of Purity, the file aspects are containerized, so it is virtual servers living within the environment. You set up a virtual server for whichever protocol you want to use, and then that virtual server does its own thing, and it does not consume the performance of the array. Whereas on Dell PowerStore, when you turn it into a unified array, you are basically cutting 20% of your performance that then gets dedicated to being able to serve files for it.

The pricing for Dell PowerStore is probably the most compelling selling piece for it because it is traditional. The pricing is not bad. Pure is very expensive because it is all NVMe technology, and it is all SSD on it. From the Pure perspective, price per gig is a lot more expensive than Dell PowerStore. However, performance-wise, I would not be able to say that a Purity array and Dell PowerStore would be at all in the same ballpark.

I have not tried clustering multiple Dell PowerStore appliances because it did not meet our requirements performance-wise.

We have maintenance contracts for Dell PowerStore, but in terms of doing firmware upgrades and life cycle replacements and other activities of that nature, that is all handled at my level.

My overall rating for Dell PowerStore is seven out of ten.