Dell PowerStore Reviews

My current use cases for Dell PowerStore mostly involve VDI and Virtual Desktop Interface connections.

We are almost at the point of using approximately 20 Dell PowerStore appliances as separate systems, and we are using it for disaster recovery as well. We have replication and everything set up with that.

Dell PowerStore is a mid-range product that can suit small companies and provides good IOPS and performance. The relatively small setup we have with Dell PowerStore works well for mid-range customers and some high-end customers as well. If they want to separate workloads accordingly, they can go with it.

We do use Dell PowerStore's data resiliency and cybersecurity features for authentication, and we are using SSO and all those things. Dell PowerStore is quite resilient, and we have not seen any kind of corruption.

Dell PowerStore is expandable up to only three expansion modules. If you want to increase the capacity, we cannot go beyond three enclosures. One is a base enclosure and there are three expansion enclosures. I think Dell PowerStore could add some more expansion enclosures, perhaps seven to eight, to get more capacity.

With CloudIQ, I have seen that when we get access to it, we do not see all the products that we have in CloudIQ. We have to struggle a lot to get access to CloudIQ because it is managed by Dell.

We have not tried using Anytime Upgrade (Lifecycle Extension) from Dell as of now. We are doing an upgrade but not using that Anytime Upgrade, as we have a planned one.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for the last two years in my career overall.

A firmware upgrade can take around three to four hours, and no downtime is needed. I have seen issues where the node gets crashed and the replacement is needed for hardware. That will be as per the plan and as per the organization policy.

We are not clustering multiple Dell PowerStore appliances.

I have contacted Dell's customer support or technical support. Earlier the quality of support was excellent, but now it has deteriorated. We do not get quick support, and we have to wait longer to get the support.

I have used alternatives to Dell PowerStore, such as IBM FS 7300 and other solutions.

IBM is a hybrid solution, whereas Dell PowerStore is completely flash-based. Dell PowerStore is more performance-driven, providing more performance.

Dell PowerStore is pretty easy to install. It comes with a pre-installed operating system itself. You just need to plug it in and plug it into the network, configure IP addresses, and handle a few basic things.

Setup can take approximately three hours minimum for a new client.

One person in the data center can manage the setup.

Maintenance for Dell PowerStore includes a maintenance contract with Dell. However, some issues during troubleshooting require reaching out to Dell.

Dell PowerStore management capabilities are pretty easy to use and user-friendly. I would rate this review a 9.

My use cases with Dell PowerStore revolve around the fact that all our infrastructure is on Dell PowerStore. Everything related to virtualization infrastructure, including all our applications and VMs, runs on Dell PowerStore.

A feature that I particularly appreciate about Dell PowerStore is RecoverPoint for VM. What makes RecoverPoint for VM special compared to others is that it solves our DRP issues much better. We do not have to purchase another solution, which is very beneficial.

Dell PowerStore improves my organization in general as we are more confident regarding DRP tests and regulations that require us to have a DRP plan. Today we can carry out these tests without any problem and actually meet those requirements.

What I do not prefer as a feature of Dell PowerStore, or what should be improved, is more on the storage side, but not the computing. On the storage side, the management of the deduplication and compression ratio should be enhanced. Artificial intelligence has been implemented, but it is not sufficient yet and is not top tier.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for more than fifteen years, approximately twenty years.

I have experienced some issues, downtime, and outages with Dell PowerStore, as we have had quite a few issues related to storage and resilience. These issues are more related to the configuration of our virtualization infrastructure, especially the ESXi we have today, particularly when we perform updates and upgrades. However, we are supported by Dell, so the outages are limited in duration.

In terms of scalability, I can scale and grow easily with this solution. Since we are moving towards AI today, Dell PowerStore can be a major player in transforming the current infrastructure we have.

I have contacted Dell support once or twice for issues related to volume on the storage side.

The interaction with Dell support went well. We had some communication challenges initially, but those were resolved.

The issues were resolved in the end, and I would rate customer support as an eight on a scale from one to ten.

Positive

Before adopting Dell PowerStore, I considered other solutions such as Equinix and IBM.

The system deployment experience with Dell PowerStore was that we were supported by another company, Axians, who assisted us. The deployment was smooth and transparent for us, particularly since we were coming from another environment in a migration scenario.

I have seen a return on investment since adopting Dell PowerStore. We have already reached the return on investment with the current infrastructure, so the ROI is good.

My impression of the price and licenses for Dell PowerStore is that we are satisfied. I hope this will not change drastically in the future, but today we are satisfied as it fits within our budget.

I chose Dell PowerStore for the relationship and because they responded to the RFP. They are the ones who meet our needs.

The AI initiative is important for me as artificial intelligence helps optimize workloads and storage, and by extension, helps save money.

I have performance metrics that tell me whether Dell PowerStore is working well, and it performs very well. We are happy.

Dell PowerStore fits my organization's growth fundamentally, providing an infrastructure that supports our expansion. My overall rating for this product is eight out of ten.

As the administrator for Dell PowerStore, I manage its functions and ensure it operates smoothly. Dell PowerStore provides the storage for all the services we have, so every server gets its disks from there. It has a nice interface and is easy to manage.

The upgrade runs quite well, except that when it shuts down one head, it then says you cannot get in here. You just have to know that you have to log in via the other head, otherwise you stand there for three quarters of an hour wondering if it is still there or if it is coming back. Dell PowerStore is fast storage and easy to administer. I would like to be able to do more on the CLI, but I have other systems where you can do that.

What differentiates Dell PowerStore from other storage solutions is that it has become simpler and more autonomous over time. Earlier, you would say you need a RAID group with a certain number of disks in a specific RAID configuration. Today you say you need a LUN size of a certain amount, and the system does everything in the background, which makes it much easier.

Where Dell in general could be more open is an area where Dell PowerStore could be improved. I have competition in-house where you can only work on the CLI if you really want to do it well, and that is more fun as an admin. However, the nice thing about the simple interface is that you can also hand it to someone who is not deeply involved.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for six and a half years.

Dell PowerStore is great in terms of stability and reliability. Even if something fails, it is really quick to swap it out. If you have virtualization layers on top, such as VPLEX, you can work on the other side and maintain the machine in peace. There are crashes from time to time. We had a controller problem once where something broke. A DIMM was defective, so the controller had to be shut down and removed, but the other controller kept running. If you do that at a time when there is not much load, then it is fine.

Scaling in terms of disks is always possible. Dell PowerStore grows well with company needs because you can cluster them so that you can put them together under one interface. You can just put a second one next to the first one, link it to the other one, and then it is basically a single system to administer.

It depends on the topic you submit regarding Dell support. I have not had any problems with Dell PowerStore, but there are other products where it sometimes gets stuck, though that is not Dell PowerStore support's fault. On a scale of one to ten for support, I would give it a nine. That is typically German; we do not give a ten, so the Americans will have to live with that.

Positive

I have worked with VNX, Unity, and XtremIO, so the whole EMC range. Before deciding on Dell PowerStore, I should note that the previous company had Dell PowerStore. They also had other solutions including XtremIO and Unity, and as Unity evolved, Dell PowerStore came along. Because people were satisfied with those products and I was very familiar with them, we decided to stick with it. At my current company, they also looked at other things, and at the company where I was before that, they also looked at various solutions. However, it is often the case that Dell, or rather the former EMC products, is what people knew and had been happy with for years. Honestly, people are usually too comfortable to switch to a completely different vendor when they do not know what they are buying there.

I took part in installing and configuring Dell PowerStore, including cabling, configuring, bringing it up for the first time, and doing upgrades. I took part in everything I could, and it actually runs quite well.

We do not yet know how Dell PowerStore plays a role in our company's AI initiatives. We had a meeting about a month ago with our sales representative, Dominik Nitsche, who is responsible for us. He was there with his colleagues, and they presented the HCI model again, where you can choose which hypervisor runs on it, and Dell PowerStore would be underneath. In case we decide we would like to try that out, Dell PowerStore would be in play with us again. I do not have much involvement with Dell PowerStore's pricing and licensing because I am just the admin and not the one who has to buy it. I give this review an overall rating of ten out of ten.

We use Dell PowerStore for storage management. We are using the 500T model. We have a standalone box and are not currently clustering multiple appliances.

The management portal is particularly user-friendly. We can access it easily, and the management software is not complicated.

With the recent firmware upgrade, we have a feature to restrict the bandwidth and throughput specifically for the volume.

The compression and deduplication that Dell PowerStore offers is performing well, especially compared to our previous storage solutions. We are achieving approximately a 2.8:1 ratio.

One suggestion for improvement would be related to volume management by both controllers. Currently, a volume is managed by a single controller, with alternate controllers managing different volumes based on load distribution. For example, if volume one is managed by controller one, volume two will be managed by controller two. In other vendors' solutions, both controllers participate in the I/Os. It would be more efficient if the volumes were controlled by both controllers in an active-active configuration.

The firmware upgrade takes longer than the other boxes. It should be better.

We have been using Dell PowerStore for three years.

I would rate the stability of the product at eight out of ten.

We experienced some concerns during a previous firmware upgrade when the controllers became unresponsive, which affected operations.

We have not performed any online scaling or scale-out operations as we use a simple standalone box. However, I believe the scalability features would be good, though I cannot speak from direct experience.

We have about 1,000 users.

I would rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

We have NetApp AFF400, which is also good. However, since Dell PowerStore is a mid-range storage solution, it cannot be directly compared with our enterprise storage solutions. We use CloudIQ with Dell PowerStore.

It is easy. It took about a week.

We are not using ransomware protection. It is enabled in the new code, but we are not using any ransomware protection. We take a snapshot for any protection.

It is user-friendly, so we can easily manage storage. Many features are there. Compression is good, and the data configuration is good. 

I would rate Dell PowerStore an eight out of ten.

The use case for companies to buy Dell PowerStore is that it's an all-flash storage, which is needed to save their data or applications that demand faster responses. They brought it because the read and write operations of Dell PowerStore are extremely high, and the IOPS are very good compared to the other Hitachi level storage.

Dell PowerStore helps the organizations that I sell to by allowing them to buy less storage and store more capacity, which helps them save costs. Additionally, it's very durable and priced appropriately, which helps the organization to save money.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is the data compression, which is extremely good, having a data compression ratio of 5:1 that rarely other storages have in the market. This feature is very good compared to others.

What makes the data compression feature of Dell PowerStore so good is that if you need to store, for example, 100 TB of storage, you just have to buy 1/5 of it, the capacity, and then you can store that data. The compression features in the storage make it very special compared to others, apart from the day-to-day, normal data retrieving capabilities such as data deduplication, which this has something more that no other storages offer.

I would suggest that Dell PowerStore could come with various other features, such as a hybrid model apart from only all-flash, which would really help the customers.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for the past four years.

Dell PowerStore has rarely had any downtime; I have never come across it having any downtime, and the technical support is extremely good, which makes it a good product.

Dell PowerStore does not meet the needs of a small organization; Dell has Unity which meets the entry-level or SMB segment. Dell PowerStore is for mid and high enterprise segments, catering to bigger customers. Dell PowerStore can grow with a small company or if the company has less than 2,000 employees; it can grow to meet their needs.

Customer service and support for Dell PowerStore are very good, so once customers buy Dell PowerStore, they always choose to buy it again since the performance is extremely nice.

Positive

Besides Dell PowerStore, we offer other solutions such as HP solutions, Lenovo solutions, and NetApp solutions. Someone might pick Dell PowerStore versus HP or NetApp because PowerStore has the unique compression feature that other products lack, allowing them to buy less storage and save more capacity.

All Dell products are quite easy to deploy and maintain.

The success metrics that companies use to determine their ROI for Dell PowerStore are based on the kind of performance they get or the returns they see once Dell PowerStore is deployed, which are quite substantial since they always look at expanding it in the near future. They don't only buy it for a specific application; once they see the performance, they try to utilize it for all other applications as well.

The pricing of Dell PowerStore is a bit high, as it is not an entry-level storage, so it is priced higher than it should be.

The companies I sell Dell PowerStore to are extremely happy, as they keep expanding it and keep buying more shelves to expand the storage. 

A con for Dell PowerStore would be if somebody has standardized on certain products, such as only buying Dell or HP products, which might lead them to choose HP instead. HP is losing a lot of market share because of Dell PowerStore, as they do not have a product that can match it. 

I rate Dell PowerStore nine out of ten.

Dell PowerStore provides measurable benefits in performance because it uses all-flash disks while our old storage relied on mechanical hard disks. We noticed significant performance improvements between mechanical storage and flash storage, and I believe this represents a major impact.

Dell PowerStore has deduplication, but it may need more enhancement because in our case, it was not as efficient as Dell Data Domain. Dell PowerStore's deduplication ratio was 1.5 or two, so perhaps it needs some enhancement in that area. We experienced an issue when we upgraded the firmware of the disks. When Dell released a firmware version and we upgraded it, some disks failed as a result, so we did not upgrade all of the disks. Dell recommended replacing the failed disk afterward and canceled the firmware upgrade from their website because the upgrade had an issue.

From a features perspective regarding Dell PowerStore, the interface is somewhat slow and needs some enhancement. The web interface for Dell PowerStore requires some improvement.

I have been working here since 2010, which is 15 years now.

In terms of operation, Dell PowerStore has supported us and we have not faced any issues with it. In terms of speed and performance, it performs very well.

The technical support I received from Dell for Dell PowerStore was satisfactory. When we faced the firmware upgrade issue, we called them and they solved the problem. It did not take much time, but it was eventually resolved and they replaced the defective parts.

Negative

We faced a challenge while deploying Dell PowerStore with the partner in implementing NVMe because it was a new offering from Dell and the partner did not have sufficient knowledge to implement it.

During implementation of Dell PowerStore, we upgraded our virtual infrastructure from VMware 7 to VMware 8, and Dell PowerStore offered a new feature for implementing NVMe over Fibre Channel. This had a significant impact on performance and speed, but at that time, it was a new feature and the partner lacked sufficient knowledge to implement it. After conducting research and trials, we eventually implemented it successfully.

To be honest, the pricing of Dell PowerStore is somewhat high, but in terms of features and performance, it is suitable. My advice to other organizations considering Dell PowerStore is to select the suitable model because there is no one model that fits all organizations. Selecting the suitable model for each company and each specific need will be beneficial. I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.

We use Dell PowerStore for backup and for database use in the pharmacy industry. We are not clustering a lot of appliances together with Dell PowerStore. Dell PowerStore helps us consolidate 100% of our data, and we have a backup contracting in the cloud.

Next year, we are planning to make a recovery station with Dell PowerStore, a power station located in another province, another state of Argentina. We are building the premise right now to locate the server in this location. We can use all Dell servers to make a recovery station for data and applications.

The features I like most about Dell PowerStore are the reliability, the time, and the performance. Reliability is very, very, very good.

The environment control in our data center affects Dell PowerStore servers significantly, as we have the servers in conditions required for humidity, temperature, and dust to be very controlled. When the servers are under these conditions, they are durable and predictable. We have a new UPS and controller supply for the current to the servers with filters, and it works very well with Schneider UPS.

We are not currently using deduplication or compression technologies with Dell PowerStore, and at this moment, we have no data about the technology from the recovery technology. In the next month, we might have a decision on the technology to be used. We have SAP offering tools for backing up the databases, and we might be using the SAP tools.

I have four years of experience with Dell PowerStore.

My experience with Dell helping me set up is very good, and the servers are very hard to break. It is a good machine to do the job.

I do not have the exact data on the ability to add capacity in single drive increments versus the drive packs with Dell PowerStore. If you would like, you can send me an email with the precise data and I will reply as soon as I have the exact models and capacities.

I would rate Dell support for Dell PowerStore as a ten, but we have support via a dealer in Cordoba, from five hundred kilometers from Tucumán. We have a contract service based on demand. The basic maintenance is done in-house, and it is very easy, just the filters. The software maintenance is contracted; for SAP, it is contracted via a consulting firm, and for Oracle, it is contracted via a supplier in Austria. All third-party. The little parts are maintained in-house. We do not have a contract with Dell directly, only through a representative.

Positive

The company evaluated changing to IBM, but IBM was discarded, and we bought a new set of servers four months ago. The decision to discard IBM as a potential replacement was primarily economically driven, and the technology involved in the IBM servers is not what we are familiar with. We are using SAP in ERP and using a version, a special version of Linux and Oracle in some parts of the business. Migrating the data, the server, and the application to another server with IBM is very hard. IBM is a good server, just not for us. Another industry might be better, but for us, Dell is better. Dell is a little more economical, not so expensive, and the service contract with IBM is very expensive from Argentina, and the ROI is better in Dell.

The initial setup of Dell PowerStore was contracted to a consulting firm from Dell directly, and the server was configured remotely.

The price of Dell PowerStore is balanced in cost versus performance. The quality should not be compromised for the price. You get what you pay for.

I do not have the model of Dell PowerStore in mind right now. I do not have data on using the lifecycle extension to upgrade to a next-generation product. My experience with Dell PowerStore deployment is that it is very easy. I would rate this review an eight overall.

I don't use Dell PowerStore myself, but we sell it, set it up for customers, and we are also the best certified, Europe-wide, I think, also for the PowerStore area with Bechtle.

You need block storage whenever you want to give your virtual machines storage where the hard drives are essentially located. For that you rather need block storage, or for databases.

The challenge with Dell PowerStore was MetroCluster, so recently it's been feature-wise MetroCluster over Fibre Channel. I think with the new update, Dell PowerStore has that now as well, and there was a discussion going on for years where people said Fibre Channel is a very German topic and people prefer to use Ethernet. The Americans recently realized they would develop this, and they even introduced the feature for Bechtle as well.

I consider the active-active MetroCluster the most valuable function on Dell PowerStore.

To growth and business success, Dell PowerStore contributes definitely because the appliances have these expansion enclosures and scale-up and scale-out work pretty well with Dell PowerStore, up to a certain degree. Ultimately the machines themselves are also very powerful. I think especially in growth phases, small and medium-sized businesses benefit from the fact that because it has a dual-controller architecture, both controllers run simultaneously and also work accordingly. They get an extremely good package for the money they invest.

The things where Dell PowerStore should be improved have now been improved and are being introduced with the new update.

Then it's actually great regarding everything with Dell PowerStore. You can always talk about the price.

For a rating of ten, what's missing is knowing quite reliably that you end up with the right support team for your problem because way too often you have a problem, call support, and then end up with people who repair laptops. They say they have no idea. The last time I had to do a major troubleshooting, you had to somehow go to Dell America, or I think you get routed via Ireland or something. That's sometimes a bit complicated, and if everything were German-speaking, that would of course be even better, but you can't always expect that.

I have been working in my field for three years.

I wouldn't know what could keep up with Dell PowerStore regarding stability and reliability.

On a scale from one to ten regarding stability and reliability, I would rate it a ten.

I find Dell's support great. I can't imagine a time when they said no idea, go look somewhere else.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it a nine.

Positive

From other manufacturers, I consider Dell PowerStore alongside something similar to NetApp FAS and Pure Storage, which is also in the block storage area. Every manufacturer has something going for them, but Dell definitely offers the best overall package.

Quality has its price regarding Dell PowerStore. The feature set of Dell PowerStore is so competitive that it can easily put the market admirers in its pocket and simply represents a better product.

I actually haven't really dealt with licensing that much yet.

The network is always a big thing with implementations of Dell PowerStore because especially Dell PowerStore with the network—you want jumbo frames, and on Dell networks they're set a bit differently on the switches.

Regarding AI initiatives, I'd say quite good, because not everyone has a manual in their head on how to use Dell PowerStore. If you can use AI to do certain things for you and to troubleshoot, I think that's quite good.

I would rate this review a nine overall.