Dell PowerStore Reviews

We use the PowerStore for our development environment. The frame is a repository for all our VMware infrastructure data stores and the applications that live on those data stores are mainly real-time voice applications in call centers.

We use it with Cisco switches and it's pure block only.

Thanks to the duplication and data savings, we have a lot of capacity available to us in the PowerStore. That lets us use and consume logical capacity, which can be done very quickly compared to having to install physical resources inside the PowerStore. The data reduction process is very efficient resulting in very high data reduction if you compare the PowerStore to legacy frames from Dell EMC. This is a very good benefit for us. We were able to very quickly connect new servers and instantly have capacity on the frame because of the data reduction. Moving forward, we can add more disks inside. We plan to have seven drives added in the coming weeks. So we are able to independently add servers, even if we don't have the actual physical capacity on the frame itself.

We have also seen a lot of savings because of the data reduction efficiency, which is currently 4:1 or 5:1.

We will also decommission old frames, and the maintenance contracts on those frames are very expensive. We will save some money as a result and we will also realize some power savings. We also have some environmental-related "green" engagements in Orange, and PowerStore is helping us go in that direction.

There are also space savings because the old frames are using a full rack while the PowerStore is only a 2U unit with almost the same amount of data being stored on it. That is very good. 

So it will save us floor space, energy, and money on maintenance contracts.

Our development team is very happy with us, from an admin perspective. When they query us for more capacity, we are very quick to respond and provide them with resources. If they want to deploy new machines, for example, we can quickly assign new data stores that those VMs will rely on. We have saved a lot of time thanks to the PowerStore.

And because the performance of the PowerStore is very high, we can connect many servers on the same frame, instead of having to multiply frames, side-by-side, to get enough power to serve our IOPS. We are working on real-time applications, so we can't afford a response time of more than 10 milliseconds or 15 milliseconds as a maximum. We can't support a greater lag in a call center. The PowerStore now is less than a millisecond, and that is with more load on it. On one VNX we have two or three VMware clusters with four or five ESXis per cluster. On the PowerStore I have, say, 10 clusters and each has about eight ESXis.

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.

I use it to solve a problem for a customer when he has a big VMware ESX environment with virtualization. You can solve a big problem with money or a lot of hardware since you can take the virtualization from PowerStore. Inside PowerStore, on the operating system level, you can use virtualization with VMware ESX or something like it. So, you don't need any hardware.

My company does backups and security. We use a lot of OEMs. We use Dell because they have the strongest product, especially in Israel.

Hybrid environments are very important for our disaster recovery issues. By default, we have 50% to the public cloud, with either Azure or AWS, and 50% on-prem. If it is on-prem, then it is a PowerStore. In Israel, 90% is deployed on-premises.

PowerStore is used in Israeli universities since they have big environments with a lot of vendors. They take all the versions from the 500 to the 3000. It is also used in IT companies with 1,000 or 2,000 employees that have a lot of traffic with heavy loads. There are a lot of people in Israel who love to work with Dell.

It provides a big benefit when upgrading a new VMware environment. For example, in a big environment with 10 to 30 ESXs, you can take everything and put that into PowerStore. So, it is cost-effective, which is very important and has been massive for us. You reduce almost 80% from the hardware and work directly from PowerStore. Building hardware, especially in a big VMware environment, is a big issue for my organization.

It brings us a lot of security, creating security between the containers. Then, we can separate an environment for security. You have IDS, IPS, the firewall, etc., but if you take the environment that you built on the containers then it creates a different security.

I use the security between the rack server and PowerStore. Or, we use a connection with the fiber channel. It also separates the network from the SAN storage. This is the most important security when you are connecting storage to PowerStore for any environment.

I use it in the financial sector for banking, specifically for core banking applications, to serve our applications. We served different types of customers, ranging from oil and gas to the financial sector, education, and healthcare. We deployed Dell PowerStore in different industry segments, such as manufacturing and retail, for example.

The most impactful benefit is the data reduction and the deduplication.

Replication is easy to implement, and you don't need higher bandwidth to do replication across sites. It's quite useful.

I have implemented Dell PowerStore primarily for use cases involving straight-up service in virtualization, which includes fewer VDIs and more generic services.

The solution's most valuable feature is that the full NVMe offers great latency, which is the most effective way to give our customers the benefits of all-flash storage, especially since they won't really notice the bandwidth more than the latency.

The challenges my company was trying to address with the implementation of Dell PowerStore revolve around floor space saving. In Germany, one mostly has to deal with a conservative customer base. If there is a storage that is seven years old and now if one wants to change it, then there are these big machines, with which one can get a lot of terabytes out of it, and that is definitely a big point. When it comes to the area of data reduction, Germany is very conservative, and it may not be possible to reach 4:1 data reduction, but it is still good as the tool's usability is very simple compared to other systems.

Dell PowerStore's ability in the area of overall energy consumption is very good compared to the other systems, which have spinning disks. All-flash storage solutions are a lot more effective, but it is a big concern as energy prices are high. In terms of whether my company could reduce the power consumption with Dell PowerStore, I would say that my company had a use case with a customer around three weeks ago where their old Dell EMC VNX Storage System used to draw about 2500 watts compared to Dell PowerStore which drew about 800 watts, which is a really a big saving looking at the twenty-four hours and seven days of usage of the system.

My organization uses Dell CloudIQ to manage and analyze Dell storage around 50 percent of the time. It makes a lot more sense when one has a lot more Dell hardware because it provides one with a single pane of glass management and an overview of the systems.

After assessing Dell PowerStore's Cyber-resilient data approach to security, I would say that its secure and immutable snapshots are a big feature in Europe. The tool was lacking for quite a time in the area of cyber-resilient data approach to security, but now it has become very good. I think Dell PowerStore is a state-of-the-art system.

I have been able to reduce our organizational footprint and data consolidation using Dell PowerStore, considering that the tool has helped with data reduction by around a 2.5:1 ratio. If I compare the footprint of Dell PowerStore with our company's previously used solution, I would say that the products used in the past did not help with any kind of reduction of data. As a company that has partnerships with different vendors, we have Pure Storage in our portfolio. Pure Storage is better than Dell PowerStore, specifically in the case of data reduction. The algorithm behind Pure Storage performs a bit better, but looking at the price difference, Dell PowerStore is available at a better deal.

The tool is deployed mostly on an on-premises model. The deployment is split into an 80 percent and 20 percent model. Around three to seventeen customers use the tool with VMware, while a few customers use OpenStack.

Dell PowerStore was attached to an SQL Database that needed to have high performance, and since the application was not very well written, the only solution was to put it on flash storage. In my company, we felt that Dell PowerStore stood out for us as a high-performance storage device in the market.

In terms of how the product has helped my organization or my company's customers' organizations, I would say that the product provides its users with the hardware they need to be able to scale and grow their applications. The product is helpful not just from the standpoint of being able to deal with expanding an array's needs but also having the power necessary for the workload.

I use the solution in my company as block storage.

The tool's most valuable features are compression and speed.

The particular models of Dell PowerStore we use in our company are our main storage tools for the commercial insertion business we do. In our company, we Dell PowerStore so that we can store a lot of data in it and the compression is really needed so that we can just have the space.

Regarding the size of my company's environment and how much space we use in the tool, I would say that we use close to 500 terabytes of data.

The product is great in terms of workload consolidation, power efficiency, and performance. The performance increase from the use of Dell Compellent and Dell Isilon is one of the reasons my company picked Dell PowerStore, which is so that we can get the compression and speed that it provides. The tool automatically reduces our workload time. In our company, we used to have job times running into hours, like 12 or 14 hours, and it has now been reduced to two hours because of the tool's speed. Instead of 4:1 data reduction, my company only gets 3:1 data reduction. My company is waiting for the patches and product to proceed with its next release so that we can get the 5:1 data reduction feature.

I use Dell PowerStore's integration capabilities. My company uses VMware on Dell PowerStore.

Dell PowerStore's integration with VMware has been beneficial in areas like speed and compression.

My company has been able to reduce footprint and data consolidation. In my company, we were able to consolidate all of our Barebone Servers onto VMs, and then onto Dell PowerStore. My company has been able to consolidate around sixty different servers along with an equal amount of virtual machines using Dell PowerStore.

I use the solution in my company for the storage of the data in our centralized IT infrastructure.

The benefits my company and I have experienced from the use of the solution revolve around the continuity in operations that the product offers.