Dell PowerVault Reviews

We choose Power Vault when we need some basic storage, which would be deployed just behind the data call, for example, or just directly attached to a server. So it's regularly, it's not for a functional library. It's all basis needed process rate.

We like the simplicity of the environment and the stability of the platform.

The room for improvement lies in the responsiveness and real-time feedback of the web server setup. We could set up the installation through a web server, but it's not very reactive on the web server. For example, when you launch a task, and you don't know exactly if the task has begun or if the task is in progress, or if it's finished. You have to wait for three to five to ten minutes to be sure that the task is running or in progress or finished. So at that point, it's not very good. For the rest, we have a good organization for the platform. And it's working everywhere.

Another area of improvement is duplication. 

I have been working with this solution for 20 years.

The stability is quite good. Once you deploy all the equipment, it's very stable.

The stability also depends on the type of disk that is installed. But in general, this type of equipment is quite stable, and we have not had any problems with it.

You can extend your library. You can add some disks. But you have to rebuild your environment, so it's not very easy. And you can add some other libraries. You can add some cables to extend it, but it's not very easy to do. So it isn't very easy because the technique used to do that is not very easy. You have to work strictly to rebuild all the alignment. So, maybe this is an area of improvement.

There are around 10 to 15 customers using this solution.

The customer service and support are good.

The initial setup is quite easy. It is very intuitive. It is good.

The time taken for the deployment depends on the size of the storage. For a small storage, it could take half a day. For a large storage, the time to format and initialize the disks could take a while. So it could take one or two days.

We have a team of five engineers for the deployment and maintenance of the solution. 

The customers pay for the equipment, and it's not very expensive. There are no additional costs. 

You have to pay at the beginning for the equipment unless the equipment is not the right one. You have not chosen a good one, so you have to change, but you cannot improve some function of that equipment. You can improve the storage and the capacity, but you cannot improve the zone environment, the functional environment.

I would rate the pricing model a nine out of ten, with one being expensive and ten being cheap.

I would advise you to be sure that this type of equipment is the right one because if you want some advanced function, it's not a good one. So, to be sure that it's a good device for their environment. If not, you will not be very happy.

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten.

We use Dell PowerVault for the storage consolidation of SMBs. 

Dell PowerVault offers valuable full flash storage. 

The product is generally stable, but there have been instances, to my knowledge, where we faced issues in the controller during software upgrades. The availability is not at the desired level during these upgrade processes, as we sometimes need to shut down both controllers. This could be an area for improvement.

I have been working with the product for 15 years. 

The product is sufficient for the SMB market. In terms of size, it caters well to SMB needs, providing full flash for production and backup storage with nearline SAS disk.

I haven't contacted technical support yet. However, my customers are less satisfied than before with support. 

I rate the solution's pricing a seven to eight out of ten. 

The product is mostly for small and medium businesses. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

The solution is suited for small companies. It has a simple setup. If you want to virtualize something, then you buy two hosts.

The solution is stable. It is a simple and better vault solution than Synology.

Many features are coming up for Dell PowerVault. Most of these features are available on the Dell cloud IO platform. They include reporting and monitoring capabilities. While some customers may not need all these features, the platform performs very well for a particular region. It is a good solution with many possibilities for every type of customer. Customers who need more features than PowerVault offers can scale up to the next model, such as PowerStore, PowerScale, vPlex, or Extreme IO. The possibilities are endless.

There could be a starting model where you have a central storage solution for a pretty good price.

I have been using Dell PowerVault for one year.

The solution is a fairly good solution with built-in high availability.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

The solution’s scalability is limited.

If you are limited in sizing, you can add four nodes to one PowerVault cluster. You will get around 82 to 100 terabytes of storage. If you are a company with five users, it would be fairly enough to work with. Still, if you are a company with 5000 users, you are making the wrong decision upfront by buying PowerVault, so don't buy it because it's not scalable for the solution.

The technical support could be better. The problem with Dell support is that you have to explain your case to multiple people, which can be frustrating and time-consuming.

The initial setup is simple. You have to plug into the power, connect to the control, and get started. The deployment of Dell PowerVault depends on the communication method. Different deployment approaches are employed for private channel communication, ISKG integration, or direct-attach storage scenarios.

We have to buy the box along with the support.

Dell PowerVault has an integration tool with Veeam Backup & Application. However, you can purchase Avamar from Dell if you want a more robust integration.

There are some good things about the Dell PowerVault. It is quick and easy to use. However, if you made the wrong decision in choosing your platform and have big expansions in your company, it may not be worth the money. It is reusable for other purposes, but you can combine it.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We have been utilizing Dell PowerVault mainly as a backup solution, for data storage and file-sharing purposes.

Dell PowerVault is a reliable solution that offers good performance and affordability. 

I find this solution to be cost-effective in providing data storage for clients.

There have been situations when our customers requested professional support and the price of that feature is quite high. I believe that customizing the pricing or offering some sort of flexibility regarding professional support would be of great benefit.

We have been using this solution for over seven years. 

PowerVault offers scalable storage capacity for their client's needs. I would rate it very high. 

We are satisfied with the customer support system. They offer a wide range of support models for customers such as basic support that is budget-friendly, but they also provide a professional support solution that is a bit costly.  

Positive

There are many solutions that are available on the market. We have been working with NetApp, QNet, and HPE solutions. All of the mentioned solutions are similar in terms of operating and pricing, so the choice usually depends on a client's request and their preferences. 

The initial setup is really facilitated for the users. 

There is no need for licensing.

I find this product to be a good fit when serving its purpose for our company's needs. But, I believe that HPE is a slightly better solution in terms of performance.

I would rate Dell PowerVault an eight out of ten.

Dell PowerVault is cheap. 

The tool needs to improve its UI. 

I have been working with the solution for 10-15 years. 

I would rate the tool's stability around six to seven out of ten. 

I would rate Dell PowerVault's scalability a five out of ten. 

Dell PowerVault doesn't have much support since it is cheap and cheap. 

Dell PowerVault's setup was easy. 

We have seen ROI with the solution's use.

Dell PowerVault's price is the tool's main attraction. 

I would rate Dell PowerVault a seven out of ten. 

PowerVault is a mid-range model geared toward small and medium-sized businesses, and it's used for billing systems. 

PowerVault comes with free software that performs functions like data deduplication and replication, which is cost-effective and delivers added value to the product.

PowerVault doesn't integrate with Active Directory. Other storage solutions offer SAN and NAS unified storage in a single appliance, but PowerVault is only SAN.

I have used PowerVault for nearly five years. 

I rate PowerVault nine out of 10 for stability. It's easy to deploy and manage. However, I don't give it 10 out of 10 because it doesn't have an active-active controller. It's active-passive. You need to buy two units to deploy it as active-active, but we always deploy one. You don't experience full controller failure every day, so it's stable enough.

PowerVault is scalable. 

Dell has 24/7 support for hardware replacement. In most regions, Dell EMC uses partners to deliver support. The partner will handle the tickets and the spare parts. Of course, the partner will not be the same quality as the vendor. The response times, hardware replacement, delivery, etc. are not as good as direct support from Dell. 

If you are investing in on-premise storage, it's best to keep some spare parts on hand to keep your system running. The general support for questions, concerns, and troubleshooting bugs or firmware issues is excellent. They respond quickly. 

Deploying PowerVault is straightforward and only takes a couple of hours.

I rate PowerVault eight out of 10 for affordability. It's a cost-effective storage solution with a lot of capabilities. You need to pay additional costs for the operating system license and servers to use some of PowerVault's features. At the same time, a small business doesn't need to invest in two sites for SAN and NAS storage or purchase an additional server. 

You can only compare PowerVault to products by other vendors with a similar product line. For example, it would be fair to compare it with HP's enterprise products, but you could look at other storage for small and medium-sized businesses. 

QNAP is another cost-effective solution for SMBs, but PowerVault has more features that customers want, such as tiering, data reduction, compression, and certification. If a customer doesn't need those features, they can go for cheaper options like QNAP.  

I rate Dell PowerVault eight out of 10. It's a good solution for small and medium-sized businesses, but it has performance limitations, and it's hard to integrate. Still, it's a cost-effective solution with great features. 

We are using the solution for storage purposes. We're using it for our storage for VMware.

It is the first time that we are using a tool like this. It helped us improve our whole VMware infrastructure and improve functions there. It has continued to help us up until this point. It also helps to improve our hardware facilities.

The storage has been good. 

It is stable.

Support is helpful.

When it comes to improvement, I don't have much to say. We've had some control issues. Otherwise, over the last five years, it's worked well.

The implementation process takes a while. 

The UI could be better. 

I've used the solution for the last five years. 

We've had some minor stability issues with control. It's largely stable. 

We have added additional storage after around two and a half years. The solution can scale. We were able to almost double capacity and it was fine. 

We have ten to 15 people using the solution and the VMs. 

We are planning to update our complete infrastructure, so we are still thinking about another solution, and considering whether we can go for a vSAN or something like that. We are at that stage now. We're shopping around so we can move away, potentially, from this solution. 

It takes some time to implement the solution. This was the first time we implemented this kind of storage so it has been a bit challenging. Maybe it will be more simple once we have more knowledge from working with it more.  

We implemented it a while ago.

For deployment and maintenance, we have four to five people able to handle tasks. 

We had a partner that assisted us with the implementation process. 

We have seen an ROI. I'd rate it four out of five in terms of the value we've seen.

I'm not sure of the exact cost of the solution. My understanding is that it's somewhere in the middle - not too cheap or too expensive. 

At the time we purchased it, we didn't have pro support. When we have that control issue, we got to recognize the value of pro support, and we have upgraded it since then. The last time we upgraded it was for the pro support. Other than that, there is no additional cost.

We'd recommend the solution to others. 

We'd like some UI improvement, however, other than that, I would rate it seven out of ten.

Our primary use case for PowerVault is for virtualization. It's a target, it's a storage, it's a direct-attached storage for the virtualization. So the nodes are in the FX tool and the storage is the PowerVault, so it is for a virtualization use case.

The most valuable features are that it's easy to set up. I also like the provisioning of storage. It's very easy. 

I would like Dell to improve the configuration of the disk groups. Only one group is expandable. Once you configure the other disk group types, you cannot expand them. It limits scalability. If you want maybe to grow a disk group, you lose information, and then you need to build it up again, which is not a good use case for customers.

Maybe they could upgrade the firmware to allow other kinds of disk groups that are the usual disk group protection. It should let you expand without destroying the disk groups first.

I've been using PowerVault for three years.

PowerVault is a stable product.

The scalability depends on how you configure PowerVault. I can set the disk groups initially, but the scaling is tied to how you configure it. 

There's a particular configuration that you will also need that can limit you. It's a Dell custom configuration for disk grouping that gives you a limitation. It will allow you to scale and add disks so that your disk group will scale. But when you configure it in a conventional way, like configuring, a disk group of rate five, that disk group cannot be expanded.

I rate Dell support six out of 10. Contacting them can be tricky because their contact methods aren't straightforward. In the East African region, we call them by Skype to log a ticket. You can follow up to get an engineer, but it's time-consuming. You can't get something immediately if you need it. 

You contact the person in charge of registering the ticket. They put it in the queue and assign it to an engineer. It would be easier if you could log the tickets online or have support engineers online to attend to customers.

PowerVault is easy to set up. I rate PowerVault 10 out of 10 for ease of setup. It doesn't require a lot of maintenance because it's a simple solution. It can be used as disk-attached storage theoretically. You can use it as a server or connect it to the SAN, so it's a simple solution.

PowerVault starts at $15,000, but it's $25,000 on average, and you pay 10 percent annually based on the size of the area. I rate PowerVault eight out of 10 for affordability. 

I rate PowerVault eight out of 10.

Dell PowerVault is used for backup, recovery, and protection and we primarily use the ML3 and TL1000.

The Dell warranty is the most valuable feature.

In most instances, clients are using Dell PowerVault with tape drives, but we want to transition them away from tape drives due to the risk of data loss. We would prefer our clients to have a more real-time backup solution, both on-site and off-site, with off-site replication. Hopefully, this is a feature that Dell PowerVault can offer in the future.

I have been using Dell PowerVault for over 12 years.

I rate the stability of Dell PowerVault a nine out of ten. 

I rate the scalability of Dell PowerVault an eight out of ten.

The technical support is very responsive on my end, and we haven't had any issues with them. I am quite happy with their service.

Positive

We also collaborate with Nakivo and Systematic when the client requires such solutions.

The deployment is straightforward and takes a maximum of one hour to finish.

The cost, compared to other solutions, is on the higher end. Since Dell does not have a direct presence in our area of operations, it means that clients incur additional costs for equipment warranty.

I would rate Dell PowerVault an eight out of ten due to its cost and the limited availability in our operational area.

Dell PowerVault is currently deployed on-premises, but we are exploring other hybrid options that will enable us to maintain a presence both on-premises and in the cloud.

We have at least ten clients that use Dell PowerVault.

We have reduced the size of our technical team from ten to three. Whenever we need additional personnel, we will hire contractors.

Most of the clients I deal with are Dell's global customers, as they maintain a direct relationship with Dell. Thus, we simply utilize our distribution channel to provide them with the products they desire. They manage their own licensing.

I recommend Dell PowerVault to others.

This is a product we offer to our clients. We've used it in different locations for data storage. Clients use it, for example, as a place to put images. Some use it for virtualization as well.

The pricing is very good. It's relatively cheap and very competitive.

It has good snapshot capabilities.

The product is easy to use.

We can integrate with it quite well.

For us, the initial setup was easy.

It is quite stable.

The scalability is good. 

Technical support is good.

The solution has made a lot of improvements when you compare it now to ten years ago.

Sometimes integrating into a cluster can be difficult as you have to do it manually. 

I've used the solution for five or ten years. 

The stability is good. I'd mark it ten out of ten for small enterprises. Larger organizations may need a larger option. I'd mark stability for a large enterprise at an eight or nine.

The solution is quite scalable. I'd rate the ability to extend ten out of ten. We haven't had issues in that regard. 

It's more suitable for smaller enterprises, for those who want to run an ERP and have some virtualization.

The support is very good. 

I've also worked with HP and Lenovo solutions. Dell is quite competitive when you look at the three. The performance and scalability of Dell are great.

It is easy to set up and implement. It's not complex. 

The pricing is very good. It's very competitive in the market.

I'm a system integrator based out of India.

Depending on the customer requirements, I'd recommend the solution. I'd rate the overall product at an nine out of ten.