Any advice re Dell PowerMax? We are looking at Unity and PowerMax, and also HPE.

The PowerMax NVMe is the high-end storage fromDellEMC it can provide up to 10M IOPS, however, if you need less, you can go with the new Unity XT which is going to have NVMe as well.

The new Unity XT is going to be ready for order in June 2019.

I have used all, EMC, and HPE 3Par, VNX, Unity, etc. All are OK. But for long term Flash Storage, I would take a look at Hitachi F Series. Best reliability hands down and they provide non-disruptive migrations, no server downtime, no scheduling with users, etc. NDM makes Hitachi a no brainer.

Many insightful answers already provided.

I would just add the following based on my experience. With so many employees an located in different places, its important for you to list the issues being encountered with the present setup, in addition of the need to upgrade, of course :

- Latency -if being experienced generally or specifically to a location as this may indicate a network issue and this is better solved before the upgrade to new storage in order not to disappoint users

-Type of need : analytics/ Big data, classical operational transactions, archiving - in this case you may go for Tiering ( that is have NVMe as the top Tier and SSD as Tier 2). Users are normally demanding but given the costs in a time of budgetary cuts, better offer them different Tiers with front end ones data residing on the better Tier

- Finally, also make sure you have some well structured storage network as you don't want some big fat slow Database VMs located in one of your data centers impacting on the performance of your leaner VMs provisioned on NVMe.

Hello Robert,
What you need to know is in the world of storage infrastructure all the constructor offers a portfolio group by categories like Entry Level Storage, Midrange Storage, Enterprise storage
PowerMax is an enterprise storage on the DELL EMC portfolio
Enterprise storage is usually used for Mission critical Application where the availability required is 99,9999%. With enterprise storage you can manage approximatively 15Millions of IOPS which are very important when you want to take decision to consolidation storage.
Personally, if you cannot expect to reach Millions of IOPS I recommend to go to DELL EMC Unity XT, otherwise move forward to Power Max
PowerMax offer many features like SLO for categories of Application (Diamond, Gold, Silver)
 Diamond latency < 1ms
 Gold Latency >1ms
 Silver Latency >10ms, <20ms
You have also FastVP to move Hot Data to the fastest TIER storage
Physically PowerMax use a Virtual matrix to interconnect all the Engine which can reach 8 depending of the model
Midrange storage use only two controller and provide you and availability of 99,999%
Unity XT is better than HPE MSA or 3PAR
If you want other informations you can contact me

Thank you for posting your question. I would definitely take a look at HPR Primera which is designed from the ground up for NVMe and SCM. HPE Primera is the follow-on from HPE 3PAR although advancements in it's design architecture and capabilities make it actually a new product with HPE 3PAR DNA. With a 100% Availability Guarantee and InfoSight and the Primera Architecture, you'll have the capacity, performance and availability you need moving forward. You'll also have deep insight into what is happening with your storage, what will or might happen with your storage and what could have happened with your storage with InfoSight. InfoSight takes telemetry data from across the entire stack to predict, detect and resolve issues before they affect your storage. www.hpe.com/us/en/storage/hpe-primera.html

On the NDM front, Dell EMC has provided simplified non-disruptive migrations to PowerMax and VMAX for some time. Customers have migrated over 100PB of capacity from older arrays at this point.

Does PowerMax have storage virtualization for external storage as part of the package?