Dell PowerFlex Reviews

Dell PowerFlex is a one-stop-shop solution. Storage, compute, network, application monitoring, and support cases are all combined into one solution. It's very easy to administer compared to when you have a reference architecture where you need to design and build everything yourself. You would also then have to work with multiple vendors.

Dell PowerFlex is easy to sell as well because it is easy to convince the customer that this is the right product rather than the reference architecture.

The support of containers needs to be improved. At present, it is limited to VMware. There needs to be direct communication with the hardware rather than through a hypervisor.

I have been using Dell PowerFlex for one and a half years.

I would rate Dell PowerFlex's stability at nine out of ten.

The scalability is okay, but it could be better. For linear and horizontal scalability, you will have to add nodes rather than just create separate storage.

The initial setup is straightforward. Within 30 minutes, it can be up and running, and you can create your own virtual machines and apply your own top ten templates.

I would recommend Dell PowerFlex.

The solution is a private cloud hyper-converged infrastructure that is scalable, with highly available computer workloads.

The solution has helped reduce our costs and increase our performance.

The integration with AWS is a valuable feature.

Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement.

I am currently using the solution and I was part of the engineering team that developed Dell PowerFlex.

I give the stability a nine out of ten.

We have seen a return on investment.

The solution is expensive and I give the cost a two out of ten.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

We are customers of Dell and I'm the general manager of our company. 

The solution saves a lot of space in the data center and that is a key advantage for us. The other advantage is the kind of contingency that it provides within itself, the flexibility of utilizing the resources as and when needed. It basically reduces manual effort and increases efficiency, both in terms of space utilization, as well as resource utilization.

I think the kind of restrictions in terms of VMware licensing is frustrating. I might have some spare licenses which I would like to utilize, but it's not possible so it requires purchasing a different license that's locked with a particular box.

I've been using this solution for one year. 

The solution is scalable. It's a consolidated system and we have around 7,000 users. 

We are generally satisfied with the customer support. 

The manpower required for set up is between one and two people. 

I'd like to see better license management with flexibility in terms of license usage.

We considered Nutanix and another product from HP but that was more from an exploration point of view.

I would suggest looking at VxRail rather than PowerFlex. There are some differences between the two and I think we're going to move to VxRail as a future investment.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

I'm an activity manager and work for a company that deals with electrical installations, assisting customers with strategy and IT investments. My job is to be well-acquainted with the various technologies and assist the customer in making the right choices. Options could include hyper-convergence, mass storage, cloud solutions, or big data solutions, those sorts of choices. It's really about explaining the different technologies and options available rather than using them. I'm not an integrator.

In terms of improvements, I think it would help to have easier access to the cost of installing VxRack infrastructure.

I think including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement. This solution is a black box solution, meaning that you don't really know how it works exactly on the inside. A feature that would include that would be helpful.

VxRack and VxRail are more or less the same solutions. VxRack is a more powerful solution than VxRail. People need to think about which technology will work for them. My opinion is that HP Hyperconvergence is a technology that perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power. If a customer has to juggle these two, the hyper-convergence solutions are okay. It's a good solution.

If the need for computing power is more important, we suggest that they focus more on a Software-Defined Storage solution like VMware vSAN or VMware VSA. Either way, the idea is to be able to increase infrastructure with the best efficiency as companies grow. 

I would rate this product a seven out of 10. 

The tool's most valuable features are its price and flexibility. It has high performance. 

The tool needs to improve its storage. It should also make migration to the cloud easier. 

I have been working with the product for eight years. 

I rate Dell PowerFlex's stability as nine out of ten. 

The solution is flexible. I rate its scalability a nine out of ten. 

I have used Cisco before Dell PowerFlex. I am also working with VMware. 

I rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten. 

Our customers are enterprise businesses. Dell PowerFlex's integration depends on the product and its vendors that are being integrated. I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten. 

At the end of the day, VxFlex is for all applications. We normally do a sizing. Then we usually look at the sizing and design it according to its outcome. It's also about applications. You can see what application requirements are.

We're doing a lot of VMware for IT so this solution is really valuable from a VM point of view. We're trying to assist our customers mainly with management because that's what they want. The most important aspects are ease of management, as well as ease of configuration, allowing them to attach additional nodes and resources for the applications.

I think there might be some room for improvement when it comes to pricing because although I know how to convert customers, at the end of the day, it's quite expensive. Sometimes your feature architecture is still coming out much cheaper than hardware costs for your infrastructure.

The guys normally say it's all about your management. If you do a feature architecture with VMware or Hypervisor with the management, you still get a lot of attitude from that as well.

We've been using this solution for the past six years.

I think it's stable. If it's properly installed, you shouldn't see any issues or bugs.

It is scalable. Scalability depends on our customer. In South Africa, our enterprise may be 2,000 users, whereas small customers would be 400 to 500 users. What might be considered small to you, is a medium sized customer for us.

From a maintenance point of view, we normally recommend customers to get a three-year warranty for maintenance and support. Then we know that they're covered and that they will get all the latest and greatest firmware. I normally sell additional man hours to assist the customers as well. That is just to assist by doing health checks on a regular basis for them. I normally sell about eight hours. It all depends on the customer's knowledge of the products. It's between eight and sixteen hours a month, where I normally send an engineer on site to do health checks to see if everything's still fine.

I have not interacted with support myself, but our technical engineers have. I have heard from them that the technical support team is good and always helpful.

Our engineers sometimes complain that it's quite complex and incongruent. You need to make sure of a lot of things. There's a lot of pre-planning that you need to do correctly. if you don't have the correct information, then you can have performance issues on your environment.

With one that we installed, the guys found out that some of the networking was not correct. It took us two weeks just to sort that one out from a networking point of view. Normally as soon as you deliver the stuff onto the customer's site and you have all the information, it can be between two to three weeks to deploy. You will get the customer up and running and he can start using it. However, you need to make sure that you have all the information.

I have a team that provides implementation services.

Make sure that you have all the required information and that you actually do a full assessment before you design or implement a solution. You need to make sure of this so you will get the best possible performance out of the solution. If you don't have the correct information, it's going to take you a bit longer than normal to make sure it's installed correctly and performs in the ultimate areas.

I would rate this as eight out of ten.

We use the solution for mission-critical applications. We have government customers who work in hydrology and meteorology.

We use it for databases. The support team responds quickly.

The storage capability must be improved.

I have been using the solution for one and a half years.

I rate the tool's stability a ten out of ten.

The solution is really scalable. Two government organizations are using the product. We have not had any issues yet.

We used Cisco UCS before. We also have SuperMicro Servers for deployment. We chose to use Dell because of the flexibility and durability of the hardware. Also, the deployment process of Dell is very simple.

The setup process is very simple. It can be deployed within a day. Government applications cannot be deployed on the cloud due to certain regulations.

A Dell engineer did the deployment. He did it within two to three hours. We evaluated it for 24 hours.

The price could be improved. We are service providers. We pay the licensing fee to Dell. Our customers pay us as they use the tool. We have subscribed to two or three services.

I recommend the tool to others. Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Recently we used it in a hybrid setup for infrastructure between the VMs and the physical. Managing such an environment is a little bit tricky. Now, we have now one solution for everything or for the different environments that we have with us with production, disaster recovery, and UAT. Everything gets managed from one platform. Everything is happening from one place instead of just physically. In the past, managing the physical servers alone and then VMs that we have on different versions, just dealing with the different environments was a nightmare. But now since we have everything in one platform, it's much easier, especially since we don't have a very big team. 

So I just needed a simple way to manage things that aligned with the business demands without wasting my time, troubleshooting, and trying to find what the problem was and integrations between the different solutions that we have here and there. Whether it's at a hardware level or software level or network, having everything in one place made my life much easier.

The most valuable feature is the overall integration and just seeing the three different layers which make up the machine software. Altogether, it's something that I would say is much better than any other solution that I have experienced before.

VxRail as a VM, as the extended version of VM, made the solution very powerful, unlike others like Nutanix or HP Synergy or SimpliVity. I can't see any problem other than one thing which is the vendor lock. It means if I want to extend my service if I want to add another stream or another data center and I want to have an integration, I have to have the VxRail bill as a total FCI solution on the other side. That's the only weakness that I see that needs to be improved; with VxRail they need to extend the licenses to any other solution. That's the only thing that I believe though.

On the dashboard itself that I use on a daily basis, I can get most of the information that I want. If I want to have more details or analytics, however, it's a little bit tricky. I'm using one of my resources to keep pulling data from different sources to build custom made reporting for myself. For example, utilization of the different resources on the different servers is there as a part of the dashboard. However, if I want to have the kind of comparison between two different VMs running on the same application, it's a little bit tricky. I'm asking my team to pull data and design it in a different way and send it back and execute it and stuff like that. Exporting data from the dashboard is not very user-friendly. It's just designed in a way that it's going to cover let's say 90%, 80%, of the end-users needs. If you need more sophisticated reporting it's not easy to have.

The solution is very stable. Over the past one and a half years, we did not face any major instance for the services itself. It's a hyper-converged by design. In terms of stability, we only have around 16 nodes, which is medium-sized. But we've never faced any failure in any nodes.

VxRail by design has an under systems scalability for whatever solution is provided for us. During the past one and a half years we just added some network cards just to cover the speed. One of them was a major card on the network cards and was one GB. When we changed the network site to have the switches with two GB, we decided also to upgrade network cards there. It was a very small job and since the solution itself it's scalable, we just did it in one day for all 16 nodes. Scalability is good. 

We have an agreement. It's a critical mission service where the SLA says they have to recover the service within four hours. So far, all the incidents that were opened with Dell directly were from a year and a half ago after the implementation itself. There have only been three tickets.

In terms of our experience on those three tickets, they were not a major or critical event. They were all medium. They call it flexibility three. It's not even one or two. As per the SLA, within 24 hours they had to fix the problem. They ended up fixing the issue within the first three hours. 

Although it was not a critical ticket, the response was great.

We just used pure VM. On HP, on the hardware itself, it was HP and virtualization. It was not a hybrid comparison. It was only a VM solution. We switched to hybrid just to take the features of all the clash kind of stuff that is more I would say sophisticated in the hybrid compared to HCI or other solutions. We moved from converged to hyper-converged. It's the technology itself that lead us to change solutions. VM as a combination isn't as good as VxRail as a total solution.

The deployment was very straightforward. We have four team members who only focus on the environment, on Excel. The system admin also has three team members. Each one has a different area to look at; one for storage, one for virtualization itself, and the other one for the overall health of troubleshooting of the Excel environment. So, one chief and three supporting leads.

When we started this project it was through a partner who did all the migration for us and handled the deployment as well. At that time it was a very small deployment.

In terms of advice, I would say that your success using VxRail would depend on the business itself. For example, if you're a high tech company, VxRail is not going to be a good solution for such a company. The same applies if you are at some software house because you need a very strong kind of computation system. In this case, HP Synergy will be the best total solution. However, if you're environment it doesn't need that high computation, it's either VxRail or Nutanix will be the best solution for anyone.

It depends on your mission. It depends on the business nature itself. For normal businesses, VxRail is a great option. For businesses that need high computation and stuff like that, VxRail will not serve them the way that they want. 

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten.