Dell PowerMax NVMe Reviews

I use the solution in my company, specifically the SAN storage in the core banking applications for our banks running in Bahrain and Egypt. Most of the projects were the same for billing applications and core banking.

The most valuable features of the solution are its compression ratio, performance, desk support, seamless configuration, the software's native migration, the NDM, and open replicators, which are very good advantages of the tool I experienced during the projects I implemented.

There are so many configurations in the tool that cannot be done by anyone who is not a Dell personnel. Not everything can be done by a partner in the tool. Handling file changes and modifying some configurations regarding mainframe integration with Dell PowerMax cannot be managed by Dell and not the partners.

Dell has to allow partners or give authorization for the partners to do some configuration for Dell PowerMax. If you need to do something in a BIN file, you need to get approval from Dell, but I feel you should be able to do it by yourself as a partner. I don't understand why one needs to engage Dell in every single detail regarding any integrations with mainframe work, integrations with third-party storage, or BIN file changes when you can do it yourself. I also don't understand why a partner should need to engage with Dell and pay a professional service to Dell for everything. Dell can be more friendly, like in the case of PowerStore or PowerScale. There are many storages Dell has been releasing, and even PowerProtect can do everything. Only Dell PowerMax has a lot of problems.

There are some limitations to the tool when you want to migrate data from third-party storage. Not all third-party storages are supported to be connected to Dell PowerMax NVMe. There are so many old operating systems that are no longer supported by Dell PowerMax, like Oracle Solaris 10, Windows 2000, and Windows 8.

I have been using Dell PowerMax NVMe from 2018 or 2019. My company serves as an implementer and a partner of Dell.

It is a very stable solution. The tool is 100 percent stable. The tool is stabler than any other storage in the market.

The tool's scalability is very good because Dell PowerMax supports scaling up configurations, like attaching enclosures to the processors using some links, so it is also quite easy.

I like the solution's technical support. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have used Hitachi's storage, specifically the high-end ones, along with Pure Storage and IBM. SAN storage is still at the top of the pyramid. The difference between Dell and other storage revolves around performance and scalability. Dell PowerMax NVMe offers the best performance compared to other vendors.

The product's initial setup phase is easy. Only a script running in the management module control station is required to deploy the tool, so it is very quite easy.

For racking and stacking, it might need two or more people, especially if the hardware is more and if there are many expansions of multiple engines. It might need two or three people to stack it because it is quite heavy. I think one person is enough if it is only one controller and one expansion.

From an enterprise storage perspective, I think it is an expensive tool, but it is the best product. I think it is expensive and the cost one must pay for the best solution.

I have never gone too deep to figure out the need to use the end to end NVMe technology in PowerMax but I was suffering for the past three or four years. Many customers share Dell PowerMax because they think it is an NVMe, but the switches and servers connected to PowerMax weren't supporting NVMe. We weren't taking advantage of the feature itself in PowerMax because the servers and switches weren't NVMe- supported appliances.

I have not used the tool's real-time machine-learning capability.

Most of the maintenance involves replacing ports, which can be replaceable. When it comes to engines and modules and something big like the processor or something, we need a customer engineer from Dell or an authorized partner to help us.

The tool can support AI because it offers the maximum performance that you can get from a SAN or enterprise storage. If the customer wants to use some AI applications, I think Dell PowerMax NVME is sufficient for all the computing.

I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

It's our primary storage and it replaced some older and slower storage.

The most valuable aspects include the remote replication features. It allows us to protect our data using different data centers and replicate bi-directionally between our two main data centers.

Simpler management would probably be my biggest ask. Some of the management features could be simplified and that's probably the main thing they need to address.

I've been using this product for three years. 

It's very stable.

We do have two main data centers and we have a PowerMax in each one. It is our primary storage so pretty much everything we have is on it.

We do not plan to increase usage at this time.

They need to make it easier to get to higher levels of support.

Positive

We previously used other Dell products, such as the BNXs and XtremIO. 

We switched mainly to gain access to the top-of-the-line model and we had more money to spend.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward.

It's a multi-step process. We had a hardware guy come out for a day and install it. Then a couple of weeks later, an implementation person set some things up. We slowly phased it in over a month or so.

There's not a lot of maintenance. It's usually just me, or, if I need to do a code upgrade, I just call down.

From Dell, there was a couple of hardware personnel and then an implementer. From my side, it was just me and one other staff member.

It's hard to quantify ROI for me. I'm not an accountant.

They're finally getting the licensing right where it's not a la carte so much anymore. That said, it is pretty expensive. 

We evaluated products from Pure, NetApp, and Kaminario.

I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I am the solution administrator for Telcel. I use it to analyze the host and for data availability. It is a useful tool for me. I use it a lot every day. It is used for mission-critical operations.

We use the PowerMax SRDF/Metro Smart DR to replicate information on some servers that are important to our company. We use it as a backup from each box and it helps to reduce our storage costs.

It is important that the product provides NVMe scale-out capabilities. We support many things with the product and we need to know what the architecture is. It makes things very simple for us.

The data security and availability are pretty good. We have many clients connecting to the box, which means security is very important. This is true when it comes to remote support. The compliance is very good.

The performance is very good on our servers. It's superior. And the QoS capabilities for providing work congestion protection are also important because about 99 percent of our servers are production servers.

I have been using Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe for about four years.

It's very stable. 

We have had some trouble with the VMAX-to-PowerMax migration, but the VMAX box will be powered down after the migration. The PowerMax boxes are working fine and we don't have any issues with them.

We plan to increase our usage of the product.

Dell EMC's technical support is pretty good.

Initially, we had Dell EMC VMAX 800 and then VMAX 20K and 40K all-flash. We have recently installed a couple of PowerMax 8000s, and our migration program includes going from VMAX 20K to the PowerMax 2000 and 8000.

The setup was pretty easy. We are a team of three people who handle storage and the deployment was not complex. We had no problem with it. It took us about eight hours.

We received help from EPS Consulting.

We use the PowerMax SRDF/Metro Smart DR, and the bandwidth is excellent but the equipment is in the same location.

Overall, I don't see much that they need to do to improve the product. It's very good.

Our clients are using PowerMax for scaling, for example, for cases with banking details and public records. They're already using it on the enterprise level. Moreover, the clients need to use strong and more expensive batteries to meet all the different tool groups and applications that are running on it. This solution provides flexibility to handle huge amounts of data, even with different sites and branches. 

Some features could be better. I think if we can integrate PowerMax with the public cloud, it would be safer as we can have the service without any data on-premises or in the public or hybrid cloud.

And we can remove all the data from on-premises and the public cloud. This would make migration and data recovery quicker.

There is room for improvement in terms of integration with various service providers for public clouds. It would be beneficial to integrate with AWS, Azure, Microsoft, Oracle Cloud, and other service providers. 

This integration would enable a more comprehensive and open solution, catering to multiple vendors and applications, particularly in Azure cloud. This would enhance the overall customer experience and provide more flexibility.

We are working with the PowerMax 2000 and PowerMax 8000. We have been stable with multiple customers for several years, ranging from two years to more.

It is a very stable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten. 

In terms of percentage, we can give it a nine for its performance. Nine out of ten. Our clients are different businesses with varying infrastructures and different project sizes. 

They fall into the medium budget category and have multiple choices. Some projects are huge, covering different branches or partnerships, including public projects. So we can definitely showcase this product in an enterprise environment.

The customer service and support team is very good. Whenever I open a case with Dell, they are available to assist us at any time. I'm very satisfied with the support team.

Positive

The initial setup is easy. The deployment depends on the infrastructure sizing, the number of clusters, and the amount of data. For example, you need to consider if it is greenfield infrastructure or if there is a migration from the existing infrastructure to the new solution. This calculation is regarding the solution and the infrastructure savings.

The solution has already been decided with the technical team from our side. But there are other infrastructure elements we need to migrate, providing value. It may require some downtime, so it might take multiple days.

This product's solution is already flexible, and we can implement it in a few hours. It's already adaptable for implementation. And already, some of our customers have mentioned the product and its capability to use it.

An implementation engineer, as a technical engineer, will assist with the technical configuration. There are multiple choices. We might need one engineer for each product, depending on the integration. And for the cluster, it's usually multiple engineers. It's a team effort.

Moreover, when it comes to maintenance, if we are already using it, we can raise any new issues and open cases with the vendor's billing team to double-check. For example, if there is any issue with one or two ports, we can utilize this feature.

The pricing depends on the integration and the solution required. It can be handled with the configurator, and it always ensures minimal specifications at the minimum cost to meet customer needs. It's already cost-effective compared to other vendors. So, the price is okay.

I would recommend using the solution. We have implemented it in a price-sensitive environment, especially for small businesses. I recommend this product for its specific use case, which is related to our SQL data, and banking accounting. This product handles this case well. 

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

We are using the PowerMax for our core banking solution, ERP, and our payment systems, as well as middleware, ATM, and the most critical banking systems.

The main improvement for us is that we have seen up to 12x performance improvements after moving from earlier, mid-range Dell EMC storage to PowerMax. Some of our reports, which were long-running, are now completed in a few minutes. Something that would take two hours is completed in 15 minutes and that has improved productivity. 

We also used to get timeouts from our storage, but now, after migrating to the PowerMax, there are no timeouts because the latencies are in microseconds, compared to the milliseconds of our old solution.

Our bandwidth requirements have been reduced because of the compression and the dedupe that we are getting with the built-in SRDF. It is bandwidth-optimized. And the best part is the reverse replication. Suppose you activate your DR. When you have to come back to the main array, only the changes are synced. That is unlike many other products. Here, only the changed tracks need to be updated, making the reverse replication very fast.

Also, by enabling the compression and deduplication, we get a very good level of compression and dedupe, of 4:1, which means if you have 40 terabytes, you only need to buy 10 terabytes. There are cost savings there. And by default, thin provisioning is in place, which also gives you at least a 40 percent reduction. And because of the bandwidth optimization, the link required for the DR replication is also reduced, meaning you are saving on the bandwidth costs. We have easily saved 50 percent.

Overall, you are getting very high-performing and reliable storage.

The most important feature is the performance, because we have four directors, all of them Active-Active. (PowerMax directors support multiple functions including front-end I/O modules).

It is highly available because it has multiple controllers. All of them are unlike some of the traditional storage arrays, where you assign certain LUNs to certain controllers. Here, everything is Active-Active. You don't assign a particular disk or LUN to a particular controller. All the controllers are servicing all of the LUNs. So from an availability point of view, we don't even know if a particular controller or director has failed. And all the spare part replacement, including controllers, can be done online while systems are working. We don't need to do it during off-peak hours. We can do so during normal working hours because the performance you get from the service, due to the other controllers, is enough to take care of any failed components.

There is also a Call Home facility configured, so the system can send out alerts to the Dell EMC support team. They can dispatch spare parts based on these alerts, so it is a fully integrated system.

Another valuable feature is the DR replication technology, which is based on the Dell EMC SRDF solution. It provides a very good level of near-real-time replication. It supports synchronous as well as asynchronous. When it comes to activating the DR, it is very easy.

Then there are the compression and deduplication which are always on. We get more than 4:1 capacity savings using them. The efficiency benefits from compression and deduplication are through a specialized hardware module within the storage itself, and that means there is no overhead to the compression and dedupe.

In addition, the solution supports IBM Power Systems, Solaris, VMware—almost everything is supported. That's important to us because we are using multiple hardware flavors including IBM Power Systems, SPARC machines, and HPE Onyx. All of these are different classes of machines, and we have different operating systems. We have Linux and Windows on physical and we have it running on VMware. Oracle virtualization is also supported. It supports a wide combination of specialized technologies and hardware.

And the built-in QoS capabilities enable you to drill down to any particular QoS levels and define the type of performance you'll have: diamond, platinum, or gold. The result is that different performance levels can be set for individual disks. Using the QoS functionality, we can vary the performance or prioritize it based on the criticality of the performance needs.

Another nice feature is the CloudIQ app. You can even monitor things using the app on your mobile. Every five minutes, the performance statistics and the system diagnosis data are sent to the cloud and you can access them sitting anywhere. You get these statistics at your fingertips.

Although they call it unified storage where you have SAN and NAS, with a NAS implementation on top of a SAN, the NAS implementation is a little complicated and clumsy. As SAN, as block storage, it is very powerful. However, even though NAS is provided as a feature, I don't think many customers will be using a PowerMax as a NAS because NAS is normally meant for file servers or some kind of archival storage. If they could provide a very good NAS implementation, it would be better, so that customers don't have to look for other simple solutions for NAS.

I have been using Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe for one and a half years.

We don't have any issues with the stability. It is rock-solid.

It is scalable. We recently did an upgrade. You can keep on adding disks within a shelf or even attach additional shelves.

Also, the NVMe scale-out capabilities are very important. Although we are using SSD, all-flash drives, the backend is NVMe. It is quite fast. The IOPS requirements will never reach the max. It is also future-looking storage because it supports storage class memory (SCM). That is where you can utilize the full benefits of the storage solution. Currently, we are not using SCM because it is quite expensive. At the moment, we don't need it, but the storage backend is already NVMe and the controllers are connected using InfiniBand for very high bandwidth.

It's also very easy to add or expand disks in very few steps. Everything can be done online, even the firmware updates, meaning that you don't need any downtime. It's all seamless.

Dell EMC's technical support is excellent. The backend support is very strong, just like the implementation team. They have a dedicated team for PowerMax, like they used to have for VMAX or Symmetrix.

Positive

We were using a Dell EMC mid-range storage solution before. 

It is a complex system, but the engineers and architects behind the implementation are well-versed. They're very technically competent. They're on top of the prerequisites, and there are a lot of those. For a first-timer customer the setup will be difficult, but they will help you. The implementation team is very strong. They're very clear on what needs to be done and how to do it. For us, it was a very clean implementation. We didn't have any hiccups.

It is not a one-day job. It is not a very easy installation. It requires the experts. But Dell EMC makes sure that you get a certified, real expert to do the implementation. It doesn't get done through a partner. Dell EMC themselves send their engineers for the installation.

It is high-end storage and it is a bit expensive, but it is doing what it is meant for: running business-critical applications or latency-sensitive applications like ATM payments, and those kinds of core banking systems.

There may be customers who don't utilize all the compression features of competing products, thinking they may slow the system down. I know certain customers who have bought competing products, but they keep the compression and deduplication disabled by default, or even the encryption, because they create additional overhead. That means that with those solutions, you need to have more capacity than what you need with PowerMax. The guarantee with PowerMax is that there is no compromise on performance, even if you enable compression, deduplication, and encryption.

This particular model of storage is considered Tier 0 storage for the most mission-critical applications, the applications that require a very high level of reliability and low latency. It's also for the types of applications that require real-time replication across different sites. The solution is suitable for mission-critical applications and not for archiving, because it is not cheap.

We are the centralized IT department for a state government and we service every agency in the state. That includes anything from the state police down to DNR, parks, unemployment, and DHHS. There is a wide variety of use cases, but the big hitters on it are Oracle and SQL databases.

It's on-prem. It's in two different data centers that are 60 miles apart and we're doing a synchronous replication between the data centers.

There are so many ways it has helped. It provides efficiencies through compression and it provides high availability through its solid-state drives. We literally turn it on and it does its thing.

When it comes to storage provisioning, a lot of it has been automated. This was true even prior to PowerMax, back with the VMAX. The days of provisioning the mapping and masking, and doing all those things manually, are over. A lot of that is automated through their tools. Overall, that automation is saving us about four hours a week.

What is most valuable to us is the fact that it has multiple engines, and each of those engines works in conjunction in a grid environment. That's important to us because we have so many different use cases. One example might be that a state trooper pulls someone over at 2 o'clock on Sunday morning and wants to go into the LEIN system, which is the law enforcement information network. He wants to see who this person is that he has pulled over and gather as much information as he can on that person. We can't predict when he's going to pull someone over, nor can we predict when backups are actually going to be taken against the volume that he's going to for that information. The PowerMax allows us to do backups of that volume at the same time that he is looking up the data he needs, and there's no impact on performance at all.

The performance is very good. Our predominant workloads are all less than 5 milliseconds and it's most common to have a sub-1-millisecond response time for our applications. In terms of efficiency, we've turned on compression and we're able to get as high as two-to-one compression on our workloads, on average. Some workloads can't compress and some can compress better, but on average, we're a little bit more than two-to-one.

The solution’s built-in QoS capabilities for providing workload congestion protection work pretty well because we actually don't even turn on the service level options. We leave it to the default settings and allow it to decide the performance. We don't enforce the Platinum, Gold, or Silver QoS levels. We just let the array handle it all, and it does so.

We also use VPLEX Metro, which is a separate service offering from Dell EMC. It does SRDF-like things, but it's really SRDF on steroids. Of course it copies data from one data center to the other, but with the VPLEX, not only does it copy it synchronously, but it also has coherent caching between both data centers. That means we are literally in an Active-Active mode. For instance, we can dynamically move a VMware host that is in one data center to another data center, and we're not just doing vMotion with the host. The data is already in there at the other data center as well. It's all seamless. We don't have to stop SRDF and remount it on another drive. It's already there.

We have been using Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe ever since it was brought to market, so it's been about three or four years.

It's rock-solid with 100 hundred percent uptime. We've never had a disruption on our PowerMax platform. It's high availability. And we can make changes, such as upgrading the code, while it's running. There's no such thing as going offline to do a service or maintenance procedure. It's all done online and the customers are working away at the same time.

The scalability is great. VPLEX is something like a federation for all our PowerMaxs. We will put a PowerMax in, give it all to VPLEX to manage, and we're good to go.

We typically see a 10 to 20 percent growth rate, year to year. To keep up with that, in a multi-petabyte environment, 10 percent is quite a lot. We buy two a year, and that's a conservative estimate.

The fact that PowerMax provides NVMe scale-out capabilities is important from the standpoint of its internal workings, but the customer data doesn't really go on the NVMe technology. At this point, we don't have any use cases for NVMe performance for any of our applications. But that will change in the future. Everything is going to go to in-memory. Compute and storage: everything's going to be on a chip.

Their technical support is really good. We are using one of their monitoring tools and it phones home to the "mothership" in Massachusetts. That means they get real-time alerts or performance indicators. If a drive has exceeded a threshold five times in the last week, they will actually come out and preemptively replace that drive before it fails.

We were a VMAX customer, so when they changed their service offering from VMAX to PowerMax, that's when we started adopting it. In a sense, PowerMax is the first of its kind for us. But we have been a long-time customer. We started with their DMX almost 20 years ago.

For us, it's straightforward to set up. We've been doing this for a long time, so it's really easy for us to set up a new array in a data center. We had one that hit the dock about two weeks ago and it's already up and running and provisioning to customers. 

NetApp will say, "Well, that's two weeks. We can come in and do it in one day." But we explain, "No, you can't because there are internal processes that we have to go through." Every piece of equipment we get, even the PowerMax, goes through its paces. We don't just turn it on and hope for the best. We check and double-check all our configuration settings. But overall, PowerMax is easy to set up. They configure it at the factory, deliver it, put it in the data center, and then we hook it to our Fibre Channel fabric and Ethernet fabrics and we're good to go. Competitors will say, "Well, it's so much easier to migrate from one array to another on our platform, versus the Dell EMCs." That's not necessarily true. We have to look at what they are actually measuring and whether we are comparing apples to apples.

With VPLEX, we can do migrations on-the-fly, live. It's no longer a six-month to one-year effort to get off of one array and move to another. We just bring the other array in, present it to VPLEX, and VPLEX takes it from there.

For a new deployment of one PowerMax, we need one FTE. On a day-to-day basis, to manage all of our PowerMaxs, we need three FTEs. But that is across two different data centers with a total of 10 PowerMax/VMAX units. It's a pretty big installation. Across our organization we have 55,000 employees. Since our HR is on this solution, and that's how people get paid, it's like we have 55,000 people using it, in a sense. Most access is through an application, but in another sense, it's used by pretty much everybody in the state.

On a typical purchase, the ROI is four years. That's when we get our money back. We charge for our service and we have a rate per GB. Our business model is set up to only recover our costs because we're government. We can't make a profit on it.

One area for improvement, one that everybody always comes to, is price. Although we get a good discount through Dell EMC, it's still quite expensive to purchase these big arrays. I buy in volumes of petabytes at a time. It's not unusual for me to have a $6 million spend. While that is petabytes of data, it always raises eyebrows when you spend that kind of money. But what I ask those raised eyebrows is, "Okay, fine. Which of the agencies in the state do you not want to give more storage to? Everybody's using it."

Many competitive vendors will come to us and say, "We have a study where we went into a company and we were able to reduce their costs by 600 percent." Of course, these are salespeople and they're speaking to two levels above me, and they buy into that and say, "Yeah, let's have them come in and talk to us." They come in and talk to us and when we get to the stage where we say, "Here's a typical configuration. Give us a quote for that type of configuration." When we compare it to the cost that we're getting from Dell EMC after the discount, it's plus or minus 5 percent. There really isn't that big of a delta compared to our pricing. This is a high-end device. For us, the pricing doesn't make Dell EMC uncompetitive.

NetApp and Pure Storage are the biggest ones we looked at for block storage. 

For other storage, like file, print, and object , there are a dozen others that are always trying to differentiate themselves on price. They want to do a proof of concept and we do those with them. But what I'll tell them up front is, "I know your products are great. They're going to work great in our lab. You don't really have to send me a piece of equipment for me to test it. I know it's going to work. You guys wouldn't be in business if they didn't work. So let's get down to the cost of it." And when we get to the cost of it, it's just not compelling enough to make a switch.

But as far as features go, I don't find there is a huge difference.

The biggest lesson I've learned using PowerMax is to trust it. For example, with the QoS, don't try and overthink this. It's engineered to take on diverse and disparate workloads. Put it in, watch it for a little bit, and if you don't absolutely need to turn on all the QoS, don't. Let it do its thing.

Don't be shocked by the price per GB. Look at your cost of transactions or IOPS. The days of looking at storage as so much per GB are over. It's how much workload you can pass through that storage device.

Overall, PowerMax is ideal for storage for enterprise-level, mission-critical IT workloads. That is really its strength, as is its ability to handle disparate workloads. I wouldn't use anything else for these high-end, critical workloads.

I use the solution in my company for mission-critical core banking applications.

If you ask me, technically, the tool is the same as most of the vendors have the same thing. If you ask me about Huawei, I can tell you about the tool's many features.

Dell PowerMax NVMe's advantage is just the support.

The tool's disadvantages are its cost and lack of ease of use. According to the latest market trends, certain technologies are lacking.

The main challenge with the product was to have control over the simultaneous failures of controllers. For recovery, manual intervention is required.

The tool's cost, active controller part, installation, maintenance, scalability, and recovery parts can be considered for improvement.

I have been using Google Cloud for five years. I have a Dell PowerMax NVMe 8000 and a Dell PowerMax NVMe 8500. I was a partner integrator with Dell. I have twenty-four years of storage experience.

It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

It is not a very scalable solution. Other vendors offer much more scalability options than Dell PowerMax NVMe.

There is something called transfer of ownership known as LUN tagging, but other boxes don't offer such a feature.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

The solution's technical support was good, and it is one of the tool's main advantages. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I am also a solution architect for Huawei.

We are talking with one of our vendors and customers, who were keen to get involved with OPSWAT. With most vendors, whenever there is an NFS and compliant storage, all the products offer support. I just wanted to understand why only a few products are listed in Google's support portal.

I have been using Huawei for almost seven and a half years now. Prior to that, I was a business partner of HP and Oracle. I was Dell's partner for almost ten years. Before that, I was IBM's partner for five and a half years.

The product's initial setup phase is okay. If you compare Dell's setup phase, Huawei is convenient and easy to install.

For Dell's installation phase, around two people are required. For Huawei's installation phase, one person is required. Huawei's installation can be managed remotely. I am a solution architect, so I don't do the deployments now.

There is no ROI. I have seen the tool used, and pretty much all the vendors are the same.

The tool is very expensive. I rate the tool's price as a one out of ten.

We are talking with one of our vendors and customers, who were keen to get involved with OPSWAT. With most vendors, whenever there is an NFS and compliant storage, all the products offer support. I just wanted to understand why only a few products are listed in Google's support portal.

The tool has a fully symmetric architecture, so it offers an active controller there. Controller failure is not something that we can withstand, especially if there are two simultaneous controller failures. With the other vendors right now, considering what we are working for, tools can support up to seven controller failures, which is so for any banking operations.

I don't know how the tool's real-time machine-learning capability has impacted our company.

The maintenance of Dell PowerMax NVMe requires companies to have resources along with extensive technology experience. It is the same for any vendor.

I have not really seen any AI features in the tool.

For the technical specifications, I can rate the tool as a seven out of ten.

I rate the overall tool as a seven out of ten.

Our customers are using it for telecom.

The high availability that other systems don't have. In other systems, there is an owner in the storage processes. But for PowerMAX, there is no owner. All the process storage is passed to all nodes without ownership. So, there is no response feature in the storage in PowerMax. In the other systems, there is a response, which is a very nice feature. No systems have such a feature.

The initial setup could be easier.

I have been working with the solution since the last year. 

The PowerMax solution has been very stable, in my experience. I have been using it for four to ten years and have only had two issues related to internal storage processes. One was a planned maintenance issue, and the other was a CBU failure. Both issues were quickly resolved with no data loss. Once again, it's a very nice feature. You can go with the upgrade without storage records. So it will not affect the production servers.

The product is scalable. 

The initial setup is not difficult. But it's not easy to have access to this material. I'm having a problem right now in this implementation in order to find the procedure generator in order to initialize the system. It's not updated on the website. So, sometimes you suffer from getting the material of the software. You need to have a discussion with the support and the way the account team is in order to provide you with such material.

The deployment thing is different from customer to customer. It depends upon the requirements. But it's fairly easy to deploy. The deployment, once initiated, is easy. There is no problem related to that.

I would rate the deployment process of this solution a five out of ten.

The pricing is competitive. I would rate the pricing of the solution a six out of ten.

For the customers, I advise them to test it and check the features because it has very nice features. It has some features that don’t exist in other solutions, such as the migration for the new PowerMax 2500 and 8500. There will be no more data migration except for licensing the nodes and the old nodes and installing the new nodes. It's a very nice feature, and in the future, there will be no technical attachments and no better migration. It will be very easy for them to implement the new solutions in addition to the other solutions. As for the partners, they have to make sure that they have their knowledge and enrich their knowledge in PowerMax because PowerMax is not an easy solution. They have to understand it to implement it easily.

I would rate PowerMax NVMe a nine out of ten.