Dell PowerMax NVMe Reviews

Our primary use case for Power Max is customer data. We host hundreds, if not thousands of applications, large and small, for hundreds of thousands of customers. It's the storage platform for our customers' online presence.

What's not on PowerMax? Because we have hundreds of thousands of customers running thousands and thousands of applications. From the small mom and pop shops running their mission-critical eCommerce site to the major Fortune 500 companies running every major database: Oracle, SQL, MySQL, Postgres, etc. We're running the big database engines, and the database is the holy grail for all online businesses. Therefore, major database applications are very important. Big eCommerce applications for very large brands are running on top of it, as well. We are running everything on it.

The role that data plays in Rackspace is two-fold because we are both a customer and a partner. As a service provider, we are monitoring millions of data points every hour for our customers. We are monitoring the health of their systems: the traditional IT monitoring, CPU, networking, storage, uptime, security, etc. We are gathering all that data and need systems where we can dump that data, then analyze it without fail, knowing that it will be there. PowerMax gives us the latency and capacity that we need at any scale for all the data that we can throw at it.

On the customer side, they are using us and our underlying PowerMax infrastructure for their mission-critical applications to do things with big data, dedupe, and other applications. Our customers are using us for the foundation of their big analytics applications.

There are a lot of ways that PowerMax is helping our organization function. From a storage admin standpoint, there is no longer a need to rely on the command line interface (CLI) to get data which is needed for performance monitoring and troubleshooting. When you use a CLI, you're actually requesting copies of data and impacting the performance of that production's data. With the REST API, we can do things, just ask for it, and there is the info. We are not impacting production systems.

PowerMax specifically is giving us incredible improvements in performance. Significantly decreased the latency, which is different than IOPS. I've been told by the team, "Don't focus on IOPS anymore, it's the latency. Not how fast is the data, but how quick is the data." So, we've seen great performance: Single millisecond type performance, which has been fantastic. 

Another huge benefit of the PowerMax has been the decreasing of our physical footprint. We recently did a consolidation where we went from 58 tiles down to 5. If we had used just the PowerMax, we could have gone from 58 tiles down to 2 tiles, which is huge space savings. If you have 56 newly available floor tiles on a raised floor data center, which you previously had to cool and provide power to, then now, not only are my costs going down, I now have more revenue opportunities because I have more space to put new customers.

My storage engineers are very happy with PowerMax. They are very pleased with the performance, decreased latency, and dependability. From the team, the RESTful API makes management so much easier for them versus the command line interface.

I would like them to continue improving the management tools and continue moving towards a RESTful API versus CLI. 

They should work with the storage engineers to better tweak the management tools to give them improved visibility into their data.

Stability has been fantastic on PowerMax.

Right now, we have zero concerns about scalability. It's running everything we throw at it, and we can't wait to get more.

Our relationship with Dell EMC is fantastic. We have very smart storage engineers, and they in turn work with Dell EMC's very smart storage engineers. We have zero complaints. We don't ever have a question that doesn't get answered.

As a major service provider, who has been working with Dell EMC for well over a decade, hosting mission-critical applications for important brands and businesses, along with some health institutions, where access to data is literally a life or death, we have to go with a system that we can trust without fail. PowerMax has been giving that to us.

One of the things that we learned right away about PowerMax during the setup is that regardless of your awareness of data type, structure, or compression, we starting seeing benefits immediately.

Rackspace is running a 1G, 2G, and 3G Dell EMC storage systems, then we added PowerMax into our array farm. So, we are migrating some data into the new PowerMaxs, and it has been smooth as silk.

I'm going to give PowerMax a ten out of ten just for the savings that I've heard about. From reclaiming data center space which is so tightly constrained these days, it will pay for itself in a short amount of time, which is fantastic. Anything we can do to get more out of our current physical data center space helps us a ton, and PowerMax has helped enable that.

PowerMax is giving us significant improvements in Oracle and VMware. We are seeing between four to eight times improvements in latency, which is serious numbers. 

Look at Dell EMC storage solutions. They have been around for a long time and are time-tested. The R&D department is constantly improving its offerings with better features, better performance, great return on investment for your purchases, and amazing support. Dell EMC bends over backwards to help its partners and customers get what they need out of this stuff. It's time-tested and trusted.

PowerMax gives our storage engineers everything they need to do their jobs successfully.

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.

We currently use PowerMax NVMe for our file server and all our VMs. It is a SAN, so all of our storage or data sits on it. It is just a great storage appliance.

With the SCM memory, it has been set it and forget it. It is being used as a cache drive. There is very little configuration for us to do. We just know that it is working.

PowerMax NVMe's QoS capabilities give us a lot of visibility into taking a look at what could be a potential performance issue. However, because it is so fast, we haven't really noticed any slowdowns from the date of deployment even until today.

It is a very good storage appliance for enterprise-level, mission-critical IT workloads because of its high redundancy, parity drives. It gives us the ability to not worry about our data. Or, if something were to go wrong, e.g., a drive pops, then we have our mission-critical warranty. We get a drive the same day, then get it swapped by the next business day at the latest.

PowerMax NVMe has made it a lot easier to understand how much we are able to provision. It has made it a lot faster to provision new things. 90% of my time for provisioning has been reduced. Also, it has made it very easy to understand and see everything behind it versus the older heritage, where Dell EMC was very convoluted and hard to get working. Things that used to take an hour, probably now take five to 10 minutes.

• The cost of the entire solution
• Their dedupe rates
• Ease of use
• Simplicity

Data availability is very high. Data security is also very good. There are a lot of encryption methods available.

We use the solution’s NVMe SCM storage tier feature. There is almost no overhead or management time involved. It was kind of set it and forget it.

The visibility within the storage resource tools or understanding the utilization of the SCM memory have been pain points. We know they are being used, but it is hard to actually see them within the actual GUI.

Firmware updates are a bit painful because you have to involve their support, as opposed to having the ability to do it yourself. This is probably for the best because you don't want something to go sideways while being the only person working on this and not having external support for it.

We have been using the physical appliance for 2.5 years.

It is a very robust, stable machine. We have had no worries whatsoever.

At this time, scalability is not applicable. I understand it is very easy to scale up. You just add on the drive shelf, then connect it in. That is really it. Now, you have all these drives available to you.

It is being used every single minute of every single day. The IOPs, the throughput data, is about 525 megabytes per second. So, it is actively being used at all times of day.

As time goes on, the usage of it will increase. That is just the nature of it being our primary storage array.

The technical support was very good. There have been no real issues. Any questions we have had, they were able to answer and assist with. There have been no problems whatsoever.

Because it is NVMe, it is extremely fast. It is a lot faster than our old SAN. It is hard to compare it to others in the market, only because we have never owned other products within the same generation. We switched to PowerMax NVMe because of aging hardware.

Prior, we were using a regular 7200 RPM disk. As a result, it was extremely slow. The upgrade to NVMe has been much appreciated by the company. Things that used to take four to five hours are now taking 15 minutes, if that.

It was a pretty complex process in the beginning: migrating data, verifying everything is good to go, standing up our volumes, and things of that nature. Once everything got going, it was a lot easier to understand and manage.

Deployment took about two weeks’ time, not including transfer times. With transfer times, it was closer to a month.

We set up our PowerMax, attached the source to VMware, and then migrated all of our VMs off of our old storage array into the new one. Once we verified everything was good, we turned off the old storage array and went from there.

We did it through Dell EMC ProDeploy, which is their professional services for this type of work. Our experience with them was very good. There were a couple of hiccups here and there, but it was more related to what was shipped to us, opposed to an actual hiccup with the implementation process.

We have seen an ROI based on time saved by being able to use a faster storage array versus our really slow, old one.

In terms of price-performance, it beat out other competitors when we were taking a look and comparing it to the market. That was one of the biggest driving points for us.

We did look at HPE Nimble Storage as well as Pure Storage. Pure Storage was probably the biggest competitor. At the time, we just wanted something that was a little bit more tried and true versus a new player in the storage array game.

Pure Storage did offer a couple of very niche tools related to SAP. PowerMax NVMe just came in very aggressively with their pricing, and that ultimately won them the business. 

PowerMax NVMe is very energy intensive, in terms of electricity. You need to spec that out properly. Just because it can fit in the rack doesn't mean it will work by sitting in the rack. You will probably need additional power, specifically just for PowerMax NVMe.

It isn't important at this very specific moment that the solution provides NVMe scale out capabilities. However, it will be once we decide to add more drives into this and expand our storage.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10). There are definitely areas of improvement, but everything comes down to time and cost.

I use Dell PowerMax NVMe for data storage and management within my organization.

A valuable feature of PowerMax is its ability to encapsulate storage, such as storage virtualization. This capability is particularly useful when it is necessary to migrate data from one storage to another without downtime. 

Additionally, the NVMe technology improves input/output performance. This makes it a valuable asset for our organization's storage solutions.

Dell PowerMax needs more connectivity options for projects that require separate web access. Usually, users propose PowerMax, however, this could be better addressed. 

Additionally, features related to AI technology could be improved by learning more from Pure Storage.

The system of the storage is well-designed with NVMe disks, allowing direct communication between the disk and the CPU memory, making it stable for future use.

PowerMax offers a range of features for big projects, making it a suitable choice for scalability.

The technical support by Dell PowerMax is satisfactory, however, there is room for improvement. Dell could be more proactive in their approach, similar to Pure Storage.

Neutral

Previously, I worked with Pure Storage and Infinidat among others before using Dell PowerMax NVMe.

The setup of PowerMax NVMe is complex and involved. The integration with backup options and software requires careful attention.

The price of Dell PowerMax depends on the project size. It is the best choice for large projects in terms of price and features compared to midrange solutions.

I evaluated Pure Storage solutions before settling on Dell PowerMax.

Dell PowerMax NVMe is recommended for its advanced capabilities in data storage and management, and I would rate the solution eight out of ten. 

The additional features I would like in the future include more proactive data collection and analytics similar to Pure Storage.

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.

We mainly use it for databases.

The speed and the compatible interface with IBM are the most valuable features of the PowerMax product.

Dell should work on their marketing strategies to make the product more visible on the market. They should promote the product's compatibility with IBM, as not everyone knows it.

I have been using this solution for four years.

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten.

It is a scalable product. There are over 1000 users in my company.

The customer service was okay. We contact customer support in case of firmware updates; they do that for us. So we contact them. It's okay now. For PowerMax, the support was good because it is enterprise technology. But for other Dell products, the support is worse.

Positive

I have worked with similar products like HP. We made a switch because PowerMax is compatible with IBM's solution. HP, we are using for the other platform.

Before PowerMax, we used internal disks. So it's the first external service for this solution.

The initial setup is easy. We are using PowerMax 2000 with fiber channel connectivity, and it was easy to set up.

The internal team deployed it. It took around a day to deploy the solution completely. We installed it in the physical location, but Dell support has to initialize the storage.

The price was good, that's why we chose PowerMax. We got a five-year pricing model, and therefore, we have five years of support. After five years, of course, if we want to use the support, we have to order support for the next years.

People should test it before buying. I tested this solution and found it suitable for us. However, the solution depends on the specific application and configuration. So, testing before buying is essential.

Overall, I would rate it 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.

I use it as a production storage solution.

The upgradability and extendibility for the size of the storage unit are noteworthy. When discussing PowerStore or PowerMax, the primary point I mention is that they use all-flash storage. This means that with more concurrent sessions on my device, we need to discuss input and output per second, which I use. PowerStore is the best solution for me in these terms.

The disadvantage of PowerMax is its cost. It is expensive, mainly due to pricing. The issue is only with pricing, as I can find the PowerVault ME cheaper than PowerMax.

I have been using the solution since 2004.

The solution is very stable.

I can't believe Dell, in the back area, is not offering better upgradability for PowerStore or PowerMax compared to HPE.

I would rate customer service as nine out of ten.

Positive

The price is starting from $500,000. It's expensive.

Dell is an end-to-end solution. Dell is the best vendor worldwide, with an end-to-end solution starting from a mouse to Telza Hyperfix or HyperConverged devices. 

If I talk about HyperFlex or storage, it's a very good solution compared to all competitor vendors. However, I found a problem in upgradability. It was surprising when searching yesterday that Huawei offers storage upgradability with fifteen device options and superior controllers. 

Dell and HPE only offer three upgradable devices. I can add three enclosures. Dell and HPE have the lowest credibility for PowerStore, as they talk about three expandable devices in a single system, while HPE offers customers the option to add eight devices, and Huawei claims they support up to twenty-four devices. You can see the difference among Dell, HPE, and Huawei in this aspect.

Overall, I rate the product eight out of ten.