Dell PowerMax NVMe Reviews

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.

We are primarily using the solution to drive components of an e-trading (electronic trading) platform.

The solution has reduced our time-to-market with a single management interface, and it is a very efficient platform. Provides great improvements in operational resilience, aligning us with our direct competitors in global markets. We are ahead in some areas as a result of the deployment of this platform.

Uptime and availability are first and foremost. The deduplication and compression capabilities are also excellent, allowing us to be very efficient with the physical hardware that we need to deploy on-prem in order to fulfill our requirements. It has given us excellent value for money without compromising performance.

The solution's snapshot capabilities and replication are very good features. Snapshots are allowing us to quickly build analytical models directly from production data. This gives us amazing insights into market trends and allows us to build more effective trading algorithms. Replication offers us unparalleled levels of resilience.

The management overall is excellent. Dell EMC continues to build on very solid foundations, which have been evolving for over two decades. 

The REST APIs are great.

The solution exposes excellent automation opportunities.

We have found the performance to be very good so far.

It's a relatively new product, but for the next release I would like to see higher bandwidth on the front-end adapters. This would allow even greater scalability for critical workloads and consolidation for non-critical workloads. The hosts may not require that level of I/O performance today. However, it allows us to scale physical non-cloud environments without large investment. 

We are about eight months into our deployment. It's still a rather new solution for us, although we have had some time to get to know it.

With six nines, we have reduced our maximum annual downtime to around 32 seconds (previously around 48 minutes). From a stability point of view, I have absolutely no issues or complaints there at all.

It's an e-trading platform. Therefore, there are no end users involved. It's about half a petabyte in size.

In terms of scalability potential, it is first class. With the level of performance it gives you and the response time that we get from the arrays, the scalability is groundbreaking.

I was very impressed with the support overall. They understand customer service. They have never made me wait for anything. Things do go bump. Challenges and unpredictable circumstances do arise. I rate the Dell EMC team based on their prompt and decisive action during these circumstances.

We did previously use a different solution.

We switched to take advantage of certain feature sets. Our previous competitor, whilst they did offer deduplication and compression to some degree, could not match the availability nor performance and didn't have the same guaranteed efficiency ratios. They also couldn't perform inline compression without significant performance penalties. This would have to happen at rest and offline. Therefore, we'd need to write the data first, then compress it. The PowerMax solution enabled us to do that inline, without a read or write penalty. Basically, there was no performance impact, and we still saw all the benefits from a reduced physical footprint, such as, cost savings, reduced power requirements, and fewer components to fail (number of drives required being 66 percent lower).

The deployment process is a standard procedure for deploying SAN, and that's with any vendor. I'd say that the process wasn't any different from deploying another solution. We've got our architecture and our blueprints. We worked with a solutions architect and that design drives the configuration, and then we go ahead and deploy that configuration.

Deployment took around three months. Some of this was due to internal processes, timing, and pandemic conditions. Over December, we were hampered with end-of-year change control freezes in place so some of the activity couldn't get done. All in all, I'd say we probably could have been done in about six to eight weeks.

I had three people working on this internally (not counting the non storage resources) as we deployed to two geographies in different time zones. 

Maintenance is just ongoing service and that'd be the same as any technological asset. It has a mean time before failure. We monitor it on a daily basis. Alerts are actioned with the vendor. However, the platform does have five-nines of availability  and multiple layers of redundancy.

We did not use an integrator, consultant, or implementor during deployment. We worked with a solutions architect to build the configuration. We then worked with our project office to coordinate and complete that deployment.

Six months in, we have ROI. Some key metrics are: 

• Increased uptime and availability, 
• Reduced man-hours for support and provisioning (approximately 30 percent reduction in overall management hours required).

Pricing will very much depend on an organization's terms and conditions with the vendor. Therefore, I couldn't really give any concrete pricing to quote. I'd just advise CTO/Technology leaders to negotiate hard and consider the commercial advantages/benefits to Dell EMC for onboarding their product. 

Be very thorough about your criteria (functional and non-functional requirements) and what you're looking to achieve. Test, test, test! Do the due diligence and test comparable solutions head-to-head. In our use case, PowerMax was the best solution. However, that doesn't necessarily mean it would be the best solution for every scenario. You really do have to do the work, the engineering and architecture, then test the products head-to-head to see if this solution really does solve your business requirement.

The licensing again depends on the agreements they've got in place with your organization. For example, we know we've got a large and global agreement with Dell, and therefore, our pricing and discounting structure might be different from a small to medium business or another enterprise.

We did look at other options. We tested it head-to-head with two other vendors in a lab with identical conditions. We basically looked at the top five storage vendors on the market and shortlisted three.

The cons were the fact that it was really an internal process. Qualifying a new platform, through engineering and getting that through governance and architecture is a detailed and time consuming process. Those were the cons. In terms of pros, the technological features available, including the compression ratios, were excellent. The performance itself, the out-and-out, the horsepower of the platform, is where PowerMax did significantly outperform the other solutions we put it up against. However, most importantly, it was that uptime and availability which pushed it ahead. The inline deduplication and compression capabilities also significantly outperformed its competitors.

We are customers of Dell EMC.

We are using the PowerMax 2000.

My advice to other organizations considering the solution is to fully understand your use case, and test it. Make sure your functional and non-functional requirements are complete, understood, and documented with input and agreement from your internal stakeholders

Definitely support your teams with education and training, even internal workshops. This will help make any transitioning smooth - a great tech solution can evaporate very quickly if your teams are not onboard and up to speed on day one.

You need to have a good people strategy and processes before you start running away with the technology!

Overall, I would rate the solution as an eight out of 10.

We use it for tying in high-end analytics services. PowerMax has some tiers which a make difference between the use of the data for our customers. All Dell technologies Solutions have tiers with faster hard disks. This one has special tiers to grant another level of data. That's why we use PowerMax and NVMe technology.

It is best for block storage.

SAP and Oracle Database are on PowerMax. Most of out critical services are on it. We use SRDF, which is a software. You can utilize the storage. It's very good, because you can make a stretch faster between two data centers.

The analytics and transactional data are its most valuable features.

With PowerMax, you don't have to buy new storage, like with the older VMAXs.

It is efficient and very simple for our administrators to use.

I would like NVMe to be end-to-end in the next release. Right now, it is not end-to-end.

It is a high-end storage. It is never down. This high-end technology is designed for mission-critical operations, where systems can't go down or it will affect a business' reputation and/or revenue.

With these type of high-end technologies and their uptime, there is no need to contact support.

Compared to VMAX, the initial setup is very easy. Setting up VMAX was a pain versus PowerMax, which was simple and efficient.

To migrate the data from VMAX to PowerMax, we used SRDF. It was fast. In some cases, we used VPLEX.

We used both an integrator and reseller to assist with the deployment.

The cost is expensive. While VMAX now has good pricing, PowerMax is a little expensive.

Our solution is focused using Dell technologies.

I work in data storage as a senior administrator.

I use multiple Dell EMC protection and storage tools like VMAX and PowerMax network for data domains. This product is an onsite data center and we have two PowerMax boxes. One of them is for our main site and the other is for our disaster recovery (DR) site.

We use PowerMax SRDF as our main application.

With the NVMe technology, performance in terms of IOPS has improved. Things are generally faster, although there are some bottlenecks with the integration of IBM servers.

The biggest way that PowerMax has improved the way our organization functions is through an increase in performance. The business of pharma is complex and the IOPS demand is huge. In the past, we used VMAX storage, and there was a big issue with the performance. Everybody complained about performance, servers, and storage, saying that they didn't have enough space. We tried many different solutions in an attempt to solve the performance issue.

For example, we tried reducing the data that was stored on disk, and we tried removing unused data. We turned to development and asked that some programs have fewer features. Finally, management made the decision to implement the PowerMax solution, and it solved the issue. As soon as we migrated from VMAX to PowerMax NVMe, the performance increased and everybody felt better.

The security is good. We enabled DSE for our encryption.

CloudIQ has made our lives better. It provides notifications, where you receive an email to let you know about your storage and your SAN. It is a powerful tool, although we have had to upgrade it a few times. Overall, it is a good monitoring tool that gives us a powerful and easy way to monitor our servers.

This product provides NVMe scale-out capabilities, which is important to us because our performance and IOPS have improved. The administrators have felt better about our environment since we implemented PowerMax. The storage is much better, overall.

We use the NVMe CSM and it's a very powerful feature that makes our business stronger. The performance is improved, making everything faster.

The reporting functionality is very good.

The UI is very easy to use. We can add volumes and manage them easily.

We have faced problems integrating IBM servers and adding volumes. The capacity on the IBM servers was not the same and we needed to perform a reclamation process on the DR site to fill the same capacity on the storage site.

The SRDF software has an issue when it's used in conjunction with VMware. In the past, we were using SRDF for VMware but in swapping from VM to DR site, VMs take a very long time. In some cases, where the data on the main size was many terabytes in size, it took a very long time to replicate to the DR site. Some VMs power on automatically, without entering any schedule. We had to migrate to RecoverPoint, which is another solution from Dell, but we still use SRDF for things that are not stored on VMware disks. When we enabled hardware compression, things improved.

PowerMax Storage needs improvement in the area of monitoring tools. It should have more functions and more complicated analysis options inside the monitoring tools. For example, if I need the tool to analyze monitoring logs from one month ago, it can't be done because it retains data only for the past two weeks.

I have been working with Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe for more than five years.

This solution is very stable.

This is a very scalable product. We have approximately 170 VMs running on the servers.

Between administrative users, including server administration and monitoring, we have approximately 20 users.

The support is very good.

They respond very quickly when we have issues and the responses are good. However, the first-level engineers take more time to investigate some problems. The first level of support could use some improvement. Specifically, they should be faster at solving problems. If there are critical issues then we need them to be solved quickly, and the first level simply takes too long to investigate.

Our management is satisfied with PowerMax. There had been a discussion with IBM about obtaining a storage solution from them but when we saw the power that PowerMax had, we opted for the next version of it instead.

PowerMax SRDF is a very powerful tool that will replicate data to a DR site. It is very fast and has many powerful features including data compression. 

This is a powerful solution for us and our performance is 100% better since we implemented it. Overall, for enterprise-level mission-critical workloads, the solution is very powerful.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have PowerMax 2000. It is for our clients. We have two PowerMax in our environment. One is in production, and another one is on the DR site. We have to replicate the data from production to that one.

It is important for our clients that PowerMax provides NVMe scale-out capabilities. They are also getting great performance as compared to the old storage array model. 

Provisioning is faster and immediate. We can do immediate allocation and configuration. As compared to the old storage array model where it used to take half an hour, in PowerMax, we can do it in 5 to 10 minutes. It doesn't take that much time, and there isn't much delay in the PowerMax array.

Our workload is reduced because we are not dealing with any issues. We are not facing many issues on the PowerMax side as compared with the previous one.

Based on our experience with VMAX, there isn't any hardware failure or something like that in PowerMax. Performance-wise also, everything is fine. We haven't faced any performance issues or any hardware failure. Its performance is great as compared to VMAX. Its I/O per second rate is higher than the old model.

We can use it block-wise, and we can also use it at the file level. It is good for any environment.

I would like to see more development in the cloud environment. It would be good if it comes in the cloud kind of setup. 

I have been using this solution for two and a half years.

It is very stable. It has very few failures. In the last two and a half years, there is only one failure that I have faced in PowerMax. That was because one of the ports went down. The port was replaced within two days or something like that by an EMC engineer. Hardware failure is very rare in PowerMax. Previously, in VMAX, multiple drives used to fail within a day itself. 

In our setup, we are just using less than one petabyte. In the PowerMax itself, we are using 130 or 150 TB. For scalability, it is the best option. We can directly connect the PowerMax array with the other storage array devices, such as a USB, without any performance issues.

We don't have much involvement in it. Whenever the customers need any help, they ask for some help from our side, and accordingly, we provide the help. They usually involve us only when they have any doubt. The entire configuration is done by EMC itself, so we are not a part of the implementation.

We don't have any involvement in the pricing. We are just from the backend support team for the PowerMax array. If any expansion is required, we will just inform the customer, and the customer directly contacts the EMC person. They discuss and finalize the dealings, and we are not involved in those dealings.

It is a good solution for any environment. You won't face any issues in terms of performance and stability. 

SRDF has helped to reduce storage costs, but I can't provide the numbers. We don't handle that aspect. We are from the support team, and for capacity, there is a separate team in our environment. That capacity team takes care of the capacity and does the daily basis and monthly basis kind of calculation. We are just supporting the existing environment, and we have to maintain its availability.

We have not been able to consolidate open systems, mainframe, IBM block, and file or virtualized data with cloud-connected storage using PowerMax. That's because currently in our environment, there isn't a separate cloud, and the cloud is not connected with this PowerMax.There is also no mainframe server. We have a separate storage array for IBM in our environment. Similarly, EMC is also separate.

We have not used PowerMax's NVMe SCM storage tier feature and PowerMax's built-in QoS capabilities for providing workload congestion protection. We have also not used PowerMax's Metro Smart DR, also known as MetroDR.

PowerMax would be useful for enterprise-level storage or mission-critical IT workloads, but in our environment, we only have the basic model, which is PowerMax 2000. As per my understanding, it will be good and useful for mission-critical applications.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. I am not giving it a 10 because day by day, technology is improving, and there might be another solution that is better than this. Even EMC might find another solution and introduce it.

We used it for Oracle Databases. The customer for which we did the PoC of PowerMax is planning on deploying mission-critical applications on this solution: Oracle workloads such as their quoting system and their data warehouse.

As a partner, we don't have PowerMax in-house but for my customers the SRDF replication is an advantage. The ability to have a scalable, all-flash array is pretty impressive. That's important for our customers.

In terms of helping to consolidate islands of storage in a data center, the use case for the particular customer for whom we did the PoC was to move off of an Exadata environment and to move off of an AIX environment and consolidate those down to one storage platform. PowerMax did that.

It is meeting our customer's requirements. They had several large Oracle databases that needed to move over, including from Exadata. Exadata is one of Oracle's fastest systems in terms of Oracle Database workloads. Our customer had to be able to hit certain timelines for jobs that would run. For example, they are running a quote database and they had to be able to hit the same timelines for jobs that were running within that, or better. As a part of the consolidation, the end goal was to limit their licensing on the front end. Being able to consolidate down into that one footprint on the back end helped them save money on the front end.

When it comes to managing and monitoring PowerMax arrays, the interface has really improved compared to the old VMAX. Getting into the interface and finding out if there are any issues with the array is a lot simpler and more streamlined.

The SRDF replication piece is probably the best feature. It's useful for maintaining recoverability in the event of a disaster.

I would like to see more cache because we are limited to two terabytes of cache now. More cache would potentially help drive better improvements in performance.

Also, when it comes to Oracle and database workloads, data reduction could be a little bit better. Some of the competition, like Pure, have post-processes which do additional deduplication and compression on the backside; everything is in-line and then they do a secondary process. It would be a good option if you could start getting 5:1 or 6:1 data reduction on database workloads. That would be beneficial.

Since our use of PowerMax was just a PoC, we didn't really have any issues with the with stability. We didn't run it for a long time, it was a 30-day PoC. There wasn't a lot of time to really explore that area. During the PoC it was fine, it was perfect, we didn't have any issues.

The ability to add additional engines, additional SSDs, is really a benefit to the customer. You can grow it as you need to.

The PowerMax architecture influenced the buying decision. The ability to grow, to scale from single-engine to multi-engine, was probably the biggest factor in that.

Tech support for PowerMax was pretty good. They came out and set it up and did the install. That took a day. We did have a problem with one of the compression modules and they had it out there and fixed the next day. It was during the install that they uncovered that. We weren't using the array yet anyway, so it was just a byproduct of the installation process.

The improvements to the interface have really been great. It's very simple to set up and configure the storage volumes, whether it's a Fibre Channel volume or an iSCSI volume.

The initial setup was straightforward. I did the setup of the iSCSI volumes to the host and it was it took me less than an hour to do that.

We were initially doing a PoC and comparing PowerMax against other arrays: NetApp, XtremIO X2, and Pure. We were doing a performance benchmark and it came in second compared to XtremIO X2, so it did a good job.

I would give PowerMax a nine out of ten, only because we had that single issue with the compression module failing. Otherwise, it did exactly what we wanted it to. It wasn't as fast as the XtremIO, but we didn't think it was going to be as fast as that in the first place. The XtremIO was somewhat oversized. So from a performance standpoint, we were very happy with it.

We are using it for VMware, virtual infrastructures, and our physical host. All of our virtual infrastructure is pretty much mission-critical, and we have all of our virtual infrastructure migrating into the PowerMax family.

Because of the compression ratio, we are able to put more on less hardware.

The PowerMax software and CloudIQ let us get an inside view of our compression and compaction, as well as our usage of the storage.

• Compression
• Compaction
• A lot of storage in a small box.

The PowerMax software has some room for improvement. We have run into a couple bugs with it so far.

It scales well. We currently buy ours fully maxed out, so we don't really worry a whole lot about the scaling from a new infrastructure standpoint.

So far, technical support has been really good.

We are migrating from HPE 3PAR, and it's been a very easy transition.

The initial setup was complex. ESRS is a very complex solution to put into our environment, because it requires external access to the Internet. That's a very tough thing for us to do, because we are a PCI and PII company. We store a lot of data for people which is personal. Therefore, going out to the Internet is not our preferred path.

We used Dell EMC directly for the deployment. The experience has been good, so far.

We generally do a PoC. In this case, we went directly to the PowerMax because we felt it was a good solution. Our upper management chose it.

Study the integration very carefully, as far as how you're going to integrate it into your environment, such as how you're going to use ESRS and the other solutions which Dell EMC offers.

As far as provisioning, storage, and use of the array, it's been very simple to use.

For the PowerMax 8000, a million IOs is our minimum requirement. We have yet to be able to test that, but that is our minimum base requirement for a PowerMax 8000.

We are using this solution as our main storage. We use it with VMware, as well as our databases. We are customers of Dell and I'm a team lead for network and infrastructure. 

I like the operability and easy scalability of this product. It's also easy to integrate with all of our systems. It has high speed and a good name in the market. The accounting is good, easy, be accessible. 

The solution is quite expensive and I believe Dell should examine their prices because they are currently very, very high.

I've been using this solution for two years. 

The solution is stable. 

It's very easy to scale this product. 

The technical support is good, whenever there's an issue they figured out the problem and repaired the faulty part.

Positive

The initial setup is easy; our deployment took a few days. Dell carried out the deployment for us. We have around 2,000 users in the company. 

The cost depends on the capacity that you're using so every use case will have a different price. 

It's important to think about your workloads and define them. All right. I'd also recommend comparing prices, both within and outside Dell. 

Feature-wise the solution is perfect but because of the price, I rate this solution seven out of 10.