Dell PowerMax NVMe Reviews

We use the PowerMax 2000 and 8000 models as storage appliances for high-end mission-critical applications. 

PowerMax is a compact high-performance appliance. It is one of the best devices in terms of performance specs. It includes an NVMe All-Flash Array. 

PowerMax's software is highly stable, but we faced two hardware issues in one year. We had a failure of the storage director module, and the physical disk failed on another occasion. Dell EMC should improve its hardware quality.

I'm unsure if PowerMax is scalable because I haven't done any scalable activity with PowerMax so far. I haven't added any components. 

I rate Dell PowerMax support five out of 10. They didn't provide an adequate explanation and resolution when we had issues. 

Neutral

Setting up PowerMax is straightforward. It only takes about three or four hours if you have everything ready on site, like the local network, power supply, and connections. 

I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe nine out of 10. If you have large applications with a high volume of transactions, Dell PowerMax is the number one solution.

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.

Dell PowerMax NVMe needs to increase storage and improve scalability. 

I have been using the product for a couple of months. 

Dell PowerMax NVMe's tech support is good. 

We can complete Dell PowerMax NVMe's deployment in a week. 

I rate the product an eight out of ten. 

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.

We run a Medicaid data warehouse on a massive enterprise Oracle shop. Therefore, we have a lot of Oracle on PowerMax. We run a big analytics for the New York State Department of Health using Oracle Big Data.

Because of the Big Data analytics, we require immense IOPS, which the PowerMax handles quite well. Our sole purpose in life is to provide endpoint analytics.

We consolidate a lot of various disparate storage arrays into one enterprise solution.

We primarily use Unisphere for managing and monitoring.

Enterprise Cloud Storage is the most valuable feature, along with the data services which come with it, plus the deduplication and compression.

We are very interested in NVMe over Fibre Channel, which I understand is on the horizon. We would like to see that come to fruition in its ability to traverse the Fibre Channel SAN.

The solution is rock solid.

It is a solid platform.

The technical support is very good. We have the ESRS call-home function, and it's been rock solid since day one.

I have always used Symmetrix and VMAX. Then, it was just a natural progression into the PowerMax solution.

The initial setup is very straightforward. We had a team come in and get everything setup. It was handled very professionally. We had a project manager assigned to the account. It was very smooth.

We used the PowerPath solution for the migration, which allowed us to seamlessly migrate from one storage array to another.

We have impeccable uptime in our data center with very strict SLAs. We have had zero downtime.

We run a big Oracle shop, as well as VMware, which is very high performing. It exceeds our needs.

Our costs for the product are three million.

We looked at Hitachi and NetApp, but it really boiled down to our relationship with Dell EMC and the portfolio of the product.

This solution’s architecture influenced our buying decision because of all the data services incorporated, especially the LAN technology. This allows us to replicate from one site to another.

Our SLAs are extremely tight, and we've had zero issues. I would highly advise going with the PowerMax.

We are using the solution's application and snapshot feature.

The solution should include more AI features to make it smarter.

I have been using Dell PowerMax NVMe for a couple of years.

Dell PowerMax NVMe is a very stable solution.

The solution has limited scalability. Around three users use Dell PowerMax NVMe in our organization.

I rate the solution’s scalability a seven out of ten.

The solution’s technical support is good.

Positive

Operation-wise, the deployment takes 20 minutes. Our process may take longer for approval. It may take a couple of days.

IBM and Hitachi are Dell PowerMax NVMe's competitors. I would recommend the solution to other users.

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

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.