Dell PowerMax NVMe Reviews

We are most interested in cloud utilization.

We would like to improve the delivery model. They don't have the delivery terms today. If they improve this area, everybody would be happy.

For the Romanian and Eastern European markets, we have long delivery times, and even if we have a solution, we don't have the products, and we don't know what to install. For the time being, manufacturers must enhance the delivery of all items while they have them.

If you go to Pure or you go to NetApp, they deliver in one month. If you go to Dell or HP, they will take up to six months for delivery. This is not a business model for today.

I have been working with Dell PowerMax NVMe for 10 years.

Dell PowerMax NVMe is a stable solution. The performance is good.

Dell PowerMax NVMe is a scalable solution.

It is suitable for enterprise customers.

They are now experiencing problems with Dell's specifications. They have a typical reporting period of five days and nine hours each day till Friday. 

Right now, on the enterprise side, they want 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It is not available in Romania, which is why you need to retain inventories or have some replacement components on hand to accomplish this type of integration with other vendors.

I am also working with HPE 3PAR. I am just looking for a place to get some 3PAR components. But nobody has it right now.

We are the HP Platinum partner in Romania, and we are now looking for a place to purchase documents from Europe.

Previously, we worked with Cisco, Lenovo, and Pure. The advantage was their delivery.

We don't an advantage. 

The consumer requests something that they do not have with the brand today. 

If it is storage, a server, or power, and we have it, they will purchase it. 

They do not wait for Dell, HP, or Cisco. It is the same for both. If you have Dell on hand, we will purchase it. If it's HP, they'll buy it. It. They don't care about the brand anymore.

The installation of Dell PowerMax NVMe was easy.

Deployment time depends on the customer's request since if you have a solution with a cluster or include VMware or a solution or disaster recovery, we can provide it in two days. But, in any case, it depends on the project and your relationship with the customer.

The price is on the market. It's not inexpensive, but it's available on the market.

The cost is determined by the solution. It's not the greatest option.

You built the solution and rely on the customer's requirements, on the budget since they know the price of the product, they know the service to the client and it's the same if it's HP, Dell, or Cisco. It is how the solution is created and implemented. 

Today, the client is asking for SLA and uptime for the critical months rather than the important months themselves. This is the most crucial. They don't care if it's from Dell, HP, or Cisco; they just care about this one.

I don't have any requirements. I am now really unhappy with the delivery, therefore I don't have any arguments or recommendations to make. 

If we receive the goods, everything will be okay. When we are working, we have something. We are now dissatisfied with our needs. Simply provide the delivery. It is more important now.

We are partners with Dell.

I would rate Dell PowerMax NVMe an eight out of ten.

The uptime is the most valuable feature, and we are satisfied with the solution.

We have been using this solution for five years and are using version PowerMax 2000.

It is a stable solution. 

It is scalable. 

The technical support is very good.

The price could be lower, and we are unhappy with the price. The licensing cost is included in the hardware price, so I am unsure if there are other licensing costs.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. When we bought it, we accepted the high price, but five years later, we need to reevaluate before we buy the next generation.

We use this solution to consolidate high-performing workloads. The solution houses all of our VM workloads, as well as our EMR, which supports over 20,000 users. We also have PowerMax deployed on a different site for disaster recovery.

We work in healthcare and have to ensure that our data is always available because it can directly affect patient care. This platform is reliable in supporting our data availability. We now have a higher-performing platform and are able to consolidate our workloads into one single platform.

Overall, the platform is easy to use. The performance has kept up with our workloads.

I have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The customer service for this solution is excellent. We received assistance with a four-hour response time. I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

Positive

We previously used XtremeIO. We switched just because we felt that the platform was aging and we needed something that was going to be high performing and offer more availability. 

The initial setup was straightforward. We received great support on the ground from Dell. They are familiar with our data center and they were able to prepare the site to install the equipment without any delays so everything ran on schedule. Deployment took one day. 

We worked with a project manager both internally and from Dell, and we ensured that we had all the necessary power, networking, and other connectivity ready for deployment to take place on schedule.

The deployment involved myself and another engineer, as well as Dell engineers. It took several days to get the configuration right from a layout perspective, but overall, it was straightforward.

The return on investment is the consolidation of our platforms. We've reduced our footprint in the data center, which has required less power, less heat, and less floor space.

The pricing for this solution is good compared to other products on the market. 

I would advise others to do their homework and assess their environment to understand their workloads. It's important to do testing and model your workloads against your expectations to push the boundaries.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for putting together solutions for our customers.

They provide up-to-date, leading-edge products that are constantly improving the technological provision of hardware and software for the customer.

The deduplication of the solution is excellent and the compression is quite helpful. These are the most useful aspects of the solution for us.

The initial setup is quite straightforward.

Technical support has been excellent.

The product would be better served if there was a slight reduction in price at the moment due to the marketplace. People haven't got as much money. If they could offer more of a discount, it would help their customer base out quite a bit. Even if it was just in the short term, it would make a big difference.

If the solution had more power-saving capabilities, it would be quite nice.

The solution could benefit from even more speed and increased redundancy and flexibility.

I've been using the solution for about one year. It hasn't been that long.

We do hope to increase usage in the future. All we just need to do is get more opportunities and as the marketplace opens up from COVID, we will be increasing our prospecting efforts.

Technical support is fantastic. they are quite knowledgeable and responsive. We've extremely happy with the level of support they provide.

The switching happens as the vendor, Dell EMC, brings out new products to supersede the old products. It's a natural evolution of things as products get better through significant R&D, and for us to follow that evolution.

For us, the initial setup is not overly complex. We've got very highly trained engineers and therefore it's no problem.

Demployment is still fairly standard. It hasn't really altered too much, so it's not gotten shorter or longer. In terms of the strategy, we have a standard scope of work document that we always employ when implementing new solutions.

The licensing costs are reasonable.

We're resellers.

We actually use the PowerStore 3000 and 1000 products.

I would definitely recommend this solution to other organizations. We've been very happy with it.

I would advise people to make sure that you introduce the features and benefits of NVMe and the power and speed and articulate that well to management or the customer.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. It's not perfect. It's evolving. However, it's almost perfect.

It is for our corporate ERP systems and databases.

We specifically use it for our PowerHA on IBM i. We were able to move away from a middleware solution for high availability, going right to snapshots and data replication on arrays.

Managing and monitoring PowerMax arrays from a performance, capacity and health checks perspective is easy with Unisphere and CloudIQ. I have CloudIQ on my phone, so I could pull it up and see the state of my arrays right now.

• The interface
• Unisphere
• SRDF
• Deduplication
• Compression
• Encryption
• The general physical footprints are pretty small compared to previous systems.

The most reliable part of it is its redundant in frame. My impression is that it is very stable. We haven't had this solution out there for very long, but we haven't had any issues with it yet.

I am impression with the scalability. Right now, we are implementing two three-engine PowerMaxs with about 500 terabytes of data, which will replicate to each other. 

If we need to scale up, it's easy just add another engine and some more drawers. It's non-disruptive, so that is also good.

We haven't really had to use technical support. It is pretty much set it up and let it go, like plug and play. I'm sure if we had any issues that we could get in touch with support pretty easily. We use ESRS for our call-home, and a lot of times, Dell EMC will respond to the issue before we even know it.

We were using generation one of XtremIO, which had some limitations on number of initiators. It didn't have native support for IBM i. There were just a number of limitations with XtremIO that we don't have now with PowerMax. So, we were pretty consolidated on our previous platform XtremIO, then we migrated from XtremIO to PowerMax.

Our corporate ERP systems of databases are all mission critical. We chose to move to this platform from XtremIO because we wanted a smaller footprint with much more capacity with all of the data services that we got out of XtremIO. We also wanted the ability to use PowerMax in our PowerHA environment with its higher availability.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was almost like set it and forget it. We were very satisfied there.

We were using a process that includes Data Domain. We are not using Open Replicator or any other tools. We are taking images of our data and putting it on Data Domain, replicating it to the new site, then rehydrating the data, which makes it easy.

We went with Dell EMC directly for the deployment.

Our application requires five milliseconds of latency or less. We are seeing about 250 microseconds of response time, so that beats our expectations by five times.

I would definitely give it a shot. It is so easy. Dell EMC has been so good with us in terms of evaluating the product and seeing it run side-by-side against other products and vendors. So, it has been great.

We were pretty satisfied with what we got.

We work in robotics and we need better response times. Our primary reasons for buying this solution are our SQL and Oracle databases, to improve the performance in running queries and their response times.

It has simplified our operations when it comes to troubleshooting. We're on-call every time there is an issue and I can show them, 100 percent, that there is no problem on the storage side. I can show them there is no issue here.

The solution has helped to improve our services, in the medical field.

The response time, compared to XtremIO, is far better.

I would like to see better provisioning of storage from PowerMax, as well as automation. If you have a cluster with 15 datastores you have to back and select everything for report groups, as an example. You have to create 15 datastores and bundle them in a storage group. If there was some automation of this process, a script or a workflow, to configure everything, that would be great.

Unisphere could be improved and I would also like to see a real-time, graphical view of metrics. I don't know how far back in time we can look, but if we could see the performance from two months or three months back, and how it is performing now, that would be helpful.

It's stable, like VMAX, which has been pretty stable for the last few years.

We had XtremIO but we have been a Dell EMC user for a long time. The solution's architecture influenced our buying decision because of the performance and storage growth. With XtremIO we have had storage growth issues.

The setup is pretty straightforward. With VxBlock 1000, everything is pre-installed.

The application folks are happy.

We didn't look at other solutions.

I would recommend this product. For us, this is the best product.

It has the ability to consolidate storage.

It is a true, stable product.

We have really good support for our data center and compute.

We had a multitude of storage systems, like Dell EMC Compellent, that we needed to consolidate. A Compellent would take an entire rack space.

The initial setup was a little bit complicated.

PowerMax has been great for us.

We are doing SRDF/A.

We have used it for a long time and we have recently been upgrading it. Last month we acquired a PowerMax 2000 and we have just finished the migration. We hope it will help us with performance and through the additional features which are part of the software.

In terms of mission-critical applications, we are running our switch, which is the most critical application that we have in our organization, on the storage box. It is because it is reliable and, in terms of performance, we do not have any issues with PowerMax.

The switch application is very sensitive to IOPs and to the speed of responding and reacting to requests. We went specifically with PowerMax to ensure that we are getting the highest performance, and it has really been exceeding our expectations. We are yet to put it into really demanding tests. We have solutions that we are implementing during the year which will be high-demand in terms of IOPs and performance. We will find out then if PowerMax meets all our requirements.

We use the solution with VMware. It made things easier for us in terms of deployment and implementation.

• Availability
• Reliability

We are also happy with the monitoring that Dell EMC is doing for us. They have helped us to identify many issues during the routine checks, issues which we were not aware of.

We are facing challenges with the SRDF replication which we got with the latest, new box. Overall, it has been working for us so well for the past few years. We hope that whatever bugs there are right now in the PowerMax are going to be sorted out quickly.

There is room for improvement with the enclosures. We were happier with the old VMAX enclosures which looked nicer in our data centers. The new one is dull.

The stability is superb.

We have yet to find out what the scalability is like. We recently added this new box and towards the end of the year, or next year, we are going to look at expanding it. So we don't know how easy it is to scale it.

Our experience with technical support was different before we got the most recent box. We are facing challenges. We were told that this is the first PowerMax box implemented in our country, so maybe these are teething issues, and hopefully, they will be sorted out quickly. But we are constantly in touch with support, and I have actually been trying to get ahold of one guy here at the Dell Technologies World conference so I can see if he can help us sort out the bugs quickly.

We were using the same solution. We just upgraded it.

The solution’s architecture influenced our buying decision with the new features it has, and the smoothness of the migration was also important. The last time we upgraded there was downtime, but this solution gave us the opportunity without bringing down the systems.

We had challenges again with the initial setup. I don't know if there was a gap during the requirement-collection phase, but the box was partially delivered to us with missing parts and it delayed the implementation by about 60 days. It was not as smooth as I would have hoped.

We used a local Dell EMC partner and they were pretty good.

We have already recommended this product to two institutions who called. Our view of the product is positive. Our experience has been positive. As head of IT, my worry was about the migration. We believe in the technology, but how could we achieve a smooth migration? What I have seen was amazing beyond expectation. Things have been so positive, overall.

The migration process from older VMAX arrays to PowerMax is very good. The data dependency is tremendous and the results we got from the migration were amazing. They were beyond our anticipation. Things went smoothly, mostly, with the SRDF technology, and the critical systems were not taken down, so we had 24-hour continuous operation.

We have attended a couple of technical sessions which talked about how to do some analysis on the box, from the box, using the Dell EMC tools. We are exploring those tools to see how we can take advantage of them and improve productivity.

We have faith in the solution and would rate it an eight out of ten. The rating will depend on fixing the issues we are facing.