Dell PowerMax NVMe Reviews

Mainframe and open system storage that replicates consistently.

We are a financial services organization, so we are data and investments. It is what our company uses to run. However, I don't know that PowerMax, or VMAX, is anything special compared to other products that we have our data on.

A lot of our critical applications are mainframe and open system-based, and they spread between those two. So, we need a platform like PowerMax to be able to recover in a DR scenario.

We can consistently replicate mainframe and open system and have a single recovery point.

I started using CloudIQ two days ago, and all it's been doing is filling up my phone with alerts that aren't worthwhile. There is something going on there that the array is flagging things as inappropriate that aren't really impactful.

I would like to have Snapchat scheduling and the ability to modify that instead of erase a schedule, then recreate it. There are way better ways to do that. 

Support for SRDF consistency groups within the GUI, instead of making that the command line. 

Remove the need for physical or hardwired virtual servers to run consistency groups, instead make the expensive array controllers handle that.

The management interface needs improvement. It shouldn't be as hard to do some of the functions as it is. Also, it shouldn't need Windows Servers to run a million dollar array.

From a host IO standpoint, the stability has been very good. 

From a replication standpoint, we're actually a company who turned up a bug in the brand new PowerMax. That makes me a little jaded.

It scales enormously, but it's expensive to do so.

The technical support has been good. When we did run into an issue, once I told them what the problem was, they were able to come up with a solution to fix the problem moderately quickly.

We came off VMAX. Our performance requirements were to just match the VMAX levels. I find the array is doing that for host IO.

Since we were already on VMAX, our decision was related to a data center move and protecting our data. Prior to that, just getting on the VMAX product line and came from IBM. That was a look at all the mainframe products, which was a cost and functionality play. We picked the product that seemed to have the best cost and functionality with longest term company relationship.

The initial setup was complex. I found out you can't make the new arrays talk to other arrays on a customer level. You have to reach out to Dell EMC support to do that. It's the only array in my environment where I can't, as a customer, make those changes. That's one of the things that slowed down our install.

The migration from VMAX to PowerMax wasn't much of a migration because it was a DR target. We just changed our SRDF.

We used a reseller to purchase it, but I believe it was Dell EMC badged people who did the install.

The experience wasn't great. The install, in my mind, meant a usable box. The install that I got was a plugged in box. Then, it's like, "Oh, but we still have to do these five steps." I was under a time crunch, so that was a surprise.

When it's mainframe there are only three: IBM, Hitachi, and Dell EMC. The arrays at this level are all fairly competitive.

IBM doesn't support VMware the way that we needed it to. 

Hitachi and EMC were neck and neck. What won it out was Dell EMC's relationship with our sales team.

It's effective at doing what you need it to do. It's fairly high-powered, but the management interface has a long way to go to be made simple and easy to use.

If you have mainframe, you have few choices, and this is a good choice. If you don't have mainframe, there are a lot of products on the market which are much easier to use. It depends on your requirements. 

SRDF/A is quite good, but even other cheaper arrays have synchronous and asynchronous replication. I don't know that I would look at a product line for this unless your needs are either enormous that you need a box this big or mainframe centric.

The Unisphere has gotten a lot better. It is fairly easy to dig into and find things. It has been a long time coming, but it's there.

From a storage point of view, our primary uses are as our primary storage which provides all of the capacity for our databases, applications, and most of our mission-critical work at the moment.

We're planning on moving our most critical databases onto the PowerMax to take advantage of all the new features and functions, as well as the ability for it to grow into the future to continue to provide that top level of performance.

Data plays a very important role in our business. It allows us to make good decisions and react to our customers' needs. The PowerMax is going to be where we put the most critical data so we can get the fastest results from that investment.

One of the valuable features is that less work needs to be done on the arrays now, compared with what used to be. I used to spend most of my day managing the array. Now I'm more managing the interconnections and the flows of data, and not worrying about the feeds and speeds anymore.

We've been doing testing before implementing for our Oracle Databases and we're seeing much better performance than we were with the previous generation.

We're using a combination of Unisphere and CloudIQ. CloudIQ has become an optimal tool for us to get the full picture of all the different arrays, from mid-tier all the way up. It gives us that single view and the ability to launch the Unisphere. That is really is powerful in being able to manage the array.

With it being part of the Symmetrix family over the years, we don't have a worry at all about it being stable and serviceable. It's been many years since we've had a hardware issue with any VMAX array, and I don't see the PowerMax being any different.

For us, it has enormous scale in the way it can grow with our needs. Starting out as small as we are, with just a small PowerMax 2000, it is amazing how much capacity we can get in such a tiny footprint.

Support from Dell EMC has been phenomenal. Getting the box up and running was very simple, and any time we have a problem we get the right engineers working on it.

We had been using the VMAX line prior, and this was just a case of capacity and performance growth. We refreshed our environment to get the most performance we can out of our applications.

The architecture - using the NVMe on the back end, with the designed use Storage Class Memory, and NVMe end-to-end in the future - really influenced us in not wanting to go backward with our purchase. Rather, we wanted to buy a future-looking device that we can keep growing into, to get our value out of that investment.

The installation of the PowerMax was very straightforward; probably the easiest implementation of an array that we've done so far.

We did it ourselves.

PowerMax was the shortlist.

This should be on your shortlist. You should really take look at PowerMax. They're reliable. They do everything you could possibly want and much more. They have a lot of features that other arrays just don't.

We'd rate it as a ten. It has done everything that we've asked it to do and much more.

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.

The primary use case is data storage consolidation for mission-critical applications, like billing, the charging system, mobile payment, and intelligent network. Virtualization and cloud infrastructure are where the customer is using many solutions for virtualization, like Hyper-V, Oracle Virtual Machine, OpenStack, VMware, Solaris, Linux, Kubernetes, and Docker. Disaster recovery was also the main focus of the customer to guarantee RPO and RTO. The last use case was a NAS solution through the eNAS provided by PowerMax. The previous eNAS hosted by VMAX 10K has its limits in term of size limit for a file system.

Helped our organization by improving performance on the I/O side. Before migrating to PowerMax, customers were faced with many performance issues due to high latency from the back-end and front-end side. Our previous storage was VMAX 10K, and with the evolution of business applications, it became more exigent in term of performance, intelligent data placement with FAST VP, resilience, replication, data protection with snapshot, and no more tasks for provisioning servers and applications. E.g., at the end of month, when the financial department ran the script to produce reports for the BI solution, these scripts generated many performance issues and the storage was struggling. With PowerMax, this is very transparent at the end user level.

1. The optimization of the cache memory of each engine and the use of persistent memory. 
2. I/O density with predictable performance when we grab the I/O to host, as the storage level supported by the PowerMax is too far to be reached regardless of workload and storage capacity utilization. 
   

The main feature that I personally want to see is the possibility to upgrade to the next generation without changing all the components and just change the engine, relying on the compatibility matrices between two different generations. Meaning that we could just keep the enclosure and upgrade the engine, integrating the enclosure to the existing pool, then adding automation tools for orchestration. When you move from VMAX 200K to PowerMax you swap Array. Or DELL EMC must give to the customer the ability to reuse component to the new Array. For example with IBM Storage like Storwize you can reuse enclosure from Gen2,2+ on Gen 3

One year.

Good.

Good.

Proactive.

Yes, we previously used Dell EMC VMAX 10K. We switched just for tech refresh.

Straightforward.

Very good expertise.

No access yet.

We hope that with the combination of both NVMe and SCM the next PowerMax will be much cheaper that the one which we acquired.

Grab performance I/O, and analyze it for better sizing and costing. 

Yes, Huawei. 

Typically, when we are doing PowerMax, it is for applications that we need maximum performance, but also maximum reliability. So, Dell EMC has a lot of other products that can do very high performance, but there are not a lot of other products in the market that can reach the reliability and the availability that PowerMax can.

The use case goes back to when you need that ultimate uptime, where you can't ever have an application go down. We see this a lot in healthcare applications. We also see a lot of miscellaneous other database applications that need to be up all the time for running web services and service providers.

We definitely have situations where we have multiple siloed storage arrays, especially like higher-end VMXs or mid-range storage. So, we have four or five arrays that we can go and take those and put it on one high performing PowerMax, then deliver it to scale and grow.

Uptime by far is the most important thing, and also the replication ability (SRDF). Most of the customers who need this type of availability also want the protection of multiple data centers, and it is able to easily switchover workloads to their other data centers.

I am looking for ease in usability going forward. PowerMax is super powerful, but because it's been around for so long, there is some complexity in configuration and getting the right SLAs set up that you want. I feel like this could be simplified. I would like to see some improvements from there to avoid having to hunt and peck through an interface to do something that I feel should be relatively simple.

I hear from people on my team that they would like improved reporting. While there are some decent tools for doing reporting, they would like to see a lot more built-in functionality. This way when they are logged into the interface everyday doing basic management tasks, they could also see some statistics on what is their storage pool usage and will be their projected usage with their current data growth. They want to be able to see more detailed stats on how they are using the system and have forecasting.

The great thing about PowerMax is from a reliability standpoint, everything is redundant. Uptime is six or seven nines.

PowerMax can grow quite a bit. The design with how storage controllers and engines scale out in regards to storage lets you scale your performance pretty linearly, though not as high as some things, like some of the hyper-converged solutions, but it's pretty nice.

The tech support has been great. One of the good things with PowerMax, as much as the new branding and everything has come about since Dell and EMC merged, but the actual product history goes back really far. So, there is a ton of expertise from a support perspective within the organization. 

There is a lot of knowledge out in the community as well, without having to directly engage Dell EMC support. A lot of times you can find community assistance for common problems and configuration needs.

We haven't done very many migrations from VMAX3-AFA to PowerMax, just because they're close enough in numbers and performance. However, we are seeing a lot of movement from earlier generation VMAX to PowerMax. I even have some customers who are still on the DMX era that were moving over to PowerMax. That is going to be a big difference for them.

Our PowerMax solutions have met all of their requirements that we had when we threw workloads at them.

There are very few other products on the market which I've run into that can give performance at this level of availability.

We do a lot of managed services. Where we get a lot of use from the data is we gather a ton of statistical data about our customers: How they're growing and using their own data. Therefore, we have a lot of metadata about our own customers that we have to sort through. From a consolidation standpoint, it's nice to have all of that in one place. It comes back to performance. We have to be able to pull from a lot of different customers, and do it simultaneously.

I find that PowerMax is improving performance for workloads, like VMware, SAP, Oracle, and SQL Databases.

We use it for virtualization and consolidation of our data lakes.

We are using PowerMax for SAP and Exchange to run the company. 

We have two sites and two data centers. So, we use SRDF to do transfers and fail overs.

The data services, especially SRDF, are its most valuable features.

We are using Unisphere for monitoring. REST API is great for configuring the storage system.

Accessibility to new users needs improvement.

The stability is great. It is five nines.

It scales far beyond what we need, so I am good with that.

The technical support is great. It is a high-end system, so the support should be high-end as well.

We previously used mid-range solutions that just didn't scale.

We used to have a whole bunch of arrays. Now, we have consolidated them onto PowerMax. 

We were looking at All-Flash Arrays that have one submillisecond latency all the time. That is what PowerMax delivers.

The initial setup was complex, as it is a complex system and you have to learn a lot.

We worked directly with Dell EMC for the deployment.

We have seen ROI.

We looked at Dell EMC and Pure Storage.

Look at it. Don't be afraid of its complexity. It has great performance.

Data is core to our business. Have an array with our data on it is very important to the business.

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 use it for our testing and development environments.

It is a hyper-converged solution, which has easy deployment. It is easy to manage and upgrade.

It doesn't need shared storage.

There are some stability issues that we just recently experienced. We hope the next release will solve these problems.

We probably needed more time to test the solution.

Stability is okay for now. However, but if you are using over 80 percent of the storage, that will become a problem.

Scalability is very good. We just added another node with computing too, so it is pretty good.

The technical support is good.

We previously used Cisco HyperFlex and Dell EMC VNXe. Both of these solutions are out-of-date.

The initial setup was not straightforward, though it was pretty easy. We did have Dell EMC come onsite and help us, which was good.

We worked with Dell EMC directly for the deployment. Our experience with them was pretty good.

We did some research and talked to Dell EMC. We asked what solution they recommended, since we are a Dell EMC shop.

I would recommend this product to other customers. It is a very good solution for a remote office, a test environment, and maybe, production. It is not that big.

We have a lot of other Dell EMC solutions: Unity, Isilon, and VxRail.