Dell PowerMax NVMe Reviews

We are using it for core banking systems and virtualized enrollment. So, everything for this bank is on PowerMax, including its core banking system, which is running on Solaris, and all the relevant applications running on VMware.

You can use PowerMax for all workloads and consolidation. We have used it to scale thousands of VMs. This is Dell EMC's selling point. 

It is a good, resilient product.  

The good thing that we have found is the enhanced data savings. For example, in an XtremIO, we were seeing the space savings was 1:4 or 1:3. With PowerMax, I have seen 10:1 and 12:1. This is something that has really come out as a distinctive feature and is helping us a lot.

The Unisphere GUI has been enhanced. A lot of options have been added to the GUI. Though, if somebody is planning to buy PowerMax, they should also have some associated training with that.

We brought up this question to the implementation engineer. We were comparing use cases where a customer is using RecoverPoint, then goes to PowerMax. In our previous setup with XtremIO, we were using RecpverPoint and keeping snapshots for 30 days, every few seconds. With PowerMax, I requested this for every 15 minutes, keeping it for a week. The engineer's answer was, "There will be too many snapshots. It might slow down the system." This is specifically for the use cases where there is RecoverPoint. While PowerMax works with RecoverPoint, and you can use it, there should be some way where you can have even more snapshots and not to worry about performance and system cache.

We have been using PowerMax for less than a year. We just installed it recently.

From my experience, it is stable enough. For our current setup, it is too early to assess stability.

They support scalability. We can add more capacity when it is needed.

I always tell my customers that Dell EMC support is good. Specifically with enterprise storage, like PowerMax and VMAX, it is really good.

Positive

PowerMax was deployed as a replacement/tech refresh for our existing VNX.

We were using XtremIO before this. We have all of the features that were available there. Relatively, there is nothing new that we are using.

We had some challenges with our core banking system. There were performance issues, which was the reason we went to XtremIO All-Flash. NVME has really helped us here because anything less than XtremIO would have caused us issues. So, PowerMax is the best replacement or fit right now. In fact, we have seen that it has really improved the performance as well.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We are still in the implementation phase. 

The ease of administration is okay for me. However, for other team members and specifically our customers, who are not very familiar with it. It has increased provision time. Though, it is just a one-time activity. During implementation, we did the split properly. Therefore, there will not be challenges going forward. 

Initially, it took a lot of time to do the initial provisioning, specifically for the Dell EMC engineer who provisioned a couple of hosts. After that, we did all the provisioning, SRDF replication, snapshots, scripting, etc., and that took awhile. 

I am hoping that this is just one time. Going ahead, it should be simple to add volumes and not have to go through the cycle.

Implementation was mainly done by a local resource, because we are not a deployment partner. The resource connected to somebody remotely from a site in Egypt. We managed to deploy it in half a day for each site. The first time that we did the provisioning, it took time, but it was a relatively straightforward process.

We had some requirements, like SRM integration, where we needed some guidance. Dell EMC has suggested that we use CloudIQ, so we want to explore that option. However, we are not using it right now.

We have used VMAX in other places. It has helped because it has various options for data protection. I have worked on DMX3, DMX4, and VMAX 10K. I am a fan of VMAX because it is really good. There are various command line options that allow you to do a lot of things.

Most of the products are the same and have similar features. There could even be some which might be better. However, one thing that I always liked about Dell EMC is the support, which is really good. If there is an issue and you can get somebody to resolve it, that is the most important thing. Many products have the same features, e.g., snapshot, replication, and data compression, but the support from Dell EMC is one of the best.

It is a good enterprise-scale storage. I would rate it nine out of 10.

Generally, storage doesn't expose your data unless you have certain protocols. With PowerMax, it is too early to remark on data security because we just deployed it and migrated the data. We have not even done a proper drill or failover for data availability and data security. 

It is also too early to remark on workload congestion. Though, since we have been migrating the data, which is live data, I have seen the utilization and that is performing relatively better than our previous Dell EMC platform.

From a technical perspective, you should have some technical training associated with the deployment. That is the one aspect that is complicated. Apart from that, everything is simple. 

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.

We use PowerMax to provide storage for our clients. The service level is important for the different service classes we propose to our clients.

It's a new generation and class of storage so it's faster and more resilient. 

We have reached our required performance level with the response time. We have benched the solution with different types of IO. Now we can be sure, with this solution, that the response time is what we need.

The solution has helped to consolidate storage. With lower space, we now have half a rack.

There is room for improvement in the replication. It's an important requirement for us.

The stability has been good.

The scalability has also been good. We have just bought PowerMax so it's difficult to say much more for now.

Technical support has been good.

The last solution we used was VPLEX. We switched to this new solution because it is more resilient.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution to help our clients respond to all their requirements. We needed to make available other services and other classes of storage. The solution's architecture influenced our buying decision. It was important for us to have NVMe because it is faster.

The initial setup was a little complex because it was our first time with a high-level storage class from Dell EMC.

In terms of migrating from older VMAX arrays, they are still running. We are working with Dell EMC to do that. We are migrating from the OS side, so it's not from the storage side. It's a little longer process.

We worked with Dell to integrate the solution. Our experience with them was good.

The other vendor on our shortlist was HPE and we went with Dell EMC because, with all the tests, it seemed to be the best array.

My advice is to buy this array.

We use CloudIQ and we use Unisphere, but for day-to-day management, we prefer to automate all tasks with REST API.

For now, I would rate this product at nine out of ten. We have tested it and it seems to be resilient and as fast as we need. But we have to do more tests, such as on the replication. That's important for us.

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.

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. 

We use it for all entitled storage on back-end hospital systems, VMware, and Citrix.

We will be putting the hospital HR system on it, because we need it to be fast, efficient, and always up. PowerMax will provide this solution for us.

We are able to provide storage at the right service levels without overmanaging it.

Data is helping us have the performance, so they can do their reporting in the hospitals every day. They are able to maintain with the compression longer.

• Its uptime
• Dedupe
• Compression
• Reliability

It would be nice if there was a training course offered by Dell EMC. It would help us use the product.

It is very stable. We have no concerns.

The brick scalability solution is very nice. It allows us to add smaller quantities and still get quality performance.

The technical support is lacking. We are working with Dell EMC to get some better understanding of this.

Currently, we have a VPLEX with multiple storage arrays behind it. Now, we will be moving to one storage array and getting rid of the rest.

The performance requirements for the Diamond Levels on certain areas, we wanted submillisecond response times. We are still working with our buyer to get this to fruition based on some of our workloads.

The initial setup is very straightforward because it is All-Flash. We are now looking at maximizing the performance features.

We are still working with our integrator on the deployment since the VMAX is relatively new in the industry that I am working in. We are still working on improving our experience, as they lacked experience in the PowerMax.

The migration process of the VMAX to PowerMax is ongoing. Because we have a VPLEX, it is causing more complexity than if it had been just VMAX to VMAX.

Ensure whomever you work with knows the solution and you get feedback from other customers.

It has good performance and speed, but it is still lacking in training and knowledge.

We are only using Unisphere of the performance management and monitoring tools, as we are not that familiar with the other ones available.

Our primary use case is data storage, compression, encryption, all in one device. So we need all those things.

We're consolidating two to three arrays down to one which means that our data center footprint has decreased by like 90%. So we're saving 90% of our space, and it also is much better on power and everything else in our data center. And on top of that, the performance is much, much better than our older arrays.

The most valuable feature is the performance and compression. The most useful tool is CloudIQ.

Stability of the new PowerMax from what I've found is a lot better than the older version of the VMAX or EMC Dell array. That's one of the reasons why we've purchased more of them going forward. I think it's going to be a pretty prevalent storage array in our environment.

All of our applications are running on mission-critical applications. We've always been a Dell EMC shop, we've always run all our critical applications on there, and this is just a better and more improved product, so we're just continuing with the cycle that we've had for 20 years.

It's very scalable. It can grow much larger than I probably would utilize, but I don't like to put all my data in one box. The scalability is enormous in the PowerMax.

We haven't had to use tech support customer service. We've had a couple of little things come up, but for the most part, they've been pretty stable, so we haven't had any issues.

We don't have a vast I/O performance database or application suite, so the old arrays were taking care of that part. But we see the milliseconds to microseconds response time in the new variety.

We have purchased some professional services to do NDM migrations. We haven't done any yet, but we will be doing that in the next quarter. From everything I've seen and looked at, and I'm going to take a few more sessions on it. I think it's going to be much easier to migrate data from the old to the new.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution based on a compression standpoint and the overall cost by reducing our footprint and fitting more data into a single file, it just made sense, and it's been working great for us so far. And MVME had a considerable influence on my decision to go with PowerMax as well the ability to encrypt and compress at the same time.

The initial setup was straightforward. From a hardware stand-up getting ready to go perspective, it was very straightforward. Our internal processes held it up. It wasn't anything that Dell held it up with. It went well.

The new Unisphere for PowerMax is beneficial in collecting that data although I have not started using the app IQ or, I don't remember what it's called. The alerting, they gather all the data, and I can use my phone and look at an app, and it can tell me right there that my environment is good that day or whatever and it sends me alerts. So, I haven't started using that, but I plan to when I get back, so it just makes the management a little bit easier looking at the whole environment.

No, we didn't implement through a vendor we go direct through Dell. And the experience was excellent. We have a great relationship with our Dell sales team as well as their support and customer service organization.

Our ROI on this is much higher than it was previously with the arrays that we had. Being able to consolidate three arrays into a single footprint has made it much easier and cost-efficient.

From a TCO perspective, we saved a lot of money by getting the over rate consolidating two into one or three into one, so we saved a ton of money on the total cost of ownership over the next four years.

We have multiple solutions, but we're mostly an HDS F-Series company as well as Dell EMC.

From what I've heard people seem to think that the cost of the array is prohibitive. And I would tell them to look at the ROI and do their cost analysis on it because from what I've found, cost per gigabyte is much lower than what it was for previous arrays as well as the overall cost of ownership in the reduction of the footprint in the data center is enormous.

On a scale from one to ten, one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate the product an eight or nine. So far it's been great.

We use the solution for managing workloads like SQL, online streaming, and middleware. 

The tool is a fast-performing asset. It can perform millions of transactions within a second. I like the tool's architecture as well. 

The tool is costly compared to other similar products. The product's pricing needs to be improved. I would like the product to include the replication feature in its future releases. 

I have been working with the tool for two to three years. 

The product is one of the most stable solution that we have ever worked on. 

The tool is scalable up to eight engines. 

The tool's support is good but they can do better. 

The product's setup is managed by Dell. The implementation process is a quick one and takes about a week to complete. The product is also easy to maintain since there are alerts and templates. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. If you are looking to use the product, go for it. It will be beneficial for you in terms of daily operations and pricing.