Dell PowerStore Reviews

We primarily use the solution for storage.

The solution is very easy to implement. 

It's stable.

The solution can scale. 

Its pricing structure is reasonable. 

There is a bit less functionality than, for example, NetApp. 

You cannot monitor as well with this product.

You cannot delegate permissions. For example, in NetApp, you can give two virtual storages and give them each to a different company. In Dell, you can only have one or two admins, and you cannot give permissions independently. It should be more flexible. 

I've been using the solution for half a year.

The stability of the product is good so far. There are no bugs or glitches. It's new. It hasn't crashed or frozen. I'd rate the stability eight out of ten. 

For now, the scalability is fine. I can grow double my size with no problem. I have yet to scale, however. I'd rate the scalability potential nine out of ten. 

There are 800 people using the solution right now. 

We do not have plans to increase usage. 

If I had any issues at the beginning, it was dealt with in the presence of the integrator, and he fixed it. I have yet to contact technical support to troubleshoot.

I've also used NetApp.

Before that, we also used HPE.

The company chose Dell PowerStore based on budgeting choices.

The implementation process is straightforward. It's not complex. It's easier to deploy than NetApp. The deployment takes about six hours for a basic setup.

You just set it up and connect it to the laptop and input the details. 

The technical team for deployment and maintenance only took one system admin. 

We had the help of an integrator during deployment. 

I have witnessed ROI while using the solution. It's been good so far.

The pricing is okay. It's expensive, yet fits within our budget. It has cost us less if we compare it to NetApp. We bought the license for the whole five years. There are no extra costs.

I'm not sure of the exact cost of the solution. 

I'm an end-user. I'm an administrator of Dell PowerStore. 

We are using the latest version of the solution. 

I've been very satisfied with the product.

The solution is easy to manage and implement. It's worth the money you pay for it. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I use the solution for storage, databases, and visualization. It serves as a storage option for our server.

It's easy, and the GUI is user-friendly. The recommendation was proper, so we adopted the solution. 

The performance is very good, which is important for storage. Performance is important for storage, with features like compression and deduplication. Performance is crucial, and the price compared to the risk isn't the worst. High availability is achieved, and the load is divided between two nodes.

Compression of data is good. It offers good resilience against ransomware. Our data is safe from attacks. I achieve a higher ability with this solution. There are features for resilience against ransomware and cyber attacks, including security. 

It's easy to manage. I use a lot of Dell solutions and find the GUI very user-friendly. 

The APEX IOPS are good. It gives a lot of good information.

We can consolidate data using PowerStore. We have a guaranteed compression of four to one. We also received extra space from the vendor.

We've been able to consolidate data by about 100% to 240%.

We've been able to increase operational efficiency. 

The data encryption is good and available in a standard license. There are snapshot and backup capabilities. 

PowerStore has helped us reduce our Capex by 20% to 40%. 

I don't see anything I need to change. I am happy with the years of use I've gotten. Nothing more is needed to meet our requirements. We have received the necessary functions, like consistent snapshots for the application. Currently, no function is missing for our needs. As long as they keep up with the quality, I would be happy.

I have used the solution for over five years.

I performed scalability adjustments this year. It was easy and simple.

Users can add capacity in single drive increments.

I'd rate scalability ten out of ten.

I am happy with customer service. I have not faced any problems.

Positive

I am still using familiar Dell products, such as PowerStore and Unity, as they are part of the same family. I'm also using PowerVault. 

We did not use a different solution previously. We've always used Dell.

The setup is easy. I implemented an instance. It is not hard. 

I need one person with some experience in storage to help with the setup. I may then possibly need more.

We currently have three devices. We are not clustering them.

There is some maintenance needed for fixes, et cetera.

We implemented the first time via a vendor. After that, it was easy to do by ourselves. 

Cost savings are evident, and we receive storage and resilience against cyber attacks. We see it as a good investment.

The cost is average.

Users can be enrolled in lifecycle extension with pro support. The pricing for that is too high for PowerStore.

The overall product rating is ten out of ten.

Typically, the customer uses it and we manage it. We primarily use it to host the sub server.

snapshot policy you can take a versions as a backup in less than seconds and quickly created volumes from snapshot provide more flexibility and fast provisioning 
compression and deduplication of overall hosted data maximize the benefits from the actual physical size with a ratio of 1:3 at least.

The usage of the system is very straightforward. It is simple and easy to use.

It has great snapshots. I can take a million snapshots and also schedule the timing.

There is no complicated configuration for queries and calls. You just create a model and go.

This generation of the product, overall, has been very nice. 

It is stable.

The solution can scale. 

There are a lot of features in IBM that we'd like to see in PowerStore as well. It has more deduplication and compression processes, all the storage, so that they do not depend on the tool embedded in the cluster. 

The pricing could be lower. It is very expensive.

I've been using the solution for at least six months. 

The stability is good. It is reliable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's been perfect so far.

The solution can scale. We can attach an expansion as needed. So far, seeing as how I haven't collected all of the information in regard to scaling, I'd rate it seven out of ten.

We have three storage admins. The customer likely exceeds 20,000 users globally.

The client does not have plans to increase usage at this time. 

I've contacted technical support, They are fine. They are helpful and responsive. 

Positive

We have received a new storage device from HP. It is MSA storage.

While I did not see the deployment, my understanding is that it is easy.

The price is very, very expensive. It is more expensive than IBM, for example. Likely the cost is $400,000 whereas IBM may be $250,000. This is a one-time payment to buy the device. There are no subscription costs. There are no other costs for support.

We've looked into IBM SS7 300 as well. I'd recommend it as it has many abilities. It can carry some uploads from storage clusters. 

We are service providers.

The solution is on-premises at our company and we manage it for the customer remotely via a private cloud.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We have two appliances — a primary and a secondary — and they are synchronized, so all the volumes are replicated. If the primary appliance goes down, we can get functions on the other side. When it's writing on one side, writing is disabled on the other side. In the event of disaster recovery, we can enable writing, and then we can do anything from there.

PowerStore simplified everything because we have a duplicate copy of all the volumes on the primary side. If anything happens, we can get data from the other side. It also takes hourly snapshots. If anything gets corrupted, we can recover using the snapshots. It's easier for our business to create volumes and allocate space on a volume. You don't have to go through the hassle of zoning the volume and doing everything else. It's simple.

PowerStore is easy to use. All the drives use soft encryption. To upgrade it, you download the app, and it runs by itself. It's very easy to deploy, share, and create volumes. It's active, so you can have two nodes on one appliance. If Node A goes down, you still get node B at the bottom running. 

I would rate PowerStore's machine learning and AI eight out of 10 because customer automation is very easy. It's just a click of the button, You can also use what they call Cloud IQ, which is an online storage and monitoring software. If you log on to the internet, you can check on your plans to see how much space is left. Cloud IQ analytics software is free as long as you have an account with Dell.

Dell's built-in intelligence is the best because it can also calculate how much data is needed for storage beforehand and if you need to add more drives or anything. The built-in intelligence can adapt quickly to changing workload requirements. We were able to migrate from IBM storage by uploading an image. With other devices, it's sometimes hard to migrate from different forms of storage, but PowerStore was very quick. We didn't have any downtime because once we were able to create the image, we just had to do a cut-over on the other side. 

Pretty soon it's going to be Meditech certified, so it's going to be able to run Meditech. Right now we are using a different solution to run Meditech, but once it gets certified, we'll be able to move from the other appliance. VMware integration is very easy too. PowerStore gives us leverage, we can tell how much space is allocated to the VM and what's happening on a VM.

We just installed PowerStore this spring.

PowerStore is highly stable. If one node goes down, it's going to alert you at any time. And then since you're using Cloud IQ, you can see all the alerts and everything. You can install Cloud IQ on your cell phone, so you'll get a notification on your phone.

You can scale PowerStore. If you look at the cost of getting a next-generation XtremIO, we can get two PASTs for the cost of one XtremIO, so it's cheaper to get the PAST. It just came out. It's new, so I don't know about the usage out there, but for us, it's a small beast. It does everything.

Dell's support is perfect. I rate Dell's support nine out of 10. You call them when you have an issue, and they'll get back to you within 24 hours. If it's a serious issue, they respond in four hours. The system itself does a lot. It lets you know when it needs to be updated. And if the upgrade fails, you can just revert to the previous version. This happened once, but we tried again and I didn't have to revert to the older version. 

Positive

Before PowerStore, we were using IBM SVC. We switched because we are getting more virtualized. PowerStore is a new solution, but we were not concerned about switching because we went through a third party called SIS, and they've already installed a couple of PowerStore storage devices in different hospitals. If you look at the DS 7000 in the data center, it's a rack. There are maybe four racks for the same storage solution on one parcel. So it also minimizes space. We only have one 2U rack and it's running like 96 terabytes. 

PowerStore is easy to install and deploy. It takes less than a day.

The price is on the higher side. It's alright relative to what PowerStore does. 

I'll rate Dell EMC PowerStore 10 out of 10. I haven't had any issues with it since we've installed it. PowerStore is easy to adapt, and it's straightforward to use. You cannot even make a mistake on anything because it's going to make sure you confirm everything before you go to the next step. I haven't seen anything that needs to be improved yet. If I compare it with what we were using before, this one is genius.

We're addressing performance issues in our data center as well as the data duplication features to make sure we can be efficient in how we're storing data.

The main improvement has been storage efficiency. The price per gig of what we're able to store has been the biggest aspect the business has seen.

Some of the new features that are coming out, like vVols support are valuable. We're very excited about it. Currently, the features of replication and deduplication have been very important to us.

We've just heard that in the second half of this year, they will come out with support for vVols and the storage replication of those, which are new features. We're very excited about those. We've been waiting for them for a while.

It was very new when we first deployed it a year ago. Even just the upgrade processes and knowing what to expect, as well as documentation, could be more robust. We had folks that helped us through, however, we did have some bumps and bruises along the way.

I've been using a solution for just over a year. 

The stability has been solid for us since we deployed it. We haven't had any issues to speak of. A part failed somewhere, but it didn't cause any user impact, however, that's been the extent of it.

We tend to think of the users being our applications that are in there. However, in terms of the total global footprint of users, we've probably got 40,000 end-users, and probably 500 applications that run on top of it.

We are considering increasing usage. We have two other global data centers where it'll be deployed and then about 120 remote sites that we're just looking at now, whether we should make PowerStore our standard there or stay with the current unity.

My team was involved in the deployment. I know we had the pro deploy services that did a lot of the work for us. It took a little while to get updates done. It sat for a few months before our data center was ready to put it in. Other than that, the deployment went pretty seamlessly.

Once we actually had all the prereqs done, it was deployed within a week, it was probably just a few days even between the two sites. There were a couple of months of waiting, however, that was more on our side.

These were two new Greenfield data center builds. It was like starting from scratch with a partner and now we're migrating workloads into them. It wasn't integrating with anything that existed.

There was one person on my team who was coordinating with outside organizations to do some implementation work for us. He was a cloud/storage engineer.

In terms of maintenance requirements, there's one person who looks after things. We've got it integrated with CloudIQ from a management standpoint. It largely tells us when things need to happen, however, one person keeps up with updates, new firmware, and those kinds of things.

We did have outside assistance. We had Presidio as part of that deployment and we also had Dell's ProDeploy services. Both were very positive. They helped us understand both the prerequisites and what we needed to get started and then got us up and running effectively.

In terms of ROI, I don't have a good measure of it, however, I do know that we've seen definite improvements when we just compare what we've done in the past to what we're doing now. We've definitely seen improvements in terms of price per gig.

The great thing was the guarantee that came with it of the four-to-one deduplication ratio. That really helped with the pricing as well as the anytime upgrades. From a TCO standpoint, we were really able to see some benefits.

We did a bake-off between NetApp, Pure, and Dell. We've used EMC and then Dell storage solutions in our environment for years and have a proven relationship with the organization, as well as the product's capability.

We have a private cloud within our two new North American global data centers. We've looked at connectivity to both AWS and Azure, however, we really don't have any storage replication heading there at this point.

I'd rate the product nine out of ten. With the new features that'll be out in a few months, it just continues to get better.

I like this solution. This was built more from the ground up with new features in mind. In particular, some of the capabilities that are coming out in the near future are really going to set it in a class above what the others have to offer.

We are a Dell partner and have been installing PowerStores since the beginning of their release. Austria is a small market so we usually deploy PowerStore 1200 and for smaller installations, we deploy PowerStore 500. We have a few customers that use PowerStore 3200.

The primary use case for PowerStore is typical block storage for VMware environments and for SQL and Microsoft bare metal systems.

We use CloudIQ to manage our customers. It is useful for us to predict the capacity and monitor performance.

PowerStore helps reduce energy consumption for our clients.

PowerStore helps reduce our client's footprint by up to four times.

We see a data reduction of three point five to one typically for our customers.

The most valuable feature is the unwavering performance. It is a fast system that is reliable. The entire Dell ecosystem offers good integration with powerful tech.

It would be helpful for us to have support for the S3 protocol because our main competitor has the S3 protocol in their system. We lost a few teams because of the requirements of S3, so maybe that could be added to their roadmap.

Dell's data reduction guarantee, initially straightforward for claiming additional storage, has become more complex. Their current analysis digs deeper into data composition, and some customers with encrypted data have been denied additional storage under the guarantee.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for three years.

Dell PowerStore is stable.

Dell PowerStore scalability is a big advantage because we can scale out if we install two or three appliances in the cluster using scale-up architecture and also scale up to four enclosures.

The Dell support is good. We have good experience starting with the Dell support portal.

Positive

We are a Dell partner but we also sell NetApp systems. NetApp was an early developer of QLC drives which Dell has only recently started to use with their first shipment going out in July of 2024. The pros of PowerStore are the performance, reliability, and flexibility. We can increase our storage pool by one SSD. Other vendors require a minimum of five SSDs or a bank to grow.

Dell PowerStore is affordable and the license is just a face license which is great.

I would rate Dell PowerStore eight out of ten.  

Dell PowerStore four point zero now can automatically replicate file services. This is an important feature of our customers but we have yet to upgrade to the latest version.

In Austria, we have installed one-half with about 15 to 20 times eight terabyte SSDs. So that means an effective capacity between 100 terabytes and 500 terabytes.

We primarily use Dell PowerStore as part of our VMware infrastructure and other Dell servers.

The biggest improvement we found when moving into Dell PowerStore was the deduplication and compression. I did not believe we could get that much storage into one. However, the solution brought it down and compressed everything, which was amazing.

We went from Compellent, which was over 100 terabytes, down to Dell PowerStore, which was 30 terabytes. It significantly saved on rack space, power, and cooling.

Our organization uses CloudIQ to manage and analyze our Dell storage. It's a little confusing because we have multiple IT shops, and I can see what other groups are using. I can only see what I can see, and they can only see what they see. So, it becomes more of a viewing thing than actually doing.

We were looking to replace our old Compellent hardware by implementing Dell PowerStore. The data reduction with Dell PowerStore was much better than we had with Compellent. It was truly amazing.

We are utilizing Dell PowerStore’s integration with VMware, which makes it a lot easier to manage.

We have been able to reduce our organizational footprint using Dell PowerStore. We went from 18U of rack space down to 2U.

We have two different PowerStores in two different geographical locations, but they're separate workloads altogether. They're not replicated or anything like that.

When you purchase the solution, it comes with professional services, and our experience with them has been great.

Dell PowerStore is far superior to other Dell products we've used over the years, such as EqualLogic and Compellent. I would recommend the solution to other users because it is worthwhile.

Sometimes, you have to go back and forth with the technical support team, where they want you to do something you've already done.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for a couple of years.

We haven't had to scale out the tool because we sized it right. Based on all our research, scaling out the solution should be pretty straightforward if we ever need to.

The solution’s technical support is pretty good. Sometimes, you have to go back and forth with the technical support team, where they want you to do something you've already done.

Positive

We previously used Compellent. We switched to Dell PowerStore because Compellent was approaching end-of-life.

Before choosing the solution, we evaluated Pure Storage. We chose Dell PowerStore because Dell is a trusted partner.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

We use the Dell PowerStore 1000, 5000, 5200, 7000, and 9200 models in our environment. We have a ten-petabyte environment and we use it for structuring storage for our SQL data basis, our search engine, and backend storage for our Kubernetes environment.

We have seen a reduction in data center space, power cooling, and the number of people required to maintain the platforms. Now that it is PowerStore Prime, it has feature parity with previous generation products when it comes to what it can do from a software perspective, which is nice as well. Also because it is a flash product with no moving parts, I can trust that it is available 99.99 percent of the time.

It depends on the workload. I'm seeing data reductions upwards of three to one. In some areas, I'm seeing data reductions of one point six to one on other workloads, but that's because it has encryption already built into it. So when they don't do compression, they're not necessarily deduplication. And so it varies by work but you do see the savings there. The easiest way to quantify it is I can get the same capacity on a high-performance all-flash model that we were getting on a much larger deployment, spinning disk of a previous generation product. Given the amount of storage we have, the cost savings are in the six if not seven figures.

CloudIQ has provided a single pane of glass. There have been some issues with CloudIQ but we have been able to work through them. The nice thing about it isn't necessarily that it just tells me the health of my storage but also gives me performance metrics. Most importantly, it allows me to see my capacity and to project capacity constraints over time within a certain confidence range.

PowerStore reduces our energy consumption. I only have so much power available in my data center and since I can now put a greater capacity footprint within a rack in a space, I can now put other things in its place because of the reduced energy consumption.

Dell is a leader in what they call ESG values. I'm familiar with a lot of things they have done when it comes to working with other countries, and conservation efforts, especially with water. It's impressive to put this much energy and effort into that because it comes at a cost to Dell, so I know it is important to them.

We are utilizing PowerStore integrations, like PowerProtect, VMware, DevOps Container Store, and others. Now that we're at a PowerStore Prime. It's taking a while to get here, but now we can see the benefits within the VMware environments, we can also see benefits on how quickly we can deploy. Especially in our Kubernetes environment, containerization makes a big difference. We can now deploy multiple times within a day as opposed to taking days for a single deployment.

The Dell data reduction guarantee is reliable. I have been supplied with extra capacity from Dell because the reduction guarantee was not met and they stand behind it.

The most valuable features of PowerStore are its density and data reduction. Combined they allow for a larger data footprint in a smaller area. It is high-performing. I get good latency and high access times for mission-critical workloads. I can scale it to meet my needs and it is reliable.

I would like a feature parity on the software side. I've been with PowerStore since version one dot zero. I've been through the growing pains of the software. The hardware has always been reliable. The software has been evolving. The biggest area in PowerStore that needs improvement is the overall visibility within the ESX environment. I haven't seen PowerStore Prime yet. I'm hoping that it'll be like it was with Unity. I am assuming it will be but I haven't seen it. That's one area if it's not done. The other area is SNMP deployment so that I can use my own observability platforms to see its performance.

One area of suggestion for the platform engineering team is that when they do introduce new features not turn them on by default, let the customer decide if they want to use those new features. It's been more than once that I have done a software upgrade and started something that's caused a negative impact on my environment.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for four years.

Dell PowerStore is stable.

The scalability has improved with the newer systems. I'm running multi-petabyte storage appliances for block workloads, which is impressive. I'd like to be able to continue adding on more, but there are always limitations to every system. There is always the processor level and we don't want to exceed that. Over time, as processing gets more powerful, the scalability will increase with it. I don't think that's different with any storage product.

I am comfortable with the Dell technical support. I work with them all the time. We've had some issues with parts availability for our mission-critical support, it could take over a day or two while waiting for parts. It's been remedied by working with some executive teams to get parts mobilized for my implementation. Every support issue that I've had has been remedied in some way, but it's taken some effort.

Positive

Our initial deployment was not good. There's a lot of learning curve for the deployment team as well. We used professional services, but the way the clustering of PowerStore, we have multiple appliances working together needs to be set up, requires certain networking services to be running that wasn't a hundred percent clear, and it took us a while to understand why we weren't getting the expected results from our deployment. I have deployed a lot of these things now in my environment. Occasionally, we still run into the problem. Every deployment team is a little bit different here and some just assume that we need to have an IPv6 network enabled in the environment for it to work. They just need to be reminded. They're not complicated. They are dense and are fitted within a rack. There's not a lot of connectivity that we have to do. I use a fiber channel on mine. So that simplifies it if I had to do more IP networking too, it would probably be more complex.

We have evaluated competitors for storage solutions. PowerStore took a while to get to par with some competitors, but I believe they're there now. The cost is better with Dell. The biggest area where I find it beneficial to stay with a single vendor for storage is that I can work with one support organization and not have to worry about finger-pointing.

I would rate Dell PowerStore eight out of ten. I like it because of its performance. I have very complex workloads that run against it in sub-millisecond latencies. I get good data reduction which has improved over time. The GUI is straightforward. The only reason I'm not giving it higher than an eight right now is that it still takes a little more effort to integrate with our VMware environment compared to Unity. The VMware environment sees the Unity, and we add it. That may not be fixed with PowerStore Prime. I'm not on that version yet. So that's to be determined. if that gap is cleared, I will rate PowerStore higher.

We are 100 percent a Dell shop for storage and computing but do not use Dell for networking.