Dell PowerStore Reviews

We were using Dell PowerStore as a block device for VMware infrastructure and in iSCSI Target for a couple of secret server clusters installed at a hardware level. Apart from that, regarding the workload, which is currently more or less 40% for SQL Servers and 60% for the production of VMware machines. We have a small workload on VMware machines to manage a typical number crunching machine and application server. Now, we have six machines running a couple of MongoDB servers. Honestly, our bottleneck is not the PowerStore. Our actual bottleneck is the networking size because we noticed how we got some barriers in LACP algorithms, indicating we have two mixes on every motherboard> However, we are not able to fulfill the double connection. We also have a part of our experience infrastructure, but instead of 25 gigabit, it functions on 10 gigabit. Sometimes, during evenings or on Fridays, we use Rubrik for protection when we run it. When Rubrik works against Dell PowerStore and MongoDB, along with SQL Server, we noticed that PowerStore's QLC is normal while its CPU and compression levels are good. But, we do face a delay in CAPA and the server. So definitely, we noticed that maybe we need to upgrade everything to 25 gigabit, and still, if it doesn't work, then we may consider FortiGate's networking. Dell Compellent was our storage before, and now we are pushing the Ethernet to the maximum with PowerStore.

Three years ago, I was a little scared about PowerStore because I have been working with storage solutions for many years and have a habit of maintaining additional storage machines, firmware, interfaces, and so on. I noticed that PowerStore is a totally virtualized solution. PowerStore runs container, docker, and so on, and the firmware is managed in a different manner, which is a good point for total virtualization of the firmware and so on. But on the contrary, it's like a black box for me. It is different to work on PowerStore compared to IBM. I worked in the past with IBM ESS 800 Shark Storage. The type of super virtualization in PowerStore is a startup feature. A digital machine is present inside the storage server when this startup feature is launched. This digital machine can be managed entirely remotely, with an automatic download available from Dell. We started with the solution's initial version three years ago, and now we are working on one of its latest versions.

Now we are not pushing the PowerStore to its maximum capability, so we are down in respect of the limit of PowerStore we use in our organization. For now, the slackness is ours, not PowerStore's. I'm not able to tell what can be improved since we are not pushing to its maximum speed. Also, we haven't experienced any downtime, and we switched from primary to secondary and so on, and there has been no problem. Initially, we had some problems with the firmware, and it was a serious problem. But, after six months, we upgraded two or three times, after which we didn't experience any problems. So, we never faced any problems or significant failures for two and a half years. We have a double installation, including primary and secondary ones. Also, in the initial six months, even if we had some errors, we never got a stop error. We never stop. Hence, we never stop the protection system. We only have a secondary type of error, which is for one of the parts of the solution but never for the software side.

The only thing is that with PowerStore, we don't have a solution for the file object. Because of this, we have been investigating Zephyr and another solution. We are also thinking of not buying anything in our data center. We are also evaluating a proposal from a provider named Wasabi, which provides an alternative to Amazon S3. Also, we want to follow a totally different approach so that there is no more spending or investments inside our hardware infrastructure, and we depend on just pushing it with the help of an external provider. Vaulting is another approach we may opt for, but we may not do it now since we are using Rubrik for vaulting. A good improvement for PowerStore would be to have an embedded vaulting feature. Currently, two providers of block devices offer vaulting capabilities, allowing for signing within multiple objects or on a partition. In such cases, this feature would be beneficial if you want to freeze a part of your storage or apply differential computing. This strategy involves preparing a disk for a machine and deploying ten machines based on multiple basic installations.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for more than three years. I am a customer using the solution.

The stability has been excellent in the last two years after the initial six months. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

I am unable to comment on the solution's scalability since we have no plans in our company to scale up and also because we are only using half of the potential of the solution. I cannot tell if adding another node to the solution is easy or not.

The solution's technical support is excellent. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

We were previously using Dell Compellent in our organization. Before that, I worked in a different company using HPE 3PAR.

The initial setup was complex and difficult, and we had to rely on the assistance of an Italian partner in Bologna under the name Cinetica. We initially planned for four days over two weeks, with two days set aside for the first week to prepare all the necessary networks for networking and another two days for the second week to start up PowerStore. However, the process took more than ten days, and we received a machine with firmware series one dot from Dell's headquarters. I cannot recall if it was one dot zero one or one dot zero two, but we encountered an issue during the initial setup. After completing the initial setup, we immediately switched to Dell PowerStore Version 2. If the machine had arrived with pre-installed PowerStore Version 2, we might not have encountered this initial problem. The main issue arose in the mapping and network features from the volume exposed by PowerStore, including MLAG, LACP, and the corner configuration in the internet reports. A large number of cables and fiber also made it difficult to align the procedures, with a ton of files on the console level.

If I were to install the latest version of the solution in 2023, with the last firmware and its additions, the setup process could be more reasonable. It would be possible to start the entire high-availability solution in four days with a double installation. However, the complexity is also related to the fact that if all production environments require at least a couple of PowerStore solutions, even if only one can be purchased, it is normal to have a high-vulnerability environment. I rate the setup process a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.

Regarding the deployment process timeline, during the dry run testing, we created an initial copy of a portion of SQL Server storage that Compellent was managing. During this phase, we were required to run the exact production workload without any interruptions to the production environment. This phase took us approximately one month. After completing the dry run, we decided to copy the storage from Rubrik to restore all the data to the logical number allocated to PowerStore. We then made adjustments because it was an iSCSI target, which meant changing the worldwide domain in the iSCSI target for the SQL Server machine.

Our organization spent two months considering its budget and economics. We got TRESIO and Excel's expected storage size and special compression, and because of this, we could save some money since the compression is working very well. In the end, we bought a solution that was half the size of the initial solution, and we got a compression ratio of about five to one, which was a win-win solution. With compression, we were able to have a solution within our company's budget. We include a clause in the contract with Dell that states if the compression ratio is not met, we will adjust the workload accordingly. In this scenario, Dell support will provide additional hard drives free of charge to be added to the PowerStore. There was Dell's competitor on our side, and they were supportive of our decision to give hard drives to buy to improve the functioning.

It's important to note that we evaluated another option quite different from a manufacturer, CentOS. However, we cannot say that we were able to make a fair evaluation between a small manufacturer and Dell, as economics played a significant role in our decision-making process. If I can freely test other environments, I would test solutions from IBM and Lenovo. IBM is a large manufacturer, and CentOS is a competing technology. VMware provides a software-based shared mapping storage technology, which emulates disk storage. CentOS is attempting to emulate VMware's vSAN technology.

It isn't easy for me to rate the solution because inside my infrastructure, PowerStore is the biggest one, and the other storage solutions we use only for secondary and unimportant projects using storage like NETGEAR. It is very difficult to give an evaluation considering my current infrastructure because I have only a PowerStore in my company. Earlier, I was able to make comparisons because I was using HPE 3PAR and IBM solutions in my previous company. Dell PowerStore is better than HPE 3PAR since there are a lot of changes and updates needed in 3PAR. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

We use the very first one we added for a very pinpointed solution for a high-performance Oracle database. We've added four more, and they're going to be used primarily to migrate away from HP systems.

Our environment is 80% to 90% virtualized VMware. We have some pretty heavy workloads, whether it be SQL databases or Oracle databases working on the PowerStores right now. It's about three petabytes in size.

The systems I currently have in place are old, and their support is running out. They're at the end of their life cycle. One of the key improvements that PowerStore is going to bring is that it will enable me to shrink the physical footprint. I'll be going from 5 physical HP arrays, which are about 12 racks in size, down to 4 PowerStores, which can fit on one rack.

As a result, I'll be able to shrink the footprint, save power, cooling, etc. I will also be able to improve the existing performance and longevity of the platform.

When we put the PowerStore in for the Oracle database, it was previously on NetApp. The staff wanted to do snapshots but also clone, and then be able to clone from a clone to add it to another system. PowerStore enabled them to do just that.

They not only got their performance back to where it needed to be from previously being on the NetApp array but also got some of the feature functions that they require for the application.

The simplicity and ease of use have been very valuable features. I have a very small team, and only half of the team is well versed in the HP product. Whereas if I bring PowerStore in, everyone can learn it because it will be new on the floor.

Also, the simplicity of the administration, snapshot capabilities, and its replication are other features of PowerStore that I've found to be valuable.

Reporting is an area that could be improved. It's very simplistic sometimes, and some of the very technical guys on my team want to see more of the details and be able to massage the report a little bit better.

We originally added our first PowerStore about a year ago.

I haven't thought about the stability of the product, which means that it's working. That says it all. As a manager of the environment, if I'm not thinking about it on a daily basis, then that means it's doing what it's supposed to be doing.

I haven't really had to scale PowerStore as of yet, but it does have the scalability features that I need. I'll be able to scale up when we do grow.

Dell's support staff is very proactive. They were with us every step of the way to make sure that we were plugging everything in properly and making sure that everything is fully redundant during deployment.

With regard to post-deployment support, if we have any needs and call them, they respond within minutes. So, I would rate them ten on a scale from one to ten.

Positive

We replaced HP and NetApp with PowerStore because we wanted to reduce the physical footprint.

Deployment is very simple. I think we were up and running in less than a day.

Dell helped us with our deployments. They use ProDeploy, and we used it for one of ours that's overseas.

Normally, my data center team does all of the rack and stack and cabling. I share all those requirements with Dell to make sure that they understand that we're following best practices. We can plug it in, and do it all online.

The rack space I'm saving alone is an ROI because I'm able to then use those racks for more servers.

Power and cooling are big factors for us because we're trying to shrink the footprint as we move things over to the cloud.

Performance-wise, if I can have jobs that used to run for ten or eleven hours cut down to three or four hours, then that allows everyone to be more productive.

Pricing is very good. It's very competitive against all the others that I looked at in the marketplace, such as Hitachi, IBM, HP, and Pure. Dell is right there in the mix as far as providing the best price point, as well as meeting the performance requirements that we have.

I looked at IBM and Pure Storage during the last purchase cycle. The reason that PowerStore won that purchase was the pricing. They definitely set the bar high as far as pricing is concerned. Going with PowerStore would also help me to shrink the environment.

Don't shy away from the higher-end workloads. You don't necessarily have to go with a big iron box like PowerMax when PowerStore will suffice. It will then allow you to save some dollars and also meet the performance requirements that you have.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate PowerStore at 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 the solution for storage and data reduction. 

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The architecture is very good.

It's a reliable product. 

The data reduction feature is quite useful. It has a good reduction ratio during migrations.

The solution is stable. 

The solution only supports NPE. It doesn't support SSD or Flash. We'd like the option to be more flexible. If a customer finds out SSD is not supported, they will look for another option.

I implemented the solution around two years ago. I haven't used it for very long. 

It is a reliable, stable product. We haven't had any issues with it. Of course, it is not that old. That said, there are no failures and we have not had controller issues. there are no bugs or glitches. 

It is a scalable product. However, I have not needed to go and upgrade it or add more enclosures, et cetera. It can scale up. However, it can not scale out.

I have three customers that have already implemented the tool. More are coming online soon. Most of them are enterprises. We do expect expansion in the coming years. 

Technical support is more than perfect. We are quite pleased with the level of support on offer. 

I'm also aware of HP, which is a very similar solution. Sometimes the pricing of HP can be better.

The solution is very simple to set up. It is not a complex process. I monitor the process from a design and implementation point of view. 

The deployment takes about 15 minutes if everything is correct and on-hand. Then you move on to the management and you can have the flow up and running. We do the configurations and create the volume and handle the storage of the whole system.

I've implemented the solution three times at different sites. We implement the tool and do the migration. I work with a separate partner and we deploy to the users. 

The pricing is fixed. We have received a good price overall. Users must pay for the licenses. Most of the tools are included in an out-of-the-box delivery. There are no extra fees.

We're partners.

The solution is acceptable for both small and large companies. 

I'd advise new users to be mindful during the implementation process and make sure it is done right. They need to choose the correct solution and implement either block or unified. It's a good idea to look at the documentation before setting everything up.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use it for machines from VMware vCenter which we keep separate from the PowerStore. It is only the storage. They are connected with iSCSI and NFS. We have no virtual machines directly on the PowerStore.

We are very impressed by the power of the system. We have gained performance for all our virtual machines and our system is running very fast.

Another benefit, for us, is the dedupe rate.

For access from virtual machines, iSCSI, and NFS, it is very good. It helps increase performance.

Also, the live dedupe application is very good.

In the first weeks, we had some problems with the dedupe. According to the warranty, we should have had a dedupe rate of at least two and we had not reached this value. We got an additional hard disk to match the planned capacity of the system and this helped a lot. We got to a dedupe rate of 1.9, and this was very good.

What we are missing is the monitoring. We cannot implement the health check of the system in our monitoring system. We have to open the PowerStore GUI every day.

Also, we have tried to install a separate virtual machine to integrate PowerStore to vCenter. VMware then provides a virtual machine with Photon OS. We have done this integration two times and it has run for some weeks. Then it stops working and I don't know why. We have not used it again. It has nice features and has saved a lot of time and creates a good integration, but it needs to be more stable.

Overall, they need to make the system stable. Again and again, we have problems with upgrades. The upgrades themselves are running fine, but after the upgrade is when we have a problem. With the update to 1.4, we had a head crash. They told us, "This is a known issue. Please upgrade to 2." We upgraded to 2 and, one week later they told us, "Yeah, there are some issues in 2.0.0. You can lose data. Please upgrade to 2.0.1." Overall, they need to make the system stable.

I try to avoid updates for such important, central systems. They require downtime for the whole company, as this is our only storage. It's not good to do so many upgrades. I have used other storage systems and, with them, it was never necessary to do so many upgrades in one year. Last year, I did four upgrades for the PowerStore but I have never done four upgrades over the lifetime of other storage systems. They have run four, five, or six years, sometimes more. I have never patched so often as I have with PowerStore.

We have been using Dell EMC PowerStore since December of last year, so almost a year.

The problem is the stability. We have a single system and on three occasions we have had unplanned head reboots because of a software failure. The positive side is that there was no impact as a result because there are two heads. It's not good to reboot a head, and we have submitted tickets about it, but the performance and the failover have been good.

We only have a single machine and we are currently using half of the hard disk slots. We have asked for an upgrade for the rest of the hard disks but, from my point of view, it costs too much. We have 12 to 15 hard disks inside and if we try to upgrade only the hard disks, it costs the same as the complete system. This is something I don't understand. It makes no sense. Buying 16 hard disks with storage costs about €40,000 and buying only 16 hard disks costs the same.

Dell EMC's first-level technical support is very fast and they communicate well. Sometimes they explain things so I can understand why something is working the way it is. But currently, we have a ticket at the second level and for two weeks I have had no answer. 

The issue is that each day we get a message from the storage, every three hours, telling us the network connectivity is lost. I don't know if this is true or not, and whether it is a failure. That is the ticket at level two but I have had no information about its status.

Neutral

I have used NetApp as well as HPE in the past. In this company, they replaced NetApp with PowerStore because the NetApp system was slow. The dedupe needed much improvement. If they stopped the dedupe, then the system power would go down. And the backup procedure took a lot of time. With PowerStore we have reduced the time for the backup by half or more.

In terms of the decision process to go with PowerStore, I was not working here at the time. After I started the company said, "Okay, in two weeks we are getting new storage. Please integrate it into our infrastructure." I know they needed a more powerful storage system and they wanted an upgrade option for the system.

The integration of PowerStore into our existing environment was very straightforward. We had an external partner that helped us, but we had prepared the system in a test environment. We took that system and put it into the production system in about eight hours and the system was running. We then started to migrate the machines. It was a good implementation process and very fast.

We have two administrators of the solution. They are working with the system full-time handling requests to change hard disks or volumes, and they create new volumes. Across the company we have about 300 users using virtual machines and virtual desktops that are stored on the PowerStore.

The performance of PowerStore is good, but I don't feel the software is completely ready. We have upgraded the system and have had failures on the system. I have never seen as many head crashes on other systems as we have had on the PowerStore in the last year. The system is fast but not stable enough.

I would not buy the system again. You should wait some years until the software is ready and doesn't have a new software release every two months.

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.