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.
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.