Dell PowerStore Reviews

We use the PowerStore for our development environment. The frame is a repository for all our VMware infrastructure data stores and the applications that live on those data stores are mainly real-time voice applications in call centers.

We use it with Cisco switches and it's pure block only.

Thanks to the duplication and data savings, we have a lot of capacity available to us in the PowerStore. That lets us use and consume logical capacity, which can be done very quickly compared to having to install physical resources inside the PowerStore. The data reduction process is very efficient resulting in very high data reduction if you compare the PowerStore to legacy frames from Dell EMC. This is a very good benefit for us. We were able to very quickly connect new servers and instantly have capacity on the frame because of the data reduction. Moving forward, we can add more disks inside. We plan to have seven drives added in the coming weeks. So we are able to independently add servers, even if we don't have the actual physical capacity on the frame itself.

We have also seen a lot of savings because of the data reduction efficiency, which is currently 4:1 or 5:1.

We will also decommission old frames, and the maintenance contracts on those frames are very expensive. We will save some money as a result and we will also realize some power savings. We also have some environmental-related "green" engagements in Orange, and PowerStore is helping us go in that direction.

There are also space savings because the old frames are using a full rack while the PowerStore is only a 2U unit with almost the same amount of data being stored on it. That is very good. 

So it will save us floor space, energy, and money on maintenance contracts.

Our development team is very happy with us, from an admin perspective. When they query us for more capacity, we are very quick to respond and provide them with resources. If they want to deploy new machines, for example, we can quickly assign new data stores that those VMs will rely on. We have saved a lot of time thanks to the PowerStore.

And because the performance of the PowerStore is very high, we can connect many servers on the same frame, instead of having to multiply frames, side-by-side, to get enough power to serve our IOPS. We are working on real-time applications, so we can't afford a response time of more than 10 milliseconds or 15 milliseconds as a maximum. We can't support a greater lag in a call center. The PowerStore now is less than a millisecond, and that is with more load on it. On one VNX we have two or three VMware clusters with four or five ESXis per cluster. On the PowerStore I have, say, 10 clusters and each has about eight ESXis.

The most valuable feature is that it is easy to use this frame. I am a SAN administrator, but I was able to train my colleague, who had only been a VMware administrator, on the PowerStore in about half a day. Now he's autonomous in assigning volumes and creating data stores, et cetera. I don't have to help him anymore. That is the beauty of this unit and it's due to the effort Dell EMC put into the GUI.

The VMware integration is very good. It integrates all the vSphere interactions when you create your data store, directly from the PowerStore GUI, into your VMware cluster. My colleague who was the VMware administrator is now able, in one shot, to provision his storage and automatically create a data store relying on this storage. That has freed up some of his time.

Another important feature is the power of this frame. It's very powerful. We have almost less than a millisecond of response time, all the time, even during backup windows. That's very good compared with the VNX, of which we have two. We also have a Unity connected on this same SAN for the same kind of application. We did a comparison among the three models of frames, the VNX, which is rather old, the Unity full flash, which is not so old, and the PowerStore. PowerStore is really on top of all of them.

Of course, it enables us to add compute and capacity independently. We add a lot of VMware clusters in our SAN thanks to the PowerStore. We are going to decommission the old VNXs because it's better adding capacity on the PowerStore than keeping the old models.

The NAS capabilities have room for improvement. Currently, when you buy the PowerStore T model, you have a choice of using only block—it's block-optimized—or you can buy it as a unified frame. With the latter, you can access the frame using either block—Fibre Channel or iSCSI, and on the other side you can access it using IP protocols, like NFS or CIFS. This is the NAS part and, currently, the NAS part is very poor. It's very basic. Even Dell EMC has said that to us. We are waiting for version 3 of PowerStore for that. This must be improved and it is in the roadmap.

We have other NAS solutions, but if someone wanted to have a unified frame, this is not the right solution, currently. That's why it's not a 10 out of 10. When we will have version 3 of PowerStore's operating system, in less six than months, my rating will probably go up.

The PowerStore was introduced in June of last year and I adopted the first one in Europe, in August last year, so we have had it for about seven months.

It is very stable.

The issue we had with PowerStore was due to being a very early adopter. We got a better version of the PowerStore operating system, but the upgrade that came after that, relying on the better version, was not easy to run. We decided to reinstall the PowerStore with a fresh, new, official operating system.

So the stability of the initial PowerStore was good enough for production, but not as good as we would have expected for this kind of frame. The four PowerStores we have that were installed with an official release are very stable. 

We faced issues, but that was normal because the PowerStore was totally new at that time. No one had experience with it. When Dell EMC came onsite to install our first one, it was the very first in Europe.

There are two ways to scale. You can scale up and out. You can easily add shelves to add more physical capacity to your appliance. If that's not enough, you can add an appliance to your federation. It's very easy.

We are on the T model, not the X model. It's pure block and we are external ESXi-connected. We need a lot of servers because we have more than 100 developers working on this frame. They all need their own clusters because there are different applications under development. An X model would not have been enough.

In the future, if the PowerStore 5k is not powerful enough, we could upgrade it to a 7K or a 9k or the new 7200 models that are coming out in a few months. But the magic is that we could do that with the data in place, inside the frame, keeping the drive. That is one of the highlights when it comes to simplifying things.

As a very big company and as a partner, we have a particular kind of access to support. We have a dedicated global account manager. All we have to do is snap our fingers and we have the guy on the phone. The quality of support is okay. I can also access the product manager of the product. I am Dell EMC-certified, so it's very easy for me to access support documentation.

Sometimes, their support doesn't really understand the customer's position. For example, some weeks ago we had an issue on a frame. Dell EMC engineering focused on what was really happening instead of trying to bypass the problem. They didn't succeed in recreating the issue we had in their lab, so they were using our infrastructure as their lab. It was a development environment so it was not harmful for production. But in the end, it was a time-consuming issue for us.

Positive

You don't have to worry about the deployment. It's already done for you when the frame is powered up. That is another aspect of how it simplifies your implementation. Dell EMC comes onsite to do the initial power-up of the frame itself. After that, we do everything by ourselves.

Aside from that—and this is important—because we were early adopters, there were some features that were mandatory at the time, and they complicated the initial deployment a little. The top-of-rack switches that are mandatory when you use a federation are no longer needed if you use a single appliance. That was our case. At the time we deployed our first PowerStore, we had a single appliance, but we needed the top-of-rack switches to be set up for a potential future connection with other appliances, if we wanted to go to a federation.

Now, with version 2 of PowerStore, you don't need to deploy top-of-rack switches if you have a single appliance. That can be done later on, if you go to the federated setup. This is a very good improvement because many customers have a single appliance. It's so powerful that you probably don't initially need a federation. Now, you don't need top-of-rack switches set up but used for nothing.

Because ours was one of the first PowerStores, Dell EMC took a day to deploy it. Afterward, for the other PowerStores we have deployed in the data center, it took less than half a day. With the last one we will deploy, which should happen next week, we will not have top-of-rack switches. There will be no connectivity to set up and no Fibre to run, so it should take two hours.

We had to migrate data out of the legacy frame we previously had to go to the PowerStore, but it was very easy because all was done on our side on our servers, so it was very quick.

We have definitely seen ROI due to our data savings as a result of the data reduction. Instead of buying one-to-one drives, we buy half a drive.

Licensing is very simple. Everything is included in the basic license. There are no concerns about having to pay to add a feature. Everything is there. 

Because we are a big partner, we get good prices from Dell EMC. They know we will resell their technology, so I'm not in a good position to discuss the pricing that applies to non-partners.

We have almost the entire portfolio of Dell EMC products, from VNXs to PowerMax. We also have some other vendors, of course, but they are not as powerful as this one.

My advice would be don't hesitate. It's a good frame. It's doing what it is designed for. It serves IOPS very well. The data savings are very important and the response time is very short. There are always tricky situations that come up, but honestly, since our PowerStore went live, I don't have to worry about the storage for this environment. The VMware guys are independent. They don't need me anymore.

We accepted the risk, due to the fact that it was a relatively new platform, when we went with PowerStore. We were totally aware of that fact. That is why we put the first one into our development area, and not production. Even if we have more than 100 developers working on it, any problems would affect developers, not production. We understood there could be costs because having 100 developers not doing anything during a day costs money. But PowerStore didn't disappoint us. We are very happy with it. We now have four in production.

We are a Dell partner, so we also resell PowerStore to our end-users. When we initially built this frame, we wanted, say, 100 terabytes, but they persuaded us to only buy 40 terabytes of SSD or NVMe drives because of the savings that they said we would see from the data reduction efficiency. The program they gave us was that if we didn't achieve that kind of data efficiency, they would provide us some disks for free.

We sell Dell PowerStore to multiple organizations in our country including lawyer firms and integration companies.

Some of our deployments are on-premises and others are hybrid. We offer our private cloud to customers and some use AWS.

Dell PowerStore has provided more power to their data centers.

CloudIQ allows our customers to see the performance and any issues their PowerStore may have.

Dell PowerStore's cyber-resilient approach to data security is good. Most of our customers use it to create immutable files. The security it provides is a big selling point for us.

The most valuable features are the three-to-one data reduction and the ability to scale out and up. The maximum data reduction the competition can offer is two to one. The higher the data reduction rate the better the price is.

The cost always has room for improvement.

I have been selling Dell PowerStore since its launch five years ago.

Dell PowerStore has been stable so far.

Since selling Dell PowerStore to our customers they have not required any scaling.

The customers like and appreciate Dell's technical support.

Positive

We previously used Dell Compellent which reached its end of life, and Dell PowerVault storage. PowerStore is more powerful and has more features. Dell Unity is a midrange storage solution and we wanted our customers to have the best so we offered them PowerStore. 

The deployment is straightforward.

We evaluated HPE and IBM but some of our customers already had Dell so for better integration and cost savings we went with PowerStore.

I would rate Dell PowerStore nine out of ten. There is always room for improvement.

I have implemented Dell PowerStore primarily for use cases involving straight-up service in virtualization, which includes fewer VDIs and more generic services.

The solution's most valuable feature is that the full NVMe offers great latency, which is the most effective way to give our customers the benefits of all-flash storage, especially since they won't really notice the bandwidth more than the latency.

The challenges my company was trying to address with the implementation of Dell PowerStore revolve around floor space saving. In Germany, one mostly has to deal with a conservative customer base. If there is a storage that is seven years old and now if one wants to change it, then there are these big machines, with which one can get a lot of terabytes out of it, and that is definitely a big point. When it comes to the area of data reduction, Germany is very conservative, and it may not be possible to reach 4:1 data reduction, but it is still good as the tool's usability is very simple compared to other systems.

Dell PowerStore's ability in the area of overall energy consumption is very good compared to the other systems, which have spinning disks. All-flash storage solutions are a lot more effective, but it is a big concern as energy prices are high. In terms of whether my company could reduce the power consumption with Dell PowerStore, I would say that my company had a use case with a customer around three weeks ago where their old Dell EMC VNX Storage System used to draw about 2500 watts compared to Dell PowerStore which drew about 800 watts, which is a really a big saving looking at the twenty-four hours and seven days of usage of the system.

My organization uses Dell CloudIQ to manage and analyze Dell storage around 50 percent of the time. It makes a lot more sense when one has a lot more Dell hardware because it provides one with a single pane of glass management and an overview of the systems.

After assessing Dell PowerStore's Cyber-resilient data approach to security, I would say that its secure and immutable snapshots are a big feature in Europe. The tool was lacking for quite a time in the area of cyber-resilient data approach to security, but now it has become very good. I think Dell PowerStore is a state-of-the-art system.

I have been able to reduce our organizational footprint and data consolidation using Dell PowerStore, considering that the tool has helped with data reduction by around a 2.5:1 ratio. If I compare the footprint of Dell PowerStore with our company's previously used solution, I would say that the products used in the past did not help with any kind of reduction of data. As a company that has partnerships with different vendors, we have Pure Storage in our portfolio. Pure Storage is better than Dell PowerStore, specifically in the case of data reduction. The algorithm behind Pure Storage performs a bit better, but looking at the price difference, Dell PowerStore is available at a better deal.

The tool is deployed mostly on an on-premises model. The deployment is split into an 80 percent and 20 percent model. Around three to seventeen customers use the tool with VMware, while a few customers use OpenStack.

After upgrades, there were a few bugs in the product, and it can be considered as an area of concern where improvements are required.

I have been using Dell PowerStore since 2021. I was still a customer back in 2021 who bought a Dell PowerStore and then switched to the partner side at the beginning of 2022. Since 2022, I have dealt with 30 to 35 product implementations.

There were a few bugs in the product after the upgrades. My company had to face a few bugs in the latest upgrades of the tool owing to which we had to reboot the solution, and it is a big no-no for us considering that the product is a part of the virtualization stack, but if you are not really counting that and stay at the target code, which the tool recommends actually, then it is good.

In my company, we have a few appliances which we scaled out. The problem is mostly that single drive additions are really expensive. For most customers, it is actually more efficient to buy a whole Dell PowerStore, which is kind of hard to explain to most customers.

My company mostly contacts Dell's support team for mission critical services. Dell's support team's response has always been completely positive. The quick response from the tool's dedicated German support team for storage ensures that our company gets new leads and connects you to the right set of people from Dell. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

Considering the other solutions my company has used, I would say that Dell PowerStore, with all its features from previous releases, offers good functionalities. The big pro associated with Dell PowerStore stems from its price point since one gets a lot more compared to other products in the market.

The product's initial deployment phase has been straightforward. You can't get anything wrong with the deployment process associated with the product. I had two or three systems on which the validation was successful, but the actual deployment failed. It is not a big problem since you can just re-initialize it and start over.

Though I don't get real hard data about the savings part attached to the product, customer feedback has been extremely positive. There are no issues with the product's performance since Dell PowerStore is an NVMe product.

I rate the tool an eight and a half out of ten.

We use this solution for storage. I'm an enterprise architect. 

It's a versatile box that has different kinds of protocols that can be switched off and on. They have their own encryption which is good. It also has its own file formatting protocol, which saves us a lot of space.

A downside of Powerstore is that it can only do thin provisioning. I had trouble finding articles on the internet about it. When I was looking for information on switching features on and off there was not a lot available. 

I've been using this solution for several years. 

The solution is stable. 

The scalability is good. 

We have a bit of a challenge with technical support. We didn't purchase any support but it would have been really appreciated if Bell would have provided some minimal support for us. 

The initial setup is quite straightforward although we had to make quite a few adjustments. There was some trial and error but we got there in the end. Some additional documentation around that would have been good.

I believe the ROI is good although I haven't checked it. 

I believe the price point is quite good. 

I like this solution, it has everything you need for enterprise-grade storage. It supports all the protocols. It is much more reliable and efficient than the normal HPD.

I rate this solution seven out of 10. 

We primarily use the solution as a POC. We have Extreme IOs that we're looking to replace, and this was brought in as a potential replacement for them.

For our scenario, it doesn't really fit the bill for where we're trying to go. The unit's fine. Unfortunately, it's a relatively greenfield type of product and we're looking for something with a little more robustness that's been in the field more. PowerMax works great, of course, and that's probably what we're going to go to instead. We just decided Power Store was just not going to fit the bill for what we needed. We needed something with a higher tier in the end.

The support is very good. 

For smaller shops, the solution is useful. 

We felt like this was just kind of a mix of Extreme IO and Unity. We weren't happy with Unity, which is why we weren't going to use Extreme IO. It seems like they just kind of merged two products and made this solution and while I'm sure it's great for smaller shops, we are not a small shop. 

It needs more mature code. 

The VASA plugins for ESX could be enhanced. My understanding is that that is in the roadmap.

I've using the solution for about a year. 

I'd rate the stability at a three or four out of ten. It could be more stable.  

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the solution at a six for scalability.

We've been quite happy with support. they are very good. 

We're trying out PowerMax, and will likely move in that direction instead of sticking with this product.

We have not witnessed any kind of ROI while using the solution. 

The pricing could be better. I'd rate it four out of ten. 

For new users, I would heavily suggest they evaluate their environment with real-world loads, not synthetic loads, when considering the solution.

I'd rate the product five out of ten. 

We use Dell PowerStore for our local operations and as a backup service that we provide. We use it for some VMware, but it's primarily for backups. 

Dell PowerStore has provided us with a lot of disk space that is easy to handle. The solution has also helped reduce our organizational footprint by about 50 percent. We have six units. That's less than what used to be on the rack. 

The platform's reliability and built-in replication between disk systems have made our customers happy. It has worked consistently well over the years.

The previous version of Dell PowerStore we used was easier to use compared to the current one. They have made it more cumbersome to handle, although it still works. It has become more complicated to manage.

We have been using Dell PowerStore for the last five years.

Dell PowerStore is stable. We haven't had any issues with it.

Scalability with Dell PowerStore is probably good, but we haven't had the opportunity to increase disk space as we have not needed it beyond our initial purchase.

I rate Dell support nine out of 10. We have not needed much support from Dell since the solution has been working well. 

Positive

We transitioned from a system called EcoLogic, which was another Dell solution. We started with EcoLogic about 20 years ago and switched to Dell PowerStore about six years ago because EcoLogic was no longer available. We needed new disks because our old ones were wearing out. PowerEdge was priced well.

The pricing structure and licensing model of Dell PowerStore are very good and I like it. We chose it because it was reasonably priced and met our requirements.

We considered other disk systems, but they were too expensive.

I rate Dell PowerEdge Servers nine out of 10. They do their job and cause us no problems. 

Dell PowerStore was attached to an SQL Database that needed to have high performance, and since the application was not very well written, the only solution was to put it on flash storage. In my company, we felt that Dell PowerStore stood out for us as a high-performance storage device in the market.

In terms of how the product has helped my organization or my company's customers' organizations, I would say that the product provides its users with the hardware they need to be able to scale and grow their applications. The product is helpful not just from the standpoint of being able to deal with expanding an array's needs but also having the power necessary for the workload.

The most valuable feature revolves around expandability, especially since our company had to grow one of the appliances once. My company found the tool to be really easy to use, expand, and manage.

My organization uses Dell CloudIQ to manage and analyze Dell storage. My company has not faced any issues with CloudIQ since we mostly use it for monitoring and reporting, and it never came back to us with anything, so everything is always green there. CloudIQ has not given our company anything yet since we may not have done anything wrong to date. As per one of the recent announcements, CloudIQ has been renamed Dell APEX AIOps. Going forward, we need to remember that CloudIQ has been branded as Dell APEX AIOps.

I don't look or assess Dell PowerStore's overall energy consumption closely since it is not in a data center where one can have features to monitor power. I would assume that the product would be efficient when it comes to the overall energy consumption area, and I understand that there will be some additional power savings with the newer versions of the product and the latest hardware. There hasn't been anything associated with the product that has been an issue for our company.

In terms of the ESG values of the product, I think Dell PowerStore has been doing a good job. Dell's team has been doing its best when it comes to the area of ESG values since they talk a lot about being green and recycling while also emphasizing how they are able to take in old products and dispose of them properly, making me believe that Dell works towards a good initiative.

The challenges my company is trying to address with the use of the solution, especially in areas like workload or data consolidation, I would say that the workloads that my company is running are all VMs, so we get into a ton of consolidation in that regard. The challenge my company is trying to address with the use of the solution revolves around the area of performance. The tool has not only met and addressed our company's challenges concerning the performance area but also exceeded them.

My company integrates Dell PowerStore with VMware.

The integration process of Dell PowerStore with VMware is not as easy as how it is when it comes to Dell Unity XT, especially in terms of getting the integrations turned on. Once the integration capabilities are turned on in Dell PowerStore, the tool works very well.

Though Dell PowerStore is generally easy to manage, it is not as easy as how one can manage Dell Unity XT. There are some management issues in Dell PowerStore. I have managed several pieces of Dell PowerStore's hardware area, and I could feel that it was almost like a step back in certain areas when it came to the management interface. I haven't looked at Dell PowerStoreOS 4.0, so I can't speak about it currently.

From a feature-oriented point of view, I don't want to see anything additional in the product since it is kind of a purpose-built appliance from what I understand. The product does everything I need it to do for me.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for a year.

The product's stability has been fantastic and rock solid.

The product's scalability features have been great. My company is happy with the product.

The solution's technical support has been fantastic, especially with the CloudIQ integration. Our company has had a couple of instances where Dell's support has actually reached out to us and told us about how there is an update in the queue and how we can download it and use the update as per our convenience.

I have not used any other solutions in the past.

The product's initial setup phase was easy. The product has an easy setup phase, especially if you have experience with Dell EMC storage products. Dell PowerStore's setup process may not seem as easy as the setup phase of the tools covered under Dell EMC storage products.

Only one of the two Dell PowerStore isn't production, but the issue that my company used to face with the previous product we used was associated with the fact that its application would die every day at two o'clock in the afternoon, after which there is a need to reboot the server in order to get the product to come back up. I believe the aforementioned problem was caused by a report running at the wrong time and taxing out the database server heavily. With Dell PowerStore, even if the report runs and Taxes out the database server heavily, the tool doesn't suffer from a performance hit. With the earlier products, users had to deal with 15 to 30 minutes of downtime in the afternoons, but now that has been eliminated with the use of Dell PowerStore. I have experienced an ROI using the product, but the number to which it equates is something that I can't specify.

When it came to the pricing part, my company looked at Dell EMC Unity All Flash and Dell PowerStore. Dell PowerStore is more expensive than Dell EMC Unity All Flash. Dell PowerStore's performance metrics were way higher than what Dell EMC Unity All Flash offered. My company considered Dell PowerStore to be the best solution despite its high cost.

I have not evaluated any other products against Dell PowerStore.

The product has not really helped reduce organizational footprint and data consolidation. The data is all there, and it just keeps growing, so I don't know if there has been any data consolidation possible with Dell PowerStore.

Though there are a few areas that Dell cannot control, when you look at an all-flash storage device, one can figure out that there is some cost involved in it. Other than the costs associated with Dell PowerStore, I feel it is a fantastic product.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use Dell PowerStore with the VMware platform for block storage.

Our customers implement Dell PowerStore for the performance and deduplication compression ratio. For all the PowerStores that Dell deployed, I am around three dot eight or three dot six compression. It depends on the VMs and the customer's infrastructure, but it's quite good.

Our deployments are always on-premises for organizations in multiple industries, including medical and production. The environments are small, with around 20 terabytes of data or less.

We integrate PowerStore with VMware. We can't use PowerStore if we don't have a virtual platform like VMware or Hyper-V. We use VMware-certified professionals.

CloudIQ is a good tool for monitoring all our systems. It creates alerts that notify us if something is wrong and it also creates tickets automatically to Dell.

The most valuable aspects of Dell PowerStore are integration with VMware and reliability.

Dell PowerStore is an unfinished product compared to the HPE systems because it is relatively new. The synchronous replication was only added recently.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for four years.

PowerStore is stable. We install it and forget it for four years until it is time to replace it. 

We only sell one PowerStore to our clients, so there has been no need to scale but if needed more disks can be added.

The Dell support is good. The response time is good and the people are reliable. I am happy with the support.

Positive

We have worked with HPE, Huawei, and Pure Storage. Dell PowerStore is a young product compared to HPE. HPE has a lot of experience. Huawei is aggressive with pricing and has good products in Europe. Pure Storage is good but heavy and costly compared to Dell PowerStore.

For me, the deployment is easy because I'm very experienced. We had a lot of issues passing from version two to version three. I had to call Dell support each time we upgraded from version two to version three but once we're on version three, it is good.

I would rate Dell PowerStore eight out of ten.