Dell PowerStore Reviews

Our use case for Dell PowerStore involves a cluster with VMware, where we have all open systems, Windows and Linux, with all that data residing in Dell PowerStore. We have SQL data, many databases, and other types of data.

Dell PowerStore has helped us consolidate the data into small boxes. Before, we had a lot of space used in our racks and data center. With Dell PowerStore, we reduce the space and power consumption.

The most valuable feature from Dell PowerStore is the velocity, particularly the IOPS and performance. It's very good for the data and for making algorithms, which respond quickly to users since I work in a bank, and we have many agencies providing services for clients. The response is very quick and fast.

If I could improve Dell PowerStore in any way, I would enhance the socialization of the good skills this equipment has, improving communication with partners as the good features are inside Dell PowerStore, however, many customers don't know how powerful it is. I suggest increasing communication and giving visibility to these features inside Dell PowerStore.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for a couple of months. Before we had Unity - and before that, the VNX3200. We changed to Dell PowerStore in our company recently.

I'm really happy with the stability and reliability of Dell PowerStore. That's a good point. They respect the planet, respect the ecosystem, and think green while making a good profit.

The scalability of Dell PowerStore is good. We don't need more space. It's easy to connect the expansions from other blocks of Dell PowerStore, which is very practical for me.

I have worked with the customer service and support for Dell PowerStore, and I have had good experiences with customer support, end-user support, and enterprise material. 

If I could rate customer service for Dell PowerStore from one to ten, with ten being the best and one being the worst, I would give them a seven or eight.

To improve, they could enhance their attitude and empathy by putting themselves in the shoes of the other person when providing support.

I have evaluated other solutions besides Dell PowerStore, including HPE, Hewlett Packard, Pure Storage, and IBM.

Dell PowerStore is very easy to deploy. It's very practical. Our people are implementing Dell PowerStore in my country, and it's so easy. We are migrating data from the other store into Dell PowerStore currently.

My company has seen a return on investment from Dell PowerStore. The ROI is good. When we have better performance, the responses that Dell PowerStore provides mean more money for the bank.

I am familiar with the pricing and licensing of Dell PowerStore; I can't speak to exact costs. However, the price-to-performance ratio with Dell PowerStore is 20% to 25% quicker than before.

We chose Dell PowerStore based on the support, while rated as a seven, is better than the others. The prices are similar, however, the support is superior to other solutions.

At the moment, we are not using Dell PowerStore for any AI-based initiatives. I recently started to learn about AI implementation. We are trying to incorporate AI in our business. 

Overall, I would rate Dell PowerStore a nine on a scale from one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best.

I have been both a user and a consultant and integrator, using Dell products for our local infrastructure, internal infrastructure, and reselling Dell PowerStore to our clients.

I usually recommend Dell PowerStore for medium firms, as I work with the industry sector and believe it is totally appropriate for that sector.

Dell PowerStore has impacted my customers' organizations in terms of performance and operational efficiency, as it is quite well known for the products, and they enjoy the use of the equipment and the stability of the equipment.

I see no room for improvement in Dell PowerStore; I think it is quite good, and I have nothing more to tell about the features and the hardware of Dell equipment.

I recommend Dell PowerStore to medium-sized companies and not for larger ones as well because I think for the bigger ones, it is missing some features and there is a bit of a lack in terms of performance for big volumetry.

Dell PowerStore lacks some features to cover bigger companies as well; perhaps there is Nutanix, I think, and there are better, bigger storage options from Dell.

Additionally, there is Huawei storage stack which is quite good.

I have been working with Dell products for many years, approximately twenty years.

I have not faced any issues with the integrations with third-party solutions; not exactly with the material, but with the environment, with SFP for example, with switches and commutators, and things of that nature.

However, never with the hardware directly; all the time with the peripherals.

The built-in integrations with VMware are very important for my customers, as they are very easy to do, native, and quite stable.

I think the technical support by Dell is quite good because when we call them, immediately there are people who are taking the case and working on it, and then they redirect the call to the right person in the infrastructure.

Each time, the people are quite good. I would rate their technical support a five out of five; they are very good.

The initial setup of Dell PowerStore is quite easy, as the interface is very user-friendly and it is straightforward to complete.

I do not know exactly what my customers are thinking about their ROI with Dell PowerStore; we do not have regular feedback regarding that, and perhaps we should improve that to know exactly what they are thinking about the materials, the finance, and the services.

I find the pricing of Dell products very competitive.

I do not know if Dell PowerStore is the best option on the market at the moment; it is one of the best, for sure, but I do not know if it is the best.

Dell PowerStore models being used are T. They are configured both standalone and clustered.

I have nothing to tell about the cybersecurity features of Dell PowerStore, but regarding the functionality, the features, and the performance, it is quite good; I have nothing to tell about that, as it is responding well to the attempts.

I have been able to consolidate data with Dell PowerStore; I have nothing to tell about that. An approximate amount of data consolidation is ninety percent.

My data reduction rate is not exactly known, but it is approximately thirty-five to forty percent. My customers utilize VMware from Dell PowerStore's built-in integrations, but not containers or Kubernetes.

Dell PowerStore is very popular in my region; when you speak about this type of product, everybody knows it and is confident in that type of product.

The documentation for Dell PowerStore is very good; it is very high quality, and I have nothing to tell about that, as it is perfect.

For all the time I have used Dell, I think the documentation is quite good. I think the licensing model is fine, with no need for improvement; it is quite good.

I give this review a rating of nine out of ten.

In Egypt, we typically deploy one appliance consisting of two controllers. In one specific case, I was able to scale out with another chassis that included two nodes to meet the compliance requirements of a banking sector client who needed specific latency performance.

We normally work with Dell PowerStore as a unified box for both SAN and NAS. I did not deploy advanced features on Dell PowerStore, and in Egypt, we generally do not implement advanced configurations unless a specific scenario requires it. Typically, we deploy Dell PowerStore as a storage box.

I find many features in Dell PowerStore to be most valuable, including active-active nodes and scalability with both scale-up and scale-out capabilities. The ability to scale up by adding disks and scale out by adding not only disks but also controller nodes is one of the most important features because you can add disks with the performance of additional controllers. Dell PowerStore can support up to eight controllers working on the same cluster, and I have personally deployed four controllers connected to the same cluster. Other valuable features include replication and standard capabilities found in most Dell products, such as thin provisioning.

One of the main features of Dell PowerStore is its support for NVMe. The main chassis must be NVMe, and when considering scalability, you can scale up with SSD or NVMe, with the main chassis being NVMe. From a performance perspective, Dell PowerStore is a strong choice.

Dell PowerStore delivers exceptional performance for our customers, not only in performance metrics but also in effective capacity. Sometimes we sell Dell PowerStore with usable capacity around 20 TB, but we can see excellent data reduction ratios reaching one to four and one to five in specific workloads such as virtual infrastructure and database environments. This capability is one of the main points that attracts customers to Dell PowerStore and allows us, as architects, to sell Dell PowerStore with confidence, providing a good cost product with excellent effective capacity. This is one of the primary reasons we recommend Dell PowerStore. Second, we see excellent performance due to dual controllers, good processors per controller, good RAM, and good cache per processor. NVMe latency is excellent, and the overall performance we receive from Dell PowerStore is outstanding.

Regarding Dell PowerStore, one consideration is whether we could support hybrid disks. As you know, Dell PowerStore supports all-flash with either SSD or NVMe. If we consider features that could be added to match some RFPs we have received, some RFPs request hybrid storage. We cannot propose Dell PowerStore because it supports all-flash or NVMe only. In some cases, we could add a tier of SAS or near-line SAS to increase capacity. This is one potential feature, but I already understand that maintaining all-flash for Dell PowerStore is necessary to preserve specific performance characteristics. Generally, Dell PowerStore is an accepted product from our customers.

I have been working with Dell PowerStore for approximately five years or four years.

Expansion is straightforward and simple. When we add disks, we can expand the volumes, or when we add nodes, they are discovered within seconds in the cluster.

For technical support, I can give a rating of 10 because we normally receive excellent responses from the technical support team, including fast response times and high-quality engineers.

My experience with the deployment of Dell PowerStore is straightforward because before Dell PowerStore, I deployed Unity many times and also deployed the old VNX. I have good experience with storage deployment. Currently, I work not only as a deployment or technical engineer but also in a pre-sales role at my company, presenting not only Dell PowerStore but many products that make up the solution I design for our customers.

The pricing of Dell PowerStore is fair enough and depends on the data reduction ratio that can be achieved through compression and deduplication.

The importance of Dell PowerStore's compression and deduplication is the foundation of the data reduction ratio (DRR). It depends on the workload. By the book, I can say one to four, for example, but normally it is very dependent on the specific workload. With virtual machines, the data reduction ratio will differ from file servers or photo storage. It depends on the workload type, but the minimum we can typically achieve is one to two.

I would give Dell PowerStore a rating of 10 out of 10, and I would like to see hybrid storage as an additional feature in the future.

I mainly use Dell PowerStore for the storage area for customers in the SAN environment.

I find Dell PowerStore's solution most valuable, especially in the area of data deduplication and compression, which Dell PowerStore performs very well.

Dell PowerStore plays a very big role in our company regarding AI initiatives because we have many companies that already use AI and want to expand it further. Performance is definitely in demand there, and that is why Dell PowerStore plays a very significant role.

Dell PowerStore can contribute to growth and business success because it has enabled a rethinking, especially with NVMe and the all-flash system, which it also provides for smaller mid-sized customers. This simply eliminates the discussion about whether there is enough performance, and mid-sized customers have already gained experience in how well and quickly they can cover their workloads.

I find the design of the products somewhat negative because they are different in terms of expansion level and are somewhat oversized, especially for small and medium-sized customers.

That would be an area where Dell PowerStore can be improved. We have the 500T, the 1200T, and then already the 3000. I think the jumps between the series are simply not explained in a meaningful way to me or to the customers. It is either called small, then really very small, or large, and then it is called large again. It is then not really intended for small or medium-sized German companies.

When we talk about disaggregated infrastructures, the native integration into HCI solutions is currently still not available with Dell PowerStore. When it comes to hyper-converged systems, enhancing them with Dell PowerStore would be desirable. Functions such as transparent failover are also missing, which we still miss at the Fibre Channel level. Because synchronization is currently only available at the iSCSI level, and that also hurts us significantly at the moment.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for more than five years.

I rate the stability and reliability of Dell PowerStore as very stable and very reliable, due to the existing NVMes and all-flash systems. However, it has also become a more sophisticated SAN solution that may appear somewhat oversized for existing customers. We have the feeling that the gap is widening even further. I hope that we can therefore also use the solution for smaller mid-sized companies in the future.

I find the pricing and licensing for Dell PowerStore very difficult in recent months because the situation has deteriorated significantly. The pricing policy in particular has been different in recent months for unexplained reasons. We are not referring here to project discounts, but rather to list prices and where the list prices actually originate. We question that quite often because they have been increased by thirty to thirty-five percent every quarter for unexplained reasons, and that definitely does not go down well with customers. We do know that demand is very high, but it is not suitable for the midmarket.

We consider other solutions like IBM storage solutions and HP storage solutions before deciding on Dell PowerStore. There are different manufacturers. However, if we look specifically at the Dell portfolio, then it is either PowerVault or Dell PowerStore itself. Otherwise, if it gets larger, PowerFlex.

I am directly involved in working with Dell PowerStore from the beginning in sales, pre-sales, through to implementation and execution in the projects, and it works perfectly.

I also handle the installation of Dell PowerStore, not only directly, but also indirectly through distribution or with our own resources. That indeed runs smoothly with Dell PowerStore, and also much faster than what I used to know from other products.

We measure success with Dell PowerStore using installations of very different sizes, as we also cover various workloads. Dell PowerStore is one of our central solution approaches that we pursue, especially in the SAN environment. Only in the area of unified or object store does Dell PowerStore appear to be not the simplest or best solution. Dell is having a hard time bringing Dell PowerStore properly to market, and there are other solutions that Dell is marketing, which we also have in view. I rate this review as an eight out of ten.

I use Dell PowerStore for an application. In my last work at B3, we bought Dell PowerStore for a specific corporate back-end, back-office solution for one application to solve problems with the service desk. We created some LUNs for a SQL Server and presented them to some Microsoft Windows Clusters using Dell PowerStore, but we don't use remote replication for Dell PowerStore; it's in a single, specific solution for an application attending a SQL Server.

The solution is implemented in finance. B3 is the Brazilian stock exchange, and all the solutions I worked on there for the last 15 years were in finance.

It reduces the time and complexity of the deployment process. It’s quite simple and can be done quickly. I believe it has significantly reduced the time required to deploy. Overall, the deployment process is very straightforward.

I really appreciate the management and the management console of Dell PowerStore along with features such as deduplication. It's good and sufficient.

Additionally, it's very easy and simple to use Dell PowerStore for moving and optimizing workloads within the cluster. It's just to provision the LUNs for the cluster. If we have a virtual environment like VMware, we can easily perform storage migration from a source disk to a target disk. This process allows us to transfer data seamlessly. In my previous jobs, we typically utilized tools such as Open Replicator, which is provided by Dell EMC, to move data between Dell EMC storage systems.

Furthermore, Dell's post-sales support is strong and very good.

If Dell PowerStore had more controllers, making it more reliable and resilient, it would be better. The most important thing for the customer is resilience and business continuity. When we have a failure in one controller and only two controllers, that's not good enough. If we could scale Dell PowerStore to four controllers, it would be better than what we have today.

I have worked with Dell EMC for more than 15 years, and also HPE, including 3PAR.

Dell's post-sales support is very strong and good. I trust in Dell's post-sales support. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with NetApp storage solutions, hybrid NetApp, all-flash storage systems, and Hitachi models such as USPV and VSP, but my strong knowledge is with Dell EMC, PowerMax solutions, PowerFlex, VXRail, and hyper-converged infrastructure solutions.

I have deployed Dell PowerStore just once, but I have deployed many other products such as PowerMax 200, PowerMax 8000, and others. I have deployed a lot of high-end storage platforms from EMC and Dell EMC including DMX series.

I deployed it on-premises; the model is 500T. It was very simple and easy to do. I particularly really appreciate using the Apex AIOps or the CloudIQ solution from Dell EMC as it allows me to observe all the metrics and telemetrics from the performance through the SAS portal, which I think is very good for knowing about the workloads and how the equipment is working.

When it comes to Dell solutions, I find PowerMax to be the most comprehensive option. It offers a range of features such as remote replication, security snapshots, immutable security snapshots, and SRDF capabilities—both synchronous and asynchronous. It also includes features like chip copy disk mode, deduplication, peak provisioning, and effective data reduction. There are some similarities between the two, but PowerMax has several advantages. It comes with more controllers and greater resiliency, making it better suited for critical mission environments.

I would rate Dell PowerStore an eight out of ten.

We store all our critical business databases and applications on Dell PowerStore, and we use it as the storage for our virtualization environment, so pretty much all our workloads from virtualization to database, it's the main primary storage for everything.

Dell PowerStore has supported the growth and operational success of our organization by reducing the footprint, rack space, power consumption, and the resources needed to run the backend storage, which has been consolidated into just 2U, thereby enhancing efficiency. We now know everything is there, as there's one GUI, and that's where it is.

The features of Dell PowerStore that I like the most include the simplified web GUI, and setting up replication to protection groups on the other site was pretty straightforward. I have presented straight-up Linux NFS shares off it as well to certain systems, which we weren't able to do on our old storage, so that was very useful.

Nothing comes to mind at the moment on how Dell PowerStore can be improved or any additional features I would like to see included in the next releases. I do not have any current pain points that I would like them to fix, although we did have one issue when an update stopped the phone-home solution, however they fixed that via support.

We've had Dell PowerStore for the last two years.

I assess the stability and reliability of Dell PowerStore as very reliable, as we've only had one alert that had an issue with it in the last two and a half years of our full operational load.

As we require additional storage, or once we hit the capacity limit, Dell PowerStore is easy to expand and add extra capacity, so it will be there for years to come.

I evaluate Dell's customer support as good, as we've always been able to upload the logs and get the parts within the four-hour deadline on the one occasion that we needed them. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Dell support a nine. What would make it a ten is that sometimes we go through an initial triage that repeats a lot of the initial triage steps that would have been done by my own engineers, so sometimes it would be nice to skip the starting point.

Positive

We transitioned from an HPE Nimble Storage and an HPE 3PAR, which are no longer supported or offered, to Pure Storage. We had also previously considered an EMC solution.

There was a general ease of deployment, as it was a fairly intuitive web GUI that was self-explanatory once it was racked.

I evaluated the market and the competition, and we settled on Dell PowerStore as our preferred NVMe flash storage solution, so my initial role was to set it up, get it configured, and get it active in the environment, and then plan the migrations to it.

I have seen some return on my investment with Dell PowerStore. You're getting rid of equipment, with the first 3PAR being a full rack, the other 3PAR being half a rack, and the Nimble being more 8U, so we've basically gone down from two rack spaces to a 2U server space. 

I have realized some money and time savings with Dell PowerStore. We're not spinning up that amount of power, and in terms of time saving, I'm sure it's performing some workloads quicker than the previous disks had to, but operational stability and 24/7, 365 operation is more what we need in our environment.

The advice I would give to other organizations considering Dell PowerStore based on my experience with it is that it has to be highly considered, as the price point was not really any better than the competitors; it was close, and it has worked out well, so stick with your account manager and they will do their best to get you a good deal.

Examples of how features benefited our organization include: previously, for the NFS, for the SIEM cybersecurity solution, we had to have a separate Linux server, where we were able to just do it straight from the Dell PowerStore GUI, so we got rid of three layers of complication and resources that weren't needed. 

I rate Dell PowerStore a perfect ten out of ten.

Our main use cases for Dell PowerStore include making it our primary storage platform, and we use it for our active-active data centers with synchronous replication.

The features I appreciate most with Dell PowerStore are synchronous replication and performance.

We are able to do stretch clusters, VMware stretch clusters with the synchronous replication, which benefits our organization.

The immutable snapshots have made a huge difference for our business, and the synchronous replication gives us active-active data centers.

I use Dell AIOps, and while I am not as familiar with it as some other analysts, we do use it.

We like what we are seeing from the insights offered by Dell AIOps, as it has come a long way in the last couple of years.

The impact of Dell PowerStore on our organization in terms of performance and operational efficiency is amazing. I forget how many IOPS we are seeing on it, but we had the Unity before, and it trumps it by 10.

I would like to see more performance and more dedupe and compression features with Dell PowerStore in the next release.

We have been using Dell PowerStore for about three years now.

I would describe my experience with Dell PowerStore data resiliency, availability, and cybersecurity features as great. We are still learning more about the cyber resilience, but we just implemented the immutable snapshots, and so far it is great.

Regarding dedupe and compression with Dell PowerStore, we are seeing about 5-to-1 currently in our consolidation of data.

On a scale from 1 to 10 in rating customer service and tech support, I would say a nine.

We are happy with tech support.

We used the Unity previously to address similar needs before Dell PowerStore.

We looked at Pure when considering other solutions before choosing Dell PowerStore.

We are enrolled in the Lifecycle Extension, formerly the Anytime Upgrade program.

We just found out the new generation is coming out, so I am sure it will be happening soon, which will benefit our organization.

My advice to someone who is considering Dell PowerStore for their organization is to buy it, as we love it. I would rate this review a 9.

I am still dealing with Dell PowerStore storages, as it is still under my job scope. I have been able to consolidate data using Dell PowerStore through migration. This consolidation is a business-as-usual job for me.

Since using Dell PowerStore, I have found features like scalability and replication most valuable, as they are very solid for their product.

It is easy to use Dell PowerStore for moving and optimizing workloads within the cluster, based on monitoring performance; I normally use migration or add more paths for load balancing to optimize the storage.

The importance of Dell PowerStore's compression and deduplication technologies lies in achieving cost savings, and I find that the ratio is very good; it ranks at the top in terms of storage compression and deduplication rates.

I see room for improvement for Dell PowerStore, especially since the market is moving towards AI, cloud, and virtualization; I believe AI can greatly help with troubleshooting, data analysis, performance monitoring, and reporting, and I think Dell will invest a lot to enhance these features.

I assess Dell PowerStore's data resiliency and cybersecurity features as very secure, from my point of view, because it is not like an open system; however, I believe there is still room to improve, as I need to raise requests for vulnerability fixes to Dell on a monthly basis.

While I consider the product to already be complicated, I believe it still has room for simplification, such as enhancing the centralized GUI features and allowing for batch jobs instead of having to click through tasks one by one.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for many years, more than ten years.

Regarding its management capabilities, I think if it comes to new users, they may not be familiar with the command line; however, from my point of view with many years of experience, I find it very stable and manageable.

It is easy to scale Dell PowerStore, whether to expand, scale up, or scale out, as it is straightforward with just a few commands.

I would rate their technical support as an eight, noting that personally, I feel the support was better ten years ago; back then, I received more help from storage support, especially regarding non-storage issues. My current assessment of their support would be about seven or eight.

Positive

I have experience with other products with Dell, as I already left Dell for a couple of years and I'm currently in an end-user company doing maintenance for storage, where I also support IBM and Hitachi products.

In evaluating other solutions, I see that the competition to Dell PowerStore is not much, with the majority being Hitachi, Huawei, and Pure Storage, which is also quite good.

Besides Dell PowerStore, I am using other storages such as IBM, Hitachi, and Huawei from multiple vendors.

My experience with the deployment of Dell PowerStore has been substantial, as I was a so-called delivery engineer in Dell for more than six years, being the person to deploy.

I find that deployment can be quite difficult for non-experienced people, as new team members coming to Dell might not pick up the concepts quickly without proper training and many years of real physical experience.

As for Lifecycle Extension, also formerly branded Anytime Upgrade, I manage scheduling and coordination as an end-user; most work is still done by Dell support representatives, so I do not have much to comment on in this area.

Personally, I feel that Dell PowerStore is a little bit costly in the market compared to other products, but this is just my personal perspective.

I do not have experience with IBM Maximo; I primarily worked with IBM SAN storage products like V Storage and S Storage. I have only a little experience with Nutanix Unified Storage, not being really hands-on with it.

I would recommend Dell PowerStore to others and I think it is the best option on the market at the moment, especially for enterprise storage where Dell PowerMax is still the top storage solution.

I assess the workload performance offered by Dell PowerStore as very good, and I am very satisfied with the performance from Dell PowerStore, as it is a high-end storage solution.

I do not really use APEX AIOps, also known as CloudIQ in Dell PowerStore, but I have seen some demos and find it to be a very impressive product that consolidates everything together; I really hope we can have this in the future.

While I work with Dell servers, including Dell PowerEdge, there are not many because I am from the storage team and servers are managed by a different team. I purchase products directly from vendors rather than through the AWS marketplace.

I have been working in this field overall for about six years. I am definitely planning to use other all-flash storages in the future, as I need to see different angles and requirements; storage requests come from application owners, and I strive to fulfill those needs.

I would rate this review an eight overall.