Dell PowerStore Reviews

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.

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.

We were end-of-life on our current Unity 480S all-flash arrays and needed to upgrade to a newer array, and we didn't want to have to pay the extortionate costs for renewing our support for Unity.

Dell PowerStore outperforms Unity by approximately ten to one. 

In terms of performance, it performs very well. Implementation went well. The console GUI is very similar to all the other Dell flagship products, such as Dell PowerProtect Data Manager or Dell Data Domain. All of the front-end console GUIs have been brought together to provide one seamless pane of glass ecosystem, which makes it really easy to move around in the environment. When I'm managing all these systems, that helps me quickly get familiar with where things are going to be placed, which then helps me speed up and do my job a little bit more efficiently.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is Metro Volumes. It allowed us to remove our current Recovery Point/Broadcom VMware SRM licenses, which cost a fortune, resulting in significant cost savings.

The product stands on its own merit. It does exactly what it's meant to do. It's very scalable, very efficient power-wise and performance-wise.

Cost is one aspect that needs improvement, as selling the drives after purchasing the solution makes them incredibly expensive. The reason we buy it as a whole complete system is because we get such a discount on the drives upfront. When we go to buy or populate more drives in the storage array, they're so expensive. If they could lower the cost for components, we would definitely expand them more and be more inclined to buy more storage units, but it's currently a price crunch for us. Price is a deterrent to scalability.

We have been using Dell PowerStore since implementing it two months ago.

We've actually crashed the system on purpose and watched Metro do what it was supposed to do. The product does exactly what it claims. We saw that on keynotes at Dell Technologies World 2024, and to see it actually work in our data center was impressive. When I removed all the cables, it failed over within five minutes. It's remarkable to see that actually happen in practice. You hear a lot of talk, but to see the talk go into action is another thing in itself.

We have 700 to 800 people. Dell PowerStore has models such as the 500T that we have in one of our smaller data centers. This solution is more suitable for mid to large-sized businesses. As a Dell company, it's definitely growing with our needs in every aspect, from data protection to storage capacity to the workstation level.

The deduplication feature set built into Dell PowerStore helps us with current scaling for storage because it provides significant data reduction. However, when we need to grow, the price point of buying external storage and filling up new LUNs and racks becomes expensive. We try to budget our storage for Dell PowerStore ahead of time to avoid populating it with more drives later, knowing that adding another rack will be costly. If they can help offset that cost, it would be beneficial.

They provide the same great support that I always receive with all Dell products. Their support is one of the best. That's why we're with Dell.

It was incredibly easy to deploy Dell PowerStore. The deployment time from start to end was a week, which included cabling, configuration, migration of data, and everything coming together.

We've received a return on investment in the coming renewal of our Broadcom VMware licensing. In terms of licensing, we're paying less due to the implementation of the new PowerStore system into our infrastructure.

After attending Dell Technologies World 2024 and seeing the new iterations and feature sets coming out in version five, we were further convinced to go with Dell PowerStore.

There are plans for an AI implementation, a kiosk-type system, that will utilize this storage, but it has been tabled for now. It will likely be picked up at the end of our quarter or beginning of next quarter.

I would rate Dell PowerStore an eight 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.

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.

Dell PowerStore is used for SAN in our organization.

I prefer Dell PowerStore because the user interaction is excellent and the GUI is also outstanding. Previously, Dell produced Unity devices for SAN along with VNX, but VNX is so complicated. The GUI is not suitable for a basic or beginner user, and beginners need to learn extensively about VNX. In contrast, when you log in to Dell PowerStore's GUI, the user interface is so intuitive that you can easily find your use case.

I appreciate that Dell PowerStore is a scale-out solution where we can add multiple clusters and nodes. With Unity, we could add only certain clusters or nodes, but in Dell PowerStore, we can add multiple enclosures as well.

We are using five clusters in Dell PowerStore across different regions, with three for production and two for data protection, binding the production to disaster recovery. For disaster recovery, it performs well compared to others. I believe Dell PowerStore is the best compared to PowerVault, which I find less efficient and not recommended for big enterprises.

Dell PowerStore does not require any downtime for upgrades because we have redundancy with clusters. If controller A goes for an upgrade, controller B takes all the processes without impacting any users. The deduplication process in Dell PowerStore is superior compared to VNX and Unity.

I don't have any ideas for improvements regarding Dell PowerStore as everything seems good and they continuously implement bug fixes and upcoming patches.

I have 2.4 years of experience using Dell PowerStore, and before that, the product was used for around 3.5 years in the project.

I rate the stability of Dell PowerStore as a 10 out of 10. I have not experienced any downtime, bugs, or glitches, and it's much better than previous technologies.

I rate the scalability of Dell PowerStore as a 9 out of 10 because occasionally some bugs occur, but they are usually fixed quickly.

I would rate Dell's technical support as a 10 out of 10 because they respond quickly, especially when we have Dell PowerStore in multiple regions. If we cannot connect with one region, we try another, and the available engineer will assist us.

Compared to other solutions in the market, Dell performs very well. If we face any hardware issue and raise a ticket, they respond as quickly as possible compared to other technologies.

Positive

Previously, we were using Unity devices and VNX for SAN. Dell PowerStore offers superior deduplication compared to both VNX and Unity.

The deployment of Dell PowerStore is easy. The ports are easily configured within four to six hours, and the whole deployment process takes about six to seven hours, including port configuration and LDAP setup.

The solution could be a perfect 10, but sometimes the cost is high when we need to add more enclosures to Dell PowerStore. Although I do not know the current cost, I believe the cost can be improved.

I would recommend Dell PowerStore because it's cost-efficient compared to PowerMax. For big enterprises, instead of using PowerMax, we can utilize a couple more clusters in Dell PowerStore.

We are deploying Dell PowerStore on-premises using an auto-cloud through the network.

I don't have any information about how Dell PowerStore was purchased. We didn't use any specific scenario like the AWS marketplace or a direct purchase.

We are unable to determine the number of users using Dell PowerStore because we are providing LUNs to multiple hosts, with multiple users accessing a single host. For instance, one VM can be accessible by a hundred users, and with 30 plus VMs, that's a large number we cannot calculate.

The environment for Dell PowerStore is essentially a global one.

Since implementing Dell PowerStore, it's very fast and very secure. Vulnerabilities are identified in upcoming patches, and Dell provides patches quickly, which is significantly more helpful than waiting three to four months for other products to release their next patch.

We cannot determine how much data we have consolidated using Dell PowerStore because multiple teams are working, and from my end, I'm just monitoring the LUNs and providing reclamation.

We are using Apex AI Ops. The insights from Apex are good as we use it to monitor the cluster health and status, and the connectivity is also good compared to PowerVault, which had some bug issues preventing proper connection with Apex IO.

Some hosts using Dell PowerStore are based on Linux and Unix. Not all hosts are dependent on Windows, as some are configured for Linux and Unix. From our end, I only provide LUN provisioning and reclamation, and I don't have extensive knowledge about Linux.

We utilize built-in integrations, but from our storage team's perspective, we just provide the LUNs to the Windows team, which uses VMware ESXi hosts. I don't think we use Kubernetes.

I have no understanding of the importance of adding capacity in single drive increments versus drive packs.

My overall rating for Dell PowerStore is 9 out of 10.

My customer typically uses block storage. They have Dell PowerStore in two different locations, with one serving as the production environment and the other as the disaster recovery site. Replication exists between these two locations. One hundred percent of these volumes are allocated to VMware hosts. Approximately ninety percent of the environment is virtual, but the physical machines do not have contact with the storage; only the virtual machines do. The storage is provided to the hosts, which create the datastores, and these datastores are distributed between the VMs.

The organization has Linux VMs, but the storage is not directly connected to any physical Linux machines. Dell PowerStore integration with VMware is implemented, though not with VASA, as the VASA provider was not installed because we did not want the Windows server administrator accessing the storage. However, I can see all the VMs and which datastores they are from the storage view.

Deduplication and compression are very important features because space is always an issue with storage. I consider space constraints to be the main concern for a system storage administrator. Deduplication and compression perform exceptionally well, especially on Dell PowerStore. The compression rate has been very good so far, and we have been able to save several terabytes.

I use Cloud IQ, and it is very important because we get lost in daily tasks and sometimes have no time to actively monitor the systems in the environment. A tool like Cloud IQ keeps sending emails if anything happens, so it provides an important overview of the systems. We also use that tool to collect capacity reports from our environment. I think it is versatile and very useful.

We had a significant incident two years ago when I was preparing one of the Dell PowerStore systems for an upgrade. While running the health check, it started to corrupt every volume inside the system. We had to recover everything from the DR site because the storage became unusable. The issue was eventually found to be a bug inside the health check package. I think Dell should do better at testing those packages before applying them to the public.

I did not have an opportunity to work with it, but I think it would be beneficial to have the ability to increment a disk one at a time.

I have been using Dell PowerStore for four years.

Apart from the issue we had in the past, the system has been quite stable and the performance is amazing. I have no complaints about that.

Scaling has been pretty easy. I did not scale out, only scaled up. When we received a bunch of disks from Dell as compensation for the issue we experienced, we added them to our DR environment because we needed to recover some machines that were not on the replication and had to be recovered from backup, which required additional space. Expanding the space on Dell PowerStore was straightforward, and we had no complaints about that.

During the upgrade I mentioned, I was scaling up with a pack of disks rather than one at a time.

I have contacted technical support multiple times. Support response is reasonable, and they usually reply in time. The team members I have worked with were versatile in their knowledge of the system and never seemed lost regarding Dell PowerStore. I was always well served.

Positive

I have prior experience with other storage solutions. Before Dell PowerStore, we also had Dell XIOs, which was a similar storage system but an older version and model. Comparing the two, Dell PowerStore is much faster and more reliable than the XIOs were. I also have experience with IBM equipment, such as the DS9000 and other IBM devices. I think Dell PowerStore can keep up with them in a middle-class or enterprise environment.

During the initial deployment of Dell PowerStore, I only participated in one deployment. I did not directly work on the deployment itself because it was not my function; the company hired someone to handle that. However, I followed the process from beginning to end and found it quite easy. If I had to do it myself, I would be capable of doing so.

The setup is straightforward and one of the easiest I have worked with. Even people joining my team who have no previous experience with storage can learn through the interface in a single day session. While some doubts naturally arise, by the end of one session, they are ready to work with it.

Dell takes care of all implementation needs. I only need to identify the issue and send it to them, and if hardware replacement is required, they will go in and complete the replacement.

I do have two new machines that were installed a couple of months ago. There are two Linux machines that are connected directly to the storage, though I do not have access to those machines.

For me, Dell PowerStore integration is neutral in that the environment would function well without it, but it proved valuable in one instance because we had discrepancies in naming conventions between the storage and VMware. Using the integration, I was able to fix all those discrepancies and keep consistent naming conventions across the environment.

I would rate this product a nine overall.