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Dell EMC PowerMax 2000 ESS Fiber Channel Director

Mfg # EHF-BEDIR CDW # 5286697

Quick tech specs

  • Maximum IOPS: 1.7Million
  • Maximum Front-End Host Ports: 64
  • Typical Effective Maximum Capacity with Data Reduction: 1PBe
  • Response Times: Under 300microseconds
  • Storage Type: Block,File,Open Systems,IBM I
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Know your gear

The Dell EMC PowerMax 2000 ESS Fiber Channel Director offers blazing fast NVMe performances and rich data services, designed for mission-critical applications. It delivers the performance your applications demand while consolidating block, file, open systems and IBM i workloads. Architected to deliver end-to-end NVMe performance, this platform is NVMeoF and SCM ready for realizing even further reductions in overhead and latency. This appliance can fit its two bricks in half a standard 19-inch rack.

This item was discontinued on October 06, 2022

Enhance your purchase

Dell EMC PowerMax 2000 ESS Fiber Channel Director is rated 4.60 out of 5 by 30.
Rated 5 out of 5 by from We have not yet hit the ceiling in its efficiency, performance, and scalability What is our primary use case? We are a medical organization. We use PowerMax with medical ERP. We have some government projects that utilize PowerMax because we have 99.99% reliability and uptime requirements. We are not using cloud-connected storage. However, we are using PowerMax to virtualize our local/on-premise infrastructure. We do not have a big installation. In Russia, our company was among the first companies who purchased PowerMax appliances. Our environment is around 250 terabytes. How has it helped my organization? We removed the need to observe whether we ran into issues with the performance of disks or number of IOPS. Previously, our Oracle Database would throw us performance errors. Now, with PowerMax, everything runs smoothly. I would access the solution’s built-in QoS capabilities for providing workload congestion protection at 10 (out of 10), as we are using the highest, platinum-level minimum response time from the system. The NVMe SCM storage tier feature offers crazy speeds. When we were looking for a storage solution, we were looking for the most reliable, high performance, latest solution to delay end-of-life. Our PowerMax setup everywhere enables the diamond-level setting with enabled monitoring. Until this day, we have not experienced any anomalies. We simply don’t experience workload congestion. Our primary requirement was the reliability of PowerMax, then the rest of the features, like NVMe SCM, were a nice add-on What is most valuable? We value maximum system uptime because our projects are associated with a government customer. We have medical ERP, which is used throughout Russia, covering 8 time zones. If it fails, then we have big problems. Therefore, the stability of the system is important for us.We are using PowerMax and VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols). We use Power Pass, which is an additional software from Dell EMC, alongside multi-passing in our SAN network. This allows us to balance uploads and optical links of our SAN network. What needs improvement? I would like a more informative CloudIQ for iOS. What you can see via the web UI significantly differs from what you can see via the web application. For how long have I used the solution? We have been using PowerMax in a production environment since August 2019. What do I think about the stability of the solution? My colleague and I are responsible for the infrastructure, network, and PowerMax storage. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? In terms of storage users, we have about 1,000 people. How are customer service and support? We are happy with everything, especially their technical support. We had a situation where there was an outage in the data center associated with our electricity supplier. Later, when we launched the infrastructure, the support perfectly helped us with this issue. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? PowerMax exceeded our expectations. We previously used its predecessor VNX, which reached end-of-life and end-of-sale, i.e., we stopped receiving support for it. We have been using PowerMax for the last three years and have not yet hit the ceiling in its efficiency, performance, and scalability. How was the initial setup? The deployment took about two days. We moved in segments, checking that everything was working properly, before moving forward with the migration. What about the implementation team? The initial setup and integration of PowerMax were carried out by Dell EMC. We then migrated it via vSphere from our previous solution EMC VNX 5700 to PowerMax. What was our ROI? We don’t calculate ROI on PowerMax. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The PowerMax appliance pricing was reasonable. Dell EMC quoted us a substantial discount. Support pricing is very high. Our support contract is about to expire and Dell EMC provided us with an extremely high renewal quote. It was four times more than the support contract for our previous EMC VNX solution. I would suggest initially purchasing PowerMax with a longer support contract to reduce your support costs.With our previous EMC VNX solution, we were able to lock in the support costs, but we failed to do so with PowerMax. Therefore, it is more cost effective for us to purchase a new appliance with a support contract than to support PowerMax at these support cost amounts. For example, if the purchasing price was a million dollars, then the support costs a third of the total appliance cost per year. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We briefly looked at and evaluated Hitachi. However, in 2019, PowerMax didn’t have any direct competitors. There might have been a similar Huawei solution, but it was not really the same as PowerMax. The primary reason that we went with PowerMax is because we have always preferred Dell EMC solutions. Our previous solution was a Dell EMC product and we were very satisfied with its reliability and performance until its end-of-life. What other advice do I have? The NVMe has great speed with an Oracle Database, but that is not that important for us. I often use the mobile CloudIQ client, which I find very useful. I would rate the solution as 10 out of 10. It works perfectly apart from the support costs. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-01-03T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Simplified storage provisioning for us, enabling us to assign any volumes in two to three minutes What is our primary use case? Our primary use case for PowerMax is hosting our VMware environment with VMware SRM hosted on and connected to both. The PowerMax does the SRDF replication for VMware SRM, and some of the workload on it is for the physical environment that consists of Unix, AIX, and Sun Solaris. In addition to that, we have physical Windows and Linux servers as well. We have 1,200-plus virtual machines hosted on PowerMax. We have two PowerMax 8000s, each deployed at a different site. The capacity of the PowerMax at the primary site is 500 terabytes, and approximately 200 terabytes at the DR site. How has it helped my organization? We are coming from the VMAX environment where the storage provisioning was a bit complex. We had to create volumes manually from the command line. But with the introduction of the PowerMax, it's a piece of cake for us. We can assign whatever volumes we want in two to three minutes. Storage provisioning has become very simple for us and is a real improvement. What is most valuable? The SRDF site-to-site replication for the volumes is the most important feature for us. That enables us to do site recovery and replication for our VMware infrastructure. Along with that, the NVMe response time is very good. We used to have a VMAX 20K but we have just upgraded, and moved two or three generations ahead to PowerMax, and the response time is great. Because we are coming from a hybrid storage scenario, the performance of NVMe is a huge upgrade for us. The 0.4 millisecond response time means our application works great and we are seeing huge performance improvements in our VMware and physical environments. Regarding data security, EMC has introduced CloudIQ solution with the PowerMax environment, and that enables live monitoring of the telemetry and security data array of the PowerMax. CloudIQ also has a feature called Cybersecurity. That monitors for security vulnerabilities or security events that are occurring on the array itself. That feature is very helpful. We have been able to do some vulnerability assessment tests on the array, which have helped us to resolve issues regarding data security and security vulnerabilities. We are not using the encryption feature of the PowerMax, because we didn't order the PowerMax configuration for it. CloudIQ helps the environment and lets us manage the respective connected environments. A good feature in CloudIQ is the health score of each connected infrastructure. It gives you timely alerts and informs you when a health issue is occurring on the arrays and needs to be fixed. Those reports and health notices are also sent to Dell EMC support, which proactively monitors all the infrastructure and they will open service requests themselves. In terms of efficiency, the compression we are currently receiving is 4.2x, which is very good efficiency. We are storing 435 terabytes of data in just 90 TB. In addition to what I mentioned about the NVMe performance, which is very good, we were achieving 150k IOPS on the VMAX, but on the PowerMax the same workload is hitting 300k-plus IOPS. That is sufficient for the workload and means the application is performing as required, according to the SLAs as defined on the PowerMax. When it comes to workload congestion protection, we have not faced any congestion yet in our environment. We have some spikes on Friday evenings, but they are being handled by PowerMax dutifully. It can beautifully handle up to 400k IOPS, even though it is only designed for 300k IOPS. That is another illustration of its good performance. What needs improvement? The CloudIQ features still need to be improved because CloudIQdoes not support PowerProtect DD capacity, although it is working well overall. Their mobile app also still needs improvement. In addition, the web GUI is good and shows all the related reports, but I would like to see more granularity in the reports, and reporting on CloudIQ should be done in the web GUI interface. There is also room for improvement in the PowerMax architecture and hardware itself. They should design the PowerMax on the basis of PCIe 4.0. I would like to see the possibility of an NVMe drive that operates on PCIe 4.0 and not PCIe 3.0. The design could be very much better if they did some R&D and introduced a version based on PCIe 4.0. For how long have I used the solution? I manage the IT infrastructure of a telco company in Pakistan. I look after the servers and storage infrastructure and I've been with the company for the last eight years. Recently, we have deployed PowerMax, PowerProtect DD and PowerScale Isilon, with the help of Dell EMC and their partners. What do I think about the stability of the solution? In terms of availability, Dell EMC claims PowerMax will give you six nines. We have not faced a single issue in the last six months with PowerMax. The storage has been very stable for us and it's performing well. It's giving us the right amount of uptime and availability. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The NVMe scale-out capabilities were a factor we had in mind when we were evaluating the PowerMax against competitors, including IBM and Huawei. The scale-out capabilities are very important. We have 4 TB of cache with four directors right now, and we can add capacity in the future. If that capacity is met and we need to add more engines for our workload, we can do that very easily. We are not currently using the NVMe SCM storage tier feature, but that is in the pipeline. If there is a high-demand workload in the future, we will consider the SCM storage. How are customer service and support? Dell EMC's support for PowerMax has worked great for us. If we have to open a severity-one, we call their support line. Other than that, the support portal works great. If we have to open a severity-two, or they open a service request with the proper severity, the infrastructure and storage support are very good. They will escalate an issue to the next level when required, as well. There is some margin for improvement in that they should develop an application for support where you could see support tickets and escalate them if you want. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive How was the initial setup? I was involved from the initial design to the product evaluation from different vendors, and I was involved in the whole migration project through to its conclusion. Dell EMC dedicated project managers and members of its professional services team to handle all of our migration from VMAX to the PowerMax without any hassle. And all of our data was successfully migrated within 1.5 months. It was a very good experience for us. There was no downtime and it was a totally non-disruptive migration for VMware, AIX, Windows, and Linux. Only some of the Solaris environment experienced a disruption because we had to reboot the servers. The rest of the migration was non-disruptive and the deployment was very good for us. For maintenance and admin of the solution, two people report to me. They manage the PowerMax series along with me as the team lead. On the user side, there are different stakeholders. We provision storage to them and then they map the storage to various OSs for VMware, Linux, Solaris, AIX, and Windows. That team is a bit larger and has separate departments, with approximately 25 to 30 people. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We evaluated PowerMax against IBM FlashSystem 9200R and against the Huawei Dorado V6. At that time, Huawei did not have the VMware certification due to US policies and enforcement, but Dorado now has VMware certification. That's why we rated the PowerMax highest. What other advice do I have? The solution is very stable and performs well. If you are doing research, look at the architecture of all the available vendors. Evaluate every storage solution with respect to architecture, the NVMe version they are using, and the hardware which they are using. Out of 10, I would give PowerMax a nine. It has worked very well for us. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-01-03T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Gives us better storage I/O for our big apps, and the dedupe and compression work well What is our primary use case? We use it for our core banking data. How has it helped my organization? It has improved storage I/O for our big apps and restores. And the snapshot process and data compression are better. What is most valuable? We like the compression, dedupe, and I/O on the PowerMax. They are better than on the XtremIO. Snapshots make it easy to deploy production, pre-production, and UAT environments. It is easy to snapshot and reverse snapshot to other environments, compared to other storage vendors. In addition, we have a lot of users in our core system and the PowerMax performance is very good. The I/O performance is running fine; it's not an issue. What needs improvement? We would like more documentation, a guide to the features of the PowerMax. We needed to use the option to reclaim storage and we had to chat with the Dell EMC team. For how long have I used the solution? We have been using Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe for around one year. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It is stable. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? Because we have just started using it, we haven't scaled up yet. How are customer service and support? We have opened cases with the Dell EMC team and we have chatted with them. They have provided good, fast support for us. But in some cases they did not explain the solution well. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We used XtremIO. We switched because we found many of the features and the functions are better on the PowerMax than they are on the XtremIO. An example would be the snapshot. When we would do snapshots on the XtremIO, we could delete a snapshot, even when we were mapping to the host. But with PowerMax, we cannot delete a snapshot when mapping to the host. How was the initial setup? The setup was difficult because PowerMax has more functionality, but some of that functionality is still not clear to us. Four people work with it on my team; all system admins. What other advice do I have? PowerMax is a good storage solution for the banking sector. Choose it for your core banking system, because of the dedupe and compression, the I/O, and the high availability for your data. Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from A resilient product with good data savings What is our primary use case? We are using it for core banking systems and virtualized enrollment. So, everything for this bank is on PowerMax, including its core banking system, which is running on Solaris, and all the relevant applications running on VMware. How has it helped my organization? You can use PowerMax for all workloads and consolidation. We have used it to scale thousands of VMs. This is Dell EMC's selling point. What is most valuable? It is a good, resilient product. The good thing that we have found is the enhanced data savings. For example, in an XtremIO, we were seeing the space savings was 1:4 or 1:3. With PowerMax, I have seen 10:1 and 12:1. This is something that has really come out as a distinctive feature and is helping us a lot. The Unisphere GUI has been enhanced. A lot of options have been added to the GUI. Though, if somebody is planning to buy PowerMax, they should also have some associated training with that. What needs improvement? We brought up this question to the implementation engineer. We were comparing use cases where a customer is using RecoverPoint, then goes to PowerMax. In our previous setup with XtremIO, we were using RecpverPoint and keeping snapshots for 30 days, every few seconds. With PowerMax, I requested this for every 15 minutes, keeping it for a week. The engineer's answer was, "There will be too many snapshots. It might slow down the system." This is specifically for the use cases where there is RecoverPoint. While PowerMax works with RecoverPoint, and you can use it, there should be some way where you can have even more snapshots and not to worry about performance and system cache. For how long have I used the solution? We have been using PowerMax for less than a year. We just installed it recently. What do I think about the stability of the solution? From my experience, it is stable enough. For our current setup, it is too early to assess stability. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? They support scalability. We can add more capacity when it is needed. How are customer service and support? I always tell my customers that Dell EMC support is good. Specifically with enterprise storage, like PowerMax and VMAX, it is really good. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? PowerMax was deployed as a replacement/tech refresh for our existing VNX. We were using XtremIO before this. We have all of the features that were available there. Relatively, there is nothing new that we are using. We had some challenges with our core banking system. There were performance issues, which was the reason we went to XtremIO All-Flash. NVME has really helped us here because anything less than XtremIO would have caused us issues. So, PowerMax is the best replacement or fit right now. In fact, we have seen that it has really improved the performance as well. How was the initial setup? The initial setup was straightforward. We are still in the implementation phase. The ease of administration is okay for me. However, for other team members and specifically our customers, who are not very familiar with it. It has increased provision time. Though, it is just a one-time activity. During implementation, we did the split properly. Therefore, there will not be challenges going forward. Initially, it took a lot of time to do the initial provisioning, specifically for the Dell EMC engineer who provisioned a couple of hosts. After that, we did all the provisioning, SRDF replication, snapshots, scripting, etc., and that took awhile. I am hoping that this is just one time. Going ahead, it should be simple to add volumes and not have to go through the cycle. What about the implementation team? Implementation was mainly done by a local resource, because we are not a deployment partner. The resource connected to somebody remotely from a site in Egypt. We managed to deploy it in half a day for each site. The first time that we did the provisioning, it took time, but it was a relatively straightforward process. We had some requirements, like SRM integration, where we needed some guidance. Dell EMC has suggested that we use CloudIQ, so we want to explore that option. However, we are not using it right now. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We have used VMAX in other places. It has helped because it has various options for data protection. I have worked on DMX3, DMX4, and VMAX 10K. I am a fan of VMAX because it is really good. There are various command line options that allow you to do a lot of things. Most of the products are the same and have similar features. There could even be some which might be better. However, one thing that I always liked about Dell EMC is the support, which is really good. If there is an issue and you can get somebody to resolve it, that is the most important thing. Many products have the same features, e.g., snapshot, replication, and data compression, but the support from Dell EMC is one of the best. What other advice do I have? It is a good enterprise-scale storage. I would rate it nine out of 10. Generally, storage doesn't expose your data unless you have certain protocols. With PowerMax, it is too early to remark on data security because we just deployed it and migrated the data. We have not even done a proper drill or failover for data availability and data security. It is also too early to remark on workload congestion. Though, since we have been migrating the data, which is live data, I have seen the utilization and that is performing relatively better than our previous Dell EMC platform. From a technical perspective, you should have some technical training associated with the deployment. That is the one aspect that is complicated. Apart from that, everything is simple. Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Partner
Date published: 2021-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from We use MetroDR for backups and it helps reduce our storage costs What is our primary use case? I am the solution administrator for Telcel. I use it to analyze the host and for data availability. It is a useful tool for me. I use it a lot every day. It is used for mission-critical operations. How has it helped my organization? We use the PowerMax SRDF/Metro Smart DR to replicate information on some servers that are important to our company. We use it as a backup from each box and it helps to reduce our storage costs. What is most valuable? It is important that the product provides NVMe scale-out capabilities. We support many things with the product and we need to know what the architecture is. It makes things very simple for us. The data security and availability are pretty good. We have many clients connecting to the box, which means security is very important. This is true when it comes to remote support. The compliance is very good. The performance is very good on our servers. It's superior. And the QoS capabilities for providing work congestion protection are also important because about 99 percent of our servers are production servers. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe for about four years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It's very stable. We have had some trouble with the VMAX-to-PowerMax migration, but the VMAX box will be powered down after the migration. The PowerMax boxes are working fine and we don't have any issues with them. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? We plan to increase our usage of the product. How are customer service and support? Dell EMC's technical support is pretty good. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? Initially, we had Dell EMC VMAX 800 and then VMAX 20K and 40K all-flash. We have recently installed a couple of PowerMax 8000s, and our migration program includes going from VMAX 20K to the PowerMax 2000 and 8000. How was the initial setup? The setup was pretty easy. We are a team of three people who handle storage and the deployment was not complex. We had no problem with it. It took us about eight hours. What about the implementation team? We received help from EPS Consulting. What other advice do I have? We use the PowerMax SRDF/Metro Smart DR, and the bandwidth is excellent but the equipment is in the same location. Overall, I don't see much that they need to do to improve the product. It's very good. Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Partner
Date published: 2021-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Software communication system used to consolidate high performing workloads What is our primary use case? We use this solution to consolidate high performing workloads. The solution houses all of our VM workloads, as well as our EMR, which supports over 20,000 users. We also have PowerMax deployed on a different site for disaster recovery. How has it helped my organization? We work in healthcare and have to ensure that our data is always available because it can directly affect patient care. This platform is reliable in supporting our data availability. We now have a higher performing platform and have been able to consolidate our workloads into one single platform. What is most valuable? Overall, the platform is easy of use. The performance has kept up with our workloads. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using this solution for two years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? This is a stable solution. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? This is a scalable solution. How are customer service and support? The customer service for this solution has been excellent. We have received assistance with a four-hour response time. I would rate it a nine out of ten. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We previously used XtremeIO. We switched just because we felt that the platform was aging and we needed something that was going to be high performing and offer more availability. How was the initial setup? The initial setup was straightforward. We received great support on the ground from Dell. They are familiar with our data center and they were able to prepare the site to install the equipment without any delays so everything ran on schedule. Deployment took one day. We worked with a project manager both internally and from Dell, and we ensured that we had all the necessary power, networking, and other connectivity ready for deployment to take place on schedule. The deployment involved myself and another engineer, as well as Dell engineers. It took several days to get the configuration right from a layout perspective, but overall, it was straightforward. What was our ROI? The return on investment has been the consolidation of our platforms. We've reduced our footprint in data center, which has required less power, less heat and less floor space. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The pricing for this solution is good compared to other products on the markets. What other advice do I have? I would advise others to do their homework and assess their environment to understand their workloads. It's important to do testing and model your workloads against your expectations to push the boundaries. I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-05-12T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from The replication has been pretty solid, but the compression and deduplication are disappointing What is our primary use case? We have two PowerMax arrays. One is at our primary data center. The other is in the secondary data center, and they replicate back and forth to each other. We use them to store a lot of databases and files, but we don't have as much on them as we used to because our CIO is outsourcing a lot. We have taken a lot out of the data center recently, so there isn't as much on them as we intended when we bought them but I think it's mostly databases, file shares, and some one-off applications. It's all virtualized on VMware as well. How has it helped my organization? PowerMax improved our storage performance and allowed us to consolidate our old storage into one platform. It's faster than the older EMC equipment we replaced. We had a few different storage arrays, and a couple of them were approaching the end of maintenance, and one was a year away from the end of its maintenance. So it was time to either spend a ton of money on renewing maintenance or replace them. At the same time, PowerMax has made storage provisioning more difficult because it's not as intuitive as other arrays, but it's still a good solution for our mission-critical workloads. We're using SRDF, but it hasn't affected our storage network bandwidth requirements. We haven't had any issues, so we haven't had to increase the size of any of our connections. Inside the data, there certainly wouldn't be any issues. The only problem would be replicating to the other site, and we haven't had any issues. We have a reasonably large pipe between the sites. What is most valuable? They're basically tanks. You could take a baseball bat to it, and it's still going to keep running and doing what it's supposed to do. We've had a couple of part failures, and you can pretty much replace any part on that thing at any time during the day in the middle of production without worrying about anything happening. Nobody notices. We even had to replace a memory card, so we had to take out a controller. There were two, so no one even realized what was going on. The availability is excellent. You can do anything to it, and it still runs. The uptime is a great feature, and the replication has been pretty solid. That's another important feature for us. What needs improvement? The dedupe and compression features have been the biggest disappointment. It's not as efficient as we were expecting or had hoped. It's not terrible, but not as good as we were led to believe it was going to be. They need to improve their reduplication algorithm or the compression algorithms. It comes with a guarantee that you'll get 3-to-1 dedupe and compression, meaning that if you have 3 terabytes of data, it should only take 1 terabyte of space because we reduce its size. We're only getting 2-to-1. It's not a big deal because we have more storage than we'll need, but it's disappointing. There's also a qualifier in that I'm told that if we filled the array up more, some deeper algorithms would kick in and help that reduction number go up a little. Also, if you have deeper algorithms that you're going to use, only if I put more data on it, is that going to slow things down? Why not just use them now? That also left a lot to be desired. I attempted to use that and was having some performance issues, and the fix was, "Don't use that." So it was a little lacking. I think management is where PowerMax is weakest. We're still managing it like we managed EMC arrays in the early 2000s. There's a slicker, fancier GUI that does more, but at the end of the day, you still have to dig into the command line and issue a lot of the same commands that we still were using almost 20 years ago. So the ease of use factor is low. One of the reasons I wanted Pure Storage was because I felt like I could teach a coworker how to fill in for me if I ever went on vacation for a couple of weeks. If anything bad happens and I'm out of the office, they're going to have to bother me. This is not intuitive. There are a lot of CLI commands that you still have to use. It's just not as user-friendly as it should be. For how long have I used the solution? We got PowerMax just short of three years ago. What do I think about the stability of the solution? The performance has been good. I wouldn't say great, but it's good. It's more than what we need. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? PowerMax's scalability is good. We have the lower model, so it doesn't scale as much as the larger model. You know that going in, so you buy the model you need. We realized we would probably never have to expand it when we bought it. How are customer service and support? I'd rate Dell EMC support eight out of 10. It's pretty good. They actively monitor the array, and it dials home to let them know if there's anything they should look at. Sometimes, when I come in the next morning and check the logs, I'll notice that somebody from support had connected in and looked at something. Then, I can look on the support website and try to figure out what they were doing, which could be an easier process, but it's good that they keep an eye on the arrays. If a part fails, the arrays generally dial home to notify them that it needs to be replaced, and they contact me to arrange it. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive How was the initial setup? Setting up PowerMax is definitely complex. The initial configuration of the array itself is pretty simple, but once you start trying to connect hosts and set up replication, then it becomes a lot more work than it probably should be. It took a couple of days for the initial setup, but after that, there has been some ongoing work as we put more and more on there. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We looked at three other vendors, including NetApp, but we were looking for block storage. I've always felt NetApp is great for file storage, but I look elsewhere if I want block storage. And while their presentations were impressive, there wasn't a compelling reason to choose them. They weren't any cheaper. There wasn't anything that stood out about them that made us want to take a closer look. We also looked at Kaminario, but we had questions about whether they'd still be around in five years to provide support. There were many positives I liked about it, and the price was low. It was like an off-brand version of a Pure array in a lot of ways. Just by playing with it, you could tell it was a year or two behind what Pure Storage was selling. We also looked at Pure Storage, and I thought Pure Storage had the best mix of cost and ease of use for an organization our size. I felt like it was probably the best choice, but the corporate leadership overruled my recommendation based on the "No one ever gets fired for buying IBM" theory. My CIO was feeling like, "He's a software developer, so he's not very hardware or vendor savvy." He didn't know much about Pure Storage and felt more comfortable sticking with EMC. What other advice do I have? I'd give PowerMax seven out of 10. There are also a few things PowerMax does that nobody else offers. For example, some of our other vendors don't have its replication or mainframe connectivity features. If you need that, you have to have a PowerMax or some kind of Dell solution. If you're planning on implementing it, you definitely need someone who knows PowerMax or a VMAX to take care of it for you. You can't just buy one and think that you're going to give it to someone who's never done it before. You need somebody with some experience on staff. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2021-12-13T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Allows us to define different service levels for storage groups to prioritize our workload at the infrastructure level, and provides remarkable value in terms of compression and deduplication What is our primary use case? We currently use it to power our Oracle databases, especially for our core banking solution. We also use it for storage. We provisioned the storage from PowerMax for various VMs that we created for the applications in that environment. How has it helped my organization? We use the NVMe SCM storage tier feature, and that's how we're able to do the service level capability (SLA). We have storage class memory as a part of our deployment, and we have about 10% of our storage sizing allocated to storage class memory. With that, we are able to create different service levels for the disk groups or loans provisioned from this storage. It most definitely helps in improving storage-related performance in our environment. The way our core banking solution works is that we have what we call ODS blocks. So, for leveraging that SLA, we were able to implement some kind of priority for those ODS blocks. Oracle had said that this is something for which their Exadata has a special way of doing, but based on my own assessment, we are able to achieve relatively similar levels of performance by using PowerMax. Before we deployed this solution, we used to struggle with processing about 100,000 transactions in 10 minutes. We are now able to process about 350,000 or more transactions. These are conservative figures. We did hit much more than that, but conservatively, we are able to see about 300% performance improvement as compared to the SSD storage that we had previously from IBM. We have metrics to show that. The performance is different, and it is better than what we were used to. We are in our ideal environment in which the storage double acts as our UAT and our test environment. So, we've seen remarkable deduplication in that environment because we are able to expand the footprint much more than what we are able to do in production. The production environment is a bit more controlled, but in our DR UAT environment, we are able to stretch those capabilities. The metrics that we see and the number of environments that we're able to create is quite remarkable. It provides NVMe scale-out capabilities, which is pretty awesome. We currently have a plan to scale up. We started off with about 100TB. Based on the performance that we've seen, we're consolidating more workloads on the storage. We need to scale up a bit, and we find it very valuable to be able to do that. The ability to scale out and scale up marginally depending on what you want is quite valuable to us. What is most valuable? We find the service level option to provision storage very valuable. The ability to define different service levels for storage groups helps us in prioritizing our workload at the infrastructure level. We also find the compression technology of PowerMax very valuable. In some instances, depending on the kind of data that we have, we can attest to compression ratios of about 9:1, which is very valuable. The NFS feature is also quite useful for us in our environment. We're able to deploy the NFS capabilities to resolve some of the use cases that we identify. Its efficiency and performance have been remarkable. It could be because we've not been able to break the limits of what we have. The PowerMax 2000 that we have can do about a million IOPS or so if my memory serves me well. Our use case at the moment isn't stretching as much as that. So, for us, performance has been remarkable in terms of meeting expectations. It has been much better as compared to what we used to have. We see responses to application requests, especially database request queries, in microseconds, as advertised, and even that in some ways gave us a bit of a challenge because the applications couldn't cope with the speed of the response of the storage. So, it was new learning for the providers of the application. The performance has been remarkable. We've seen data within microseconds as advertised. In terms of the IOPS, we've not been able to fully exact the limits, but so far, so good. We are pretty comfortable with that. As we grow organically, we will see more performance and we will be able to drive, but in terms of compression and deduplication, we have received remarkable value. In the last one year, we haven't had any issues with the availability of the platform, the storage, and the extension of our data. The encryption or data address feature is also there. Even though we've not fully utilized that, it's comforting to know that capability is available for us to explore. We've not had any storage level outage in terms of the data not being accessible within the agreed service. So far, so good. What needs improvement? They can make the GUI better, especially for the ones that come out of the box. We did encounter a bit of difficulty in setting up the storage. We had to deploy Solutions Enabler on a Linux machine to be able to fully interact with the storage. They need to upgrade the web interface for the management of the storage that comes out of the box. The management interface for NFS is also a bit old and not very intuitive. For how long have I used the solution? We deployed PowerMax for our core banking solution in October last year. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It is pretty stable. We've not had any incidents around this storage in the last one year. I can't recall any major incidents. The storage supports our core banking solution, which is always in use. We have 24/7 banking services, and the solution has been pretty stable. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? We are able to scale. There are plans to procure more capacity so that we can consolidate other workloads to this storage. How are customer service and support? It was top-notch, and it still is top-notch. They're quite responsive. They have a team of knowledgeable people, and they were quite supportive all through the implementation. They still keep in touch to see how we're faring. I would rate them a nine out of 10. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We were using SSD storage from IBM. We moved because of multiple things. One reason was the cost. Another reason was the SCM offering advertised by Dell, which was coupled with the AppSync feature of this storage that allowed us to create clones of our databases for UAT, development, and test purposes. So, the features that we desired in the environment were: * Cost and performance * The ability to have database clones without necessarily increasing the footprint of the storage required. * The ability to create service levels for the storage or for disk groups created from the storage. It was critical for us because of the consolidated environments in which we wanted to use the storage. How was the initial setup? With professional services from them, it was straightforward. The only issue was that some of the management and out-of-the-box capabilities needed a bit of work to make it as easy as possible for system admins to provision clones from the storage. Aside from that, the setup was pretty easy and straightforward. We did the most part in about two weeks or less. Some of the delays must have been from our end because of a few requirements. We had the production site and the DR site, and it took about two weeks. After the arrival of the infrastructure, we did the entire project in about six weeks. The setup of the storage took about two weeks. For its maintenance, we have a team of three system administrators who also act as storage admins. What was our ROI? I believe we have seen an ROI. It took us about eight months to see a return on investment. The way I gauge it is that the ROI started coming in when the storage gave us what our previous capability couldn't in terms of: * The ability to do more transactions * The ability to see the effects of things like compression and duplication * The ability to create and extensively use the storage to create multiple environments as desired All of these pretty much started coming in when our data footprint increased and our transaction volume also increased. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Its price is competitive, but they need to have a different price for West Africa. They can do better with the price point to allow us to scale even more. We wanted to migrate our entire storage infrastructure to PowerMax, which would require us to buy more capacity, and from the price point, it didn't attract us. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We reviewed a few other solutions. NetApp was one of them. What made us go with Dell was a combination of the offering that we saw and the price point at which that was being offered to us by Dell. So, the combination of the offering in terms of the storage features and the fact that Dell offered us competitive pricing at that point were the main reasons. At the time we were choosing this product, they and a few others were the only ones boasting of having a true NVMe experience. At that point, they had also introduced the SCM into the mix that lowered the platinum latency to about less than 0.04 milliseconds. Those were the things that really attracted us to this storage solution. What other advice do I have? I would advise others to go for it. It is highly recommended for storage for enterprise-level and mission-critical IT workloads. It has fully met the expectations based on what is availab... Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-12-13T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Built-in SRDF helps reduce our bandwidth requirements, through compression and dedupe capabilities What is our primary use case? We are using the PowerMax for our core banking solution, ERP, and our payment systems, as well as middleware, ATM, and the most critical banking systems. How has it helped my organization? The main improvement for us is that we have seen up to 12x performance improvements after moving from earlier, mid-range Dell EMC storage to PowerMax. Some of our reports, which were long-running, are now completed in a few minutes. Something that would take two hours is completed in 15 minutes and that has improved productivity. We also used to get timeouts from our storage, but now, after migrating to the PowerMax, there are no timeouts because the latencies are in microseconds, compared to the milliseconds of our old solution. Our bandwidth requirements have been reduced because of the compression and the dedupe that we are getting with the built-in SRDF. It is bandwidth-optimized. And the best part is the reverse replication. Suppose you activate your DR. When you have to come back to the main array, only the changes are synced. That is unlike many other products. Here, only the changed tracks need to be updated, making the reverse replication very fast. Also, by enabling the compression and deduplication, we get a very good level of compression and dedupe, of 4:1, which means if you have 40 terabytes, you only need to buy 10 terabytes. There are cost savings there. And by default, thin provisioning is in place, which also gives you at least a 40 percent reduction. And because of the bandwidth optimization, the link required for the DR replication is also reduced, meaning you are saving on the bandwidth costs. We have easily saved 50 percent. Overall, you are getting very high-performing and reliable storage. What is most valuable? The most important feature is the performance, because we have four directors, all of them Active-Active. (PowerMax directors support multiple functions including front-end I/O modules). It is highly available because it has multiple controllers. All of them are unlike some of the traditional storage arrays, where you assign certain LUNs to certain controllers. Here, everything is Active-Active. You don't assign a particular disk or LUN to a particular controller. All the controllers are servicing all of the LUNs. So from an availability point of view, we don't even know if a particular controller or director has failed. And all the spare part replacement, including controllers, can be done online while systems are working. We don't need to do it during off-peak hours. We can do so during normal working hours because the performance you get from the service, due to the other controllers, is enough to take care of any failed components. There is also a Call Home facility configured, so the system can send out alerts to the Dell EMC support team. They can dispatch spare parts based on these alerts, so it is a fully integrated system. Another valuable feature is the DR replication technology, which is based on the Dell EMC SRDF solution. It provides a very good level of near-real-time replication. It supports synchronous as well as asynchronous. When it comes to activating the DR, it is very easy. Then there are the compression and deduplication which are always on. We get more than 4:1 capacity savings using them. The efficiency benefits from compression and deduplication are through a specialized hardware module within the storage itself, and that means there is no overhead to the compression and dedupe. In addition, the solution supports IBM Power Systems, Solaris, VMware—almost everything is supported. That's important to us because we are using multiple hardware flavors including IBM Power Systems, SPARC machines, and HPE Onyx. All of these are different classes of machines, and we have different operating systems. We have Linux and Windows on physical and we have it running on VMware. Oracle virtualization is also supported. It supports a wide combination of specialized technologies and hardware. And the built-in QoS capabilities enable you to drill down to any particular QoS levels and define the type of performance you'll have: diamond, platinum, or gold. The result is that different performance levels can be set for individual disks. Using the QoS functionality, we can vary the performance or prioritize it based on the criticality of the performance needs. Another nice feature is the CloudIQ app. You can even monitor things using the app on your mobile. Every five minutes, the performance statistics and the system diagnosis data are sent to the cloud and you can access them sitting anywhere. You get these statistics at your fingertips. What needs improvement? Although they call it unified storage where you have SAN and NAS, with a NAS implementation on top of a SAN, the NAS implementation is a little complicated and clumsy. As SAN, as block storage, it is very powerful. However, even though NAS is provided as a feature, I don't think many customers will be using a PowerMax as a NAS because NAS is normally meant for file servers or some kind of archival storage. If they could provide a very good NAS implementation, it would be better, so that customers don't have to look for other simple solutions for NAS. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe for one and a half years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? We don't have any issues with the stability. It is rock-solid. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? It is scalable. We recently did an upgrade. You can keep on adding disks within a shelf or even attach additional shelves. Also, the NVMe scale-out capabilities are very important. Although we are using SSD, all-flash drives, the backend is NVMe. It is quite fast. The IOPS requirements will never reach the max. It is also future-looking storage because it supports storage class memory (SCM). That is where you can utilize the full benefits of the storage solution. Currently, we are not using SCM because it is quite expensive. At the moment, we don't need it, but the storage backend is already NVMe and the controllers are connected using InfiniBand for very high bandwidth. It's also very easy to add or expand disks in very few steps. Everything can be done online, even the firmware updates, meaning that you don't need any downtime. It's all seamless. How are customer service and support? Dell EMC's technical support is excellent. The backend support is very strong, just like the implementation team. They have a dedicated team for PowerMax, like they used to have for VMAX or Symmetrix. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We were using a Dell EMC mid-range storage solution before. How was the initial setup? It is a complex system, but the engineers and architects behind the implementation are well-versed. They're very technically competent. They're on top of the prerequisites, and there are a lot of those. For a first-timer customer the setup will be difficult, but they will help you. The implementation team is very strong. They're very clear on what needs to be done and how to do it. For us, it was a very clean implementation. We didn't have any hiccups. It is not a one-day job. It is not a very easy installation. It requires the experts. But Dell EMC makes sure that you get a certified, real expert to do the implementation. It doesn't get done through a partner. Dell EMC themselves send their engineers for the installation. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? It is high-end storage and it is a bit expensive, but it is doing what it is meant for: running business-critical applications or latency-sensitive applications like ATM payments, and those kinds of core banking systems. Which other solutions did I evaluate? There may be customers who don't utilize all the compression features of competing products, thinking they may slow the system down. I know certain customers who have bought competing products, but they keep the compression and deduplication disabled by default, or even the encryption, because they create additional overhead. That means that with those solutions, you need to have more capacity than what you need with PowerMax. The guarantee with PowerMax is that there is no compromise on performance, even if you enable compression, deduplication, and encryption. What other advice do I have? This particular model of storage is considered Tier 0 storage for the most mission-critical applications, the applications that require a very high level of reliability and low latency. It's also for the types of applications that require real-time replication across different sites. The solution is suitable for mission-critical applications and not for archiving, because it is not cheap. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-01-17T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Secure, fast performance, and good reporting capabilities What is our primary use case? I work in data storage as a senior administrator. I use multiple Dell EMC protection and storage tools like VMAX and PowerMax network for data domains. This product is an onsite data center and we have two PowerMax boxes. One of them is for our main site and the other is for our disaster recovery (DR) site. We use PowerMax SRDF as our main application. How has it helped my organization? With the NVMe technology, performance in terms of IOPS has improved. Things are generally faster, although there are some bottlenecks with the integration of IBM servers. The biggest way that PowerMax has improved the way our organization functions is through an increase in performance. The business of pharma is complex and the IOPS demand is huge. In the past, we used VMAX storage, and there was a big issue with the performance. Everybody complained about performance, servers, and storage, saying that they didn't have enough space. We tried many different solutions in an attempt to solve the performance issue. For example, we tried reducing the data that was stored on disk, and we tried removing unused data. We turned to development and asked that some programs have fewer features. Finally, management made the decision to implement the PowerMax solution, and it solved the issue. As soon as we migrated from VMAX to PowerMax NVMe, the performance increased and everybody felt better. The security is good. We enabled DSE for our encryption. CloudIQ has made our lives better. It provides notifications, where you receive an email to let you know about your storage and your SAN. It is a powerful tool, although we have had to upgrade it a few times. Overall, it is a good monitoring tool that gives us a powerful and easy way to monitor our servers. What is most valuable? This product provides NVMe scale-out capabilities, which is important to us because our performance and IOPS have improved. The administrators have felt better about our environment since we implemented PowerMax. The storage is much better, overall. We use the NVMe CSM and it's a very powerful feature that makes our business stronger. The performance is improved, making everything faster. The reporting functionality is very good. The UI is very easy to use. We can add volumes and manage them easily. What needs improvement? We have faced problems integrating IBM servers and adding volumes. The capacity on the IBM servers was not the same and we needed to perform a reclamation process on the DR site to fill the same capacity on the storage site. The SRDF software has an issue when it's used in conjunction with VMware. In the past, we were using SRDF for VMware but in swapping from VM to DR site, VMs take a very long time. In some cases, where the data on the main size was many terabytes in size, it took a very long time to replicate to the DR site. Some VMs power on automatically, without entering any schedule. We had to migrate to RecoverPoint, which is another solution from Dell, but we still use SRDF for things that are not stored on VMware disks. When we enabled hardware compression, things improved. PowerMax Storage needs improvement in the area of monitoring tools. It should have more functions and more complicated analysis options inside the monitoring tools. For example, if I need the tool to analyze monitoring logs from one month ago, it can't be done because it retains data only for the past two weeks. For how long have I used the solution? I have been working with Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe for more than five years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? This solution is very stable. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? This is a very scalable product. We have approximately 170 VMs running on the servers. Between administrative users, including server administration and monitoring, we have approximately 20 users. How are customer service and support? The support is very good. They respond very quickly when we have issues and the responses are good. However, the first-level engineers take more time to investigate some problems. The first level of support could use some improvement. Specifically, they should be faster at solving problems. If there are critical issues then we need them to be solved quickly, and the first level simply takes too long to investigate. Which other solutions did I evaluate? Our management is satisfied with PowerMax. There had been a discussion with IBM about obtaining a storage solution from them but when we saw the power that PowerMax had, we opted for the next version of it instead. What other advice do I have? PowerMax SRDF is a very powerful tool that will replicate data to a DR site. It is very fast and has many powerful features including data compression. This is a powerful solution for us and our performance is 100% better since we implemented it. Overall, for enterprise-level mission-critical workloads, the solution is very powerful. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-01-13T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Has good customer support but needs to increase storage and improve scalability What needs improvement? Dell PowerMax NVMe needs to increase storage and improve scalability. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using the product for a couple of months. How are customer service and support? Dell PowerMax NVMe's tech support is good. How was the initial setup? We can complete Dell PowerMax NVMe's deployment in a week. What other advice do I have? I rate the product an eight out of ten. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Implementer
Date published: 2023-08-25T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Offers reliable features such as replication, encryption, and data reduction What is our primary use case? We're trying to converge a lot of storage equipment, around ten units, from two different locations into redundant PowerMax sites. We need to converge all the VNX and HVAs from Hitachi to something like enterprise storage like PowerMax. How has it helped my organization? During the Request for Proposal (RFP) process with Dell, we know that the throughput of PowerMax will be convenient for us and it will handle our data center workloads. We already have NVMe in the company, and we're very satisfied with NVMe technology within PowerMax that impacted our IO performance. What is most valuable? First, it's an enterprise storage solution. This is very important for us. Another important feature is replication. However, many features are common across vendors such as Hitachi. Whether it's replication and encryption, we find the same features with IBM or Hitachi. There are minor differences, but not significant. Replication is important because we replicate some data. Encryption is also crucial. Additionally, data reduction is vital. The more the storage can reduce data volume, the lower the cost. Good documentation is important. We currently have a lot of documentation from Dell. What needs improvement? Configuration could be easier to manage, and implementation should be easier to install and configure. Dell can improve the Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance. Sometimes, when we need to replace a component, the SLA says four hours, but for some reason, the technician doesn't arrive until the next business day or even six to eight hours later before the case is placed. So, focusing on respecting the SLA is where Dell could improve. For how long have I used the solution? What do I think about the scalability of the solution? PowerMax is still in the evaluation stage. However, I do have experience with other Dell products such as PowerStore. We can scale it out easily, but it is a bit tricky to scale up. When we scale up with Dell PowerStore, it has a "cluster" approach, but scaling closer isn't clustering. It's more like unified management of two or three "folks." Dell calls it a cluster because there's no I/O shredding, zoning, or LAN data shredding, which would be true clustering. How are customer service and support? Dell support is crucial. It's important to us that the vendor responds and respects the SLA. We don't anticipate any problems with Dell, so we consider them a good vendor and a good business partner. Dell can improve the Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance. Sometimes, when we need to replace a component, the SLA says four hours, but for some reason, the technician doesn't arrive until the next business day or even six to eight hours later before the case is placed. So, focusing on respecting the SLA is where Dell could improve. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We've been using Dell EMC midrange storage for a few years now. We're moving from older Dell platforms, previously known as EMC. We're transitioning from VNX, including VNX 7600, 5600, and 5400, to newer storage platforms, primarily Dell EMC PowerMax. I have also used Dell EMC Data Protection Advisor (DPA). What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The pricing is comparable to other vendors. There aren't significant price differences. Since the price is high, a few hundred thousand dollar difference between vendors isn't a major deciding factor. So, they're comparable, but it's more about the support, implementation, and configuration of their product. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We're in the Request for Proposal (RFP) process. The RFP is not closed. Dell is one of the vendors we're considering, and we're working with them to figure out migration and other technical details. They're not the only vendor; we're also considering IBM, Hitachi and others. What other advice do I have? considering it's an enterprise storage solution, I would rate it a nine out of ten. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2024-02-25T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from A reliable solution with good replication configuration but needs to improve performance What is our primary use case? Our database and client records are stored in EMC. What is most valuable? I am impressed with the tool's reliability since we see a few hardware failures with it. Also, the solution's replication configuration is good. What needs improvement? The tool needs to improve its performance. Today's applications are demanding a response rate of one millisecond or below. The product should also look into AI integration. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using the product for four years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? I would rate the product's stability a nine out of ten. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? I would rate the product's scalability a seven-point five out of ten. We have encountered controller failures while scaling the solution up. Controller failures occur when we expand to 85-90 percent since they are unable to handle the load. My company has around 40,000-50,000 users for the product. We manage about 260 petabytes of storage with a team of 25 people managing it. How are customer service and support? We have platinum support from Dell. We didn't face many issues with the support team. They take some time to go back to the engineering and R&D and come up with a solution. That's the only delay I have seen with them. How was the initial setup? The product's setup is simple since EMC is in the industry for many years. The vendor is always with us during the setup process. They do the major activities of setting it up. Our engineering folks take care of the rest of the parts. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Dell is expensive compared to other products and I would rate its pricing a four out of ten. What other advice do I have? I would rate the solution a seven out of ten after considering factors like cost, stability and performance. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2023-06-16T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Good performance and cloud utilization, that is easy to install What is most valuable? We are most interested in cloud utilization. What needs improvement? We would like to improve the delivery model. They don't have the delivery terms today. If they improve this area, everybody would be happy. For the Romanian and Eastern European markets, we have long delivery times, and even if we have a solution, we don't have the products, and we don't know what to install. For the time being, manufacturers must enhance the delivery of all items while they have them. If you go to Pure or you go to NetApp, they deliver in one month. If you go to Dell or HP, they will take up to six months for delivery. This is not a business model for today. For how long have I used the solution? I have been working with Dell PowerMax NVMe for 10 years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? Dell PowerMax NVMe is a stable solution. The performance is good. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? Dell PowerMax NVMe is a scalable solution. It is suitable for enterprise customers. How are customer service and support? They are now experiencing problems with Dell's specifications. They have a typical reporting period of five days and nine hours each day till Friday. Right now, on the enterprise side, they want 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It is not available in Romania, which is why you need to retain inventories or have some replacement components on hand to accomplish this type of integration with other vendors. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? I am also working with HPE 3PAR. I am just looking for a place to get some 3PAR components. But nobody has it right now. We are the HP Platinum partner in Romania, and we are now looking for a place to purchase documents from Europe. Previously, we worked with Cisco, Lenovo, and Pure. The advantage was their delivery. We don't an advantage. The consumer requests something that they do not have with the brand today. If it is storage, a server, or power, and we have it, they will purchase it. They do not wait for Dell, HP, or Cisco. It is the same for both. If you have Dell on hand, we will purchase it. If it's HP, they'll buy it. It. They don't care about the brand anymore. How was the initial setup? The installation of Dell PowerMax NVMe was easy. Deployment time depends on the customer's request since if you have a solution with a cluster or include VMware or a solution or disaster recovery, we can provide it in two days. But, in any case, it depends on the project and your relationship with the customer. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The price is on the market. It's not inexpensive, but it's available on the market. The cost is determined by the solution. It's not the greatest option. You built the solution and rely on the customer's requirements, on the budget since they know the price of the product, they know the service to the client and it's the same if it's HP, Dell, or Cisco. It is how the solution is created and implemented. Today, the client is asking for SLA and uptime for the critical months rather than the important months themselves. This is the most crucial. They don't care if it's from Dell, HP, or Cisco; they just care about this one. What other advice do I have? I don't have any requirements. I am now really unhappy with the delivery, therefore I don't have any arguments or recommendations to make. If we receive the goods, everything will be okay. When we are working, we have something. We are now dissatisfied with our needs. Simply provide the delivery. It is more important now. We are partners with Dell. I would rate Dell PowerMax NVMe an eight out of ten. Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Partner
Date published: 2022-11-06T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from A solution with great uptime features and excellent technical support What is most valuable? The uptime is the most valuable feature, and we are satisfied with the solution. For how long have I used the solution? We have been using this solution for five years and are using version PowerMax 2000. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It is a stable solution. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? It is scalable. How are customer service and support? The technical support is very good. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The price could be lower, and we are unhappy with the price. The licensing cost is included in the hardware price, so I am unsure if there are other licensing costs. What other advice do I have? I rate this solution a nine out of ten. When we bought it, we accepted the high price, but five years later, we need to reevaluate before we buy the next generation. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-10-26T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Good protection undermined by a complicated GUI What is most valuable? The best feature is the protection - PowerMax NVMe is volume-based and replicates data, so it's very comfortable for us to use. What needs improvement? The GUI interface is very complicated and could be improved by streamlining the number of steps in the process, as the new storage UIs have done. For how long have I used the solution? I've been using this solution for eight months. What do I think about the stability of the solution? PowerMax NVMe is stable. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? This is a scalable solution. How are customer service and support? I'm happy with Dell's technical support - we have a private support contact that ensures we get good support. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive What other advice do I have? I would rate PowerMax NVMe six out of ten. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-05-24T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Offers good reliability, has great remote replication features and is able to replicate bi-directionally What is our primary use case? It's our primary storage and it replaced some older, slower storage. What is most valuable? The most valuable aspects include the remote replication features. It allows us to protect our data using different data centers and replicate bi-directionally between our two main data centers. What needs improvement? Simpler management would probably be my biggest ask. Some of the management features could be simplified and that's probably the main thing they need to address. For how long have I used the solution? I've been using this product for three years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It's very stable. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? We do have two main data centers and we have a PowerMax in each one. It is our primary storage so pretty much everything we have is on it. We do not plan to increase usage at this time. How are customer service and support? They need to make it easier to get to higher levels of support. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We previously used other Dell EMC products - the BNXs and XtremIO. We switched mainly to gain access to the top-of-the-line model. We had more money to spend. How was the initial setup? The initial setup was fairly straightforward. It's a multi-step process. You got the hardware guy who comes out for a day and installs it. Then we had another day, a couple of weeks later with an implementation person who set some things up. As far as starting to use it, we slowly phased it in over a month or so. There's not a lot of maintenance. It's usually just me, or, if I need to do a code upgrade, I just call down. What about the implementation team? From Dell, there was a couple of hardware personnel and then an implementation person. From my side, it was just me and one other staff member. What was our ROI? It's hard to quantify ROI for me. I'm not an accountant. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? They're finally getting the licensing right where it's not a la carte so much anymore. That said, it is pretty expensive. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We evaluated products from Pure, NetApp, and also Kaminario. What other advice do I have? I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-05-17T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Good speed and compatible interface with IBM What is our primary use case? We mainly use it for databases. What is most valuable? The speed and the compatible interface with IBM are the most valuable features of the PowerMax product. What needs improvement? Dell should work on their marketing strategies to make the product more visible on the market. They should promote the product's compatibility with IBM, as not everyone knows it. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using this solution for four years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? It is a scalable product. There are over 1000 users in my company. How are customer service and support? The customer service was okay. We contact customer support in case of firmware updates; they do that for us. So we contact them. It's okay now. For PowerMax, the support was good because it is enterprise technology. But for other Dell products, the support is worse. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? I have worked with similar products like HP. We made a switch because PowerMax is compatible with IBM's solution. HP, we are using for the other platform. Before PowerMax, we used internal disks. So it's the first external service for this solution. How was the initial setup? The initial setup is easy. We are using PowerMax 2000 with fiber channel connectivity, and it was easy to set up. What about the implementation team? The internal team deployed it. It took around a day to deploy the solution completely. We installed it in the physical location, but Dell support has to initialize the storage. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The price was good, that's why we chose PowerMax. We got a five-year pricing model, and therefore, we have five years of support. After five years, of course, if we want to use the support, we have to order support for the next years. What other advice do I have? People should test it before buying. I tested this solution and found it suitable for us. However, the solution depends on the specific application and configuration. So, testing before buying is essential. Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2023-04-06T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Excellent technical support with a straightforward setup and great compression capabilities What is our primary use case? We primarily use the solution for putting together solutions for our customers. How has it helped my organization? They provide up-to-date, leading-edge products that are constantly improving the technological provision of hardware and software for the customer. What is most valuable? The deduplication of the solution is excellent and the compression is quite helpful. These are the most useful aspects of the solution for us. The initial setup is quite straightforward. Technical support has been excellent. What needs improvement? The product would be better served if there was a slight reduction in price at the moment due to the marketplace. People haven't got as much money. If they could offer more of a discount, it would help their customer base out quite a bit. Even if it was just in the short term, it would make a big difference. If the solution had more power-saving capabilities, it would be quite nice. The solution could benefit from even more speed and increased redundancy and flexibility. For how long have I used the solution? I've been using the solution for about one year. It hasn't been that long. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? We do hope to increase usage in the future. All we just need to do is get more opportunities and as the marketplace opens up from COVID, we will be increasing our prospecting efforts. How are customer service and technical support? Technical support is fantastic. they are quite knowledgeable and responsive. We've extremely happy with the level of support they provide. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? The switching happens as the vendor, Dell EMC, brings out new products to supersede the old products. It's a natural evolution of things as products get better through significant R&D, and for us to follow that evolution. How was the initial setup? For us, the initial setup is not overly complex. We've got very highly trained engineers and therefore it's no problem. Demployment is still fairly standard. It hasn't really altered too much, so it's not gotten shorter or longer. In terms of the strategy, we have a standard scope of work document that we always employ when implementing new solutions. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The licensing costs are reasonable. What other advice do I have? We're resellers. We actually use the PowerStore 3000 and 1000 products. I would definitely recommend this solution to other organizations. We've been very happy with it. I would advise people to make sure that you introduce the features and benefits of NVMe and the power and speed and articulate that well to management or the customer. I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. It's not perfect. It's evolving. However, it's almost perfect. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Reseller
Date published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Highly resilient with excellent performance and deduplication plus compression capabilities What is our primary use case? We are primarily using the solution to drive components of an e-trading (electronic trading) platform. How has it helped my organization? The solution has reduced our time-to-market with a single management interface, and it is a very efficient platform. Provides great improvements in operational resilience, aligning us with our direct competitors in global markets. We are ahead in some areas as a result of the deployment of this platform. What is most valuable? Uptime and availability are first and foremost. The deduplication and compression capabilities are also excellent, allowing us to be very efficient with the physical hardware that we need to deploy on-prem in order to fulfill our requirements. It has given us excellent value for money without compromising performance. The solution's snapshot capabilities and replication are very good features. Snapshots are allowing us to quickly build analytical models directly from production data. This gives us amazing insights into market trends and allows us to build more effective trading algorithms. Replication offers us unparalleled levels of resilience. The management overall is excellent. Dell EMC continues to build on very solid foundations, which have been evolving for over two decades. The REST APIs are great. The solution exposes excellent automation opportunities. We have found the performance to be very good so far. What needs improvement? It's a relatively new product, but for the next release I would like to see higher bandwidth on the front-end adapters. This would allow even greater scalability for critical workloads and consolidation for non-critical workloads. The hosts may not require that level of I/O performance today. However, it allows us to scale physical non-cloud environments without large investment. For how long have I used the solution? We are about eight months into our deployment. It's still a rather new solution for us, although we have had some time to get to know it. What do I think about the stability of the solution? With five nines, we have reduced our maximum annual downtime to around 5 minutes (previously around 48 minutes). From a stability point of view, I have absolutely no issues or complaints there at all. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? It's an e-trading platform. Therefore, there are no end users involved. It's about half a petabyte in size. In terms of scalability potential, it is first class. With the level of performance it gives you and the response time that we get from the arrays, the scalability is groundbreaking. How are customer service and technical support? I was very impressed with the support overall. They understand customer service. They have never made me wait for anything. Things do go bump. Challenges and unpredictable circumstances do arise. I rate the Dell EMC team based on their prompt and decisive action during these circumstances. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We did previously use a different solution. We switched to take advantage of certain feature sets. Our previous competitor, whilst they did offer deduplication and compression to some degree, could not match the availability nor performance and didn't have the same guaranteed efficiency ratios. They also couldn't perform inline compression without significant performance penalties. This would have to happen at rest and offline. Therefore, we'd need to write the data first, then compress it. The PowerMax solution enabled us to do that inline, without a read or write penalty. Basically, there was no performance impact, and we still saw all the benefits from a reduced physical footprint, such as, cost savings, reduced power requirements, and fewer components to fail (number of drives required being 66 percent lower). How was the initial setup? The deployment process is a standard procedure for deploying SAN, and that's with any vendor. I'd say that the process wasn't any different from deploying another solution. We've got our architecture and our blueprints. We worked with a solutions architect and that design drives the configuration, and then we go ahead and deploy that configuration. Deployment took around three months. Some of this was due to internal processes, timing, and pandemic conditions. Over December, we were hampered with end-of-year change control freezes in place so some of the activity couldn't get done. All in all, I'd say we probably could have been done in about six to eight weeks. I had three people working on this internally (not counting the non storage resources) as we deployed to two geographies in different time zones. Maintenance is just ongoing service and that'd be the same as any technological asset. It has a mean time before failure. We monitor it on a daily basis. Alerts are actioned with the vendor. However, the platform does have five-nines of availability and multiple layers of redundancy. What about the implementation team? We did not use an integrator, consultant, or implementor during deployment. We worked with a solutions architect to build the configuration. We then worked with our project office to coordinate and complete that deployment. What was our ROI? Six months in, we have ROI. Some key metrics are: * Increased uptime and availability, * Reduced man-hours for support and provisioning (approximately 30 percent reduction in overall management hours required). What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Pricing will very much depend on an organization's terms and conditions with the vendor. Therefore, I couldn't really give any concrete pricing to quote. I'd just advise CTO/Technology leaders to negotiate hard and consider the commercial advantages/benefits to Dell EMC for onboarding their product. Be very thorough about your criteria (functional and non-functional requirements) and what you're looking to achieve. Test, test, test! Do the due diligence and test comparable solutions head-to-head. In our use case, PowerMax was the best solution. However, that doesn't necessarily mean it would be the best solution for every scenario. You really do have to do the work, the engineering and architecture, then test the products head-to-head to see if this solution really does solve your business requirement. The licensing again depends on the agreements they've got in place with your organization. For example, we know we've got a large and global agreement with Dell, and therefore, our pricing and discounting structure might be different from a small to medium business or another enterprise. Which other solutions did I evaluate? We did look at other options. We tested it head-to-head with two other vendors in a lab with identical conditions. We basically looked at the top five storage vendors on the market and shortlisted three. The cons were the fact that it was really an internal process. Qualifying a new platform, through engineering and getting that through governance and architecture is a detailed and time consuming process. Those were the cons. In terms of pros, the technological features available, including the compression ratios, were excellent. The performance itself, the out-and-out, the horsepower of the platform, is where PowerMax did significantly outperform the other solutions we put it up against. However, most importantly, it was that uptime and availability which pushed it ahead. The inline deduplication and compression capabilities also significantly outperformed its competitors. What other advice do I have? We are customers of Dell EMC. We are using the PowerMax 2000. My advice to other organizations considering the solution is to fully understand your use case, and test it. Make sure your functional and non-functional requirements are complete, understood, and documented with input and agreement from your internal stakeholders Definitely support your teams with education and training, even internal workshops. This will help make any transitioning smooth - a great tech solution can evaporate very quickly if your teams are not onboard and up to speed on day one. You need to have a good people strategy and processes before you start running away with the technology! Overall, I would rate the solution as an eight out of 10. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-04-22T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Allows us to do backups while users access data, without impact on performance What is our primary use case? We are the centralized IT department for a state government and we service every agency in the state. That includes anything from the state police down to DNR, parks, unemployment, and DHHS. There is a wide variety of use cases, but the big hitters on it are Oracle and SQL databases. It's on-prem. It's in two different data centers that are 60 miles apart and we're doing a synchronous replication between the data centers. How has it helped my organization? There are so many ways it has helped. It provides efficiencies through compression and it provides high availability through its solid-state drives. We literally turn it on and it does its thing. When it comes to storage provisioning, a lot of it has been automated. This was true even prior to PowerMax, back with the VMAX. The days of provisioning the mapping and masking, and doing all those things manually, are over. A lot of that is automated through their tools. Overall, that automation is saving us about four hours a week. What is most valuable? What is most valuable to us is the fact that it has multiple engines, and each of those engines works in conjunction in a grid environment. That's important to us because we have so many different use cases. One example might be that a state trooper pulls someone over at 2 o'clock on Sunday morning and wants to go into the LEIN system, which is the law enforcement information network. He wants to see who this person is that he has pulled over and gather as much information as he can on that person. We can't predict when he's going to pull someone over, nor can we predict when backups are actually going to be taken against the volume that he's going to for that information. The PowerMax allows us to do backups of that volume at the same time that he is looking up the data he needs, and there's no impact on performance at all. The performance is very good. Our predominant workloads are all less than 5 milliseconds and it's most common to have a sub-1-millisecond response time for our applications. In terms of efficiency, we've turned on compression and we're able to get as high as two-to-one compression on our workloads, on average. Some workloads can't compress and some can compress better, but on average, we're a little bit more than two-to-one. The solution’s built-in QoS capabilities for providing workload congestion protection work pretty well because we actually don't even turn on the service level options. We leave it to the default settings and allow it to decide the performance. We don't enforce the Platinum, Gold, or Silver QoS levels. We just let the array handle it all, and it does so. We also use VPLEX Metro, which is a separate service offering from Dell EMC. It does SRDF-like things, but it's really SRDF on steroids. Of course it copies data from one data center to the other, but with the VPLEX, not only does it copy it synchronously, but it also has coherent caching between both data centers. That means we are literally in an Active-Active mode. For instance, we can dynamically move a VMware host that is in one data center to another data center, and we're not just doing vMotion with the host. The data is already in there at the other data center as well. It's all seamless. We don't have to stop SRDF and remount it on another drive. It's already there. For how long have I used the solution? We have been using Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe ever since it was brought to market, so it's been about three or four years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It's rock-solid with 100 hundred percent uptime. We've never had a disruption on our PowerMax platform. It's high availability. And we can make changes, such as upgrading the code, while it's running. There's no such thing as going offline to do a service or maintenance procedure. It's all done online and the customers are working away at the same time. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The scalability is great. VPLEX is something like a federation for all our PowerMaxs. We will put a PowerMax in, give it all to VPLEX to manage, and we're good to go. We typically see a 10 to 20 percent growth rate, year to year. To keep up with that, in a multi-petabyte environment, 10 percent is quite a lot. We buy two a year, and that's a conservative estimate. The fact that PowerMax provides NVMe scale-out capabilities is important from the standpoint of its internal workings, but the customer data doesn't really go on the NVMe technology. At this point, we don't have any use cases for NVMe performance for any of our applications. But that will change in the future. Everything is going to go to in-memory. Compute and storage: everything's going to be on a chip. How are customer service and technical support? Their technical support is really good. We are using one of their monitoring tools and it phones home to the "mothership" in Massachusetts. That means they get real-time alerts or performance indicators. If a drive has exceeded a threshold five times in the last week, they will actually come out and preemptively replace that drive before it fails. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We were a VMAX customer, so when they changed their service offering from VMAX to PowerMax, that's when we started adopting it. In a sense, PowerMax is the first of its kind for us. But we have been a long-time customer. We started with their DMX almost 20 years ago. How was the initial setup? For us, it's straightforward to set up. We've been doing this for a long time, so it's really easy for us to set up a new array in a data center. We had one that hit the dock about two weeks ago and it's already up and running and provisioning to customers. NetApp will say, "Well, that's two weeks. We can come in and do it in one day." But we explain, "No, you can't because there are internal processes that we have to go through." Every piece of equipment we get, even the PowerMax, goes through its paces. We don't just turn it on and hope for the best. We check and double-check all our configuration settings. But overall, PowerMax is easy to set up. They configure it at the factory, deliver it, put it in the data center, and then we hook it to our Fibre Channel fabric and Ethernet fabrics and we're good to go. Competitors will say, "Well, it's so much easier to migrate from one array to another on our platform, versus the Dell EMCs." That's not necessarily true. We have to look at what they are actually measuring and whether we are comparing apples to apples. With VPLEX, we can do migrations on-the-fly, live. It's no longer a six-month to one-year effort to get off of one array and move to another. We just bring the other array in, present it to VPLEX, and VPLEX takes it from there. For a new deployment of one PowerMax, we need one FTE. On a day-to-day basis, to manage all of our PowerMaxs, we need three FTEs. But that is across two different data centers with a total of 10 PowerMax/VMAX units. It's a pretty big installation. Across our organization we have 55,000 employees. Since our HR is on this solution, and that's how people get paid, it's like we have 55,000 people using it, in a sense. Most access is through an application, but in another sense, it's used by pretty much everybody in the state. What was our ROI? On a typical purchase, the ROI is four years. That's when we get our money back. We charge for our service and we have a rate per GB. Our business model is set up to only recover our costs because we're government. We can't make a profit on it. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? One area for improvement, one that everybody always comes to, is price. Although we get a good discount through Dell EMC, it's still quite expensive to purchase these big arrays. I buy in volumes of petabytes at a time. It's not unusual for me to have a $6 million spend. While that is petabytes of data, it always raises eyebrows when you spend that kind of money. But what I ask those raised eyebrows is, "Okay, fine. Which of the agencies in the state do you not want to give more storage to? Everybody's using it." Many competitive vendors will come to us and say, "We have a study where we went into a company and we were able to reduce their costs by 600 percent." Of course, these are salespeople and they're speaking to two levels above me, and they buy into that and say, "Yeah, let's have them come in and talk to us." They come in and talk to us and when we get to the stage where we say, "Here's a typical configuration. Give us a quote for that type of configuration." When we compare it to the cost that we're getting from Dell EMC after the discount, it's plus or minus 5 percent. There really isn't that big of a delta compared to our pricing. This is a high-end device. For us, the pricing doesn't make Dell EMC uncompetitive. Which other solutions did I evaluate? NetApp and Pure Storage are the biggest ones we looked at for block storage. For other storage, like file, print, and object , there are a dozen others that are always trying to differentiate themselves on price. They want to do a proof of concept and we do those with them. But what I'll tell them up front is, "I know your products are great. They're going to work great in our lab. You don't really have to send me a piece of equipment for me to test it. I know it's going to work. You guys wouldn't be in business if they didn't w... Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-05-16T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from No hardware failures, great performance, and reduces workload What is our primary use case? We have PowerMax 2000. It is for our clients. We have two PowerMax in our environment. One is in production, and another one is on the DR site. We have to replicate the data from production to that one. How has it helped my organization? It is important for our clients that PowerMax provides NVMe scale-out capabilities. They are also getting great performance as compared to the old storage array model. Provisioning is faster and immediate. We can do immediate allocation and configuration. As compared to the old storage array model where it used to take half an hour, in PowerMax, we can do it in 5 to 10 minutes. It doesn't take that much time, and there isn't much delay in the PowerMax array. Our workload is reduced because we are not dealing with any issues. We are not facing many issues on the PowerMax side as compared with the previous one. What is most valuable? Based on our experience with VMAX, there isn't any hardware failure or something like that in PowerMax. Performance-wise also, everything is fine. We haven't faced any performance issues or any hardware failure. Its performance is great as compared to VMAX. Its I/O per second rate is higher than the old model. We can use it block-wise, and we can also use it at the file level. It is good for any environment. What needs improvement? I would like to see more development in the cloud environment. It would be good if it comes in the cloud kind of setup. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using this solution for two and a half years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It is very stable. It has very few failures. In the last two and a half years, there is only one failure that I have faced in PowerMax. That was because one of the ports went down. The port was replaced within two days or something like that by an EMC engineer. Hardware failure is very rare in PowerMax. Previously, in VMAX, multiple drives used to fail within a day itself. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? In our setup, we are just using less than one petabyte. In the PowerMax itself, we are using 130 or 150 TB. For scalability, it is the best option. We can directly connect the PowerMax array with the other storage array devices, such as a USB, without any performance issues. How was the initial setup? We don't have much involvement in it. Whenever the customers need any help, they ask for some help from our side, and accordingly, we provide the help. They usually involve us only when they have any doubt. The entire configuration is done by EMC itself, so we are not a part of the implementation. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? We don't have any involvement in the pricing. We are just from the backend support team for the PowerMax array. If any expansion is required, we will just inform the customer, and the customer directly contacts the EMC person. They discuss and finalize the dealings, and we are not involved in those dealings. What other advice do I have? It is a good solution for any environment. You won't face any issues in terms of performance and stability. SRDF has helped to reduce storage costs, but I can't provide the numbers. We don't handle that aspect. We are from the support team, and for capacity, there is a separate team in our environment. That capacity team takes care of the capacity and does the daily basis and monthly basis kind of calculation. We are just supporting the existing environment, and we have to maintain its availability. We have not been able to consolidate open systems, mainframe, IBM block, and file or virtualized data with cloud-connected storage using PowerMax. That's because currently in our environment, there isn't a separate cloud, and the cloud is not connected with this PowerMax.There is also no mainframe server. We have a separate storage array for IBM in our environment. Similarly, EMC is also separate. We have not used PowerMax's NVMe SCM storage tier feature and PowerMax's built-in QoS capabilities for providing workload congestion protection. We have also not used PowerMax's Metro Smart DR, also known as MetroDR. PowerMax would be useful for enterprise-level storage or mission-critical IT workloads, but in our environment, we only have the basic model, which is PowerMax 2000. As per my understanding, it will be good and useful for mission-critical applications. I would rate it a nine out of 10. I am not giving it a 10 because day by day, technology is improving, and there might be another solution that is better than this. Even EMC might find another solution and introduce it. Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Partner
Date published: 2021-11-23T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Offers outstanding high availability and stability for telecom company's critical system What is our primary use case? Our customers are using it for telecom. What is most valuable? The high availability that other systems don't have. In other systems, there is an owner in the storage processes. But for PowerMAX, there is no owner. All the process storage is passed to all nodes without ownership. So, there is no response feature in the storage in PowerMax. In the other systems, there is a response, which is a very nice feature. No systems have such a feature. What needs improvement? The initial setup could be easier. For how long have I used the solution? I have been working with the solution since the last year. What do I think about the stability of the solution? The PowerMax solution has been very stable, in my experience. I have been using it for four to ten years and have only had two issues related to internal storage processes. One was a planned maintenance issue, and the other was a CBU failure. Both issues were quickly resolved with no data loss. Once again, it's a very nice feature. You can go with the upgrade without storage records. So it will not affect the production servers. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The product is scalable. How was the initial setup? The initial setup is not difficult. But it's not easy to have access to this material. I'm having a problem right now in this implementation in order to find the procedure generator in order to initialize the system. It's not updated on the website. So, sometimes you suffer from getting the material of the software. You need to have a discussion with the support and the way the account team is in order to provide you with such material. The deployment thing is different from customer to customer. It depends upon the requirements. But it's fairly easy to deploy. The deployment, once initiated, is easy. There is no problem related to that. I would rate the deployment process of this solution a five out of ten. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The pricing is competitive. I would rate the pricing of the solution a six out of ten. What other advice do I have? For the customers, I advise them to test it and check the features because it has very nice features. It has some features that don’t exist in other solutions, such as the migration for the new PowerMax 2500 and 8500. There will be no more data migration except for licensing the nodes and the old nodes and installing the new nodes. It's a very nice feature, and in the future, there will be no technical attachments and no better migration. It will be very easy for them to implement the new solutions in addition to the other solutions. As for the partners, they have to make sure that they have their knowledge and enrich their knowledge in PowerMax because PowerMax is not an easy solution. They have to understand it to implement it easily. I would rate PowerMax NVMe a nine out of ten. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Implementor
Date published: 2023-08-09T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from An enterprise array that can handle a minimum of one petabyte and gives you maximum throughput What is our primary use case? Dell PowerMax NVMe is an enterprise array that gives you maximum throughput. It's not a mid-range or small array. Dell PowerMax NVMe can handle a minimum of one petabyte. What is most valuable? The most valuable feature of Dell PowerMax NVMe is its replication feature. The replication was configured directly on the array, and we didn't need any separate replication switch. Dell PowerMax NVMe will have one administration login for DBA. So if you log in, the DBA can see the performance of the database in the storage area level. I have not seen this feature in any other storage vendors. What needs improvement? Dell PowerMax NVMe is costly compared to other solutions. For how long have I used the solution? I have been working with Dell PowerMax NVMe for three years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? We didn't experience any downtime or shutdown with Dell PowerMax NVMe. I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe a nine out of ten for stability. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? Dell PowerMax NVMe is a scalable solution. I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe ten out of ten for scalability. How are customer service and support? The solution's technical support is really good. Dell PowerMax NVMe's technical support is our benchmark with all other support vendors. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? I have worked with other solutions like Hitachi, HP 3PAR, and IBM storage. Dell PowerMax NVMe makes it easy for a technical or non-technical person to see the performance. If you need to dig deeply into the performance analysis, you'll have more options in Dell PowerMax NVMe than other vendors. How was the initial setup? The solution's initial setup was easy because an implementation engineer helped us with everything. What about the implementation team? It took two to three hours to deploy Dell PowerMax NVMe. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe a five out of ten for pricing. What other advice do I have? You need proper technical knowledge to use Dell PowerMax NVMe. A classroom session will help users acquire more technical knowledge to explore and use the array. So it's not easy to dive deep in without technical knowledge. An instructor-led session would be helpful for users before using the array for the first time. Overall, I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe a nine out of ten. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2023-07-26T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Small Business suitability and offers a price-sensitive environment What is our primary use case? Our clients are using PowerMax for scaling, for example, for cases with banking details and public records. They're already using it on the enterprise level. Moreover, the clients need to use strong and more expensive batteries to meet all the different tool groups and applications that are running on it. This solution provides flexibility to handle huge amounts of data, even with different sites and branches. What needs improvement? Some features could be better. I think if we can integrate PowerMax with the public cloud, it would be safer as we can have the service without any data on-premises or in the public or hybrid cloud. And we can remove all the data from on-premises and the public cloud. This would make migration and data recovery quicker. There is room for improvement in terms of integration with various service providers for public clouds. It would be beneficial to integrate with AWS, Azure, Microsoft, Oracle Cloud, and other service providers. This integration would enable a more comprehensive and open solution, catering to multiple vendors and applications, particularly in Azure cloud. This would enhance the overall customer experience and provide more flexibility. For how long have I used the solution? We are working with the PowerMax 2000 and PowerMax 8000. We have been stable with multiple customers for several years, ranging from two years to more. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It is a very stable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? In terms of percentage, we can give it a nine for its performance. Nine out of ten. Our clients are different businesses with varying infrastructures and different project sizes. They fall into the medium budget category and have multiple choices. Some projects are huge, covering different branches or partnerships, including public projects. So we can definitely showcase this product in an enterprise environment. How are customer service and support? The customer service and support team is very good. Whenever I open a case with Dell, they are available to assist us at any time. I'm very satisfied with the support team. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive How was the initial setup? The initial setup is easy. The deployment depends on the infrastructure sizing, the number of clusters, and the amount of data. For example, you need to consider if it is greenfield infrastructure or if there is a migration from the existing infrastructure to the new solution. This calculation is regarding the solution and the infrastructure savings. The solution has already been decided with the technical team from our side. But there are other infrastructure elements we need to migrate, providing value. It may require some downtime, so it might take multiple days. This product's solution is already flexible, and we can implement it in a few hours. It's already adaptable for implementation. And already, some of our customers have mentioned the product and its capability to use it. What about the implementation team? An implementation engineer, as a technical engineer, will assist with the technical configuration. There are multiple choices. We might need one engineer for each product, depending on the integration. And for the cluster, it's usually multiple engineers. It's a team effort. Moreover, when it comes to maintenance, if we are already using it, we can raise any new issues and open cases with the vendor's billing team to double-check. For example, if there is any issue with one or two ports, we can utilize this feature. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The pricing depends on the integration and the solution required. It can be handled with the configurator, and it always ensures minimal specifications at the minimum cost to meet customer needs. It's already cost-effective compared to other vendors. So, the price is okay. What other advice do I have? I would recommend using the solution. We have implemented it in a price-sensitive environment, especially for small businesses. I recommend this product for its specific use case, which is related to our SQL data, and banking accounting. This product handles this case well. Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Partner
Date published: 2023-05-23T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from A fast performing asset that can perform millions of transactions within a second What is our primary use case? We use the solution for managing workloads like SQL, online streaming, and middleware. What is most valuable? The tool is a fast-performing asset. It can perform millions of transactions within a second. I like the tool's architecture as well. What needs improvement? The tool is costly compared to other similar products. The product's pricing needs to be improved. I would like the product to include the replication feature in its future releases. For how long have I used the solution? I have been working with the tool for two to three years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? The product is one of the most stable solution that we have ever worked on. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The tool is scalable up to eight engines. How are customer service and support? The tool's support is good but they can do better. How was the initial setup? The product's setup is managed by Dell. The implementation process is a quick one and takes about a week to complete. The product is also easy to maintain since there are alerts and templates. What other advice do I have? I would rate the product an eight out of ten. If you are looking to use the product, go for it. It will be beneficial for you in terms of daily operations and pricing. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2023-04-24T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Good operability and easy scalability but unfortunately quite expensive What is our primary use case? We are using this solution as our main storage. We use it with VMware, as well as our databases. We are customers of Dell and I'm a team lead for network and infrastructure. What is most valuable? I like the operability and easy scalability of this product. It's also easy to integrate with all of our systems. It has high speed and a good name in the market. The accounting is good, easy, be accessible. What needs improvement? The solution is quite expensive and I believe Dell should examine their prices because they are currently very, very high. For how long have I used the solution? I've been using this solution for two years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? The solution is stable. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? It's very easy to scale this product. How are customer service and support? The technical support is good, whenever there's an issue they figured out the problem and repaired the faulty part. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive How was the initial setup? The initial setup is easy; our deployment took a few days. Dell carried out the deployment for us. We have around 2,000 users in the company. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The cost depends on the capacity that you're using so every use case will have a different price. What other advice do I have? It's important to think about your workloads and define them. All right. I'd also recommend comparing prices, both within and outside Dell. Feature-wise the solution is perfect but because of the price, I rate this solution seven out of 10. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2023-01-31T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from It's a high-performance device ideal for mission-critical applications What is our primary use case? We use the PowerMax 2000 and 8000 models as storage appliances for high-end mission-critical applications. What is most valuable? PowerMax is a compact high-performance appliance. It is one of the best devices in terms of performance specs. It includes an NVMe All-Flash Array. What do I think about the stability of the solution? PowerMax's software is highly stable, but we faced two hardware issues in one year. We had a failure of the storage director module, and the physical disk failed on another occasion. Dell EMC should improve its hardware quality. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? I'm unsure if PowerMax is scalable because I haven't done any scalable activity with PowerMax so far. I haven't added any components. How are customer service and support? I rate Dell PowerMax support five out of 10. They didn't provide an adequate explanation and resolution when we had issues. How would you rate customer service and support? Neutral How was the initial setup? Setting up PowerMax is straightforward. It only takes about three or four hours if you have everything ready on site, like the local network, power supply, and connections. What other advice do I have? I rate Dell PowerMax NVMe nine out of 10. If you have large applications with a high volume of transactions, Dell PowerMax is the number one solution. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:
Date published: 2023-03-01T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from An enterprise storage designed for bigger customers that require resilient and powerful storage solutions What is our primary use case? Dell PowerMax NVMe is an enterprise storage designed for bigger customers that require resilient and powerful storage solutions. It ensures seamless management of large database workloads that need high performance and low latency in data handling and responsiveness. What is most valuable? I have been highly satisfied with the resiliency and scalability of the solution. What needs improvement? It is more expensive compared to midrange storage options. For how long have I used the solution? I have been working with Dell PowerMax NVMe for the last four years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? I am highly satisfied with the stability of the solution. I would rate it ten out of ten. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? It allows great flexibility regarding scaling options to adapt to evolving storage needs, ensuring organizations can meet their growing data demands without major disruptions. I would rate it ten out of ten. How are customer service and support? We are overall satisfied with the customer service provided by their support team. I would rate it eight out of ten. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive How was the initial setup? The initial setup can be somewhat complex as it requires specialized knowledge. I would rate it seven out of ten. What about the implementation team? The basic deployment can be done in one day, as it easily integrates with existing Dell EMC storage platforms and software. Usually, it will require following certain steps regarding the configuration and installment in the data center of the customer, connecting the storage to the infrastructure, and initializing it. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The cost of the solution is quite noticeable, but it provides a good fit regarding the price of the hardware and all of the required licenses. We are fairly satisfied with it as we didn't have any need for additional subscriptions and licenses. What other advice do I have? I would suggest thoroughly evaluating all of the benefits of Dell PowerMax NVMe and checking if it provides good value for the money because it might not be feasible for organizations with budget constraints. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Integrator
Date published: 2023-09-04T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from A fast and reliable product that is easy to handle and provides excellent technical support What is our primary use case? Our customers use the product for virtualization. They also use it for SAP deployments and bigger databases like PostgreSQL. How has it helped my organization? The solution provides an ease of handling backups and deployments. It provides a smart integration into the customer environment. What is most valuable? The product is very fast and reliable. It's certified for several scenarios. It is easy to handle. The UI is good. What needs improvement? The initial setup process is difficult. For how long have I used the solution? I have been working with the product for five years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It is the most stable system we know. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The tool is scalable until a certain point. There are only two versions available. Each has a limit, but the limit usually is never reached by our clients. Generally, the scalability is limited, but we have no problems with it. How are customer service and support? The technical support is brilliant. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? I have worked with NetApp before. Over the last three or four years, we only worked with Dell. Dell is easier to set up and handle. Dell is technically more advanced than NetApp. Dell’s support is better than NetApp's most of the time. The selling process of NetApp was a nightmare. How was the initial setup? I rate the ease of setup a four out of ten. We have to prepare for the deployment and plan with the customer. We set up the hardware. We need Dell’s help with the software setup because we do not have access to all the tools that are needed for it. The initial deployment and software work is done together. Afterward, we do the detailed configuration of the machine. We need one person from our organization and one from Dell for the deployment. The deployment can be done in one day. The maintenance is mostly easy. It’s done with the Copilot system. Dell checks the machine in advance and tells us whether the software version is available. What was our ROI? We get a return on our investment. The solution is not cheap, but it is worth buying. All our customers who bought the solution were satisfied and said they would buy it again. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The price is really high. It could be better. It is a high-end product. What other advice do I have? We sell the solution, implement it, and support our customers. I recommend the solution to others. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten. Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Reseller
Date published: 2023-12-14T00:00:00-05:00

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