Dell PowerStore Versus VxRail

Innovative data center solutions are hitting the market faster than ever. These solutions bring unprecedented speed, efficiency and flexibility to critical workloads, but it can be confusing for infrastructure leaders to determine the right solution for their target use cases and future growth.

In 2020, Dell EMC introduced an innovation to the mid-range storage market: PowerStore. For good reason, customers came to us wanting to know more about PowerStore, especially the PowerStore X model. That's because PowerStore X includes installation of the VMware hypervisor, allowing applications to be embedded as virtual machines (VMs) directly on the appliance. Meaning, you now can run VMs natively on the storage array controllers, alongside having the benefits of a centralized storage array. 

Given this capability, our customers wanted to know what use cases were best suited for PowerStore versus Dell EMC's leading hyper-converged platform, VxRail. 

PowerStore X acts as a two-node ESX cluster in addition to its storage array capabilities. For large IT shops running thousands of VMs, they'll still need the scale out capabilities of a dedicated hyper-converged platform like VxRail. The size and scale of large VM environments is a primary use case for VxRail. 

Where PowerStore X really shines is in its ability to handle high-intensity, storage-centric workloads, while also handling a small amount of VMs concurrently.

A great example of where PowerStore X is a perfect, and cost-effective, fit is at the remote office. 

By deploying PowerStore X at a remote office, IT can run their domain controller, print server and other smaller types of VMs. IT doesn't have to worry about compute as it's all on the PowerStore X appliance, plus they get the benefit of storage protection features, such as shared storage without having to invest in a hypervisor. 

To learn more about use cases for PowerStore, as well as those for VxRail, watch our webinar on the subject.