We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and Dell SC Series based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The deduplication and compression rates are beyond impressive."
"Our storage phones home. It is smart and intelligent in that aspect, which has been huge for us. We don't have to be storage administrators."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is its high stability level."
"The speed is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"It worked flawlessly."
"One of the lesser sung advantages was when we started running our interface engine on Pure Storage. The ability to process messages and pass them through in our organization skyrocketed purely because of a disk that I owned which we were getting out of Pure Storage."
"I like its speed. It has all the features that I need."
"It is easy to deploy and it's all-flash, so it's very fast."
"PowerMax, with version 9.02, which we installed recently, has some very good features, such as CloudIQ."
"The speed and the compatible interface with IBM are the most valuable features of the PowerMax product."
"It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"It has dramatically cut down the footprint in our data center and reduced the amount of raw disk capacity that we needed to purchase."
"We were able to move away from a middleware solution for high availability, going right to snapshots and data replication on arrays."
"It is very stable. We expect superior performance and reliability from this particular storage system."
"The most valuable feature is its global cache, which allows for uncompromised performance."
"We can consistently replicate mainframe and open system and have a single recovery point."
"The product offers good performance and is quite powerful."
"The performance benefits weren't surprising, we expected that. What we didn't expect were the densification benefits that we got out of going all-flash. We're able to put more applications on the arrays because of how all-flash performs. The way some of the application profiles have responded to all-flash has been really pleasing."
"Everything is sub-5 MS for us. What I've found is that, with all-flash, when an app from my business is slow, I pretty much know it's them and not me. It leads to a performance conversation that has really hit an interesting threshold point where we are better than what they need. So now we get to have that "refactoring your application" conversation a lot quicker because now the performance on the infrastructure side isn't in question anymore."
"It has good dedupe and compression. Also, the built-in data migration capabilities are pretty good, as is the federation. When we started migrating the workloads from different storage platforms, like NetApp and XtremeIO, it helped us in moving to that direction."
"Connecting it up, you can run it within a few hours."
"I've found the stability to be very good."
"Technical support is very good. I do use it from time to time and it's always excellent."
"The solution is stable."
"The setup needs to be improved the most. They can do a little more with the user interface, but the setup is what I would like to see made a bit easier."
"We haven't seen ROI yet."
"The integration capabilities could be improved."
"The number of Filesystems is limited, which it is not on the EMC VNX."
"This product has only two active controllers, whereas other solutions can have more. This is something that needs to improve."
"The support for NFS protocols right out-of-the-box need improvement. I'm used to other storage vendors who have NFS support right out-of-the-box, and Pure Storage doesn't seem to have anything."
"In some cases, we get into very in-depth conversations around movement of specific data and, what's more, chunk sizes. The documentation lacked any description or information on that."
"In terms of the future, I have been excited by some of the copy data management stuff that they're talking about building into the environment. There are feature sets where I've done a lot of automation work. So, I am always looking forward to extensions of their API. They're also talking about a phone home centralized analytics database being used as a centralized management console with a list of new cloud features, but this doesn't seem finalized."
"If the solution had more power-saving capabilities, it would be quite nice."
"I would also like to see a real-time, graphical view of metrics. I don't know how far back in time we can look, but if we could see the performance from two months or three months back, and how it is performing now, that would be helpful."
"Setting up PowerMax with VMAX is always complex."
"I would like NVMe to be end-to-end in the next release. Right now, it is not end-to-end."
"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."
"The initial setup could be easier."
"The price could be lower, and we are unhappy with the price."
"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."
"Snapshots in VMware. You can’t do snapshots since the storage itself does that. Therefore, some apps (Veeam, for example) don’t work well with this kind of tiering storage."
"In terms of additional features, I would like to see some kind of I/O meter, to indicate what we are using in terms of performance. I would like to see automation with that, where it would give me the trends. I want to know those things easily, to help me know where issues are going to occur."
"The initial setup is somewhat complex and should be made simpler to do."
"I would like to improve the processing ability."
"I would like to see higher compression, dedupe, faster I/O, and bigger drives."
"This solution could be improved if overall performance was improved and operated with a higher speed and supported a higher volume of RAM."
"I would like to see an integrated key manager in the controllers. Currently, it's an external product. It would be nice to have the option of having a built-in key for self-encrypting drive features."
"Dell could improve the upgrading process."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 9th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while Dell SC Series is ranked 24th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while Dell SC Series is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "Simplified storage provisioning for us, enabling us to assign any volumes in two to three minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "Automated architecture that proactively optimizes your database ". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and Dell XtremIO, whereas Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, Huawei OceanStor and IBM System Storage DS8000 Series. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell SC Series report.
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