We performed a comparison between Dell SC Series and Dell Unity XT 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."Pure Storage technology allowed us to automate tasks, reducing something which started as a 12-hour turnaround down to about 15 minutes."
"We find the ease of usability and setup valuable."
"It's just very easy for general block storage."
"I like FlashArray's ActiveCluster as well as its snapshot and cloning capabilities."
"The connections are a lot faster than what we had in the past. One InfiniBand does what we did on all of our Fibre Channels."
"The code upgrades are very smooth."
"Redundancy and the fault tolerance of the platform are the most impressive."
"It has made working with storage as easy and simple as it should be."
"It is just as stable as any other high-end solution."
"We see very low latency with very high IOPS for mixed workloads."
"The interface is easy to use which makes the product user-friendly."
"With federation, you can have multiple systems across sites. You can treat them as one, and with a live migration, volumes don't go down. You can move them from site to site, doing maintenance, and keep your environment up."
"Its leading feature is the price-performance ratio, which is very good."
"It's very scalable, especially with federation. If you outgrow the number of spindles that a unit can support, depending on the model, you can go into federation."
"The most valuable features are the with back-end dedupe, and the thin nodes. For a 20TB or 60TB, we're using almost a one-to-two ratio."
"Connecting it up, you can run it within a few hours."
"The most valuable features are its performance and simplicity."
"The scalability is really good now that they have the Dynamic Pools. We don't always have the money to buy complete write sets when we have to expand the storage, so now with the Dynamic Pools we can add disks on the go."
"The most valuable feature of Dell Unity XT is data duplication. Additionally, the management interface is simple, and is not a hassle using it. You don't need too much to learn or to be familiarized with it."
"Dell Unity XT is user-friendly and easy to use."
"We run about 100 virtual servers on it. We have about 100 users accessing the file shares from there, and I've seen no problem with that. We have about a 10GB backbone. Whatever we throw at it, it hasn't shown any sign of weakness or anything. It's been really good."
"I like that the performance is very good."
"It has helped us be able to use less administrators per device or system. Therefore,we are more streamlined."
"It is easy to manage. Managing it, I get alerts if there are any type of issues. I had a hard drive go bad, which had never caused any issues. Dell EMC contacted me, and said, "We are a shipping a new one out." My response was, "Why?" He told me that hard drive was bad. So, I went and looked, and it was. This was almost immediate. I never even knew anything had happened."
"There's always an opportunity for new feature functionality."
"We've had it in place for about a year and a half and have had zero complaints, other than that box-to-box replication is not encrypted."
"Part of our company works on Dell EMC because Pure Storage did not have synchronous applications when we were purchasing our products."
"Its price could be cheaper. It is not the cheapest one out there, but I'm not directly involved in the figures and negotiations."
"When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller."
"It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays."
"It's not so scalable. It's got moderate scaling capabilities right now. The clustering technology needs a bit of work, they need to improve that."
"I would like to migrate to the cloud in the future and know how that would actually work with this product."
"What I understand is that this is a 13 year old architecture, so it has lived its life and they're phasing it out. Honestly, we were initially struggling with the integration with VMware (but it was fixed with the VMware 6.5) and, then, it was around a 10GB network. At that time, it had the longevity to go to 100GB as well. It got us thinking about, when we go into the containerized architecture, what do we need to do to fix the infrastructure?"
"While there's always room for improvement in everything, I can't really think of a specific feature of the solution that requires immediate attention."
"The SC Series doesn't support NVMe storage."
"I would like to improve the processing ability."
"The initial setup is somewhat complex and should be made simpler to do."
"Technical support should respond more quickly because the turnaround time is very high."
"We can definitely see a need for it being a multi-controller system for customers who want to scale beyond the current capability. That's always a downside. A lot of the new systems are scaling vertically, they scale out, and the Compellent, of course, is controllers with shelves under it, so you don't scale out with it, unless you add another one. But if you do, they don't talk to each other, like some of the other solutions that we sell."
"This solution could be improved if overall performance was improved and operated with a higher speed and supported a higher volume of RAM."
"Support Responsiveness & time to fix bugs should be improved."
"The pre-sales technical support and technical engagement could be made better for this product."
"This product lacks deduplication and compression at the current version 4.1.0. LACP is not available for iSCSI either."
"Dell Unity XT’s price needs improvement."
"The uses of tools to communicate with EMC directly. With EMC, I am not able to connect and resolve issues without assistance, so they can't do unattended maintenance on devices, which would be a massive benefit if they could."
"Our request to Dell EMC for improvement was in the reporting and monitoring areas. Dell EMC built up a cloud ID so that we could see the overall storage numbers. We needed to have the proper KPIs to be able to see and manage things."
"This solution would be improved with the addition of flexible raid volumes."
"I called about an issue where I couldn't get VVOLs registered. It turns out it is a bug in the code and that there is no information about when it will be fixed. It's just not going to work. I was a little miffed about that."
Dell SC Series is ranked 24th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews while Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 186 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.4, while Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "Automated architecture that proactively optimizes your database ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell Unity XT writes "Easy to set up with good data compression technology and useful deduplication". Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Huawei OceanStor, HPE Nimble Storage and NetApp AFF, whereas Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage and IBM FlashSystem. See our Dell SC Series vs. Dell Unity XT report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
