We performed a comparison between Dell SC Series and HPE 3PAR StoreServ 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.
"We can store more for a cheaper price as opposed to paying for larger devices and larger rack spaces which get outdated sooner and which we'd have to change every two years. It simplifies storage for us."
"The product cheaper compared to other solutions concerning the technology that they are using."
"The all-flash disc is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"Pure gives us better compression, it's easier to manage, a lot less hands-on."
"We also like the compactness, the small footprint. It takes up very little space in a data center and uses little power."
"It allows engineers to focus on other things rather than doing the more manual tasks. It automates tasks, so the ease of use is extreme. It simplifies the storage."
"Access speed and power consumption are most valuable."
"Lone segmentation is simpler and more agile. It's improved the velocity in overall provisioning from project to operation."
"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."
"A valuable feature is the performance of the auto-tiering. It will move hot data up to your fastest Tier 1 or move your slow data down. Data progression is what it's called. With the auto-tiering you can have multiple tiers, you can have your Tier 1 be either spinning or flash, all the way down to 7.2K. It will change the RAID on the fly so your writes come in at RAID 10. After they sit for a while, they get converted to RAID 5, then they'll cool off and move down the tiers. Your performance is kept going, while the cold data is moved to your slow, non-performance tiers."
"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."
"There's some new stuff coming with 7.3, which just got released, where they're spreading the sparing across the whole array, rather than having a dedicated spare disk, and have it sit there and do nothing until one of them dies, and then it kicks in - and having to rebuild all of that. Now, they'll do the sparing across all the disks and they say that is going to add not only space but performance to the array, with 7.3."
"We see very low latency with very high IOPS for mixed workloads."
"What is most valuable about the Dell EMC SC Series system was its reliability."
"We replicate between SAN to SAN for a lot of features and supportability. It also helps us when we want to upgrade to a newer SC Series or move the data from one data center to another."
"One of the most valuable features is the capability to switch between all-flash to hybrid, which have have actually done for one of our arrays. We started with the hybrid, with the limited if I'm not mistaken, and then over a period of time, we swapped all the hybrids with the SSDs. This was one of the big features because it gave us the capability to not stick with just one kind of media. Secondly, since it has sorted clustering, we were able to bring in the newer boxes and have it all clustered together. These were the two main features that we really looked into, which benefited our use case from an expansion/growth perspective. Another valuable feature is the ease of management."
"It has helped a lot for times when our customers do DR testing. Instead of having to spin down and spin up, I can do it live and seamless. I do not have to schedule downtime with an organization."
"We saved a ton of power just turning off our old one when we went to the new one."
"This solution has given us improved application uptime and performance."
"The solution’s deduplication functionality works great. We are getting about a 16:1 dedupe ratio on our VM workloads."
"The solution offers good stability."
"The solution, stability, and the performance work well for us."
"We're using the all-flash arrays and, with the deduplication and compression, it just really fits our virtualization environment very well."
"The intelligence around the solution is good."
"Pure Storage will have issues with positioning in the near future since its a relatively new company. For now, customers need a PoC to trust using the solution, as it can't stand on its brand name alone. They need to improve Pure Storage's marketing."
"I would rate this solution an eight. There's always room for improvement, nobody is perfect to get a ten out of ten. They do what they do well. It's not cheap but we it's for uses that we needed."
"The problem is that we can only make a few groups, around five or six groups. I like groups and we need a lot of them. We had to put all the information in only a few groups and cannot make a more detailed separation of them."
"In the next release of this solution, we would like to see automated copy data management for SQL Server."
"The data reduction that we had initially anticipated when we bought Pure and we move over, is way lower than the expected reduction. It depends on the workloads, of course. But that has been a challenge at times."
"The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations."
"There was some complexity in the initial setup."
"I would like to see them lower the costs."
"An issue we had was that the controller went down during an upgrade because of their upgrading the code. One side of the switch was down."
"Dell could improve the upgrading process."
"The SC Series doesn't support NVMe storage."
"It would be helpful if the solution offered higher performance, at least on the back end."
"From a performance point of view, it's getting a bit old."
"One option I would like to see is, when you're up on the view-screen, to be able to incorporate getting to what HPE call the iLO, the Integrated Lights-Out. To be able to get that instead of having to go back and trying to find IP addresses and re-institute those would be good. It would be good to be able to that put on the initial splash screen."
"The administration and support (on the way that they delivered) was a little bit slow."
"It's not very efficient anymore. There are better products out there."
"3PAR did not increase our performance, and it has increased our latency by at least double."
"Feature-wise, with the InfoSight additions, there is a lot of the stuff missing in the intelligent interface. As they grow and push, a lot of it will not tie into Hyper-V."
"The GUI interface could be improved. I have been having trouble with one issue in particular. If you look at the DC and DR, if there is a communication break and the link went down—so the data is not replicating from DC to DR—there is no way to find out how much data is ready for transmission. Only the size of the data that needs to be transferred after the link comes up. If the firewall link is down, there is no way of seeing how much data is waiting to be transferred. This is a weak point of 3PAR."
"This solution is now at end-of-life."
"Although we experienced malfunctions where a virus was running and it failed."
"Integration with some cloud services would be nice... We would like to be able to provision from the 3PAR and decide whether or not we are going to provision onsite or the cloud."
"We have issues with scalability because 3PAR has limited storage capacity, so we have to invest more after a while."
"Cloud integration could be better. They can also add an NVMe to port to that. I would like to see NVMe in the next release. That's the future or the near future for storage. That will give us a real high throughput and some performance."
Dell SC Series is ranked 24th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews while HPE 3PAR StoreServ is ranked 9th in All-Flash Storage with 299 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.4, while HPE 3PAR StoreServ is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "Automated architecture that proactively optimizes your database ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE 3PAR StoreServ writes "The product's technical support is outstanding as I can reach someone right away". Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, Huawei OceanStor and HPE Nimble Storage, whereas HPE 3PAR StoreServ is most compared with HPE Primera, Dell Unity XT, HPE Nimble Storage, NetApp AFF and HPE StoreOnce. See our Dell SC Series vs. HPE 3PAR StoreServ report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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