We performed a comparison between Dell SC Series and HPE Nimble Storage 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."Performance, dedupe, and that it works well with database workloads are its most valuable features."
"It helps simplify storage. When you're running Pure all-flash, you don't have to do a lot of the old Oracle best practices. You don't have to worry about putting log files on a different disk channel than the data files, and those types of issues... That has made it vastly easier to do large volumes, rapid provisioning in databases, without taking a performance hit."
"The amount of throughput that we're getting is really nice."
"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."
"All updates, upgrades, and hardware work are all performed on-line with no impact."
"The top-tier support and reliable storage are the most valuable features of this solution."
"The performance and the ever-growing maintenance are the most valuable features of this solution."
"We've been using FlashArray's snapshot for backups. Their replication across sites and response time are also excellent."
"I find this version to be more budget-friendly compared to products from other vendors. This aspect greatly benefits my customers. It's highly advantageous due to its affordability. The operational aspect is also noteworthy. Additionally, its availability and performance are commendable. The speaker are also equally powerful."
"Connecting it up, you can run it within a few hours."
"It is easy to use, expand the hard drives, add storage, and set up replication."
"This solution is easy to use."
"Customers are most impressed with SC's provisioning because you don't need to buy a large amount of storage upfront. It's pay-as-you-grow. It also has solid compression and duplication features."
"It had many features, like a snapshot, replication, on-the-file RAID levels, mix-and-match files, those kinds of things."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the management of Nimble Storage, InfoSight. This is like a cloud. That's really a very nice feature. I think that's the only reason to buy Nimble Storage."
"InfoSight has allowed us to centralize our management, understanding how it correlates to the array. It has identified a network issue in the network configuration of ESXi hosts. It enables us to get servers back up faster by 25 percent."
"The most valuable feature is data mirroring."
"We get storage access without the need for more human monitoring of those resources."
"InfoSight has identified controller failures or performance issues."
"It's given us more time to do the important things, less time worrying about SANs and failures and picking up the pieces. It just works."
"Even through upgrades, there is no downtime, not even a hiccup for users."
"Scalability is another reason we chose to go with Nimble: upgrading to another storage array. If we need higher capacity or throughput, we can just replace controllers, we don't have to replace or forklift-upgrade the whole chassis."
"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."
"The price of this solution could be improved."
"I would love for them to have a hyper-converged solution."
"The product should improve its response time. I have also encountered issues with its configuration."
"What it needs to do is work a little closer with solutions, like VMware, so it understands the particular workloads that are on it. Today, it does not understand the applications which are running against it."
"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."
"The backend of this solution utilizes an Active/Passive architecture, rather than an Active/Active architecture, which is a disadvantage, when compared to some of its competitors. Its storage capacity should be expanded in the next release."
"As partners, we should have the option to download the software, rather than have to go back through Pure to obtain it."
"Overall, I'd like to see more synergy between Dell EMC's higher-tier platforms and their mid-tier platforms. What I have said, constantly, to my partners at Dell EMC is that the clear articulation of the path is really important to us. In that vein, what I'd also like to see is, with the migration strategy that's built into this product, a lot more attention paid to Dell's - in particular - legacy platforms and how we get from some of our legacy EMC platforms onto this platform with a straight-through migration and scaling strategy, not host-based migrations and not piecemeal... Dell EMC would do well to focus more on my ability to skip a generation, rather than having me take individual hops because I can't greenfield my way into a software-defined data center fast enough. This journey of multiple hops is not helpful."
"We have seen some degraded throughput with mixed workloads. We have been working with Dell EMC to correct some of these latency issues."
"In some customer cases, customers experienced more performance or latency."
"The cost of the solution could be better."
"From a performance point of view, it's getting a bit old."
"There's always room for improvement in the operating code."
"This solution could be improved if overall performance was improved and operated with a higher speed and supported a higher volume of RAM."
"While the scalability is good, there are certain limitations."
"I would like to see more advanced analytics in the next release of this solution."
"I'd like to see more granular quality of service rules. Currently, I think currently there's not much room for maximum IOPS, but there's not an option for minimum IOPS for a given volume."
"The resellers did the implementation of the solution, we did not do it ourselves. We have ten people for the deployment of the solution."
"We are doing a hybrid and are moving some machines to Microsoft Azure to run in hybrid mode. We are checking the availability of extra software-defined storage so that we can configure it."
"Nimble Storage could increase its flexibility by adding more protocol options. Nimble mainly uses fibre channel protocols, whereas many other storage arrays support fibre channel, iCSI, and NFS protocols."
"HPE Nimble Storage should improve its latency. It is expensive."
"It would be ideal if all these enterprise-class high-performance products would come at a cheaper price."
"A feature that would be a nice addition to the next release would be a filer option. A filer option so that you could connect the sim or NFS or chips like NetApp does for NAS functionality."
Dell SC Series is ranked 24th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews while HPE Nimble Storage is ranked 5th in All-Flash Storage with 119 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.4, while HPE Nimble Storage is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "Automated architecture that proactively optimizes your database ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE Nimble Storage writes "Beneficial management software, straightforward installation, and good support". Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, Huawei OceanStor and NetApp AFF, whereas HPE Nimble Storage is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Dell PowerStore, HPE Primera, VMware vSAN and IBM FlashSystem. See our Dell SC Series vs. HPE Nimble Storage report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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