"The high performance is very valuable, as well as the enterprise reliability features."
"There's lots of flexibility in how we use the resources while also maintaining a small footprint."
"We have been able to consolidate storage into Pavilion. Pavilions are our only SANs because it is a bring your own disk solution. When new drives come out, we are able to take out half of the drives in the system, put in new drives, move our VMs over to the new drives, take the other drives out, and populate those with new drives. Then, we are suddenly twice as dense as we were before. NVMe flash is only going to get denser and cheaper so we can make use of that every couple of years by just throwing newer disks into it at a fraction of the cost of a new SAN."
"The product offers good performance and is quite powerful."
"The solution has a wide variety of valuable features. The data progression works well. We use the snapshot functionality quite a bit and really like it."
"What is most valuable about the Dell EMC SC Series system was its reliability."
"The Dell support is helpful and the response is quick. The agents' knowledge is very good."
"One time, we had a drive fail and we were notified before we even saw it on the device."
"Performance-wise it's high speed. It's also more stable and scalable."
"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 setup is straightforward."
"One of the most valuable features is that it's very easy to use and configure. It used to be more difficult, but now it's almost flawless."
"The most valuable features are deduplication and compression, which together, enable you to have more space."
"No queuing and high ops, speed, and performance."
"The compression and deduplication features are the most valuable."
"We've found the solution to be very stable so far."
"The maintenance service and support from IBM is very good."
"The price-performance ratio is most valuable."
"When it comes to the interface of the solution we did not encounter any challenges. Additionally, the solution has good documentation."
"In our current configuration, we can only run the line controllers in high availability, active-standby mode, whereas we would like to see active-active implemented."
"I would like to see the management layer improved."
"The rail system that Pavilion uses to mount up into a standard Dell or APC cabinet extends further back than normal rails, and they cover up the zero PDU slot. So, I don't like the rail system that comes with the device. That is my biggest complaint."
"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 initial setup is somewhat complex and should be made simpler to do."
"This product should be a lot more user-friendly."
"In some customer cases, customers experienced more performance or latency."
"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?"
"Dell could improve the upgrading process."
"Technical support should respond more quickly because the turnaround time is very high."
"The interface could be improved. It should have an application point of view."
"The data reduction pool feature sucks and is not recommended for use with heavy workloads."
"The installation is not easy. You need to have extensive knowledge to handle it."
"The pricing needs to be more competitive."
"We had issues when attempting to do a flash, we hope to resolve it soon."
"The Data Reduction Pools (DRP) support could be better."
"There could be some extra features added."
"They can improve its initial configuration. The initial configuration is currently very difficult. There are multiple choices or alternative ways to configure based on the use case and what you are targeting out of the device, that is, more capacity or more performance. These multiple alternatives cause a lot of confusion. They should increase the processing part of the nodes. Currently, you can cluster up to eight nodes. From my experience and the workload that I am facing in my environment currently, I would like to see either a bigger or stronger node or a larger number of nodes that can be clustered together. We formally communicated to them that we need to see either this or that, and they are working on something."
"The design is a little old-fashioned and could be updated. The rack is very primitive and designed in an older style."
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Dell EMC SC Series is ranked 10th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 13 reviews while IBM FlashSystem is ranked 7th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 28 reviews. Dell EMC SC Series is rated 8.0, while IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell EMC SC Series writes "The performance was staggering and more than what we paid for". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM FlashSystem writes "Good performance, energy efficient with a small form factor, helpful support". Dell EMC SC Series is most compared with Dell EMC PowerStore, Dell EMC Unity XT, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series, Dell EMC XtremIO and HPE Nimble Storage, whereas IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell EMC PowerStore, Dell EMC Unity XT, HPE Nimble Storage and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series. See our Dell EMC SC Series vs. IBM FlashSystem report.
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