"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."
"What is most valuable about the Dell EMC SC Series system was its reliability."
"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."
"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."
"The product offers good performance and is quite powerful."
"The Dell support is helpful and the response is quick. The agents' knowledge is very good."
"Its leading feature is the price-performance ratio, which is very good."
"One time, we had a drive fail and we were notified before we even saw it on the device."
"Regarding features, SnapMirror is one we depend on right now. It helps us provide snapshots to the customers on request. There are many scenarios in which we might take snapshots in various daily use cases. We trigger the snapshots, which gives us a sense of security because we know we have this technology in place if something happens."
"The newest version of ONTAP has a bit of a learning curve because you need to learn where things are to find them. It is not impossible, but when you are accustomed to the older version of ONTAP, it just takes a bit getting used to it, but it is about the same as before."
"I like some basic features like Snapshot, FlexClone, and advanced features such as SnapMirror, and SnapVault. They also recently enhanced the market with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. I think that NetApp is a very good product."
"Technical support has been okay."
"It impacts customer retention because of its overall ease. When you are running a business, where time is a factor, that is the biggest selling point. Things happen really rapidly, when they happen, and being able to say, "Yeah, we can get this up and running in a day, if you want," or even less time in some cases. Sometimes, that can be what makes or breaks our case."
"The most valuable features are the performance and the storage efficiency, due to the compression and deduplication... The efficiency is very important because we can buy fewer disks for more data."
"The initial setup is very simple."
"We have had issues before on our infrastructure where 20 to 30 percent of the people would come to us pointing the finger at the storage technology or storage back-end. That is now virtually zero."
"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."
"I would like to see the management layer improved."
"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."
"This product should be a lot more user-friendly."
"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?"
"It would be helpful if the solution offered higher performance, at least on the back end."
"The interface could be improved. It should have an application point of view."
"Technical support should respond more quickly because the turnaround time is very high."
"There's always room for improvement in the operating code."
"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."
"Dell could improve the upgrading process."
"Their backup software could be improved."
"We would like to have a feature that automatically moves volumes between aggregates, based on the performance. We normally need to do this manually."
"Another issue is that for smaller customers, NetApp doesn't have enough disk sizes. You begin with a 980-gigabyte disk and the next size is 3.8 terabytes. There aren't any disk sizes in between. Competitors have more choices in disk sizes."
"It would be better if they just improved the performance of the system."
"There is room for improvement in terms of support. I have noticed that if I sometimes call their customer care for a particular issue, they will give me another number and ask me to call that other team. It would be better if they could do a warm transfer. That would save customers time from calling all the numbers again and speaking to another team."
"I don't like the newest GUI. It needs more options. Some features have been removed. Oversight is not as good in the new GUI compared to the previous version. Though, it might be something that we just need to get used to."
"When comparing with Pure for example, with Pure you have no maintenance anymore and with NetApp, you still need maintenance."
"There is room for improvement with the user interface. There are a few things that cannot be done in the GUI. We do a lot of things through the CLI, but that's grown out of a lack of ability to do them in the GUI. An example is QTrees. You can manage them within the GUI, but the GUI is missing a few options."
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Dell EMC SC Series is ranked 10th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 13 reviews while NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 16 reviews. Dell EMC SC Series is rated 8.0, while NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is rated 9.0. 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 NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) writes "Provides us with quick options when restoring things for customers". Dell EMC SC Series is most compared with Dell EMC PowerStore, Dell EMC Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series and Huawei OceanStor, whereas NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is most compared with Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell EMC Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Dell EMC PowerStore and HPE Nimble Storage. See our Dell EMC SC Series vs. NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) report.
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