We performed a comparison between Dell SC Series and SolidFire 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 is the most valuable feature."
"Non-disruptive upgrades: You can upgrade at anytime without worry."
"The scalability options are very nice because you can scale it much better and faster. The scalability was there in the previous environment also, but this is far better than what we had before. It basically helps the user in case they are looking for more storage. We can scale it much faster."
"It reduces space and the polar consumption. It also accelerates the application."
"The speed is one of the most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray."
"We like the speed. It's very low latency. In virtualization, you can mask lots of problems, and even in code you can mask lots of problems, with low latency. It's just pure speed and low latency."
"The tool is simple and easy to use. It has neat features like protection from device removal. Moreover, you can undo the deletes. The solution is easy to work with and not as complicated as CAC"
"It is easy to manage. You don't have to have the same people who used to manage the Dell EMC arrays because the solution is more intuitive."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to replicate. We are running a financial company and it needs to be available 24/7. We can't afford any downtime."
"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."
"Easy management of volumes: You can create volumes and easily assign them to VMware clusters, increasing their size."
"It had many features, like a snapshot, replication, on-the-file RAID levels, mix-and-match files, those kinds of things."
"Performance-wise it's high speed. It's also more stable and scalable."
"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."
"The Dell support is helpful and the response is quick. The agents' knowledge is very good."
"We can just buy them, scale them as we need on demand, and we don't have to spend so many front end cycles on designing the architecture."
"SolidFire has seamless performance for the nodes and extensions. I also like the tool’s scalability. The product’s performance does not get affected when we scale either up or down. This is not the case with other products."
"The quality of service for minimum iOS, to maximum iOS in a multi-terminal environment is very powerful. The SQL service feature is the best part of SolidFire."
"The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance which is particularly valuable for tasks like data mining, where quick results are essential."
"Individual settings you can put on each individual volume, if you want to do that."
"The most valuable feature is the performance, as well as how you manage performance on the system."
"The square footage for doing development is at a premium when dealing with government networks. To be able to put a lot of IOPS in a lot of high-speed performing drives in a very small location which requires very little HVAC with very little power, it is very valuable to us."
"The dashboard is such that you don't need to be a storage expert to administer it."
"We would like to see better troubleshooting aspects. It helps us if we can find out where the problem is. Right now, it's difficult. Sometimes it's difficult to pinpoint the issue. If they had more visibility and more troubleshooting feature built into the tool that would really help."
"I would like to see support for NVMe, end-to-end."
"I can't see where they can make anything better, unless, of course, they lower their prices even more."
"The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations."
"Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."
"A minor issue that comes to mind is that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad."
"It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays."
"Pricing could be better in comparison to other solutions."
"Dell could improve the upgrading process."
"Snapshots in VMware. You can’t do snapshots since the storage itself does that. Therefore, some apps (Veeam, for example) don’t work well with this kind of tiering storage."
"This solution could be improved if overall performance was improved and operated with a higher speed and supported a higher volume of RAM."
"Licensing, especially on the storage line, could use some simplification. It's not terrible, but, for example, with the Isilon series, they've gone to completely a la carte. A la carte is very difficult to traverse, as to what you need. It would be more beneficial, at least from my point of view as a customer, if they did it more like car companies do, where there are package lines"
"I would like to improve the processing ability."
"Technical support should respond more quickly because the turnaround time is very high."
"It would be helpful if the solution offered higher performance, at least on the back end."
"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."
"I would like to see integration with the cloud, number one. Being able to spin SolidFire in the cloud."
"The tool should improve its initial cost which is expensive compared to other products."
"It would be good to provide administrative access at the root level to be able to do things with the system, if need be."
"There is room for improvement with a focus on creating a centralized storage system, functioning similar to AWS."
"We have a large fiber channel infrastructure, and that's one area that we haven't seen implemented in SolidFire, its more iSCSI."
"The inclusion of more protocols and interfaces would make it easier to integrate with other products."
"When you set up the nodes, we have to serial into each one of these nodes to configure the IP ranges. It's still very easy, but it's time consuming."
"I think there is room for improvement needed with its storage capability. A bigger node is needed."
Dell SC Series is ranked 24th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews while SolidFire is ranked 19th in All-Flash Storage with 33 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.4, while SolidFire is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "Automated architecture that proactively optimizes your database ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolidFire writes "A versatile storage solution suitable for various workloads in cloud environments providing scalable architecture, granular Quality of Service and consistent performance". Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, Huawei OceanStor and HPE Nimble Storage, whereas SolidFire is most compared with NetApp AFF, Dell PowerStore and VMware vSAN. See our Dell SC Series vs. SolidFire report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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