We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and Dell SC Series 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're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"Dell PowerMax NVMe has good scalability and performance."
"The best feature is the protection - PowerMax NVMe is volume-based and replicates data, so it's very comfortable for us to use."
"The number one most valuable feature is reliability. I want to go home at the end of the day and come in the next day knowing it works, especially since we have storage offshore."
"We use ESRS for our call-home, and a lot of times, Dell EMC will respond to the issue before we even know it."
"The performance is very good. Our predominant workloads are all less than 5 milliseconds and it's most common to have a sub-1-millisecond response time for our applications. In terms of efficiency, we've turned on compression and we're able to get as high as two-to-one compression on our workloads, on average."
"A huge benefit of the PowerMax has been the decreasing of our physical footprint. We recently did a consolidation where we went from 58 tiles down to 5. If we had used just the PowerMax, we could have gone from 58 tiles down to 2 tiles, which is huge space savings. If you have 56 newly available floor tiles on a raised floor data center, which you previously had to cool and provide power to, then now, not only are my costs going down, I now have more revenue opportunities because I have more space to put new customers."
"The high availability that other systems don't have. In other systems, there is an owner in the storage processes. But for PowerMAX, there is no owner. All the process storage is passed to all nodes without ownership. So, there is no response feature in the storage in PowerMax. In the other systems, there is a response, which is a very nice feature. No systems have such a feature."
"PowerMax NVMe has made it a lot easier to understand how much we are able to provision. It has made it a lot faster to provision new things. 90% of my time for provisioning has been reduced. Also, it has made it very easy to understand and see everything behind it versus the older heritage, where Dell EMC was very convoluted and hard to get working. Things that used to take an hour, probably now take five to 10 minutes."
"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."
"It's very scalable, especially with federation. If you outgrow the number of spindles that a unit can support, depending on the model, you can go into federation."
"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."
"The Dell support is helpful and the response is quick. The agents' knowledge is very good."
"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."
"They have a feature called Live Migrate; it's been very, very useful."
"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."
"It is just as stable as any other high-end solution."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"We have had some trouble with the VMAX-to-PowerMax migration, but the VMAX box will be powered down after the migration. The PowerMax boxes are working fine and we don't have any issues with them."
"They should work with the storage engineers to better tweak the management tools to give them improved visibility into their data."
"There are some stability issues that we just recently experienced. We hope the next release will solve these problems."
"Since the merging of EMC and Dell into Dell Technologies, there has been a hurdle that they've had to overcome, and they're not over it yet. It takes two to three times longer for things to get fixed than it did when they were separate companies. That is something that has to be fixed."
"We are very interested in NVMe over Fibre Channel, which I understand is on the horizon. We would like to see that come to fruition."
"We've had a couple of little things come up, but for the most part, they've been pretty stable."
"Dell needs to offer more midrange storage options with enterprise-class features similar to the PowerMAX."
"We have issues that we don't know about, which Dell EMC fixes."
"The administration and support (on the way that they delivered) was a little bit slow."
"I don't think the solution is very scalable."
"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 lack of reporting would be the main issue."
"From a performance point of view, it's getting a bit old."
"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."
"The ease of use could be improved. It took me a while to learn it."
"There's always room for improvement in the operating code."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while Dell SC Series is ranked 24th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while Dell SC Series is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "Simplified storage provisioning for us, enabling us to assign any volumes in two to three minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "Automated architecture that proactively optimizes your database ". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray and Huawei OceanStor Dorado, whereas Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, Huawei OceanStor and IBM System Storage DS8000 Series. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell SC Series report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
