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 Arrays solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The uptime is the most valuable feature."
"We like the compression, dedupe, and I/O on the PowerMax. They are better than on the XtremIO."
"We find the service level option to provision storage very valuable. The ability to define different service levels for storage groups helps us in prioritizing our workload at the infrastructure level."
"Technical support has been excellent."
"You can use PowerMax for all workloads and consolidation. We have used it to scale thousands of VMs."
"The UI is very easy to use. We can add volumes and manage them easily."
"This platform is reliable in supporting our data availability. We now have a higher performing platform and have been able to consolidate our workloads into one single platform."
"The solution's snapshot capabilities and replication are very good features. Snapshots are allowing us to quickly build analytical models directly from production data. This gives us amazing insights into market trends and allows us to build more effective trading algorithms. Replication offers us unparalleled levels of resilience."
"The setup is straightforward."
"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."
"What is most valuable about the Dell EMC SC Series system was its reliability."
"The flexibility of this solution has been valuable for our business."
"It had many features, like a snapshot, replication, on-the-file RAID levels, mix-and-match files, those kinds of things."
"The solution is stable."
"I've found the stability to be very good."
"PowerMax Storage needs improvement in the area of monitoring tools. It should have more functions and more complicated analysis options inside the monitoring tools."
"We brought up this question to the implementation engineer. We were comparing use cases where a customer is using RecoverPoint, then goes to PowerMax. In our previous setup with XtremIO, we were using RecpverPoint and keeping snapshots for 30 days, every few seconds. With PowerMax, I requested this for every 15 minutes, keeping it for a week. The engineer's answer was, "There will be too many snapshots. It might slow down the system." This is specifically for the use cases where there is RecoverPoint. While PowerMax works with RecoverPoint, and you can use it, there should be some way where you can have even more snapshots and not to worry about performance and system cache."
"It's a relatively new product, but for the next release I would like to see higher bandwidth on the front-end adapters. This would allow even greater scalability for critical workloads and consolidation for non-critical workloads. The hosts may not require that level of I/O performance today. However, it allows us to scale physical non-cloud environments without large investment."
"Although they call it unified storage where you have SAN and NAS, with a NAS implementation on top of a SAN, the NAS implementation is a little complicated and clumsy. As SAN, as block storage, it is very powerful... If they could provide a very good NAS implementation, it would be better, so that customers don't have to look for other simple solutions for NAS."
"The GUI interface is very complicated and could be improved by streamlining the number of steps in the process."
"I think management is where PowerMax is weakest. We're still managing it like we managed EMC arrays in the early 2000s. There's a slicker, fancier GUI that does more things, but at the end of the day, you still have to dig into the command line and issue a lot of the same commands that we still were using almost 20 years ago."
"Firmware updates are a bit painful because you have to involve their support, as opposed to having the ability to do it yourself."
"We would like more documentation, a guide to the features of the PowerMax."
"In some customer cases, customers experienced more performance or latency."
"Dell could improve the upgrading process."
"From a performance point of view, it's getting a bit old."
"The lack of reporting would be the main issue."
"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?"
"The price could be improved."
"This product should be a lot more user-friendly."
"The configuration could be easier in Dell EMC SC Series."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 20 reviews while Dell SC Series is ranked 15th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 10 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while Dell SC Series is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "CloudIQ ensures that all our arrays are properly communicating so we can see performance and storage capacities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "The performance was staggering and more than what we paid for". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray, IBM FlashSystem and Huawei OceanStor Dorado, whereas Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series and Dell XtremIO. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell SC Series report.
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