We performed a comparison between Dell PowerStore and Dell SC Series based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Dell PowerStore came out ahead of Dell SC Series. Although both products have good service and support and have brought positive ROI, SC Series is more difficult to deploy and has more areas that require improvements.
"It is an easy to use product for all of my team members."
"It helps to simplify storage because it has an easy front-end to access everything."
"Technical support is good."
"All updates, upgrades, and hardware work are all performed on-line with no impact."
"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"
"The most valuable feature is its upgradeability."
"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are simplicity, ease of use, and dashboard management."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the all-flash storage performance, low latency, and efficiency of their de-duplication technology. Additionally, the ease of use is good compared to other storage systems. The features in data protection, snapshotting, and replication between data centers and sites are superior to other solutions."
"When compared to Pure Storage, Dell PowerStore's cost was quite attractive."
"I find all of the Dell PowerStore features to be valuable."
"This solution is highly flexible and offers efficient online compression capabilities."
"The way you're able to manage all your PowerStores as one solution is very good for us. PowerStore enables you to federate or cluster multiple appliances with automated load balancing. In terms of management, it's helpful that we can do it from a single interface where we're able to manage multiple PowerStores. When you have multiple PowerStores it works intelligently by running the workloads based on the needs of the infrastructure."
"The solution is easy to use and has good performance."
"Gives us flexibility, performance, and ease of use. It also has some very good compression capabilities. We were looking for a solution that was easy to install in our VMware environment, that was flexible. PowerStore X is a type of a VMware cluster that you install inside your environment. If you have a VMware environment, like we have in production, it's easy to install and use."
"The solution is very easy to implement."
"The solution's technical support is excellent. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten."
"Most valuable features have been the system customization with it, the performance you receive, and their CoPilot Support (or Dell EMC Storage Support)."
"What is most valuable about the Dell EMC SC Series system was its reliability."
"One time, we had a drive fail and we were notified before we even saw it on the device."
"The flexibility of this solution has been valuable for our business."
"It has been one of the most stable products in our data center."
"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."
"We see very low latency with very high IOPS for mixed workloads."
"Connecting it up, you can run it within a few hours."
"We did have one hiccup with the integration of vCenter. When we were installing Pure Storage, we were using vCenter 6.7, which defaults to the HTML5 Web Client. The current plugin for Pure Storage doesn't show up in that client at all. You have to go and use the legacy FlexFlash client to see the Pure Storage plugin in vCenter."
"The credentials on the iSCSI interface are only available to type in with the Chrome browser, and not with the Firefox browser."
"The solution is not cheap."
"It's too early to tell if we've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership. The solution is expensive."
"The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations."
"In the next release of the solution I would like to see Vormetric native block encryption."
"I think replication is one area that still needs improvement. Earlier, Pure Storage FlashArray only had IP-based replication. There was no API-based replication, but they have enhanced the feature now. However, they need to work on API replication for C-type of arrays."
"Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."
"More demonstration and training options are needed."
"PowerStore's management console could be improved."
"There is no Synchronize replication feature on the storage."
"It needs more mature code."
"Reporting is an area that could be improved. It's very simplistic sometimes, and some of the very technical guys on my team want to see more of the details and be able to massage the report a little bit better."
"The pricing could be lower. It is very expensive."
"After the smooth launch of the product in our company, only the areas around upgrades are a bit problematic. In our organization, we face difficulties when updating the product."
"I have not seen anything specific. The only thing I can think of that needs improvement is the price."
"The configuration could be easier in Dell EMC SC Series."
"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."
"In some customer cases, customers experienced more performance or latency."
"Compellent comes in the form of a component that's not true of a unified storage platform."
"The initial setup is somewhat complex and should be made simpler to do."
"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 higher compression, dedupe, faster I/O, and bigger drives."
"Overall, I'd like to see more synergy between Dell EMC's higher-tier platforms and their mid-tier platforms. What I have said, constantly, to my partners at Dell EMC is that the clear articulation of the path is really important to us. In that vein, what I'd also like to see is, with the migration strategy that's built into this product, a lot more attention paid to Dell's - in particular - legacy platforms and how we get from some of our legacy EMC platforms onto this platform with a straight-through migration and scaling strategy, not host-based migrations and not piecemeal... Dell EMC would do well to focus more on my ability to skip a generation, rather than having me take individual hops because I can't greenfield my way into a software-defined data center fast enough. This journey of multiple hops is not helpful."
Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage with 46 reviews while Dell SC Series is ranked 24th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews. Dell PowerStore is rated 8.6, while Dell SC Series is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell PowerStore writes "It has a very strong NAS that can support a lot of big, heavy environments". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "Automated architecture that proactively optimizes your database ". Dell PowerStore is most compared with Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, NetApp AFF, Dell PowerMax NVMe and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, whereas Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, Huawei OceanStor, HPE Nimble Storage and NetApp AFF. See our Dell PowerStore vs. Dell SC Series report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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