We performed a comparison between Dell PowerStore 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."The speed is great. That's probably number one in terms of features we appreciate."
"Other manufacturers claim simplicity. In fact, frankly, they do have an advantage in that regard, however, they don't have the functionality. If you were to compare one of those products to NetApp, head to head from a feature perspective, NetApp would wind up in the top 10."
"I like the ability to snapshot, and the cloning features are valuable to us as well. I like that I can quickly and efficiently snapshot the data and move it to wherever I need to locally or in the cloud. Also, I know that when I take the snapshot that all of the data will be there and that it will be usable when I need to use it."
"We recently started using the volume encryption feature, which is helpful because there are some federal projects that require data at rest to be encrypted."
"It also helps to accelerate databases in our environment. First of all, there is the reliability of things staying online and the small response time as well, from the MetroCluster, for all of the data that we're serving; and the applications are talking to the MetroCluster. It provides a very fast response time."
"Technical support has been okay."
"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."
"The performance is outstanding when it's all Flash. That's the biggest bang for the buck that we get."
"I have found the most valuable part of Dell PowerStore is the price."
"The solution is extremely stable."
"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."
"You can add compute and capacity independently. We have sized the solution based on our current needs, but in the future we can choose to increase capacity if we grow our activity in the market. And if we have more business in our monetary system, we can increase compute. The ability to choose what we increase is a good feature."
"Has a great mapping feature."
"Currently, the features of replication and deduplication have been very important to us."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"The support is very good."
"Customers are most impressed with SC's provisioning because you don't need to buy a large amount of storage upfront. It's pay-as-you-grow. It also has solid compression and duplication features."
"The solution is stable."
"It had many features, like a snapshot, replication, on-the-file RAID levels, mix-and-match files, those kinds of things."
"What is most valuable about the Dell EMC SC Series system was its reliability."
"I've found the stability to be very good."
"The user interface is good, I would rate it a nine out of ten."
"The Dell support is helpful and the response is quick. The agents' knowledge is very good."
"The flexibility of this solution has been valuable for our business."
"NetApp should offer more training so everyone can learn about the products. Other vendors have a lot of training options. It would be great if NetApp would highlight how to use the features more so that every admin or person can gain more knowledge about this technology."
"It used to give us the volume where LANs should be placed when we created a LAN in the older version. However, in the newer version of ONTAP, it does not give where to place the LAN in the volume. So, that liberty has been taken away. If that was there again, it would be very good."
"It would be better if they just improved the performance of the system."
"In the past, NetApp designed it so that you have a 70% threshold. You would never fill up past 70% since you need to have that room available. Whereas with Pure, I can fill it up to 110% of what they listed and it's still going at full speed. NetApp can't do that."
"Some of the graphical user interface changes in the later versions of NetApp have not been as good as the older ones, like in the 9.5 era."
"After the three-year prepay, the extended warranty is a little expensive."
"From my perspective, everything works well. They've already announced that they have some features in their next release that make the existing investment more usable, by adding software features to your existing legacy hardware investment."
"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."
"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 storage could be improved. I would like a feature for how to best secure an appliance and the storage since we are connecting the container to the public cloud. I would like them to develop another level of security, making it more secure than from what they have now."
"During the installation phase, the licensing part was not straightforward. It was very difficult for the technicians, who are not trained Dell EMC technicians, to do the licensing because the information on their website is not straightforward... Eventually, I had to pass this task to our business partner and they did it for us."
"The UI should be a little more user-friendly to manage."
"More demonstration and training options are needed."
"Many customers are looking for a cyber recovery feature included in PowerStore. We would like to see this added in a future release."
"The only area I can highlight for improvement is that the 4:1 data reduction target has not been reached. This may be due to an issue with Dell EMC's initial analysis of data compression. As a result, we have had to add new physical disks to reach our goal of total available disk space."
"While the scalability is good, there are certain limitations."
"The price could be improved."
"The lack of reporting would be the main issue."
"The configuration could be easier in Dell EMC SC Series."
"Dell could improve the upgrading process."
"From a performance point of view, it's getting a bit old."
"The SC Series doesn't support NVMe storage."
"In some customer cases, customers experienced more performance or latency."
Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage with 25 reviews while Dell SC Series is ranked 16th in All-Flash Storage with 10 reviews. Dell PowerStore is rated 8.6, while Dell SC Series is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell PowerStore writes "Saves us power and floor space, and we can quickly assign new data stores for our developers' VMs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "The performance was staggering and more than what we paid for". Dell PowerStore is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray, IBM FlashSystem, Dell PowerMax NVMe and Dell XtremIO, whereas Dell SC Series is most compared with IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, IBM System Storage DS8000 Series and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series. See our Dell PowerStore vs. Dell SC Series report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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