We performed a comparison between Dell SC Series and Dell Unity XT 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."Technical support has been okay."
"This solution helps accelerate demanding enterprise applications. VMware workloads, the database, and Oracle Solaris are hosted on AFF, which means that our primary priority workloads are on AFF and that the secondary ones are on FAS. That includes the SAN national cloud."
"In terms of the footprint, it is far more efficient. It has smaller, higher-capacity drives than our older unit. In terms of space, power, and cooling, it has simplified things."
"Regarding features, SnapMirror is one we depend on right now. It helps us provide snapshots to the customers on request. There are many scenarios in which we might take snapshots in various daily use cases. We trigger the snapshots, which gives us a sense of security because we know we have this technology in place if something happens."
"The benefits of being on AFF are the phenomenal speed at which we're able to ingest data and index it, and the IOPS."
"Snapshots, snap clones, backups, flexibility, and agility are valuable features. I like that NetApp AFF is easy to use. We can automate everything for our backups and use cases. It's fast and simple, and provides storage to all of our VMware ESX hosts. It expands easily as well."
"Using System Manager for green management or command line interface, we have a single point for managing the cluster. It is much easier to manage. It is very seamless. The product is robust and solid."
"We have had issues before on our infrastructure where 20 to 30 percent of the people would come to us pointing the finger at the storage technology or storage back-end. That is now virtually zero."
"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."
"What is most valuable about the Dell EMC SC Series system was its reliability."
"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."
"The Dell support is helpful and the response is quick. The agents' knowledge is very good."
"The user interface is good, I would rate it a nine out of ten."
"It had many features, like a snapshot, replication, on-the-file RAID levels, mix-and-match files, those kinds of things."
"I've found the stability to be very good."
"The flexibility of this solution has been valuable for our business."
"Stable data storage platform which promotes ease of management through its multi-cloud support. Remote support provided to users to address issues is very good."
"The solution overall has high performance."
"The inline deduplication and data reduction capabilities have been the most valuable."
"The most valuable feature of Dell Unity XT is data duplication. Additionally, the management interface is simple, and is not a hassle using it. You don't need too much to learn or to be familiarized with it."
"The Unity XT box is very strong. It doesn't break. The MTBF time is very large so you don't have to worry about faults or outages in your operations."
"My storage team likes Unity's replication features. Three-site replication is a unique feature that EMC offers us."
"The most valuable features of Dell Unity XT are the data compression for all of our VMs up to four times and the performance is good."
"It is easy to set up the solution."
"It can get a little expensive if you need to add more disks. The cost is a pain point for us, especially in terms of expansion."
"We would like to have a feature that automatically moves volumes between aggregates, based on the performance. We normally need to do this manually."
"The NetApp support could be better."
"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."
"After the three-year prepay, the extended warranty is a little expensive."
"There is room for improvement in terms of support. I have noticed that if I sometimes call their customer care for a particular issue, they will give me another number and ask me to call that other team. It would be better if they could do a warm transfer. That would save customers time from calling all the numbers again and speaking to another team."
"Another issue is that for smaller customers, NetApp doesn't have enough disk sizes. You begin with a 980-gigabyte disk and the next size is 3.8 terabytes. There aren't any disk sizes in between. Competitors have more choices in disk sizes."
"In some customer cases, customers experienced more performance or latency."
"While the scalability is good, there are certain limitations."
"The configuration could be easier in Dell EMC SC Series."
"The SC Series doesn't support NVMe storage."
"From a performance point of view, it's getting a bit old."
"Dell could improve the upgrading process."
"The lack of reporting would be the main issue."
"The price could be improved."
"There is no de-duplication. Unity used to be Bionics, which had de-duplication; however, in Dell Unity XT, the de-duplication was deprecated and is no longer available."
"It could go faster. Make it bigger, better, and faster at a lower price, and I am there."
"Our request to Dell EMC for improvement was in the reporting and monitoring areas. Dell EMC built up a cloud ID so that we could see the overall storage numbers. We needed to have the proper KPIs to be able to see and manage things."
"The solution can use improvement with the patch cluster like the Synchron and Active replication."
"The price of this product can be more cost-effective."
"I have a problem because between the Unity XT and the PowerMax, sometimes we need another product between these two products. There could be better integrated and the capacity of the size could be larger."
"The pre-sales technical support and technical engagement could be made better for this product."
"This product has some scalability issues. Before you can get support, you have to look for the service tag number on your product which could make it difficult to access support."
Dell SC Series is ranked 16th in All-Flash Storage with 10 reviews while Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 43 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.6, while Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "The performance was staggering and more than what we paid for". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell Unity XT writes "Price / Quality ratio is good and since OE 5.03 code the array family reached a rather good maturity level". Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Pure Storage FlashArray, IBM System Storage DS8000 Series and Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series, whereas Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray, HPE 3PAR StoreServ and Huawei OceanStor. See our Dell SC Series vs. Dell Unity XT report.
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