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Dell SC Series vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
14th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
Dell SC Series
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
17th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
Frame-Based Disk Arrays (2nd)
Hitachi Virtual Storage Pla...
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
11th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
54
Ranking in other categories
NAS (4th), Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) (4th), Frame-Based Disk Arrays (1st), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (5th)
 

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature
One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.
RafaelGamaluis - PeerSpot reviewer
User interface offers clarity and detailed information while technical support consistently delivers
The best features of Dell SC Series are stability and replication. The replication solution is excellent, and they have a solution named Live Migration. It is a robust platform. The interface and the GUI (graphical user interface) for administrating the Compellent are exceptional, with abundant information that is very clear. The management capabilities are excellent, and the stability of our storage hardware is remarkable.
Ozair Amin - PeerSpot reviewer
A robust and dependable product that ensures a 100 percent data availability guarantee
We don't encounter any challenges in selling these Hitachi VSPs to our customers. These products boast an exceptionally robust architecture, making them highly reliable. This reliability is the key reason behind our lack of challenges. However, when we delve into the realm of competition, particularly in the unified storage sector, we do face certain challenges. This is primarily due to the usage of gateways in their storage solutions by some competitors. Unlike other competitors such as NetApp and Huawei, who do not employ gateways, we contend with challenges related to these gateways within the context of unified products. Many customers have been utilizing Hitachi Vantara for several years, relying on its storage capabilities. They appreciate its reliable roadmaps, which facilitate long-term planning. This makes it an effortless choice for customers to opt for Hitachi Vantara, as the product seamlessly accommodates updates and future changes. The key focal point of the Hitachi Vantara roadmap for our clients is centered around future upgrades. Typically, customers undergo tech refresh cycles approximately every five years. Consequently, when they embark on a tech refresh initiative, they tend to prioritize options that facilitate a smooth transition of data to alternative storage solutions. In this context, Hitachi Vantara leverages its external storage virtualization platform to ensure a seamless data migration process. This approach proves to be highly advantageous for our customers, and it stands as a primary reason for their choice to engage with Hitachi Vantara's offerings. Our customers are highly satisfied with their choice to acquire Hitachi products and services. I have not observed any of our customers shifting away from the Hitachi brand. I would recommend Hitachi Vantara 100 percent of the time to others. There are tools that assist us in accessing the IOPS per second and latencies of Hitachi Vantara systems. One such tool is the CPK tool, accessible through the Hitachi Vantara portal. Whenever we configure a product and a customer requests information about the IOPS and latencies, we can provide them with a report from the portal. This report includes details about reads, writes, IOPS, and sequential operations, offering a comprehensive overview of the IOPS performance that Hitachi Vantara offers. The combination of low latency and high performance has consistently assisted customers in improving their production and enhancing their working experience. It also aids them in easily managing the product, giving them time to expand their knowledge and plan for the future, rather than dealing with storage-related issues. The cost comparison of IOPS between our solutions and those of competitors is favorable at present, but this wasn't always the case. In the Pakistani market, Huawei used to be highly competitive. However, our current partnership with Hitachi has allowed us to pose a strong challenge to Huawei. Additionally, when considering products from NetApp, EMC, and even IBM, Hitachi remains highly competitive. Hitachi offers flexible media options to support the consolidation of multiple uses within the same platform which is important to our customers. Most of our customers utilize Unified Storage, employing a two-tier storage approach that includes both NVMe and SSDs. However, current trends indicate a shift in customer preferences towards NVMe over SAAS or SSDs due to the heightened reliability and increased cost-effectiveness of NVMe technology. This transition is driving many customers to adopt a comprehensive NVMe solution. Nonetheless, a substantial number of large customers still adhere to the two-tier storage model. For their primary tier, they employ NVMe drives, while for the secondary tier, they opt for NFS drives or a SAAS-based large-scale service. The integration of various use cases into a unified platform to facilitate the transformation of data into business insights is highly valuable. We receive input from our customers regarding their workloads. Based on the nature of these workloads and their intended use for storage – whether for ERP solutions, archives, or backup purposes – we recommend the appropriate storage type. These steps outline our process for evaluating the intended storage workload. Following this workload assessment, we suggest either NAS Unified Storage or Document Storage solutions. In the portal, there is a tool that enables us to calculate Hitachi's guaranteed effective capacity. It is quite straightforward for customers to comprehend and identify the effective capacity ratio. This is because many customers in Pakistan are already familiar with and using effective capacity ratios. Explaining the concept of effective capacity to customers is not a challenging task. Customers typically appreciate the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform due to its efficiency, easy product manageability, and product reliability, all of which offer significant benefits to the customers. This is crucial, especially in sectors like banking, where any breach or downtime could lead to substantial losses for customers. The uninterrupted operation of storage is paramount. This substantial benefit not only ensures customer satisfaction but also underscores the value derived from data utilization. Hitachi's adaptive data reduction technology assists in decreasing our client's storage footprint by around 50 percent. The majority of our customers were using storage from various vendors. We consolidated this storage into a single system using Hitachi Vantara.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"I use the tool for Oracle databases, Oracle virtual machines, and Oracle Linux databases. I'm on the storage side, not a database administrator."
"We are satisfied with the performance as it is significantly faster compared to traditional storage options."
"The solution is scalable."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"The database workloads are pretty fast because I frequently move data from here to there."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"The most valuable feature is the speed for the end-user."
"The Dell support is helpful and the response is quick. The agents' knowledge is very good."
"Dell SC Series offers a lot of performance, being one of the best performing storages Dell ever made."
"One time, we had a drive fail and we were notified before we even saw it on the device."
"Its leading feature is the price-performance ratio, which is very good."
"A valuable feature is the performance of the auto-tiering. It will move hot data up to your fastest Tier 1 or move your slow data down. Data progression is what it's called. With the auto-tiering you can have multiple tiers, you can have your Tier 1 be either spinning or flash, all the way down to 7.2K. It will change the RAID on the fly so your writes come in at RAID 10. After they sit for a while, they get converted to RAID 5, then they'll cool off and move down the tiers. Your performance is kept going, while the cold data is moved to your slow, non-performance tiers."
"Dell SC Series' most valuable features are performance and network facilities. We have no issues with its integration. The tool helps to visualize servers."
"We replicate between SAN to SAN for a lot of features and supportability. It also helps us when we want to upgrade to a newer SC Series or move the data from one data center to another."
"It is robust. It doesn't need too much troubleshooting. It is a good device."
"The solution provides excellent scalability."
"The product has great data storage performance with a 100% data security and availability guarantee."
"The solution is very user-friendly in terms of maintenance and configuration. It's also possible to connect the solution to other storage management solutions."
"The first thing that attracted this model to us was the non-disruptive migration. We had a very large database application that was on older gear and needed to be migrated to these arrays. We had experience with virtualizing behind an array and moving applications and data but this made it even better."
"The most valuable feature is that you can use it with all deployment models."
"The active data management of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, especially with the HOPS Center, makes it easier to work with the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform infrastructure."
"Its scalability and performance are the most valuable. It is quite scalable and has a huge capacity."
 

Cons

"It feels more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses rather than enterprises."
"Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution."
"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."
"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"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."
"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."
"The lower model, the 3000, should have duplication. It doesn't right now. It's only from 5000 that this is offered, but it depends on the performance. It could be they don't offer it on lower models because the duplication is too much of a burden to the performance."
"The tool's pricing is high and not suitable for medium companies."
"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."
"I don't think the solution is very scalable."
"Dell SC Series is no longer available, while Dell PowerStore, which supports NVMe over TCP, is different and not very affordable."
"The lack of reporting would be the main issue."
"The administration and support (on the way that they delivered) was a little bit slow."
"It would be helpful if the solution offered higher performance, at least on the back end."
"For the support windows to work, maybe they have to upgrade the firmware of the VSP. They changed the hardware or the disk. I don't know if it was the port blade they changed or a VM for a memory cache. Also, replacing the old target with the processor target would be fine. The old equipment is very easy to manage, and I don't have any bad commentary."
"One problem is that there are too many management tools for the F Series and for all the other Hitachi storage systems. There are four or five such solutions. Maybe these could be combined in the future."
"The replication technology that Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform uses is quite older, and the replication methodology they employ for data between the data center and the production and standby database shows no significant improvement in that particular field."
"There is a drawback related to Hitachi's configuration flexibility. The Hitachi storage platform solution is not flexible. That means that both the Hitachi and the partner presale guys have to do a lot of work to design a solution."
"The complex setup, ease of use, and snapshot operations of this product need to be improved."
"The deployment could be a bit easier, because it's a bit tricky"
"The solution is stable. However, there have been some software crashes where we had to restart the system. They could improve the hardware to prevent this type of issue."
"They should look at the cost because there are other vendors who offer the same cost with more features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet."
"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."
"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."
"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
"The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits. We don't regret purchasing it."
"The product is expensive."
"They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."
"There are costs involving the solution, vendor fees and product safety which are additional."
"The maintenance is usually pretty good. It's not like some of the others where they increase it in the fourth, fifth, or sixth years."
"We have found it to be affordable. Comparing the cost with other hardware, it seems to be right in line with the compute and the storage that we get with it."
"The pricing of this solution is competitive."
"It is one of the most cost effective systems for us. We have been able to run it longer than most, getting the most benefit and money out of it."
"It has a good price point and offers some value-added enterprise features."
"It's absolutely affordable. Again, not having to do a forklift upgrade like some of the others have had to do in the past, it's very affordable for our customers and they continue to buy."
"The SC Series was priced fairly. I wouldn't call it either expensive or cheap because we had a very tight budget, so if they were able to fit in that type of budget, they met our expectations."
"We pay for a support contract agreement."
"The price of the solution is reasonable compared to others, such as Dell EMC."
"The costs were primarily in line with every other vendor at the time."
"This solution is cheaper than Dell EMC VMAX. When you are looking for a high-end solution, price matters, but availability and stability are more important than the price."
"Considering the solution's price, it is very competitive compared to the other competitors in the market. I rate the product price a nine out of ten."
"A drawback of Hitachi storage systems is that they are expensive. The upfront cost is very high compared to others. But when you compare the IOPS at the same price, Hitachi gives you better business value..."
"It is cheap. It is not very expensive. If you decide to expand the system, the cost is pretty low as compared to other vendors, such as Dell."
"I would like to see better pricing and more discounts."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
8%
Educational Organization
6%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.
What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...
What do you like most about Dell SC Series?
I find this version to be more budget-friendly compared to products from other vendors. This aspect greatly benefits ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell SC Series?
Cost considerations are crucial when choosing between solutions like Dell and NetApp. Sometimes Dell offers better pe...
What needs improvement with Dell SC Series?
In the future, I want any box that comes on-premises to have the provision to integrate with cloud storage. If I want...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform?
For NVMe storage, the pricing is reasonable compared to competitors in India. However, for entry-level SAN storage or...
What do you like most about Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E990?
The product's reliability has been crucial for our company's operations.
What needs improvement with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E990?
The interface management and monitoring need improvement. Although I receive emails from Hitachi Virtual Storage Plat...
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
SC Series Storage, Compellent
Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series, 5000 Series, E Series, N Series, G Series
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
TGen, Frost Science, Gerrie Electric
Turkcell, Owens Corning, Region Nord, Net Credit Financial Group (NFC Group), Russian Railways
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell SC Series vs. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
860,825 professionals have used our research since 2012.