We performed a comparison between Dell SC Series and HPE 3PAR StoreServ 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 benefits of being on AFF are the phenomenal speed at which we're able to ingest data and index it, and the IOPS."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I actually did major projects where we used NetApp storage for some government agencies, and we were able to keep the storage where the government or the customer is able to own the storage while using AWS as their computing. That part was helpful to the customer."
"The speed is great. That's probably number one in terms of features we appreciate."
"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."
"We are a large-scale company, and our growth has been pretty significant over the last five or six years. We like the scale, and the way NetApp grows, so that's why we use it. It's mostly for block storage."
"The Dell support is helpful and the response is quick. The agents' knowledge is very good."
"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."
"The solution is stable."
"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 user interface is good, I would rate it a nine out of ten."
"I've found the stability to be very good."
"The setup is straightforward."
"HPE 3PAR StoreServ has been stable."
"We use all the features, but some of the most valuable are the replication, priority optimization, provisioning, and deduplication. There are a lot of good features in this product."
"We're hosting virtual infrastructure on the 3PAR storage and it's been very good for that."
"It's a very popular product for enterprise storage."
"The technical support is good."
"Very recently, we are able to do a lot of data center automation by being able to script some of the 3PAR actions for our private cloud."
"We never had a blackout and we have never been offline."
"The solution is easy to install."
"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."
"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."
"The NetApp support could be better."
"After the three-year prepay, the extended warranty is a little expensive."
"For ONTAP, in general, the deduplication ratio and Snapshot limitation are areas that need improvement. There is a global limitation on the number of Snapshots or clones that can be spun off of a particular Snapshot. If those limitations are increased, it might be helpful."
"When it comes to the cloud, they might need to improve in terms of making it clear why someone would use a NetApp solution over cloud-made storage."
"We would like to have a feature that automatically moves volumes between aggregates, based on the performance. We normally need to do this manually."
"During the initial setup, you need to know what you are doing."
"The price could be improved."
"The configuration could be easier in Dell EMC SC Series."
"The SC Series doesn't support NVMe storage."
"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?"
"In some customer cases, customers experienced more performance or latency."
"Dell could improve the upgrading process."
"This solution could be improved if overall performance was improved and operated with a higher speed and supported a higher volume of RAM."
"From a performance point of view, it's getting a bit old."
"The solution lacks reliability."
"The solution could improve by being more secure."
"The interface could be improved to match the system."
"The solution could improve by being able to handle larger data."
"The GUI interface could be improved. I have been having trouble with one issue in particular. If you look at the DC and DR, if there is a communication break and the link went down—so the data is not replicating from DC to DR—there is no way to find out how much data is ready for transmission. Only the size of the data that needs to be transferred after the link comes up. If the firewall link is down, there is no way of seeing how much data is waiting to be transferred. This is a weak point of 3PAR."
"I would like to see more storage, a better interface, and to move from mechanical disks."
"The performance of the solution is not good anymore and the software is different from all the other types and is not compatible. There are more negative things at this moment than positive. This is why we are removing them all from our organization this year."
"While the stability is pretty good, it could always be improved upon."
Dell SC Series is ranked 16th in All-Flash Storage with 10 reviews while HPE 3PAR StoreServ is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 27 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.6, while HPE 3PAR StoreServ 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 HPE 3PAR StoreServ writes "User-friendly graphical user interface and simplifies reporting for easy management". Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, Pure Storage FlashArray and Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series, whereas HPE 3PAR StoreServ is most compared with HPE Primera, Dell Unity XT, HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray and HPE StorageWorks MSA. See our Dell SC Series vs. HPE 3PAR StoreServ report.
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