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 solution offers amazing performance."
"It is the SAN backbone for our company."
"The technical support is very good."
"We've had to use tech support on a number of occasions. They did everything remotely and talked us all the way through. They fixed the issue within 30 minutes. Every single time we contact them, they're perfect. I would give their technical support a ten out of ten."
"We have seen savings in our storage. The speed of deployment has gone from several days to a few minutes. This product has reduced that time into minutes, simplifying storage for us."
"The data reduction technology part of the scalability has been impressive, like its ability to host additional workloads, volumes of data, and databases."
"We like the data reduction rates. That has been really helpful. You get 4U of Pure storage replacing something like two racks of spinning disks. One of the things that has contributed to that are the data reduction rates."
"It is always out of the box, and ready to use."
"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 most valuable features are the with back-end dedupe, and the thin nodes. For a 20TB or 60TB, we're using almost a one-to-two ratio."
"The user interface is good, I would rate it a nine out of ten."
"Its leading feature is the price-performance ratio, which is very good."
"In terms of stability, it's good enough. It's okay."
"Performance-wise it's high speed. It's also more stable and scalable."
"It has good dedupe and compression. Also, the built-in data migration capabilities are pretty good, as is the federation. When we started migrating the workloads from different storage platforms, like NetApp and XtremeIO, it helped us in moving to that direction."
"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."
"The deduplication is pretty impressive because it will shrink. We also do some clones in addition to the snapshots, where we can have multiple clones. These reduce the actual written storage by as much as 50 percent."
"It is reliable, and it seems like a solid product. It has been working well so far."
"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."
"It works well and we don't have any issues with this solution."
"For virtualization, the failure rate is much less compared to traditional storage where you need more hard drives"
"Resilience and reliability, unmatched. They take good care of us."
"The Call Home feature is really a great feature, so I do not need to monitor the 3PAR. The 3PAR team is monitoring it and letting me know if there are any problems."
"HPE can login, fix things, alert us to things, and upgrade. We are there and aware, but we do not do the work. So, that is good."
"I would rate this solution an eight. There's always room for improvement, nobody is perfect to get a ten out of ten. They do what they do well. It's not cheap but we it's for uses that we needed."
"I would like a feature to integrate with external or cloud solutions. For example, if I want to use this storage for a backup from the cloud, I want to have integration with the cloud vendors, such as Microsoft, Oracles, or Amazon. It could be available as an API to allow seamless integration. Additionally, the solution could improve by having native integration with a cloud provider, such as VMware or Microsoft, this would reduce the need to use third-party solutions to complete the task."
"The technical support is okay, but could be improved."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"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."
"I would like to see the NAS add-on component become more fault-tolerant than just a single virtual machine running inside the array. I'm unwilling to use it for that reason."
"We would like to see better troubleshooting aspects. It helps us if we can find out where the problem is. Right now, it's difficult. Sometimes it's difficult to pinpoint the issue. If they had more visibility and more troubleshooting feature built into the tool that would really help."
"Data reduction is an area that needs improvement. There is a garbage collection service that runs but during that time, system utilization increases."
"The interface could be improved. It should have an application point of view."
"In some customer cases, customers experienced more performance or latency."
"We had times that we needed a file service solution. We've used FluidFS, but it's a solution that is being transitioned out."
"Snapshots in VMware. You can’t do snapshots since the storage itself does that. Therefore, some apps (Veeam, for example) don’t work well with this kind of tiering storage."
"Technical support should respond more quickly because the turnaround time is very high."
"The administration and support (on the way that they delivered) was a little bit slow."
"It's not very efficient anymore. There are better products out there."
"Dell could improve the upgrading process."
"It's a very complex platform to manage and it's not cheap either. It doesn't really give us the level of flexibility we had for very, very small workloads."
"We have had a few issues with it. We had our virtual environment lock up a few times on storage-based things. We think we have it sorted out, but maybe it came down to a configuration issue on it."
"HPE 3PAR StoreServ is at its end of life and they are forcing us to purchase new hardware. They will no longer support this solution. They should provide support for a longer time. For example, 10 years instead of five years."
"HPE gives you how to get everything going, but it would be nice if they could go a little deeper sometimes. That is always the case: To get the value-add, you have to pay for those services."
"Upgrades could be improved. We would like to see more upgrades."
"I would like to see an automatic re-balancing system or functionality for adaptive optimization."
"We are seeing that there are some enhancements which are required in the SSMC console. There are some features that we do not see in the dashboard."
"Integration with some cloud services would be nice... We would like to be able to provision from the 3PAR and decide whether or not we are going to provision onsite or the cloud."
Dell SC Series is ranked 24th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews while HPE 3PAR StoreServ is ranked 9th in All-Flash Storage with 299 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.4, while HPE 3PAR StoreServ is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "Automated architecture that proactively optimizes your database ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE 3PAR StoreServ writes "The product's technical support is outstanding as I can reach someone right away". Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, Huawei OceanStor and HPE Nimble Storage, whereas HPE 3PAR StoreServ is most compared with HPE Primera, Dell Unity XT, HPE Nimble Storage, NetApp AFF and HPE StoreOnce. See our Dell SC Series vs. HPE 3PAR StoreServ report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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