We performed a comparison between Dell SC Series and HPE Nimble Storage 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."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."
"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."
"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."
"It simplifies data management for NAS environments with its ease of management, ease of share creation, and Active IQ feature. These features are good overall. It helps us manage data quickly and sufficiently. Also, compression features, like dedupe, give us a good ratio."
"NetApp AFF has helped to simplify our clients' infrastructure while still getting very high performance for their business-critical applications. One of our customers uses the vSAN environment in the release, then they use NFS for their VMware VCF environment and TKG environment. In this case, when they move to NetApp for the TKG and the VM infrastructures, they use AFF for block, CIFS, and NFS. It provides a single storage with NFS, block, and CIFS with deduplication, team provisioning, and compression. Everything is in there, which makes it very good to use."
"The speed of data retrieval is the most valuable feature. We mostly use it for our SAP database and we are getting good IO from the hard drive."
"One of the main features that we love about the system is the ability to create snapshots. NetApp makes a lot of snapshots in a short space of time. Also, the speed of data recovery with NetApp, at the time we need it, is an important feature that we love."
"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."
"What is most valuable about the Dell EMC SC Series system was its reliability."
"The user interface is good, I would rate it a nine out of ten."
"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 Dell support is helpful and the response is quick. The agents' knowledge is very good."
"The solution is stable."
"The setup is straightforward."
"HPE Nimble Storage uses the InfoSight platform and it is useful because we can identify the faults and can analyze the performance. It has many other features. This feature is the best that I have observed from HPE Nimble Storage."
"The management software that runs in the cloud is called InfoSight and it is very good. It is similar to machine learning software that monitors your hardware."
"The deployment is fast."
"InfoSight - analytics sight that collects data for all Nimble arrays deployed"
"The most valuable feature is the NVMe flash storage."
"I have found the convergence rate and deduplication the most valuable features."
"The most useful features are high availability and the storage snapshot backup functionality."
"The capacity for data storage and compression is good."
"The NetApp support could be better."
"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."
"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 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."
"The initial setup has a lot more steps in it than are probably necessary for a base deployment, unlike other vendors where it's more straightforward. It could be a little bit more streamlined."
"There is room for improvement with the user interface. There are a few things that cannot be done in the GUI. We do a lot of things through the CLI, but that's grown out of a lack of ability to do them in the GUI. An example is QTrees. You can manage them within the GUI, but the GUI is missing a few options."
"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 SC Series doesn't support NVMe storage."
"Dell could improve the upgrading process."
"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?"
"The lack of reporting would be the main issue."
"While the scalability is good, there are certain limitations."
"This solution could be improved if overall performance was improved and operated with a higher speed and supported a higher volume of RAM."
"The configuration could be easier in Dell EMC SC Series."
"The price could be improved."
"The HPE Nimble Storage could have better integration with monitoring and machine learning system information solutions."
"The resellers did the implementation of the solution, we did not do it ourselves. We have ten people for the deployment of the solution."
"The solution could improve by having more granularity. For example, having the ability to go deeper into specific IO channels or specific latency issues that can happen would be a benefit. HPE has this ability on their side but it would be useful to have it on our side."
"HPE does not have suffficient storage."
"We would like there to be more enhanced features."
"You could argue that it would be preferable if everything were cheaper in order to save taxpayer money."
"HPE Nimble Storage could be improved with some critical application or servers."
"We are doing a hybrid and are moving some machines to Microsoft Azure to run in hybrid mode. We are checking the availability of extra software-defined storage so that we can configure it."
Dell SC Series is ranked 16th in All-Flash Storage with 10 reviews while HPE Nimble Storage is ranked 7th in All-Flash Storage with 25 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.6, while HPE Nimble Storage is rated 8.8. 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 Nimble Storage writes "Proactive end-to-end 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 Nimble Storage is most compared with HPE Primera, Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray and IBM FlashSystem. See our Dell SC Series vs. HPE Nimble Storage report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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