We performed a comparison between Dell SC Series and IBM FlashSystem 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."I like how easy it is to discover an issue and either resolve that issue or fine-tune that app to premium support to find that resolution."
"The speed is great. That's probably number one in terms of features we appreciate."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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've found the stability to be very good."
"It had many features, like a snapshot, replication, on-the-file RAID levels, mix-and-match files, those kinds of things."
"The Dell support is helpful and the response is quick. The agents' knowledge is very good."
"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."
"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."
"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 setup is straightforward."
"IBM's technical support do excellent work."
"Installing FlashSystem is very easy. It takes less than half an hour, and I can handle it all myself."
"One of the valuable features is the performance, it is one of the best in the market."
"The solution is very easy to configure and use."
"It's a mature product. It's like a BMW that evolves consistently."
"The performance is very good and we use this product to enhance our core system."
"No queuing and high ops, speed, and performance."
"The most valuable features of IBM FlashSystem are performance and security."
"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."
"We have been seeing some challenges around the application layer implementation. We are having some teething problems now with the cooperation between the application layer and backups to things, like SnapCenter. This may be a question of product maturity."
"When it comes to the connectivity on the back end, where the hardware is concerned—the cabling and the like—it could also be simplified to ease the communication between the nodes and between the other components of the infrastructure. I still find that a little bit complicated."
"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."
"It used to give us the volume where LANs should be placed when we created a LAN in the older version. However, in the newer version of ONTAP, it does not give where to place the LAN in the volume. So, that liberty has been taken away. If that was there again, it would be very good."
"The NetApp support could be better."
"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."
"During the initial setup, you need to know what you are doing."
"The SC Series doesn't support NVMe storage."
"Dell could improve the upgrading process."
"The configuration could be easier in Dell EMC SC Series."
"The price could be improved."
"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."
"While the scalability is good, there are certain limitations."
"The lack of reporting would be the main issue."
"The deduplication and compression ratio is not very good. It's not reaching a very high ratio."
"The interface of this solution could be improved."
"Our model does not support compression or deduplication."
"The initial setup is complex."
"This solution could be improved by offering greater amounts of storage."
"The design is a little old-fashioned and could be updated. The rack is very primitive and designed in an older style."
"The price is very costly."
"The only issue my team faced was transferring the data from the old system to IBM FlashSystem, which is an area for improvement in the solution."
Dell SC Series is ranked 16th in All-Flash Storage with 10 reviews while IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 39 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.6, while IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.6. 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 IBM FlashSystem writes "Reliable and easy to configure with simple data migration capabilities ". Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray, IBM System Storage DS8000 Series and Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series, whereas IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Pure Storage FlashArray, HPE Primera and HPE Nimble Storage. See our Dell SC Series vs. IBM FlashSystem report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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