Dell SC Series vs IBM System Storage DS8000 Series comparison

"It is just as stable as any other high-end solution."

"One time, we had a drive fail and we were notified before we even saw it on the device."

"With auto-tiering, it's easier to understand than most arrays, knowing that all of your writes go to the tier that you specify, with easy-to-create storage profiles."

"It is suitable for small or medium businesses."

"The flexibility of this solution has been valuable for our business."

"Performance-wise it's high speed. It's also more stable and scalable."

"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."

"Technical support is very good. I do use it from time to time and it's always excellent."

"The high throughput feature is the most powerful thing in this product."

"The Global Copy and Global Mirror features are the solution's most valuable aspects."

"Some menus aren't so intuitive."

"We can definitely see a need for it being a multi-controller system for customers who want to scale beyond the current capability. That's always a downside. A lot of the new systems are scaling vertically, they scale out, and the Compellent, of course, is controllers with shelves under it, so you don't scale out with it, unless you add another one. But if you do, they don't talk to each other, like some of the other solutions that we sell."

"In the future, I want any box that comes on-premises to have the provision to integrate with cloud storage."

"The lack of reporting would be the main issue."

"Licensing, especially on the storage line, could use some simplification. It's not terrible, but, for example, with the Isilon series, they've gone to completely a la carte. A la carte is very difficult to traverse, as to what you need. It would be more beneficial, at least from my point of view as a customer, if they did it more like car companies do, where there are package lines"

"The SC Series doesn't support NVMe storage."

"Technical support should respond more quickly because the turnaround time is very high."

"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 solution should embedded replication switches into the hardware instead of using them externally."

"The GUI isn't as user-friendly as other options."

"Support typically depends on the array. It can range anywhere from $7,000 to a couple of hundred thousand dollars."

"The pricing is reasonable, but it is expensive."

"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."

"There are costs involving the solution, vendor fees and product safety which are additional."

"The scalability seems a bit more expensive than even buying a brand new one so far. That has been kind of a drawback."

"We have the basic license for the use of this solution and it is a permanent license. The overall cost could be less, it is expensive."

"It's a very affordable solution."

"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."

"The license is very expensive."