Dell SC Series vs IBM System Storage DS8000 Series comparison

"Easy management of volumes: You can create volumes and easily assign them to VMware clusters, increasing their size."

"It has definitely improved our speed, storage space, and recovery times."

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

"The user interface is good, I would rate it a nine out of ten."

"We have gotten really good performance out of it, fast IOPS."

"The solution has a wide variety of valuable features. The data progression works well. We use the snapshot functionality quite a bit and really like it."

"Component support was great; on a scale of one to ten they were a ten, they were always helpful."

"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 solution is very stable; there aren't any problems there at all as it doesn't have bugs or glitches and doesn't crash or freeze, and we've found it to be very reliable."

"I really recommend the IBM DS8000 solution as it is the most advanced technology available for storage solutions."

"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."

"We have had no outages now for literally six years and that's really impressive."

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

"These are global mirror and replication for DR, which allow us to do a lot of DR testing."

"The main benefit is from the standpoint of recovery; recovery time and being able to quickly replicate data."

"While the scalability is good, there are certain limitations. Our racks are at their limit, so we do not have the requisite scalability to expand."

"We had times that we needed a file service solution. We've used FluidFS, but it's a solution that is being transitioned out."

"This system is not a good fit for most customers. It's not only the fact that it's too old, but it has not developed any more since Dell bought it."

"There's always room for improvement in the operating code."

"It's not very efficient anymore. There are better products out there."

"The initial setup is somewhat complex and should be made simpler to do."

"We need more discount, but it's good."

"This solution could be improved if overall performance was improved and operated with a higher speed and supported a higher volume of RAM."

"Sometimes when we do encounter problems, but not a complete system shutdown, that gets a little bit frustrating."

"We need the GUI feature to be improved. If the GUI is good, then it is easier to manage with just the clicks, rather than going in with CLI and commands to do the stuff."

"I would like it to be easier to use. Some of it is so complex that we've got a lot of scripts and automation and things tied around it."

"The pricing of the solution is difficult to deal with. Lower pricing would be preferred."

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

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

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

"On the open system side, it's a little different."

"Pricing depends on varying life cycles."

"We have reviewed many platforms over the years. It is probably the best solution for its value."

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

"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."

"We have found it to be affordable. Comparing the cost with other hardware, it seems to be right in line with the compute and the storage that we get with it."

"The maintenance is usually pretty good. It's not like some of the others where they increase it in the fourth, fifth, or sixth years."

"It has a good price point and offers some value-added enterprise features."

"We have found the solution to be affordable."

"The license is very expensive."