We performed a comparison between Dell SC Series and Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series 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."Data deduplication is one feature I found to be the most valuable in the tool...Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"It's actually very stable"
"The first set up we had was really straight forward and simple."
"The scalability is good."
"The performance and the ever-growing maintenance are the most valuable features of this solution."
"The job of support for the storage engineers dramatically changed. We know more quickly the automation of the provisioning. We can now focus on things that bring more value to the company than just managing storage."
"We find the ease of usability and setup valuable."
"It has good stability for our company."
"We replicate between SAN to SAN for a lot of features and supportability. It also helps us when we want to upgrade to a newer SC Series or move the data from one data center to another."
"The performance benefits weren't surprising, we expected that. What we didn't expect were the densification benefits that we got out of going all-flash. We're able to put more applications on the arrays because of how all-flash performs. The way some of the application profiles have responded to all-flash has been really pleasing."
"I've found the stability to be very good."
"Easy management of volumes: You can create volumes and easily assign them to VMware clusters, increasing their size."
"It is easy to use, expand the hard drives, add storage, and set up replication."
"The Dell support is helpful and the response is quick. The agents' knowledge is very good."
"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."
"The user interface is good, I would rate it a nine out of ten."
"Scalable and stable storage array."
"Last year, I did a DM Series installation with my colleague, and this installation was effortless because we had Lenovo support on the phone, so it was easy to get help if we had any problems."
"Ability to cluster two storages together with HA availability."
"The product’s quality of service guarantees the performance of each workload."
"The price of this solution is good."
"The solution offers very good reliable systems and storage for our clients."
"The FlexClone feature is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"The most valuable feature of the Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is its ability to store data well."
"I would rate this solution an eight because we have had outages. The commit times went very high in the database. The whole array went down so our customers were down for around eight hours. This was a very big outage which could have been our fault because we didn't do the upgrade in time."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features."
"We did have one hiccup with the integration of vCenter. When we were installing Pure Storage, we were using vCenter 6.7, which defaults to the HTML5 Web Client. The current plugin for Pure Storage doesn't show up in that client at all. You have to go and use the legacy FlexFlash client to see the Pure Storage plugin in vCenter."
"The integration capabilities could be improved."
"When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller."
"There are scenarios with very specific functionality around VMware integration particularly to do with the way we'd like to manage LUNs in VMware. The tools are pretty good but there's room for improvement there."
"The problem is that we can only make a few groups, around five or six groups. I like groups and we need a lot of them. We had to put all the information in only a few groups and cannot make a more detailed separation of them."
"I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good."
"While there's always room for improvement in everything, I can't really think of a specific feature of the solution that requires immediate attention."
"Overall, I'd like to see more synergy between Dell EMC's higher-tier platforms and their mid-tier platforms. What I have said, constantly, to my partners at Dell EMC is that the clear articulation of the path is really important to us. In that vein, what I'd also like to see is, with the migration strategy that's built into this product, a lot more attention paid to Dell's - in particular - legacy platforms and how we get from some of our legacy EMC platforms onto this platform with a straight-through migration and scaling strategy, not host-based migrations and not piecemeal... Dell EMC would do well to focus more on my ability to skip a generation, rather than having me take individual hops because I can't greenfield my way into a software-defined data center fast enough. This journey of multiple hops is not helpful."
"The administration and support (on the way that they delivered) was a little bit slow."
"From a performance point of view, it's getting a bit old."
"Technical support should respond more quickly because the turnaround time is very high."
"An issue we had was that the controller went down during an upgrade because of their upgrading the code. One side of the switch was down."
"In some customer cases, customers experienced more performance or latency."
"The SC Series doesn't support NVMe storage."
"Many people do not realize that Lenovo has a storage solution, so better marketing from the vendor is needed."
"The solution needs a simpler licensing theme around the DM series. The problem is if you only need one of the features, you still have to buy the whole thing. The licensing needs to be more granular or flexible so you have the option to only license FlexCone or Inline Compression features."
"The solution should change the licensing model and allow customers to choose features based on their requirements."
"This is an expensive solution."
"Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series could improve by having a snapshot feature. Additionally, there can be other features added to help restore the data faster."
"I would rate the support of Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series a four out of five."
"The licensing model needs to be revisited. It needs to be simplified."
"The Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series was very hard to configure. Installation of the product was very hard. These are its areas for improvement."
Dell SC Series is ranked 24th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews while Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is ranked 21st in All-Flash Storage with 10 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.4, while Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is rated 7.4. The top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "Automated architecture that proactively optimizes your database ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series writes "Simple deployment, stores data well, but missing features". Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, Huawei OceanStor and HPE Nimble Storage, whereas Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is most compared with NetApp AFF, Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series, Dell Unity XT, Dell PowerStore and NetApp FAS Series. See our Dell SC Series vs. Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series report.
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