We performed a comparison between Dell SC Series and Pure Storage FlashArray 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."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."
"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."
"It impacts customer retention because of its overall ease. When you are running a business, where time is a factor, that is the biggest selling point. Things happen really rapidly, when they happen, and being able to say, "Yeah, we can get this up and running in a day, if you want," or even less time in some cases. Sometimes, that can be what makes or breaks our case."
"I like the ability to snapshot, and the cloning features are valuable to us as well. I like that I can quickly and efficiently snapshot the data and move it to wherever I need to locally or in the cloud. Also, I know that when I take the snapshot that all of the data will be there and that it will be usable when I need to use it."
"The Snapshots and just the overall flexibility of the product have been great."
"Technical support has been okay."
"The most valuable features are the performance and the storage efficiency, due to the compression and deduplication... The efficiency is very important because we can buy fewer disks for more data."
"We recently started using the volume encryption feature, which is helpful because there are some federal projects that require data at rest to be encrypted."
"The setup is straightforward."
"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 solution is stable."
"It had many features, like a snapshot, replication, on-the-file RAID levels, mix-and-match files, those kinds of things."
"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 Dell support is helpful and the response is quick. The agents' knowledge is very good."
"The all-flash disc is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"This solution is very scalable."
"The availability and ease of use are the big features."
"The management features are well organized and they have a very good dashboard."
"The product cheaper compared to other solutions concerning the technology that they are using."
"I use all the features of this solution and I find them to be easy to use and functional, such as the compression and capacity to expand."
"Pure Storage is extremely reliable — it's never failed."
"It is always out of the box, and ready to use."
"NetApp should offer more training so everyone can learn about the products. Other vendors have a lot of training options. It would be great if NetApp would highlight how to use the features more so that every admin or person can gain more knowledge about this technology."
"It would be better if they just improved the performance of the system."
"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."
"Some of the graphical user interface changes in the later versions of NetApp have not been as good as the older ones, like in the 9.5 era."
"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."
"We would like to have a feature that automatically moves volumes between aggregates, based on the performance. We normally need to do this manually."
"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."
"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."
"While the scalability is good, there are certain limitations."
"The configuration could be easier in Dell EMC SC Series."
"In some customer cases, customers experienced more performance or latency."
"This solution could be improved if overall performance was improved and operated with a higher speed and supported a higher volume of RAM."
"Dell could improve the upgrading process."
"The price could be improved."
"From a performance point of view, it's getting a bit old."
"The lack of reporting would be the main issue."
"A minor issue that comes to mind is that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad."
"When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller."
"I want to learn more about command line usage which I have not explored much yet. However, there are many automated solutions for repetitive tasks. I would like to see additional features like performance monitoring, configuring of alerts, and the customization of alert thresholds in the next release."
"The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in."
"It was not proactive communication."
"Automation could be simplified."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"Data reduction is an area that needs improvement. There is a garbage collection service that runs but during that time, system utilization increases."
Dell SC Series is ranked 16th in All-Flash Storage with 10 reviews while Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 42 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.6, while Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.0. 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 Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Provides protection against ransomware threats with immutable snapshots, and it is well known for its scalability, ease of use, and non-disruptive upgrades". Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, IBM System Storage DS8000 Series and Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series, whereas Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell PowerStore, VMware vSAN, IBM FlashSystem, HPE Nimble Storage and Dell Unity XT. See our Dell SC Series vs. Pure Storage FlashArray report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
