Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Dell SC Series pros and cons

Vendor: Dell Technologies

4.2 out of 5

55 reviews
94% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Dell SC Series offers exceptional performance featuring auto-tiering and sophisticated scalability for seamless site integration. It supports easy management and replication, ensuring continuous availability and strong technical support. However, it struggles with snapshots in VMware, lacks NVMe support, and its compression needs improvement. The licensing model is complex, and its performance seems outdated compared to other options, complicating procurement. Despite initial VMware integration struggles, architecture remains reliable yet inefficient.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Dell SC Series offers easy management of volumes, allowing users to create and assign volumes to VMware clusters effortlessly.

Its auto-tiering performance efficiently moves hot data to the fastest tier, enhancing resource usage and performance.

Federation capabilities enable seamless live migration across sites, providing scalability and maintenance without downtime.

Dell SC Series provides excellent stability and performance, with features like compression and deduplication contributing to its powerful operation.

Cost-effectiveness and the ability to mix different drive technologies enhance its appeal, providing high performance and network facilities for small to medium businesses.

CONS

Snapshots in VMware aren't possible due to the storage handling it independently, impacting compatibility with apps like Veeam.

Integration with VMware initially posed challenges, and the architecture is considered outdated, being phased out by Dell.

Scalability is limited without adding additional controllers, which do not interact seamlessly.

NVMe storage support is absent, limiting performance enhancements.

Processing ability and scalability need improvement, and pricing is considered high for medium companies.

Dell SC Series Pros review quotes

IT Manager

Sep 12, 2017

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

Read full review

DH

System Administrator at Reuter GmbH

Jun 14, 2018

It is fast and performs well.

Read full review

DW

Network Admin at Jefferson County Washington

Aug 29, 2018

The most valuable feature is the speed for the end-user.

Read full review

Free Report: Dell SC Series Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Dell SC Series. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.

879,711 professionals have used our research since 2012.

IT Manager at a non-tech company with 201-500 employees

Sep 2, 2018

It is easy to use, expand the hard drives, add storage, and set up replication.

Read full review

Data Center Supervisor with 501-1,000 employees

Sep 2, 2018

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.

Read full review

TG

IT Architect at Synoptek

Sep 2, 2018

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.

Read full review

Infrastructure Engineer at a leisure / travel company with 1-10 employees

Sep 3, 2018

It has been one of the most stable products in our data center.

Read full review

Managing Director at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Sep 3, 2018

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.

Read full review

DW

Solutions Consultant at BlueAlly Technology Solutions

Sep 3, 2018

The most valuable feature is the no-forklift upgrade. While the thing is running, I can change out the controllers one at a time and keep the customer up and running. I can add shelves and storage and SSD drives or spinning drives to the system, while it's running. I can bring all that in and rebalance the load across the new disks or, if we take disks away, rebalance the load across what's remaining, and it just works.

Read full review

Senior Systems Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Sep 5, 2018

The most valuable features are the with back-end dedupe, and the thin nodes. For a 20TB or 60TB, we're using almost a one-to-two ratio.

Read full review

Show 10 more reviews (out of 40)

Dell SC Series Cons review quotes

IT Manager

Sep 12, 2017

Snapshots in VMware. You can’t do snapshots since the storage itself does that. Therefore, some apps (Veeam, for example) don’t work well with this kind of tiering storage.

Read full review

DH

System Administrator at Reuter GmbH

Jun 14, 2018

The administration and support (on the way that they delivered) was a little bit slow.

Read full review

DW

Network Admin at Jefferson County Washington

Aug 29, 2018

The ease of use could be improved. It took me a while to learn it.

Read full review

Free Report: Dell SC Series Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Dell SC Series. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.

879,711 professionals have used our research since 2012.

IT Manager at a non-tech company with 201-500 employees

Sep 2, 2018

I would like to have 100% functionality through the web app.

Read full review

Data Center Supervisor with 501-1,000 employees

Sep 2, 2018

I would like to see an integrated key manager in the controllers. Currently, it's an external product. It would be nice to have the option of having a built-in key for self-encrypting drive features.

Read full review

TG

IT Architect at Synoptek

Sep 2, 2018

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

Read full review

Infrastructure Engineer at a leisure / travel company with 1-10 employees

Sep 3, 2018

We have seen some degraded throughput with mixed workloads. We have been working with Dell EMC to correct some of these latency issues.

Read full review

Managing Director at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Sep 3, 2018

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.

Read full review

DW

Solutions Consultant at BlueAlly Technology Solutions

Sep 3, 2018

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.

Read full review

Senior Systems Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Sep 5, 2018

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.

Read full review

Show 10 more reviews (out of 40)

Product Categories

Product Categories

Frame-Based Disk Arrays

All-Flash Storage

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Dell SC Series

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Dell SC Series

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Dell SC Series

NetApp AFF vs Dell SC Series

HPE Alletra Storage vs Dell SC Series

Dell Unity XT vs Dell SC Series

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell SC Series

VAST Data vs Dell SC Series

Dell PowerMax vs Dell SC Series

HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs Dell SC Series

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs Dell SC Series

Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs Dell SC Series

HPE Primera vs Dell SC Series

HPE Nimble Storage vs Dell SC Series

Huawei OceanStor vs Dell SC Series

See all alternatives

Product Categories

Product Categories

Frame-Based Disk Arrays

All-Flash Storage

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Dell SC Series

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Dell SC Series

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Dell SC Series

NetApp AFF vs Dell SC Series

HPE Alletra Storage vs Dell SC Series

Dell Unity XT vs Dell SC Series

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell SC Series

VAST Data vs Dell SC Series

Dell PowerMax vs Dell SC Series

HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs Dell SC Series

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs Dell SC Series

Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs Dell SC Series

HPE Primera vs Dell SC Series

HPE Nimble Storage vs Dell SC Series

Huawei OceanStor vs Dell SC Series

See all alternatives

Related questions

5

When evaluating Frame-Based Disk Arrays, what aspect do you think is the most important to look for?