Dell SC Series Reviews

It is a global storage solution for all our servers.

What is most valuable about the Dell EMC SC Series system was its reliability. It did serve us well. Overall it was a good product for us.

In terms of what could be improved, I would say the lack of reporting would be the main issue.

I have been using Dell EMC SC Series for at least 10 - 12 years.

We keep it up to date, so it is the latest version. The hardware is not the latest, but the firmware and the controllers are the latest.

We use Compellent and we're looking at other products at this point. The Compellent is going to be phased out in a year or so or maybe two years. I don't know, but it has to be replaced sooner than later which is why I was looking for another product.

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

It does the work for us. If you're on SSD, it is going to do the the work. Obviously working with tiering at tier 1, 2, 3 was a pain when we got it, because the data is always moving around but since we're using only one tier SSD, there's no management to do with it and we are just checking to see if everything is working well on that. Otherwise, outside of the reporting, I would not complain about that system. If we could extend the support another five years we would have done so because the support is perfect. When you call them, there is always someone.

Because this product is going to be phased out I wouldn't recommend anyone to start with it. But I'm looking at the PowerStore to see if it is a fit for us. I would assume that PowerStore is going to be the next step after the Compellent.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Dell EMC SC Series an eight.

We use it for various type of data but mainly for virtual environments.

With the hybrid storage approach, we can balance between cheap space and good performance.

The solution has a wide variety of valuable features. The data progression works quite well. We use a lot the snapshots functionality.

We appreciate the solution offers deduplication and compression as well.

I would prefer to have NVME, at least on the back-end and inline deduplication. Anyhow as Dell EMC has announced the new product - Power Store these features will not be available for Compellent.

I've been using the solution for six years.

The solution is very stable.

We have about 60 ongoing operations. As you can imagine, we have had some challenges in the past, but not something that it's more concerning than what might happen when compared to the other storage vendors.

We didn't have a need to replace the controllers. These can be added, however, we didn't replace the controllers in any of the cages. As I understand it, that is something you can do. 

The only issue with scaling up is that the pricing gets pretty high. It's not easy to get a discount for a vendor if you want to extend the box. It might be about 1000 Euros for a few terabytes and goes up pretty quickly from there.

The support works very well. We deal with support from different parts of the world including Europe, Asia, and America. There are local support centers in each region. It's easy to engage the support and usually they are very proactive. I have very good feedback for support. We have had some challenges sometimes in a very few amount of cases where the parts were not delivered on time.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's simple and lower models are customer installable. 

We do the physical installation for our clients. We handle the initialization of the site. We get access and do the initial configuration where we configure the storage pool, the profile, and whatever is needed there. Then we do a series of tests. Functional tests, such as failover tests, are something we do for our clients during the implementation process.

The solution is not expensive. Initialization is strait forward, not complicated

They have a few features that can be licensed.

THe solution works well for small to medium-sized environment. The storage isn't enterprise-level. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We're starting our ScaleIO implementation. We have vSAN but we also have software-defined. Our primary goal is to reduce our infrastructure costs by having another offering out there, outside of the traditional SAN storage environment.

It's definitely scalable, definitely fits the majority of our use cases, in high-performance environments such as Oracle, SQL, and so forth.

In particular, for us, we have two primary data centers. The hospital is located in New York but we have two data centers in New Jersey. So geo clustering is a big thing for us, for our active-active environment.

It's still an early phase for us, but as of right now it's stable.

We've been looking at it for some time, and we decided to go for it for our projects for this year.

In terms of the initial setup, we did two. We did the software-only and we also did the hardware. Software-only was pretty straightforward. With hardware, the challenge we had was that we're pretty siloed in our environment so we had to get networking involved. It was the complexity of the network which was difficult, to make sure we had the performance in the environment.

Start slowly. Generally, initially, you'll get pushback because people are used to traditional storage. Start with what we call low-hanging fruit. For example, we put our test environment on it. Once people become comfortable with it, see that it performs well, then they'll start looking for it for the higher-tier environments.

We're using VMware and it's particularly easy, you just provision the storage. But when it's a physical environment and you're trying to go to that environment you have to have a migration, usually a whole space migration. We try to get away from that because it's time-consuming, after hours, and so forth.

I would rate the SC Series at seven out of ten right now. That might change as future releases come out and more functionality comes into the product.

We use it for storage. The performance is great. So far there are no issues at all.

The benefits are the reliability and the performance. That is what we look for and it works great for us.

It's secure and fast. There's no downtime and the HA works great. Everything is easy and their support is great. 

Mostly, during an upgrade process, there is no downtime at all. The way they do is really great. Very easy, straightforward. There is a pre-check and then, when they finish it, they do a post-check. It's great the way they do the upgrade, no downtime at all.

Something that has been needed should be coming out with the 6.7 version of vSphere: You don't need a hot spare, so that should give you more IOPS. They've figured out how to do a RAID across all the drives, rather than using a hot spare. So the hot spare can be used too. You won't need a dedicated hot spare any longer.

Scalability is fine. It's much easier. I can add more drives and just keep on adding stuff if I want to. Of course, that affects your price point.

We've had great support from the Dell EMC team. I would rate their Copilot support the best that we have seen in the industry. I have used support with every vehicle we have, but their support is the best. Great engineers. Great engineering team. It's straightforward, easy, and you get the right people.

We were previously using Compellent. At the time we went with Compellent we looking for a solution which was affordable for us. We are a non-profit organization and it worked great from that point of view. They were new, they had this great solution. We looked at it and we said, "Okay, it is at our price point and it works great. Let's get it and done." Dell EMC acquired it but they continued the same support and it worked fine.

When selecting a vendor, what I look for is a good technical solution. As a technical guy, that's all I look for.

I engineered the solution, architected it with their support. We have also upgraded several times.

I think our ROI has been good. We used Compellent for seven years and it worked great. We didn't have any major downtime or major performance issue. We're already three years into the SC Series, so I hope I can use it for four more years. That would be a good ROI.

So far, the solution has been affordable for us. We have a 48-drive solution and that works great for our headquarters site. Their pricing goes by the number of physical drives that you have and the drives are not cheap. Whenever you want to upgrade something there is a price issue. For example, for a 4TB SSD, they may charge you seven grand or eight grand. It's expensive. So we try to get the maximum use out of what we have, for five to seven years, and then upgrade it.

We were looking at HPE, and we had looked at a product called OSNEXUS. They operate in the same town as us so we thought we could get support from them. We looked at five or six products.

We actually went with two solutions. In India, we are using OSNEXUS, which is located in the Seattle area. We use Dell EMC in our headquarters.

It depends on your budget. What are the criteria you're looking for? And it depends on how much storage you're going to use and the cost associated with that. There a lot of solutions now, software-defined solutions, which are way cheaper, but everything has a price. It depends upon your usage. If you are going for virtualization, sure, go ahead and use it.

Performance for a regular workload is pretty great, using 3000 IOPS and, during backup at night, it goes up to the 3000 IOPS as well.

Overall, the underlying technology they are using is really great. That's the whole thing. It's how they do the data programming, the read-cache and the write-cache. That's why everyone understands it very easily. "Oh, this is the underlying technology that you're using." And the new features they are coming up with, they're constantly trying to improve the system.

I rate it an eight out of ten. It's reliable and gives us performance. It's not a ten because no product is a ten. Technology is changing so fast. I'm sure they're adapting to it but nobody can say, "That is a ten out of ten," on a technical thing. It doesn't work that way.

We use Dell EMC storage at two data center sites for hosting vSphere server environments. Those server services are something that we offer internally in the company: SharePoint, GIS mapping services, license servers, and domain controllers. Pretty much everything is hosted on those servers or on the storage.

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

• I would like the ability to monitor and manage the storage.  
• The web GUI is not fully there. 
• I would like to have 100% functionality through the web app.

The solution is stable. We have not had too many problems. The issues that have come up have been addressed very quickly via Dell EMC. 

It is scalable. You can easily add-on storage to the core platform. 

I like using the technical support. Their support is set up where they actually get notified before we do if there's an issue. Thus, they are very proactive about issues.

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

Dell has a foot in the door. We buy their servers and have relationships with their account manager and reps. I'm content. 

Dell EMC has been through some changes over the past couple of years. When Dell merged with EMC, it was a bit rough, but they have great experts. That kept us in this realm because of their support and team.

It is a great, mid-level introduction to storage. I would recommend it. We are happy with it.

We are a solution provider and the Dell EMC SC Series is one of the products that we implement for our customers. Our clients often use this product in a virtualized server environment for mid-range database use.

Once it's put in place, it becomes a vital tool.

Its leading feature is the price-performance ratio, which is very good.

The management is pretty good.

It has good expandability options.

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

I have about five years' experience with this product.

I have not heard any feedback about bugs or glitches in the system. Once it's in place, it's solid.

It's fairly scalable, as long as you size it properly, to begin with. The expansion options are pretty good. Our clients for this product range in size from small to large businesses.

Technical support for this product is excellent and I would rate them a ten out of ten.

When you have questions, you get them answered

We have deployed HPE storage in some cases where it was what the customer already had installed. Some of these customers switched to Dell because their technical staff was more familiar with it.

My understanding from our engineers is that the initial setup is on the complex side. There are things that are not intuitive that make it a little more complex.

This is a solution with good performance that I recommend, and for anybody who is considering it, I would tell them to give it a shot.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I mostly like the interface of the product.

Compellent is a nice technology, but it's not very efficient anymore. There are better products out there.

I have been using Compellent for five years.

In terms of stability, it's good enough. It's okay. 

Compellent is not scalable.

We have a medium size company using the product.

The support is good.

Compellent's setup is straightforward.

I would not recommend the product. There are other, better products out there.

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.

On a scale from one to 10, one is the worst, 10 is the best I'd give it a 6.

It acts as our VM storage, and the performance is good.

It could be hyperconvergent in the future.

Stability is good so far.

The scalability is very good because we can add up to, if I'm not mistaken, another three stacks, three cases. There is room for us to keep upgrading the capacity.

The Phone Home support is very good. It provides proactive troubleshooting and responds to end-customers like us.

We also have a local vendor to support us and all our IT infrastructure. They are acting as our consultant.

Initially, when we chose this product it was because of the cost component and because the service was very good.

For me, when selecting a vendor the most important issue is support, after-sale services.

The initial setup was straightforward. Everything was done by the engineers on site. Very little was required of IT during the setup. So it was pretty easy for us.

We did do some comparisons between HPE 3PAR as well as Dell Compellent, but we choose Dell, as I mentioned, because of the cost factor.

The first thing you need to know is what you need, what your requirements are. The second thing is how much of a budget there is.

I rate Dell Compellent an eight out of 10. So far, we haven't faced any problems. Even during the upgrades, there have been no issues. In addition, support is very good.