Dell SC Series Reviews

Compellent is a very easy-to-use solution because after the first installation you have no more parameters to fix. You can add discs easily and all discs are in one group or folder. It is also very easy to expand. 

The solution is very complete as you can use it as solo for primary storage for production, and you want to implement a cluster with two storage systems, all you need is include it in the software of the storage system. So it's easy and very efficient, and when I have to choose a solution for a customer, I must find out what kind of security the customer wants. When I use this solution, I have all kinds of installation possibilities. So, for me, it is a very good solution.

When we installed this solution, we were surprised by how stable and efficient it is.

For me, there is only one limitation with the scalability of the solution. When you have the solution with two controllers, and you add a lot of SSD, you reach a limit. You have to use your system in his linear opérating zone. when you add discs, you add IOPS and storage space. there is a saturation point of the controller beyond which you add only storage space but no more IOPS, the limit point is reached  and the limit is almost 60 discs. You can put in 200 discs, mostly at once. This point limit the scalability of the full flash solution with only one system. you can add another system in fédération mode to exceed this limit.

I am very impressed by the simplicity of the solution. They have very good support system called CoPilot. Whenever I contact them, they are very efficient. Whenever a customer calls them, they immediately take his problem in account wihout going through a support level 1; we are immediately in contact whith expert.

We work on different solutions. The most important point for me is how is implemented disc virtualization. In this solution, disc management is really very simple and disc utilisation is efficient. all disc are add in a group and raid is oragnized on 2Mo stripe. The stripe are organizer in 2 raid automatically : by default, 20% in raid 10 to write blocs with very effective performane and 80% raid5 to store data with a good use of space.When you add many disks in the folder their are automatically integrated in the profile and add performance to production. The possibility to implement two system in a cluster and can also be integrated in a federate mode to agregate multiple system in one global storage.

My advice to others would be to get the demo to test the solution out. On a scale of one to ten, my rating is a ten. Simplicity and stability are very important for me, and this solution is very simple to use, it's very efficient and a customer won't make many mistakes when using it. 

In the future, I would like to see better monitoring so that we can give to the customer an indication of their capacity to upgrade. These kinds of tools must be very user-friendly - especially for those customers that didn't study storage functionality in detail. 

It's easy to expand. Back in the day, if you wanted to expand, you would have to buy a block of disk from somebody or a new shelf. Here, if you have open spots, you buy some more disk and you expand.

What I really like, from the model line starting with the 3000 all the way up, is the flexibility. You can have spinning disk, you can have flash, you can have a combination. 

Another 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.

With federation, you can have multiple systems across sites. You can treat them as one, and with a live migration, volumes don't go down. You can move them from site to site, doing maintenance, and keep your environment up.

They already integrate with Dell Storage Manager, so you can manage multiple, you can set up replication, you've got monitoring, vSphere, Hyper-V.

Going into the unit itself, to manage, takes a little more intuition. But when you integrate it into the Dell Storage Manager it gives a much more GUI, user-friendly area to manage, provision volumes, etc.

It's very stable.

It's very scalable, especially with federation. If you outgrow the number of spindles that a unit can support, depending on the model, you can go into federation.

Copilot support is next to none. I've dealt with a lot of support before. With Copilot, you're usually on the phone if you have a problem. Even as a customer, not a partner, if you have an issue or you're planning on upgrading code, you call Copilot, they do a system check, they give you the thumbs up. The support is very helfpul.

The 3000 Series are user-installable but, as a certified installer, I have found that customers, if they're not used to the interface, like to come in and have a tutorial to see the interface and how it's done. Anything in 5000 Series and above requires a certified installer. You want to make sure that you get your networking and zoning set up properly; and to get a walk-through on setting up the environment and for getting used to it.

It does not have a steep learning curve. Especially in the SMB, the front-end is not hard. You set up the Storage Manager, it gives you the dashboard and tells you when you're over-provisioned, and shows performance and the like.

It's very affordable. Anything from an SMB on up to the large enterprise - from a 3000 Series all the way up to a 9000 Series - with federation and you name it.

You should definitely have a partner come in. If you're going to do a multi-tier environment, look at your IOPS: What are your hot IOPS, what's your total storage need? You need to plan out those different tiers because that's where it saves you money. You don't have to go all-flash if you don't need it. You only need to be able to deliver your performance and most places have tons of cold data that they aren't aware of. So, having someone come in and do an assessment of your current storage environment and see what performance you really do need - what you're getting now and what your projected growth will be - is important, so that a system can be properly sized. That should be a pre-sales process. Your engineer should understand Compellent and be able to size it properly.

I just deployed a 3000 Series in a small VDI environment and, during a bunch of huge data copies, I was seeing 15,000 IOPS at less than about 7 or 8 milliseconds of latency and that was on 10K disk. I was really impressed with that.

The most important factor when looking at a vendor is, are they there to sell you a box or are they there to help you? Are they there for the long term?

From my dealings with it, it's right up there at ten out of ten. Obviously, there are more expensive systems out there but, for all the deployments that I've seen or done, its been a rock solid platform.

It's primary storage. It started off as just being spinning disk, but recently we've had a lot of traction with customers adding flash and even going to all-flash systems. Some of our customers have had it six, seven, eight years.

It performs quite well. We had a customer who had an Oracle all-flash system, and they needed to run VMs in their disaster recovery facility and, of course, they did not want to purchase the Oracle storage because it's extremely expensive. So, they added flash to their existing Compellent storage, they were using a DR for the other stuff. It has performed quite well for them.

One of the nice things about it is that there is no forklift upgrade required to upgrade the storage. That's why a lot of our customers like 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. That's another reason the customers like it.

We've been able to maintain a lot of customers over the last six or seven years. We actually started selling the SC Series - it was called the Compellent - before Dell purchased them.
We had picked it as a strategic storage for our company to sell. It has been good to us over the years. We continue to make a lot of sales.

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.

Also, in terms of auto-tieriing, Compellent writes all of its writes into Tier 1, unless of course you do something silly and pin a whole bunch of LUNS, which means you're telling your VM, your data stores, that they have to live in that top-tier storage. As long as you follow the best practices recommendations and let it do its own auto-tiering then it works very well. 

In most cases the customers with all-flash, most of their active data lives in flash. So, they're really using all of those IOPS and performance in that tier, and the other tier or tiers are just being used for cold data storage. It works very well, as long as customers follow the best practices there.

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.

It's absolutely stable. There were some issues in the early days with the tiering, but they straightened that out. What was happening was, if the first tier filled up - and it wasn't necessarily because of pinning - but if the first tier filled up because you overran the "write" amount that you had in the first tier, it died, actually.

Dell EMC was really quick in fixing that. Now, if it gets to 90 percent, if you start to overrun that tier, it will start moving stuff automatically. It doesn't have to wait for the tiering, "seven down and three up." The way that it works is, if you're in the top tier here and something is not accessed in the last seven days, it will move down to the next tier and it takes three days to move it up. But with it automatically tiering it down, it can automatically go and take it out of there if it sees that it's going to fill up.

It scales very well. It's not a multi-controller system right now. They are limited to two controllers, like some of the others. It is an active-active controller, so both controllers are processing LUNS. One of them is called the leader and it is the transcriber - think of it as the "court reporter" guy. But both of them actually take reads and writes.

I do use technical support quite often. In fact, any time I do an upgrade I call Copilot and let them know that I'm going to be doing an upgrade, in case anything happens and they get an alert. They'll also do a system check for me so that I know everything's working at 100 percent before I go in there and start pulling cables or adding cables. It gives me peace of mind. A customer can't say, "Well, you broke it." It was that way before we started. And in some cases, support won't let me start the upgrade, they'll advise me not to. I work with them quite a bit. They are probably the best support that you'll find.

But recently, things have changed a little bit. I have gotten some wrong answers from Copilot. I have to double-check their work on certain things. I've had at least three times where I've gotten the wrong answer from someone, which is not good.

But they're always responsive, whether you call at three in the morning or three in the afternoon. It's the same group of people up in Minnesota. They're not in India, they're not in the UK, they're not in Turkey, they're not somewhere where they have a thick accent and you can't understand them. 

I think the reason for the changes, from what I'm seeing and what I've heard, is that they have now started pulling some of the other storage people, who may have done the EqualLogic stuff, the lower-end storage, into the Copilot fold, and are having them do the support. I'm sure it's just a popularity thing.

We were concerned too, when EMC came on board, that Dell would bury the SC line at some point. What we've been told is that they're going to continue it on. It's a much better product than even they imagined. It seems the product is going to stick around for a while, from what we've been told by Dell EMC.

We still sell some EqualLogic. I had worked with that before. I had also worked with the EMC Series for many years, back to 2000. I still do both EqualLogic and SC Series.

I'm a certified SC Storage Engineer and when our company sells the SC Series, I will go out and install it. I've been doing it for a long time so I can do a lot of the stuff with my eyes closed now.

It's not something that an end-user is going to pull out of the box and set up. You have to some knowledge of the SAS chaining, how it works with the Compellent, and how you load the software and how to set it up. It does have a pretty easy GUI on the setup. It's not command-line-based like some other stuff. The SAS chaining is the hardest part to understand.

We just had a customer that ripped out a whole cabinet of spinning disks and they're down now to one shelf of 24 flash disks and three shelves of spinning disk to replace all that. We're talking about a huge return on power, cooling, rack space, and cost of maintenance, because they do charge by the shelf for their maintenance. Now they've got four shelves as opposed to 18 or 19 that they had before. That maintenance cost goes down quite a bit because of that and that's all because of the SSD drives now, being able to add those in.

About four or five years ago, they finally brought on the what we call the hybrid and full SSD to existing customers. Initially, it started off that only new systems could be all-flash, and now we're going back and we're seeing a lot of our customers who add the flash in and revitalize their whole storage system, completely.

It's absolutely affordable. Again, not having to do a forklift upgrade, like some of the others have had to do in the past, it's very affordable for our customers and they continue to buy.

We have looked at different solutions over the years. We represent quite a few: EqualLogic, the SC Series, NetApp, and, now that HPE has Nimble, we sell Nimble. About the only ones we don't sell are Pure and Tintri.

We looked at a lot of others, back in the day, that are gone now. Going with the EqualLogic and the SC Series was a wise choice because they're still here, seven or eight years later and people are still buying them and people are still upgrading.

The SC Series is not the thing for your mom and pop shop. It is an enterprise-grade, mid-tier business type solution. It depends on how much space you need. Some situations can be fine with the EqualLogic series, although that's going to go away and, perhaps, the lower-end Unity's will replace them. You have to look at all those factors.

In terms of performance with mixed workloads, generally, the Compellent has been very good. If it's over the 20ms mark that's not good, but I have never seen any problems with that, in particular, when we've added flash.

In terms of migrations, I haven't used the built-in capabilities. I'll use VMware's VMotion to move things from one SAN to the other. A couple of years ago I had a Compellent upgrade where, at that time, they didn't support the upgrade I mentioned earlier, where you do one controller at a time on that thicker model, so I had to set them up side by side. They had some physical servers and I just used replication to replicate the LUNS over to the new SAN. I then shut down the physical servers for a few minutes and pointed everything to the new SAN and that worked great. I know they do have the data import, it's just something that we don't generally use because most of our customers are fully virtualized.

We sell the equipment and install it. I do both sides of the field, the engineering, both pre-sales and post-sales.

We still have a lot of customers that are in the 6 series. A lot of our customers have moved up to 7.1. If you have the SSD drives, then you can do things like dedupe, which you can't do on the older versions, and you can't do if you don't have the SSD drives. Evidently, the deduplication uses some part of the SSD drives for metadata or something like that, so that's a must.

There's some new stuff coming with 7.3, which just got released, where they're spreading the sparing across the whole array, rather than having a dedicated spare disk, and having it sit there and do nothing until one of them dies, and then it kicks in - and having to rebuild all of that. Now, they'll do the sparing across all the disks and they say that is not only going to add space but performance to the array. I've got a couple of customers that want to use that very soon.

I like the SC Series. I enjoy working with it. We've done a lot of sales lately, which is kind of surprising with all the new, fancy, all-flash arrays out there. Customers really don't need all-flash today, and that's really where SC fills in, with its auto-tiering, hybrid - mixed SSDs and spinning disks - customers just don't need all-flash systems. They don't have that kind of workload.

The useability is the most valuable aspect of the solution. 

I've found the stability to be very good. 

The solution is scalable. 

We have found the solution's technical support to be helpful.

The model of the device is quite old. They need to update it a bit. 

From a performance point of view, it's getting a bit old. Although I know that the storage that we are using is a bit old as well. Beyond that, I don't see any other features that I'm exactly missing.

I've been using the solution for about two years or so, give or take. It hasn't been that long. 

The solution is quite stable and the performance is good even though it is getting old. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. We find it reliable. 

The solution can scale well.

We have about ten people using the solution in our organization. 

Technical support has been quite good. We are very satisfied with the level of support we receive. 

We've worked with a few similar solutions, including HPE Nimble Storage. If you compared it to this solution, I'd say that both have good value and both have their place in environments that are a bit different. I wouldn't compare them directly.

I haven't been involved in the usage or installation of the device.

The solution is coming to the end of life. They don't really sell them as new products.

I'm a user, consultant, and reseller. 

I can't remember the exact version number of the solution, however, the model of the series is 5020.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We use the product in our company and I deal with it personally.

The solution is automated, but we still don't get a complete speech from the disc. The flash speed should be addressed. 

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 would like to see replication of the data storage without the need to resort to third party tools. Storage to storage repetition would be a nice feature. 

We have been using Dell EMC SC Series for four years. 

The solution is stable. 

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.

When it comes to upgrading, we are contemplating a move to TISON, TI-1, TI-2 and TI-3. There may be a need to move between the TISON. 

As this is our first product, I cannot give a comprehensive review or rating.

I rate Dell EMC SC Series as an eight out of ten. 

We use this product for daily business and normal IT operations. We also use it for replication of one system to another system. We also use it for the hostings for HANA virtualization. Those kinds of replications and IT applications. We use a hybrid version.

It had a lot of integration and supported all the platforms, so I was happy with what they were offering. The biggest selling point was when the vendor upgraded it. Dell upgraded the software licenses sold with that. Whenever the hardware is end-of-life, we could upgrade the controller or add a new disk or whatever. There was no lifecycle of three years or five years. We could carry on just by upgrading. It had many features, like a snapshot, replication, on-the-file RAID levels, mix-and-match files, those kinds of things.

Dell could improve the upgrading process. It was the lifecycle that made it very short. You'd upgrade the disk, and in eight, nine months, it would be obsolete. They cancelled an enhancement that included an all-flash unit. This would have improved the product.

We had worked with this product from Compellent's days before Dell bought them over, so I'll presume from 2006.

We never had a single crash with this product. It was just fine. 

The support was excellent. We had this storage for a while and server monitoring from Compellent.

Any IT company can do it. It's straightforward.

Pricing is market-related and is flexible for the solution. Pricing depends on varying life cycles.

We're trying to move some people across to some other storage solutions because this product is at end-of-life. I would give this product 10 out of 10.

The solution is used for shared storage for the ESX cluster, VMware, or Vcenter cluster. It's a virtual machine and it's hosting space for virtual service. The primary reason we use the solution is to host the core infrastructure, the virtual servers including file servers, domain controllers, application servers, sequel servers, etc. Basically, the servers that run the business.

The solution's most valuable feature is its performance redundancy. The solution works quite well for that. The redundancy is important to us for snapshot and recovery purposes.

The product offers good performance and is quite powerful. 

The implementation is straightforward. 

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.

I've been using the solution on and off for over a decade. It's been about 12 years at this point. However, I should note that I don't use it every day. 

The stability of the solution is good. There don't seem to be any issues with reliability. There aren't bugs or glitches. It works well.

The solution is targeted at small to medium businesses, I would say. It's usually something that you would put in and expand on, so, in that sense, yes, it is scalable to a degree. 

However, it is not infinitely scalable. That's not a criticism. You just need to buy the right product in the first place. I don't have any problems recommending it for companies of a certain size that may need to expand a bit.

We contact technical support all the time, so we've been in touch on multiple occasions. They are very good. They're responsive and knowledgeable. They help us when we have issues. We're very satisfied with the level of service they provide.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. It's not complex by any means.

The time it takes to deploy the solution depends on how big it is. It's difficult to say exactly how long it will take as each company is different. At the most, it might take three days, however, it depends on where it is and what has to be set up. Right from out of the box users can start putting data on the storage. 

We handle the implementation for our clients. On top of that, wherever we've been asked to either install or work with Compellent SAN, there's usually someone on site who is trained to do basic maintenance and tasks of that nature.

I don't really have experience across different vendors. 

I'm a contractor and a Dell partner; I help implement the solution for clients, however, I'm not a reseller. I help fix and update the solution and occasionally maintain the product for clients. In my experience, the solution is usually deployed either on-premise within the office or the head office, or quite often in a co-located data center.

I would recommend the solution, however, only if it made sense for the individual company. It's not right for everyone and it would depend on the situation. A company considering implementing it should always check their requirements.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten overall. Now and then, they do break and you do have to replace them. With any solution, something always goes wrong at some point. That's not a mark against this particular product. I don't believe any product is perfect.

We are a system integrator and this is one of the solutions that we provide for our clients. We have deployed it for more than seven customers

It is used for several purposes including server consolidation and business applications. 

The most valuable features are the efficiency and replication.

This solution is easy to use.

Dell offers a good warranty on this product.

Technical support should respond more quickly because the turnaround time is very high.

Although the pricing is competitive, it is a concern because competitors such as HP are also competitive.

We have been using Compellent for two years.

Compellent is a stable solution.

This is a very scalable product.

The technical support is reasonable but I feel that the turnaround time is very high and can be improved.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is complex but straightforward. It takes approximately 45 minutes to configure.

The pricing of Dell EMC Compellent is competitive.

The pricing for solutions by HP is also competitive.

I definitely recommend Compellent to my customers because it is a very good product that is very scalable, it is easy to use, and Dell offers a good warranty. I find the features handy and it is a good match for my customers' requirements.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.